David Foster Wallace reads from "The Pale King" and "Incarnations of Burned Children" (12/2000)
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- This is from a reading David Foster Wallace did for the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Check out these David Foster Wallace books on Amazon!
The Life of David Foster Wallace: geni.us/7xzix
Conversations with David Foster Wallace: geni.us/HHYcGBe
Infinite Jest: geni.us/RwhKG
Join us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/ManufacturingIntellect
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I just became a father recently (8-20-2024 8:44am). Listening to the last passage shook me, but I feel steeled now if my child is ever burned in this way. I pray that I have the presence of mind should this ever happen to my son
Best of luck, Jaime
DFW I hope you understood, in life, that the laughter your self-deprecating stream of consciousness provides is due to how deeply it resonates with others. We laugh with something when we see a part of ourselves. No one is laughing at you, we literally feel what you are saying and it strikes a chord and resonates as laughter. It is a beautiful thing. Wish you were here. ❤️
Aside from the fact that he had a great sense of humor and his writing is often hilarious, when giving public readings DFW tended to pick passages that were particularly funny, to be entertaining, and to stick with ones that got a lot of laughs.. This is a gift to the reader, the fan, who goes back, reading alone, and hears the laughter said reader had missed or not enjoyed quite so much the first time.
I think DFW killed himself because he heard the laughter at the pain and horror he was writing about as a confirmation that the world he lived in is so completely ass backwards.
Rest in peace DFW, you are genius! Your Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books😢
The irony in commenters here complaining that the laughing audience "doesn't get it" is that the commentars are the ones who do not get it. Laughter is a natural response to more than just knock knock jokes. Humans use it to connect to each other, but also to separate themselves from discomfort. Wallace knows this. All of Wallace's work is to some extent a comedy. It is impossible to "get" Wallace's points while listening to one live reading for the first time, but that doesn't mean that the people laughing are hopelessly ignorant or that Wallace finds them frustrating. He knows what he wrote, he knows what response it will elicit, and he is eliciting that response on purpose. To think that Wallace doesn't want the audience to laugh is to discredit Wallace as a writer.
I'd like to hear more about this. I don't know his work, but listening to this made me feel like the people laughing were in fact hopelessly ignorant, but I don't know, maybe I am missing something. I agree that laughter can be a response to discomfort, but he's talking about some pretty heavy stuff here and...I don't know man, it just feels wrong to laugh at such vivid descriptions of suffering of children, fictional or not. I also saw an interview with him where he talks to a woman with an accent and at one point she asks him about his comedy and he says that he was surprised when people found it funny because it wasn't really supposed to be funny, so maybe he really doesn't understand why people are laughing, given that in his previous book, that was the case.
Now I'm not one to talk, I don't know his literature, but maybe you can relate to why I feel discomfort and confusion when I hear the audience laugh, and the tid bits of evidence that would seem to support the idea that he is not trying be funny.
Help me to understand. :)
Here's that video I was talkin about. Mind you, he is referring to Infinite Jest here, not The Pale King, so I know it's not a 1:1 match but it just supports the idea that maybe he really isn't trying to be funny most of the time.
ua-cam.com/video/iGLzWdT7vGc/v-deo.html
@@crowlsyong you’re right, he would always push back against the funny label. On the whole his works are sad.. profoundly sad even.
though the fact I wanted to add ‘lol’ to the end of that means both comments are correct. Still, ..that is the nature of his work haha
Wrong
@@crowlsyong Это лукавство с его стороны - заявлять, что он не понимает, что в книге смешного. Там очень много забавных моментов - фильмография Джеймса Инканденца, кровожадные игры для инициации квебекской молодёжи, описание быта обитателей дома на полпути, бородатый анекдот про каменщика и так далее.
The level of detail is hilarious, uncomfortable, and admirable. I love this guy. I dont understand most of this, but the fact that someone wrote and is reading this is so fascinating in itself.
So he read from his then unfinished book? It is amazing how patiently he liked to describe people's rotten lives in such details to the core of the nitty gritty. It is a social mirror for society to show people what they are doing to themselves and that there is a way to dissolve this suffering.
I believe this was likely his primary aim as a writer, whether fully conscious of it or not
@@CadeCYC Yes I view him as an activist.
12:56 for the Pale King excerpt
One of the subsections that stood out to me while listening to the book, about 1/4 thro rn
1:36 is also from The Pale King.
a lot of hate for the laugh track the audience provide. as someone who always found Wallace's work screechingly funny I think it's nice to see his work read in the context of a laughfest.
Yeah he knew what he was doing. He even added humorous inflections. I think he realized how disarming humor could be because he always used it to set up bombshells he would drop after the funny bits
Laughter is about relating to what is being said. We find his work “funny” because it resonates with our lives.
David Foster Wallace’s writing is known for being funny. Why are people in this comments section miffed that people are enjoying the reading?
DFW has said of IJ "I set out to write a sad book, and when people liked it and told me the thing they liked about it was that it was so funny, it was just very surprising." So some of the comments are probably overzealous fans who have heard that quote and are performatively insisting that his writing is meant to be sad, not funny, and that the people who are laughing don't "get it."
@@deadeadedRight. As if the book wasnt also clearly intended to be hilarious. Things can be funny and sad at the same time
just having a body is insane
He looks gorgeous in this picture
300 rpm im fucking dead
"Child labor, cool!" -The Pale King
DFW was soo good....soooo talented that the only way I (equipped only with an "average" brain) am able to process the vast differences of his (writing/articulating/researching) genius to that of other writers I have read is to make excuses. Surely the parts of his brain which processed his hyper-awareness required to "witness" his writing (as the author) were the same parts of his brain that did him in. To have that nth degree of observance, from so many points of view, so many multi-mirrored dimensions of awareness coupled with the ability to convey such ideas to the masses in (seemingly) effortless, poetic, and precise factual language....is staggering. To posses that power day in and out, from moment to moment must have been exhausting. No wonder he favored a program whose focus is to keep things simple and do things "just for today." He saw everything from an outsider's POV. So glad I found his writing....it seems as though I've found what I was looking for all these years.....his writing makes me feel normal....
