The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
I'm in the middle of the Margaret Talbot. I enjoyed the piece about the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, and discussion of how the book has become so male-coded. I love David Foster Wallace's essays and at one point challenged myself as a New Year's resolution to read the almost 1,100 pages of Infinite Jest. I mentioned the plan to my son, who has read the entire book. A couple of months later, he saw the book sitting on a table with a bookmark at about page 17. "Looks more like a finite jest to me," he said.
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on February 17, 2026, 05:19:43 pm ---... "Looks more like a finite jest to me," he said.
--- End quote ---
:laugh: :laugh:
Yes, Feb. 2 was quite a standout issue. I loved the part in the Rapanui (Easter Island) article where she describes Heyerdahl's theory that tall, blond, bearded people settled on the island and built the moai. People who looked a lot like...Heyerdahl. And it was sad to read about the fate of Katherine ROutledge, who did the initial research that was largely forgotten and who was banished to an insane asylum.
Front-Ranger:
I went back and read "Don't Say it Like That" by Ben Yagota in the September 29, 2025 issue. I didn't think I would enjoy it the first time around but I really did. But, what an amazing number of quotes there are in that article! It would take forever if we were still setting lead type. The review of Thomas Pynchon's new book was good too, so I ordered the book.
serious crayons:
I should read the Pynchon review. I haven't read any Pynchon -- he, along with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, have always struck me as being more male-coded than DFW. But I think my sons enjoy Pynchon, so I gave them both that book for Christmas (they live in different cities, so would be difficult to share a copy).
Jeff Wrangler:
I read the "Infinite Jest" article.
What actually popped out at me wasn't anything about DFW. It was a comment the author made about a book by George Eliot, which she describes as "a florilegium of instructive or consoling lines mostly wrestled from the fictive surroundings that had loaned them their vitality and moral torque."
Say what?
Writing like that is why I don't think very much of "criticism," of art, music, or literature.
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