Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace

[Mark Kohut]

Dear John Marr, (may I call you Johnny?)---

I've been immersed in Dylan again and that middle section on writers is a
nice verbal homage
from one slant.....118th Dream Song, at least.....Love it......

On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 6:28 AM Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:

> Time​ will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was
> ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of
> fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp
> of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to
> which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen,
> opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den,
> reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to
> the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife.
> I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these
> wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to
> encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the
> competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the
> USmilitary.
> You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.
>
>
>
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> From her piece in the LRB (which isn’t as harsh on his writing as she was
> on Updike, despite her disdain for DFW as a person)
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>