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as others say, totally legit to criticize the writing of a dead or living writer, they take on that risk when they decide to publish. mostly here to say: all of DFW's writing is basically a pain in the ass to read, and many folks (including myself) consider that to be very much on purpose - he wrote (posthumously so maybe wrote is the wrong thing to say..) a 550 page book (the Pale King) about the IRS, tax code and boredom (yes, that explicit ha) and honestly, it’s one of my favorite books of all time, though sometimes really boring ha (a choice quote, from an accounting professor to class: “To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”). the fact that you were able to make it through Big Red Son at all (even though you didn’t specifically enjoy it) makes me want to recommend more DFW to you, because not everyone has the will/patience to get through a piece like that in the first place. To that end, I think for a HN audience there are definitely more interesting pieces like: “Tense Present”
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...
(an exhaustive and IMO awesome essay on the “seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography” specifically with regard to the actual usage vs. institutional tradition in language) “Television and US Fiction”
https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
(interesting take on TV, advertising and its effect on society, consciousness and fiction - it was written pre social media and even pre ubiquitous internet, so can feel dated but towards the end feels prescient, esp. as it focuses a lot on one of DFW’s favorite themes: “what we pay attention to and why and how that affects our consciousness”, etc.) plenty more, but i think those are both good places to start. (PS: if you like David Lynch or Dostoevsky, DFW has AMAZING essays on each of them too, highly recommend) |