I love this. His writing makes me feel normal. I was not familiar with this one. Amazing writing.
First of all your brain is just fine and intelligent. Appreciate your precious brain man. But why do those stories make you feel normal? Ha. If your live is not tedious and painful then isn't it wonderful to not be normal? My friend Rita said to me that her son asked her "how do you attract normal people?". That question kinda made me irritated because why do people seek normal people? For what reason? I'm certainly not normal and will never attempt to even try being normal. What David describes are people who are normal and it's normal people who always accept the most abhorrent conditions in society and the most idiotic norms.
WTF
Shim Dim watch it now
please yawl let's be inspired/moved by the dude and NOT bogged down by comparison and endless idjit questions about his life!
"Они его ненавидели. И ненавидели себя за то, что чувствовали к нему эту ненависть. И ненавидели его ещё больше за то, что он заставляет их ненавидеть себя".
Рекурсия чисто в духе ДФУ)
Great line and so (unfortunately) relatable
Can't seem to find the section where he reads from the pale king? Can anyone help me out :)
It is all from The Pale King.
The people who don't understand why the audience is laughing don't understand DWF.
@Manufacturing Intellect: From when is the recording?
Apologies, but for those having a hard time with the seemingly irreverent laughter, perhaps attempt approaching this with less crude and linear notions of suffering conveyance. DFW was, at most reading attempts, connecting to that communal grip of despair and banality which (at times) comedy lent the needed sentiment of chaos to capture the ultimately inarticulable depth and terror of the human condition. “Das ist komisch”.
his work is funny, period. you should hear him talk about why Kafka is funny.
When my father was dying of cancer he constantly cracked jokes, even when moribund and barely able to move, and they were often very morbid ones that were as screechingly funny as they were tragic. The tragedy for me was not so much the jokes themselves but the realization that he would soon be gone, excised from my life. The pain and memory of watching him die for three years would come later down the road. He would have us all in stitches, but the underlying sadness and trauma never left me, even as I laughed. He believed that humor was the only way to approach and process tragedy -- it depends on each individual of course -- but for me this is absolutely true, and I wouldn't be here now if not for it. DFW's writing for me, is at once achingly lonely, wounding, and also very funny. Not all of it, but some. It always resonates for me as brutal and lonely, even when it's funny. But I could never see a piece such as Forever Overhead as funny; each time I reread it, it leaves me stunned by the beauty of the prose and also desperately sad. There are parts of IJ that are very funny and others, very deeply painful.
@@headshock1111 OP's final quote is from the essay you are refering to
@@headshock1111 DFW seems to disagree. Source: ua-cam.com/video/iGLzWdT7vGc/v-deo.html
@@crowlsyong yeah I’ve seen that, that’s ok, it makes it even funnier.
Last one reminds me of Johnny Truant from House of Leaves. I can't verify all the details but they're definitely connected
some of this work is very funny but the audience laughs at the most random moments so you can't help but feel they are not super connected to the writing but maybe just more enthralled by David himself.
The audience once again doesn't really get what DFW is sharing. It's no wonder he disliked doing public readings of his work.
*audience laughing at a child who does anything and everything he can to help people and make sure everyone is taken care of because the one person he wants to help most, his mother, is in a coma*
Imagine the frustration he must have felt.
So idg your comment bc idk what specifically ur referring to but is it that you thought he wrote in technical health jargon about a woman engorged by herself spinning on her joints as fast as the accelerators of a hot wheels track without expecting himself or his audience to smirk and giggle ? W/e notion u have about what he is willing and unwilling to have conveyed to an audience is probly wrong
My God, surely DFW understood the audience’s laughter was because they could relate to the material? Laughter is about resonating what the reader is saying.
Wallace would hate if what he was sharing wasn't understood. He would do another draft.
@@itsGOJIRAuMORON Honestly I don't think you got it either. The lengths at which he goes to (and the continuity with the way he acts when he grows up in the Pale King too) is humorous and it is meant to be.
why are people laughing is this a seinfeld episode or what
Because its genuinely funny and people cant help but to laugh.
I would edit out the laughter
13:00
This my fav story
The audience is really distracting. Also nothing they laugh at is funny
Yeah. I hate it. It's the opposite of a funny story...
I like it
The audience laughs when they can relate to what has been said. This is what laughter is in life, resonating with the other.
Fuck you, it's very funny.
@@Hellofriend88 Laughter is more than just relating. If you scrape your knee, I am not gonna laugh at that despite that I can relate. If you have a bad breakup, I'm not gonna laugh just because I can relate. If you suffer a loss in the family, I'm not gonna laugh just because I relate.
I'm not saying I know what laughter is, but I know it's more than merely relating.
Seriously, what is so funny?
Most of it.
Sui phagia
Dude that Leonard Stecyk section is hilarious. Like, it’s sad but it’s really funny too.
Does no one understand laughter? It is about resonating with the material. We laugh because we can relate.
Giggle giggle.....I listen to NPR and went to college..
They only accept it as a joke they don't want to take him seriously.
good god i hope its just a joke
Working my way through these goodies will be useful and hopefully edifying.... pity they're not edible.... Ta much.
I started with Hitchens C., but although I would class him as an 'intellectual, I have many problems with his mindset, so I switched to the bottom of your Playlist.
Some of these shows are good, would never be allowed again, and very enlightening:
ua-cam.com/users/results?search_query=after+dark+tv+discussion
excelsior.