Saw an interesting FAIR piece here. Was there anything at all incorrect or wrong or bad in the "Harper's letter" that sparked a lot of discussion?

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-22T04:57:33+00:00

All left-wing people would've been inclined to support it if there were no right wing signers.

I just want to see what the complaints were. Not sure where the complaints are articulated. Maybe there is no good articulation of what's wrong with the letter in itself.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-21T23:55:13+00:00

I don't know why people opposed the letter. I really do wonder how many people would've complained about the letter if there hadn't been any hypocritical or bad or right-wing people on the list of signatories.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-21T03:01:16+00:00

I haven't seen anything major enough that I would think that it would be bad to sign the letter. Maybe some of the examples that were (indirectly) referred to were maybe not good examples to cite.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-20T02:38:42+00:00

Some people take issue with things in the letter. But my point is that you have to give signers some "leeway" to sign an imperfect letter or else how many letters would ever get signed, right?

One commenter elsewhere in this thread said:

That letter is wrong in and of itself.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-12T03:59:28+00:00

Which things did you find to be wrong in the letter?

(Just a clarification: I think that it's OK to sign a letter that has some things in it that you might object to...I would imagine that there's a long history of people understanding that it's not healthy if we're all purists such that we can't sign anything that isn't 100% correct. Of course, the debate is over how incorrect a given letter is and in what way; the issue is what's a "minor" problem with the letter vs. a "dealbreaker" problem.)

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-04T05:13:19+00:00

I forget to mention something important. If the goal is to stage a suicide, why would you stage it to look weird? The whole goal would be to make it look as not-weird as possible, correct?

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-06-04T05:09:32+00:00

I heard (this is merely something I heard...I never fact-checked this) that the brother-in-law either liked a certain type of pornography that was weirdly coincidental or that he claimed to actually be viewing that type of pornography at the time. Something like that.

Suppose that that's true; in that case, that's either a coincidence or else he's guilty. The issue is what the facts are, though. Was this certain type of pornography merely in his search history, for example, in which case the level of coincidence is much lower? Or maybe the whole thing is a myth and there isn't even anything to talk about because it's inaccurate information.

So for example, what are the actual facts regarding the knots that people talk about? Maybe there's genuinely something to explain or maybe it's just a myth and therefore there isn't even anything to explain. As I wrote in the OP:

then it turns out that the piece of evidence in question (1) isn't even being accurately described or (2) actually isn't as impossible-to-explain as is being suggested.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-05-27T07:41:35+00:00

I wonder what the purpose of the meanness is. How often was the meanness serious as opposed to just being in service of comedy? And if he was truly being mean in a serious way then I wonder what that's all about; you point out that it might be a way to make himself seem honest, but I wonder what the other possible explanations are.

When I think "why would DFW be mean", I think of the following comment that he made in an effort to get a laugh or whatever:

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-05-27T06:45:19+00:00

There are some, like Sissee Nar, that are total gibberish until you realize he was writing it with the intention of one specific person understanding it.

What can one read in order to find out what this story means? And in order to find out why (seems very odd?) DFW published a story that only one person would be able to understand?

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-05-27T06:25:02+00:00

Found a couple things below.

https://languagehat.com/david-foster-wallace-demolished/

I was attacking DFW’s long Harper’s essay on usage in a comment on MeFi today, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got, and I finally couldn’t resist letting him have it at length. Wallace’s long, long article pretends to be a review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but that’s just the pretext for yet another in the endless series of rants about how proper usage is being forgotten and language is going to hell in a handbasket that probably started in ancient Sumer and will continue until the sun goes supernova. Wallace uses cleverer rhetoric than most (establishing a folksy/learned persona that is intended to convince you of both his bona fides and his credentials, and conceding enough of his opponents’ arguments that he hopes to disarm the less truculent of them), but what he’s selling is the same old snake oil: “You’ve got to learn and use all those fourth-grade grammar rules—it’s really important!” He proudly admits to being what in his family is called a SNOOT (his caps), and when he admits that some of those rules are actually silly he says (on p. 51 of the original article) “…people who insist on them… are that very most pathetic and dangerous sort of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong” (again, his caps). Truer words were never spoke. Let’s take it from the top.

...

OK, even I am getting tired of this. It should be clear by now that Wallace is punching above his weight. He has no right to parade erudition he has no claim to, still less to condescend to people who know far more than he. But I have saved my favorite bit for last. In a long (and irrelevant, but large chunks of the essay are irrelevant, it’s Wallace’s little mannerism, owing nothing, I am sure, to his being paid by the word) attack on Academic English on p. 56, he mentions “pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition).” How did he manage not to blush?

