DFW - The Pale King

This particular book always felt tainted to me. DFW didn't complete it, it feels dirty to read something he didn't sign off on.

That chapter about the christian couple in the park is one of the best things the Wallace ever wrote

>didn't sign off on
>Leaves instructions on how to publish his book as his suicide note
Retard.

i think it's kind of a misinterpretation.
Apparently he left a light on illuminating one on the unfinished manuscript when he died. I think you kinda get the idea of the story.
There may have been a forthcoming part two, as there are some notes that sort of allude to that, but i got the sense that he moved a lot of that stuff forward and compressed it. You can read some of his other drafts and things and aside from some bits that suggested that he wanted to do more with Sylvanshine as a character, and develop a plotline where Drinion becomes some kind of hero in defiance of the incoming administration's plans to replace workers with machinery and automation, it's main purpose seemed to mostly make Sylvanshine less likeable, so im not sure it's really missing there, but i guess I would have liked to see Meredith and Drinion's relationship develop even if it did ultimately go nowhere. It could've been funny. That said, a lot of what is included seems to be more than enough to illustrate the main points he was getting at and it's not like his other books weren't similar in the sense that they all initially seem to be a bit disjointed or incomplete.

Are you being meta?

>but i guess I would have liked to see Meredith and Drinion's relationship develop even if it did ultimately go nowhere.
It went exactly where it needed to go for the novel.

Didn't know that, thanks user

i think this is to the benefit of the book, had he actually finished it it probably would have turned into a bloated rambling mess, this way we got the gems and a melancholy sense of what might have been rather than a failed masterpiece

That user somewhat suggests things which are not there, ambiguously phrased. The book follows DFWs final outline for the novel, which did not include those bits, some where completely discarded and some where things he would have liked to have in the novel but including them would fuck things up. The introduction by his editor (Michael Pietsch) explains some of this and he also wrote/gave some interviews elaborating on it. There is nothing to suggest that any plots would get developed and developing them does not really make sense in context of the novel, from what I have seen those bits were ideas he had discarded.

If someone can link to something which shows he wanted to develop such plots or any plot at all, I would love to see them. No one has yet to provide me anything beyond 'just trust me bro.'

it's true, there is some suggestion from his wife that the novel would have taken a more sappy turn focusing on domestic life of Drinion and Meredith. Lots of repeating references to this idea that doing boring ritaulistic things is difficult and important, but also referencing this idea that some people wont be able to handle that and it's bad for everyone involved if it isn't acknowledged or addressed.
I think that point did get across though with what is already there.

>some where completely discarded
That is discarded by DFW, not Michael Pietsch.

The reference to most of this stuff such including the part 2 is in the the notes/errata bit at the end of the novel.
there is also an edition of the book with 4 incomplete chapters (one of which is very relevant to his suicide).
There is also articles and other things written by his widow.

>The reference to most of this stuff such including the part 2 is in the the notes/errata bit at the end of the novel.
There is nothing to suggest he wanted to include that stuff, it is just acknowledging that it is there and the first paragraph of the notes and errata plainly states that most of it makes no sense to the novel. He annotated his drafts heavily and wrote a great deal, it was part of his writing process and how he brainstormed, the bulk of what he wrote for a work would be discarded. You can get a glimpse of his writing process and see the evolution of the authors preface section which includes the conception of the novel (picrel) here;
hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll20
I have some more examples of his writing process but am not finding them online and do not have them with me at this moment (not at home).
>there is also an edition of the book with 4 incomplete chapters (one of which is very relevant to his suicide).
Those were chapters which DFW had decided to discard and abandoned or things which he would have liked to include but could not without fucking things up, if memory serves it explicitly states this in that edition but I could be conflating it with some other Michael Pietsch interview/writing, been to long since I have seen that and I just read them at the book store since I already had a copy.
>There is also articles and other things written by his widow.
Those seem very much like an author bouncing ideas of his wife and discussing the current state of it, nothing about them sounded concrete to me, at least in the article I read. If there is an article where she is more concrete than I would love to see it.

