shabbos_reads_arty's review against another edition
4.5
Not as good as Consider the Lobster, but still pretty darn good.
rick2's review against another edition
3.0
Some good and some bad. I think this is part of the pantheon of collections that editors used to cash in after DFW’s death. When it’s good it’s really good, when it’s not, it’s self satisfied and haughty with a glaze of condescension
wulfus's review against another edition
3.0
With each passing year, my reverence for David Foster Wallace wanes, and I'm unsure if it's because my migrating politics or the fact that Infinite Jest came at certain time of my life. It seems as though Infinite Jest beckons for the sad, self-loathing, middle-class white kid that demands answers (answers I have found better answered among my leftist comrades [maybe the lack of answers provided from reading Infinite Jest is itself an indictment])1. Both Flesh and Not shines at best as an example of DFW's ability to write, every essay reading like butter to my Midwestern ears. But at worst his politics shine through as middling centrist (a long diatribe about the word "Biased" in "Deciderization 2007") or noncommittally reactionary (any footnote/endnote about the carnal excesses that lead to a sense of emptiness, particularly the essay about AIDS that has far too many incel/men's rights talking points to make me comfortable). Despite it all, Wallace does write with an empathy that echoes my own, straight, white male thought process, and it still reads as literary comfort food to me. And for that, salute.
1 Hey, that was pretty post-modern, huh?
1 Hey, that was pretty post-modern, huh?
pelicaaan's review against another edition
4.0
This was my first DFW, and it's very enjoyable, including (or especially) the examinations of a sport I don't watch, and the reviews of books I haven't read. In fact, the review of The Best of The Prose Poem is probably the finest, funniest, and most thoughtful review-of-a-book-I'll-never-read that I've ever read.
I do think that the inclusion of lists of words in between the essays seemed hagiographic and uninteresting.
I do think that the inclusion of lists of words in between the essays seemed hagiographic and uninteresting.
grgrhnt's review against another edition
4.0
This is a different world built with familiar words. How, I wonder, can that be? How can words mean something alone and something very different when set together in a certain way? Words are mechanical things, how can they inspire emotion? No, how can they be emotions themselves?
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**
inkylabyrinth's review against another edition
challenging
informative
lighthearted
2.0
There were some solid ideas/opinions in this but mostly I'm just glad that it's over.
Half the text is completely irrelevant, and the other half is shocking in its relevancy. The criticism of the Patriot Act in this final essay was particularly poignant, as the RESTRICT Act is currently threatening our personal freedoms far more than any foreign power or app ever could.
Half the text is completely irrelevant, and the other half is shocking in its relevancy. The criticism of the Patriot Act in this final essay was particularly poignant, as the RESTRICT Act is currently threatening our personal freedoms far more than any foreign power or app ever could.
beatsbybeard's review against another edition
4.0
As always, DFW’s obsession with and adoration for words make reading him both an endurance and a joy. I tend to like his nonfiction more than his novels, especially when he writes about things unrelated to language (e.g. tennis, lobsters, Terminator 2). He does retain some amount of stick-up-his-ass elitism (especially re: cultural taste and grammar usage), but what a shame it is that he ended his own life before the U.S. made his most pessimistic predictions real. Reading him always reminds me to take language more seriously whether I’m consuming or producing, and I’m grateful for that.
chelseamartinez's review against another edition
4.0
I tried to read this at a bar in Monument this weekend; a man at the bar said "whatever you do, don't sit there and read a book at the bar, jeez." So I talked to him and his friends for a while while drinking a sour beer (with which was provided a shot glass of syrup, in case I am a person who orders a sour beer and then gets mad when it is sour), and listen to them talk about how Chelsea Clinton was born of a loveless marriage to prove something, but that she'll probably be president someday. This man indicated that his children's math teacher, a great teacher despite having Asperger's, he said, was at the bar too, and I met him, and he said he tried to read some DFW but it wasn't for him; I described this particular book, and he said "oh sure, a money grab," which indeed it is. I spoke with this teacher a bit more; he asked me nothing about myself, which is exactly what I'd like from a person I talk to at a bar, and told me about summer math camp in the mountains for teachers. He said it's his third year teaching, and the other two years, when it was this many days out from the end of the school year, he had started to miss the kids, but this year no; and because it was germane I shared some of what my mom says about the necessities of a summer break and every group of students being different. His son was watching Mary Poppins on a little foldable dvd player at a table in the corner.
It's good to get out of the house sometimes.
Anyhow, I love the tennis articles always; "Back in New Fire" seems uncomfortably at many points like it will crack me over a sharp aluminum mixing bowl's edge of orthodox values before blessedly ending with a poing of generosity, for which I had desperately hoped. I haven't seen Terminator 2 and now I know I don't need to (weird to think of a world before Titanic, is my pathetic thought). Fictional Futures, and Deciderization, I hope I remember to read again someday.
It's good to get out of the house sometimes.
Anyhow, I love the tennis articles always; "Back in New Fire" seems uncomfortably at many points like it will crack me over a sharp aluminum mixing bowl's edge of orthodox values before blessedly ending with a poing of generosity, for which I had desperately hoped. I haven't seen Terminator 2 and now I know I don't need to (weird to think of a world before Titanic, is my pathetic thought). Fictional Futures, and Deciderization, I hope I remember to read again someday.