>>25303412
I gotta try it. I have the pale king on my bookshelf, but I've read nothing else from him other than IJ and some essays. Is Good Old Neon as good as they say?

>>25303516
it's good but not the best in the collection, the title story and the soul is not a smithy are golden.

I've read IJ, Pale King, and this one in translation. Excited to finally go for the original.

>>25303412
Good Old Neon, obviously.

>>25303412
i didnt really like any of them. i was perhaps spoiled too early in my exploration of this writer nothing else he wrote is even close to the story Octet contained in Brief Interviews.

>>25303412
I like the story ‘good ole neon’ because ‘good ole neon’ is clearly broken as a story and partly this is like ts eliot claiming that hamlet doesn’t work as a play and nobody is even reading the story because everbody is like omfg! dfw but the difference here is that by the end of ‘good ole neon’ the writer to that story is in some dimensional limbo or something like that, like agent cooper in twin peaks before return or something like that, which i still haven’t watched all the way yet, and shakespeare had the whole cast and crew of that production of hamlet for that sort of disintegration, where dfw has arrived at were a place that is completely broken, dfw only ended that story with a metaphysical gambit of david wallace and the gambit is that nobody will call bullshit on what dfw is doing but what dfw is doing is allowing the story to write the story in this sort of twisting nether regions of what stories were and dfw has the skills to podrace drift that story over the line and have readers that will reader but also to a writer this a dangerous realm because relationship to craft that gets invoked, the literary idea of fame is an idea that only seems dead when you would call on that idea but much at work else times anyway the literary idea of fame still potent though archaic atavistic where the pages of old libraries are from and perhaps all pages of books are stored somewhere maybe in borges library the relationship to craft is important to a writer though especially with meta-fiction which is a kind of cottage industry of literature responding to strange tides and eddies of time and marketing and at the end of that story dfw has a character called david wallace come into the story as a metafictional narrator and none of that has a narrative coherence as concerns the story to the story but the narrative texture calls or allows for the kind of disintegration that when the standards to the pattern were warped to the degree that adding david wallace does not prevent the suspension of disbelief and that this story get accepted on the craft level because of the skill and yet according to the critic james wood ‘ the skill of djw makes the skill of dfw scarf up the skill of dfw like a fire being scarfed up by the invisible hand of the night’ but important to this is the james wood is also badly mistaken i reckon so anyway owing to the cause that wood writes largely support of the archaic traditional realist novel instead of support of craft anyway that is beside the point and this is also late as a piece of art dfw doesn’t just leave dfw out there, from metafictional angle this is all narrators something like that this is last piece dfw put out while alive, what a lot pieces are are aporia arrived at at the end of dfw’s life as artist and part of the effect of this disintegration that this narrator voice shattered by what dfw did partly, especially for other writers and readers, anyway this story is not bad

>>25308755
interesting, yeah from what i remember i always saw "good old neon" as quite literally the scrambled thoughts of a man in his dying moments, which he sort of reveals at the end. just in that the story is so spliced up between the salesman's memories, his regrets, and his actions in the lead--up to his suicide. nothing's in chronological order, he sort of skips around because he says that that's how messy the mind is and it gets especially messy in its final moments. i did forget about the self--insert though, i should go back and check it out.

he does seem to play around with the mind a lot here. "the soul is not a smithy" does a similar thing by capturing how messy thinking is--in that one the narrator switches between the hostage situation, his childhood imagination, and memories of other stages in life all at once. it's confusing as hell but i liked it a lot, haven't read any of his other works. does he do a similar thing with this narrative technique in IJ?

Mr Squishy is great.