Attached: p15878coll20_65_extralarge.jpg (2000x1410, 449.22K)

oh

no idea why you would take his word for it, i assume you are samefagging for some spiteful reason, im not sure.
did you actually read the notes and errata?
did you actually understand the novel? it doesnt seem like it.
everything i told you is there, i could quote it for you verbatim, but i dont know why you couldnt look it up yourself if youre willing to get so upset about the facts.
you have no idea what youre talking about. it's weird.

>Those were chapters which DFW had decided to discard and abandoned or things which he would have liked to include but could not without fucking things up, if memory serves it explicitly states this in that edition but I could be conflating it with some other Michael Pietsch interview/writing, been to long since I have seen that and I just read them at the book store since I already had a copy.

this is just untrue, the only problems in these chapters were that they assumed a depth to sylvanshine's character that the rest of the story didn't justify as is and there is also some inconsistency about his origin. He was going to re-work somethings for his vision of "part 2", but again, i think he just sort of compressed it.
But you can get an idea of what he was going for.

>There is nothing to suggest he wanted to include that stuff, it is just acknowledging that it is there and the first paragraph of the notes and errata plainly states that most of it makes no sense to the novel.
this is also just a lie, why would say this blatant lie and then try to hide it behind some tangential but irrelevent info about his writing process?
These were the final notes to himself included in the manuscript that suggested any sort of plans for where the plot and characters would end up in the end. If there is anything that "makes sense to the novel" or suggests he "meant to include that stuff", it would be that.

You again. Still waiting on your proof from the IJ thread.
>this is also just a lie
Notes and Errata introductory paragraph from The Pale King
>Throughout the manuscript of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace wrote
hundreds of notes, observations, and larger ideas. Some of these asides
suggest where the plot of the novel might have headed. Others provide
additional information about characters’ backgrounds or their future
development. Contradictions and complications abound among them. For instance,
some notes say it’s DeWitt Glendenning who is bringing examiners with unique
abilities to Peoria; others that it’s Merrill Errol Lehrl. A note from chapter
22 suggests that Chris Fogle knows a string of numbers that, when recited,
give him the power of total concentration, but nowhere in the chapters we have
does Fogle display this power. (Perhaps this ability is the reason Fogle has
been summoned to meet Merrill Lehrl in chapter 49.) The hope in including this
selection of notes is that they allow a fuller understanding of the ideas
David was exploring in The Pale King and illuminate how much a work in
progress the novel still was.

I will ignore the rest of your posts because you do not actually say anything other than insult and provide nothing to back up what you say. The link I provided plain demonstrates how DFW used the notes and how things evolved.

so it's you!
id be happy to honestly, we could do this all year.
but remember: i know i'm right, just remember that, you only think you are.
But more important than anything just remember that you did a TERRIBLE misreading of the events of Infinite Jest and really should re-evaluate your own authority.

Yes, that would be a literal quote from the editor.
And to some notes it's very literally true, and like i said, it didn't "fit" with what he had, but this is a blanket statement, you can kinda see where things would have fit together, where certain gaps would be filled.
It probably takes a kind of intuition and discernment that you don't have.
You can't take everything so literally, especially with art.
I could see you kind of falling into that kind of autistic thinking based on your fixation on these certain aspects of the story like the cessation of narration as it relates to Hal's communication skills, which is really just part of a bigger thing about the failure of communication.
And this thing you have about the footnotes making some sort of particular trend towards the end of the novel, or focusing on particular styles of speech towards the end of the novel, which again is sort of a sub-observation of a bigger more important thing youre actually missing.
again, i dont spend too mcuh time on this, thinking of what to say to you or making sure you completely understand because i get an impression of your character and im not particularly impressed.

>id be happy to honestly
Than do it.
> just remember that you did a TERRIBLE misreading of the events of Infinite Jest
And yet you could not provide one thing to demonstrate that or address a single point I made. Dig that thread out of the archive and start a thread, provide all that evidence you endlessly talked about but never provided. It was kind of fun but I am not going to play that game again, either address the points made and provide evidence to back it up or I will not reply. So far you have remained true to form and offered nothing of substance.

alright so shoot, what were your infinite jest questions?
last i remember before i got bored was something totally retarded i couldnt be bothered with explaining.
like do you really think that some other organization could have been responsible for the distribution of the entertainment?
How is it it not incredibly obvious to you that Orin was the one? I mean, even on my first reading i got this. But once you know, it only becomes more clear.

