David Foster Wallace is a fascinating and tragic figure. Lev Grossman is a fascinating writer but a very un-tragic one. His name is made of Tolstoy’s first and Vassily’s last, combining the two greatest writers of the two consecutive centuries (IMHO implied in this blog throughout, but I will just add it here). Lev’s review was tweeted by Josh Wills of Cloudera and this piece has caught my eye:

Wood, in case it’s not obvious from that quote, was not in love with these books. He felt that they fundamentally failed at the novel’s basic task of representing human beings. This conceit of describing people as hyper-connected nodes, defined by the mass of external details that stick to them and the chance connections that link to them to other people-nodes, overwhelms any sense of their interiority. They don’t create that ghostly illusion of actual living consciousness that novels are supposed to create.

Read more

Most value of the original thinkers we consider influential is derived from accomplishment of the self – thinking, contemplation, progress, and discovery. It is not done by connections per se. Hence marketing is always secondary to product. An interesting question is whether our times will change that, whether the Katz influencers will replace Einsteins (sic).