glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- cremation It is now in the death flow 10:55 AM Sunday morning. A cold gray cloudy day here where I am at presently. I got up this morning around 8:20 AM. I got up made coffee and ate four plastic waffles for breakfast. I ate my toasted frozen waffles messing with our main computer. After eating my plastic waffles I wrote in my paper diary. Not much else to report. I have next to me to read this morning “Infinite Jest” a novel by David Foster Wallace. Last night I messed with our main computer and read late into the night the novel “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. I think I made a video last night for my YouTube channel on reading David Foster Wallace. I have a ton of shit on my brain this morning, too much to unload here. I am weary of it all. I have nothing to do today. This evening I will watch the Superbowl and go to bed when it is all over. I suppose I will close to wander my cell and watch the birds. I will read “Infinite Jest” and before you know it I will be six feet under. I mentioned in my last video the essay in the New York Sunday Review Tom Bissell’s essay on David Foster Wallace novel “Infinite Jest”. I like this quotes from Bissell’s essay- “Theory 2: “Infinite Jest” is a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language. Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than Wallace — not Joyce, not Bellow, not Amis. Aphonia, erumpent, Eliotical, Nuckslaughter, phalluctomy! Made-up words, hot-wired words, words found only in the footnotes of medical dictionaries, words usable only within the context of classical rhetoric, home-chemistry words, mathematician words, philosopher words — Wallace spelunked the O.E.D. and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographic reality. But nerdlinger word-mongering or “stunt-pilotry” (to use another Wallace phrase) can be an empty practice indeed. You need sentences to display-case the words, and here, too, “Infinite Jest” surpasses almost every novel written in the last century, maintaining a consistent and mind-boggling descriptive mastery, as when he portrays a sunset as “swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light. . . . It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.” (No one is better than Wallace when it comes to skies and weather, which is traceable to his having grown up in central Illinois, a land of flat tornado-haunted vastidity.) As John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote after Wallace’s death, “Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished.” It has been eight years since Wallace left us, and no one is refilling the coffers of the David Foster Wallace Federal Sentence Reserve. No one is writing anything that resembles this: “The second shift’s 1600h. siren down at Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.” Or this: “But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on.” We return to Wallace sentences now like medieval monks to Scripture, tremblingly aware of their finite preciousness. While I have never been able to get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language. Whereas most religions deify only certain words, Wallace exalted all of them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/everything-about-everything-david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-at-20.html?_r=0 11:15 a.m. - 2016-02-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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