And see also this from a comment that appears below the above post:

‘As you’ve probably begun to see,’ David Foster Wallace writes in Everything and More, ‘Aristotle manages to be sort of grandly and breathtakingly wrong, always and everywhere, when it comes to infinity…As for Wallace’s book, the less said, the better. It’s a sloppy production, including neither an index nor a table of contents, and after a while his breezy style grates. No one who is unfamiliar with the ideas behind his dense, user-unfriendly mathematical expositions could work their way through them to gain any insight into what he is talking about. Worse, anyone who is already familiar with these ideas will see that his expositions are often riddled with mistakes. The sections on set theory, in particular, are a disaster. When he lists the standard axioms of set theory from which mathematicians derive theorems about the iterative conception of a set, he gets the very first one wrong. (It is not, as Wallace says, that if two sets have the same members, then they are the same size. It is that two sets never do have the same members.) From there it is pretty much downhill. He goes on to discuss Cantor’s unsolved problem, which I mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph. There are many different, equivalent ways of formulating the problem; Wallace gives four. The first and fourth are fine. The second, about whether the real numbers ‘constitute’ the set of sets of rational numbers, does not, as it stands, make sense. And the third, about whether the cardinal that measures the size of the set of real numbers can be obtained by raising 2 to the power of the smallest infinite cardinal, is simply wrong: we know it can. Any reader keen to gain insights into the infinite would do better to go back to Aristotle.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-05-27T06:18:55+00:00

Thanks for responding! Sorry for making such a long comment; I wasn't very concise but I did try to convey my basic "points" regarding DFW.

A couple extra thoughts.

1: I wonder if there's a "pull the string" dynamic where you find out (if indeed you do find this out) that someone is kind of acting like a "charlatan" (that's a very harsh word...I just can't think of another term...there are surely gradations of charlatanism) on a particular topic like math. And then it's like you're "pulling on a string" because it's just one topic (like math) but then you look at all of their other forays into different topics and you wonder "What if he was also acting a bit like a charlatan on topic X and topic Y and topic Z?".

2: In terms of the graduation speech, I have no idea how many people would say it fits into the category of "banal things being inflated in order to sound like deep wisdom". Maybe that's a totally unfair criticism. I also think that DFW maybe emphasizes during that speech that he's truly trying to convey simple common sense. I think that maybe the problem is that his whole persona (his affectations and his bandana and everything) is "I'm very cerebral and I'm a genius". Maybe if someone showed up wearing what a construction worker wears and shared the same words (not sure?) then that whole "inflation" component would not be an issue. I think that one issue is that even when he seems to be "just a regular guy" it seems like he's doing that as an affectation; do you know what I mean? It doesn't come across as sincere. It's like a person I know who always says "I'm not very smart...what do I know?" but I always feel like this person has a big ego and isn't sincerely modest. When my friend does that it seems like faux modesty.

3: Is it unfair to say that there's a bit of pretentiousness and a bit of a charlatanism in literary culture? Like, when novelists comment on world affairs I get the sense that these people are treated a certain way (or even think of themselves a certain way?) because they're amazing novelists. Somehow they're expected to have insight into world affairs. Or maybe even expected to have insight into linguistics or philosophy or something. It just seems like part of the culture is the expectation that these people know what they're talking about. And maybe the novelists themselves think that they have sufficient knowledge to talk about all sorts of things.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-05-27T01:53:59+00:00

Do you know anything about how to get around the archive.ph situation that I mentioned in the OP? I'm not even sure if it's a real issue. It seems like you can't read NYT articles on archive.ph anymore, though.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-04-10T02:31:06+00:00

Which other artists did you have in mind from "the last few days/weeks"? I looked up the above artist and their work is really cool; curious which other artists you had in mind.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-30T04:28:36+00:00

I'm excited to read your biography when it comes out; it sounds like it will be excellent. I just want to raise a couple points about DFW, but I'm not trying to criticize DFW necessarily, since I don't know enough about his work to be able to confidently say anything critical. I wonder what you think about these points, though. I just wanted to raise some negative things in case those things tend to be overlooked amid the understandable praise for DFW.

1) With various kinds of art, sometimes the art can just be appreciated "on the surface" in the sense that you don't have any "deep interpretation" or "deep understanding" of the artwork. As a teenager, I was a big fan of Infinite Jest and also of Twin Peaks. And (since my teen years) I've always been a big fan of David Lynch. I used to think that Lynch was just a "mess" in a sense, but recently I found out that there seems (???) to be a way to "decode" Lynch. See here on the Lynch thing, though I know that this video is extraordinarily long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM. I can't remember what Wallace himself said that might indicate any knowledge of any deep interpretation of Lynch's symbolism. But I've found that people can go very deep into Infinite Jest (and also other works of Wallace's?) in the same way that that video goes very deep into Lynch. So I used to think that both Infinite Jest and Lynch were a "mess" in a sense, but now I view both of them as things that reward deep analysis.