That's.... not what happened at all.

>And yet you could not provide one thing to demonstrate that or address a single point I made. Dig that thread out of the archive and start a thread, provide all that evidence you endlessly talked about but never provided. It was kind of fun but I am not going to play that game again, either address the points made and provide evidence to back it up or I will not reply. So far you have remained true to form and offered nothing of substance.

I'm not sure that's true.
The notes and errata clearly reference and i quote i remember the words "for forthcoming part two" written by DFW, i'm relateively sure were in reference to details of Meredith Rand.
I don't know if you relaly gort this, but you are supposed to relate those notes to particular subsections, notice the numbers are not sequential? Theres a reason for that, those are his notes for where particular storylines were going.
Like i said, im not sure i can really be bothered to pull up full text quotes, you can do that yourself instead of getting so angry, i can promise you it's there.
Like i said, you just don't really excite me as a person to debate, it almost seems like youre trolling me into doing your homework for you or something like that. There's not enough reciprcicoal energy. You should appreciate i even bother at all, i'm probably one of the few people who really knows this stuff.

to be fair, you weren't there.
No one read his suicide note except his wife.
He apparently arranged the manuscript in a certain way before his death though, it apparently seemed deliberate, what with the light being left on it and all.

>he does not know how to use the archive.
warosu.org/lit/thread/S20228758

are you kidding?
i know very well how to use the archive, i use it almost every day as a matter of fact.
the truth of the matter, as indicated by my lazy style of replies, is that i just dont really respect you as an opponent, ask me the questions again, here in this thread if you really want to know.
I assure you i have the answers and you do not.

DFW didn't write anything worth reading. He managed to stay on the train while his buddy Franzen fell off, but he'll fall off eventually and soon. He'll not be carried past 2050 except for some academics dabbling in the obscure who imagine they are somehow superior for knowing of this uninteresting turd's work.

This post really is quite worthless.

this might be true, but maybe for literature as a whole.
I think films will fill this role in the academic world.

Okay so out of kindness i did a quick perusing of the thread but i was very quickly reminded of the issue.
AFR and Interlace, being the two organizations possibly "responsible" for the distribution is a again, a weird focus on sub-fact, or missing the forest for the trees.
The AFR gets the tape from Orin and uses the interleace network for mass distribution, that's obvious, but the point is that they needed the master copy, which only Orin has.

what else is here..
the thing about masks? it's again too simple, you want it to be something specific but it's part of a bigger thing about the failure of communication, it's too abstract to nail to any one thing in particular, or i suppose you could try but it would ultimately be able this communication theme.
the thing about the narrative structure is not about "unreliability" of the narrator, it's about, again, the failure of to communicate. It's supposed to fall apart, but mostly just to call attention to the meta aspects of the book, a reminder that the book is an object. It's a brick.

do you remember something about a string being plucked by a thumb?
it's about turning pages.
there's a lot like this.

If we're going to focus on rhymey coincidences, why dont we think about Geofrey Day? Gee, every day?
Ennet House? In-it House?
ETA or Estimated time to arrival (where?)
Etc. i suspect this would blow you away based on your shallow readings.

>lazy style of replies
lol, obsessive posting is not exactly lazy. also, not him, just shared for those following along and missed it. I can not decide if you are a troll, you seemed to put in a awful lot of time and effort for a troll but you never really said anything.

I use Yea Forums x, i get thread updates.
i wouldnt call it obsessive.
I guess, it's sort of a personal beef against people who get their heads up their asses because they came to their own interpretation about a "le big book" when really it's completely off-base.
It's a personal pet-peeve, my motivation is mostly spite.
What do you want me to say, if anyone is saying anything interesting at all that hasnt been said a million times it's me, so i dont know if i get what youre saying exactly.

If it was truly obsessive i wouldnt have abandoned that least thread.
I will eventually abandon this one as well as soon as it becomes clear that I'm only speaking to myself.
The issue with the last thread was i was just hit with walls of retardation that i couldn't be bothered to refute seeing as how it all could have been easily resolved by my opponent simply "learning to read".

