Insoluble Flux

"It's interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing" [From "Good Old Neon"]

Been rereading some of David Foster Wallace's stuff, to remind myself of how good he could be. Sometimes his stuff didn't work. Sometimes his stuff was amazing. I think this is what I liked about reading him, the sense that you didn't really know what to expect. I mean it wasn't like reading someone else, someone else you know is good, but who'll never surprise you or inspire you (like Martin Amis maybe, back in the day when Martin Amis was actually worth reading). It was different. I went through a phase, soon after having read everything David Foster Wallace wrote, of looking for someone similar - reading "Young American Novelists", "postmodern writers" looking for something of the same thrill that I found with him - but I never found anything as satisfying and gave up the search.
What perhaps struck me most in that search was (and I'll get to the other stuff I think made DFW great) the actual quality of the writing, a certain sharpness, a clarity of expression even in the midst of those long rolling sentences. Some of these other writers I looked at, well, maybe they had ideas (tho generally...), but the writing always seemed so dull compared to DFW. In a way perhaps this is the true genius of DFW: that while he wrote so much on the impossibilty of expressing feelings in writing, in language, his own writing was so good. Perhaps he felt that in some way if he could just write better and better (stylistically) he would eventually come upon the secret of some impossible expression...
And that is of course the other thing that I really loved about DFW, that there was always this belief in something else. It never (or hardly ever) had the feeling of writing for writings sake, pointless stylistic experiments, hiding behind irony - he was always willing to say something, to believe in something, to want to say something even if it seemed impossible to truly express anything at all.
I'll finish up these brief thoughts with a quote from the end of "Octet", in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I found so many things I could have quoted, and this quote is overlong, but I think it expresses everything very well:

It may well be that all it'll do is make you look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself. Even under the most charitable interpretation, it's going to look desperate. Possibly pathetic. At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do... more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.
So decide.