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peterwknox:

Film of Wallace’s ‘Hideous Men’ to Be Released - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com

The film, which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, marks the directorial debut of the actor John Krasinski (of NBC’s “The Office”) and stars Julianne Nicholson (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”) as a graduate student who is interviewing men for a thesis project, as well as Will Arnett, Dominic Cooper, Timothy Hutton, Christopher Meloni and Mr. Krasinski as the subjects of some of those interrogations. Mr. Krasinski has said he first got the idea for the film as a student at Brown University, where he acted in a staged reading of the book, a collection of short stories and monologues.

What is up with the David Foster Wallace renaissance? David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace. Everyone is obsessed with David Foster Wallace. There are like, 20 DFW hardbacks visible in Dolores Park this afternoon.

Let me be plain: He was a bad author.

What if, by some chance, and I’m not attempting snark here (or any approximation thereof), I was totally incapable, and by incapable of, I mean lacking the necessary ability, capacity, or power (i.e. incapable of carrying a tune; incapable of love) writing in any form other than long multi-clause sentences that rambled on and on without much regard for the limitations of either subject or predicate? And if perchance these subordinate clauses were jagged/unwieldy with implications of …? What if I pimped out this quirk for SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PAGES. What if I was constitutionally unable to edit anything, ever, and for all time? What if my stated mission was to make the experience of reading, suck? Would you call me a genius, too? You might.

He was a good journalist. Actually, a great journalist. But reporting thoughts on actual events is a different skill-set from creating original stories. Ask Stephen Glass.

DFW was awful at fiction. Because writing fiction is hard. Plots are hard, characters are hard, dialogue is hard. (Capote was right!) And it becomes immediately obvious upon first read that DFW was fantastically bad at all these things. He should have stayed away from them. He was the exact inverse of Hunter S. Thompson.

If this movie is any good, it’ll be precisely because all the DFW-ness has been edited out. His writing is the opposite of what makes good drama.

200 pages of endnotes is a gimmick.

Go read something better.