I don't like his gay melodrama but sometimes he was really funny desu

if you werent obsessed you would not come back with after thoughts every 5 minutes. making posts over an hour in response to a single post is obsessive and notifications do not really account for that. but thanks for clearing that up. meds.

>making posts
making 5 posts over an hour. i really need to get a new keyboard.

i can imagine it looks that way, i mean i clearly dont re-read my posts either. But no, that's just sort of how i write on Yea Forums. I usually only post when i get annoyed by something and this is just sort of my process of venting. it's impulsive and then i dwell on things.

i actually disagree, this is kind of spot-on in a lot of ways.
I can see why you wouldnt want to see it that way, mainly because it is kind of cynical, and there is this general conception that DFW's stuff is all about sincerity in post-modernism but yeah, the general message in TPK is kind of cynical i guess. IJ too in many ways.

I would not call it or IJ cynical, he is just pointing out things which actually exist and doing it in an entertaining and interesting fashion. He shows a clear way out of it all and that is where sincerity comes into it, you have to be honest with yourself. The books themselves are not sincere, they would have failed horribly if he had made them so and would read like self help books, he was not oblivious to the way the world worked. So he wrote them in a way that they may have an effect on people and sacrificed that aspect in his own work. My quick and somewhat tongue in cheek summary does give a bit of a cynical cast to it all, but that was not intended, I just started in on that run on sentance and went with it. Mostly I simplified it down to be blunt, TPK has considerably more to say than just that.

>some notes say it’s DeWitt Glendenning who is bringing examiners with unique
>abilities to Peoria; others that it’s Merrill Errol Lehrl.

Well, Pietsch was just an editor, and it's not like he had David to ask, but a very simple explanation for this is htat DeWitt worked under Merril Errol Lehrl (which the name btw is supposed to sound like blah blah blah, or the voice of the peanuts teacher), so of course htey would be doing the same hting, it doesnt mean that he liked it (which evidently he does not as indicated by i think subsection 46, where he commends the narrators red-lining suggestion)

The Chris Fogle thing is, yes, tied to the Lehrl meeting in ss49. It's likely he wasnt meant to be part of the team used to defy the imminent automation with the help of Drinion. And yes, Fgole does display this chapter in the novela, where he accurately counts how many words he said so far.
So yeah, again he's just an editor, he tried, but you cant take his word so literally, he is not the artist.

i violently disagree with every word you wrote here, especially
>he shows a clear way out of it all

IJ - an extremely boring book about entertainment
TPK - an extremely entertaining book about boredom

It does have more to say than that, but i really do think that gets to the heart of it: that no one really wants to listen or understand each other and that people dont take responsibility for themselves, but can they really be blamed when you consider the way they are shaped by the world around them.

IJ is very cynical, you might have misunderstood parts of it, but like most of his stuff there's a sense of humor about it, sure.

What do you find cynical about IJ?

Oh boy you'd have to read the last thread.
someone linked it here already.
basically, he's saying no matter what you do, whether you take the Ennet or ETA route, the USOS or AFR route, the UHID or AA, black or white, etc, you will suffer and you are essentially living in a state of cope and tolerance until you eventually die or kill yourself.

denial maybe would be a better word than tolerance*
It's kind of framed optimistically, but that is what he's saying.

>Anyone talking about "shining a light" or any ideas he left in his suicide note probably don't know how book are written and the process through which they are edited.

i mostly agree with you but some of this seems to be beside or missing the point. He likely knew it was incomplete but was in a despondent state at the time & had given up hope. The way he organized the manuscript and left a note reading "For Little Brown Advance" indicates that he accepted the work as it was in his final moments.

Are you the blindpill user?

no, but im interested.
tell me more.

Everyone hates your lebbit smart-ass humour. You are not entertaining anyone. Kys.

A schizo with a flawed understanding built a pill around his flawed understanding of IJ and a bunch of other books and tried to force his meme pill for years, you reminded me of him there. Interesting you agree with the summary of someone who you repeatedly stated did not understand it in the slightest. Did not recognize you without you schizophrenic serial posting and I wrongly assumed that second post just happened to end up in your rant. Sorry, my fault, I will go back to ignoring you until you actually offer what you endlessly promise but never deliver on.