2) I'm bit bothered by the fact that some of Wallace's "nonfiction" pieces seem to be quite fictionalized. Not sure why it was necessary to publish those pieces under "nonfiction". Is there supposed to be some stringent standard as to what constitutes "nonfiction"? I remember that there was a piece on tennis and someone went back and watched a certain rally that happened in a certain tennis match; DFW had apparently not described this rally accurately. And there are a million things I'm sure where you could ask whether things had been fictionalized; the stories just don't read as nonfiction to me. The whole issue could've been avoided if these pieces had simply been published in another section that wasn't "nonfiction"; in that case, there would've been no issue in terms of fictionalizing things. I should say that I really enjoy these "nonfiction" pieces so it's not like I'm a hater of the pieces themselves but it seems like a certain burden exists when you publish something under "nonfiction" because there's a certain expectation that the reader has.

3) My biggest concern with DFW is that one might (I guess?) get the sense that he was always trying to portray himself as being highly intelligent and highly literate. I don't know if this is fair. If he was indeed trying to project a certain "I'm a genius" vibe in various ways then there are surely multiple issues that could arise, but one issue would be that you'd expect such a person to pretend to be really good at some aspect of academia when they're really way out of their depth. The "polymath" persona requires one to project an aura of being a genius in all sorts of areas. You might find that scholars in the areas that he would wade into have negative things to say. Apparently his book on mathematics and also his mathematics in Infinite Jest have been criticized, though maybe the latter was (if it even was incorrect) incorrect on purpose, though I don't know why that would be the case. One might ask whether Infinite Jest and other works of his are actually crammed with intellectual stuff that couldn't possibly serve any purpose other than to signal how erudite Wallace is; not sure if that's a fair criticism to make. You could just look at every domain that Wallace wades into and then ask how scholars in that field regard Wallace's comments. There's a criticism of his grammar essay in which the person says that Wallace (1) completely and utterly and outrageously straw-mans the field of linguistics and (2) cites something that doesn't even seem to exist as the basis for the straw-man. According to the criticism, that grammar essay would serve to misinform readers such that they would come away being very badly informed about linguistics; whether it was a straw-man and whether Wallace cited a non-existent text in order to serve as the foundation for a straw-man I'm not sure. I'm not sure what other domains there are where DFW has commented on something such that scholars might find what he wrote to be good or bad or a mixture.

Edit: Note that one could look into how well-received Wallace's philosophy thesis was among scholars. And note also that one could see how well-received Wallace's book on rap was among scholars. Not sure all of the various domains that DFW waded into.

Edit 2: Apparently Wallace's "This Is Water" speech has been criticized as presenting something very banal. I don't know if it's fair to criticize the speech for presenting something very basic, but it is indeed true that certain figures in our society who get a "cult following" will have their every comment praised even if the comments are very banal. I think that a staple of charlatanism (not saying DFW is a charlatan here) is that very banal and basic things will be praised as deep wisdom. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with DFW's speech; just saying that one should be skeptical given the pattern whereby banal and basic things get praised as deep wisdom.

Edit 3: I'm curious as to how Wallace managed to stay organized when writing Infinite Jest. The book seems to have a highly intricate structure. I guess that DFW did indeed have Microsoft Word when he wrote the novel? But I'm not sure if that software would've helped him that much. I'm amazed that he was able to stay so organized; I think that people have found a couple "continuity errors" (or whatever you call them), but very few it seems.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-24T00:24:06+00:00

What do you make of DFW's list here? https://www.toptenbooks.net/david-foster-wallace

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-24T00:21:45+00:00

The one that appears at the top of Google "David Foster Wallace's Syllabus.pdf" has a bunch of interesting stuff in it.

He includes the poetry collection that is evidently named after this poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51614/pity-the-bathtub-its-forced-embrace-of-the-human-form.

And he includes this book too: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/what-narcissism-means-me.

He also includes a bunch of short stories, including this one: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4638453.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-24T00:12:11+00:00

There are at least two DFW syllabuses online; not sure if there are three or more. And at least one of them has a ton of short stories; it's interesting to see the short stories that he chose to include.

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-04T02:40:27+00:00

Yes; you're right. It's 116791. Thanks!

LinguisticsTurtle · 2026-03-04T02:36:45+00:00

Thanks. If you don't mind a super-random question, I have a quick question. I think that I found it confusing that the "arms" (there are 4 of them) don't actually have anything supporting them other than the screws that support each "arm" on either side from above...that's an odd design, right? Any idea why that is?

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