Not P but DFW: a mean parody

[Mark Kohut]

I thinb it mostly means "mean' as in unkind....as in his criticism....and
it also has approbation meaning....because the best parodies
do make fun of, that is are mean as to the writing...

And what he overlooks, in my stupid opinion

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 8:27 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Looking over it again, I can see indeed all three meanings are possible. It
> keeps flip-flopping on me. It's almost as if I'm looking at the M. C.
> Escher print* Convex and Concave.*
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:45 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's review of John
> > Updike’s *Toward the End of Time*:
> >
> > The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the
> > line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years.
> Toward
> > the End of Time does have flashes of beautiful writing—deer described as
> > “tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese
> beetles,” a
> > car’s tight turn as a “slur” and its departure as a “dismissive
> > acceleration down the driveway.” But a horrific percentage of the book
> > consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to
> > my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its
> > mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it
> > begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and
> > “This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent
> issues
> > of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole
> reams
> > of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our
> > independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled
> or
> > honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—and so much subordination—“As our
> species,
> > having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted
> out,
> > move in”—and such heavy alliteration—“the broad sea blares a blue I would
> > not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less
> > like John Updike than like somebody doing *a mean parody* of John Updike.
> >
> > I thought the word "mean" here is used with an approbative connotation,
> > i.e. the parody is considered very well done, instead of being poorly
> done
> > or mean-spirited, is that correct?
> >
> >
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