Andrew Brower Latz

Andrew Brower Latz

Andrew is Head of Religion and Philosophy at MGS. He did his PhD at Durham on Gillian Rose and Frankfurt School social philosophy. He has been lecturing and teaching for nearly 20 year

Location UK

Activity

  • @SueIbrahim 'Sometimes it seems that he wrote just to be 'clever' - to impress. At other times it seems he was trying to exorcise his demons. At others again, he seems to be genuinely trying to connect with people, but still seems uncertain how to do that.' These are all true and I think IJ is all three.

  • @SueIbrahim I love this essay too. I don't think accessible is a bad word! I think Wallace's accessibility here is essential to his purpose and fully intended for that reason - to change people's minds (a difficult task, which rarely happens!).

  • Good point. In an interview, Wallace said he wanted to use the AA material as a metaphor for religion, as a way of talking about religious and moral impulses in modern America, and it takes him about 900 pages of IJ before he feels he has laid enough groundwork to be fairly explicit about it. In his review of Josephs Frank's biography of Dostoevsky, Wallace...

  • @SueIbrahim Your point about extracts is true, especially with a novel as big, complex, polyglottal and fragmented as IJ. It was tough choosing extracts from it for that reason!

  • Sorry I misunderstood!

  • Can we not authentically express reservations about our own values or ideals?

  • @GilbertMansell So true! There is no unproblematic hero in IJ. Even Gately's "traditional" action-hero scene is written with irony to undercut it.

  • Wallace actually had a really unfortunate experience with medication, at the behest of his doctor but not really the fault of the doctor, such that his depression meds basically stopped working. D T Max's biography has more detail, but the upshot is I think we should be cautious about attributing Wallace's suicide to his values or work, though of course they...

  • Gately is definitely the hero of IJ, insofar as there is one. Hal, another candidate for a sort of hero of the novel, writes an essay picking out action, modern and post-modern heroes, which Wallace seems to intend to apply to Gately and Hal in different ways.

  • @SueIbrahim Definitely it can be challenged! The context of the novel presents these characters as representatives of two political/philosophical traditions: the individualist liberal tradition (Steeply, America) and the communitarian tradition (Marathe, Europe). Over the course of the novel we see a long dialogue between the two on the mountaintop, each...

  • @KathleenWalker Lots of people, including the esteemed James Wood, have had a similar reaction. One question for fiction writers is how to represent boring and/or banal language; the sort of thing we see in advertising, say. One way is to reproduce it, but at the cost of in all likelihood then being boring and banal. For a very different feel, the stories in...

  • In that section of the essay, Wallace is talking about literary fiction that is about TV, rather than TV itself. I think TV these days could present itself as empty (in an ironic way, e.g. Family Guy), or can be politically critical (e.g., The Wire), but writing about TV is a little trickier according to Wallace because it shouldn't simply or automatically...

  • Keep this in mind when we read 'Octet'!

  • @MichaelMischler Toll! Die Texte fuer diesen Kurs sind alle hier, aber natuerlich ist es besser, die Buecher zu haben. 'Octet' ist besser im Buch als hier (die Formatierung funktioniert besser auf die Blaette als auf eine Webseite.)

  • Great point. How do you think Wallace sees TV feeding into those issues?

  • Hope you enjoy his writings!

  • I really agree with the first point and that's a really interesting explanation and I'm sure that must be a factor.

  • Agreed, had 1850 at first pass and feel like a key part of the idea is being lost by having to halve it. Effectively it becomes a different story/idea, which I suppose is ok for practice but it's a bit of a shame we can't have 2k.

  • Book I enjoyed: Guy Gabriel Kay, Tigana. Page-turning plot, characters you like and want to spend time with and feel you get to know and are part of their companionship group. The world is well imagined and all the strands comes together at the end. There’s some humour, tragedy, parts that are moving and parts that are exciting (e.g. Battles).

    Book I...

  • A really articulate skater/stoner dude.
    An anthropologist who hates 'primitive' people.

  • The loaded snub-nose was hidden inside Hilary’s coat. She was the only one on the rush hour street to look up at the winter rain clouds about to burst open.

  • The notebook was open and one page hovered in the air, now quivering, now gently swaying, its edge describing a curve at first gentle but becoming exponentially steep till it met the spine, like a graph plotting his hopes tending to zero on the y-axis.

  • It looks like there's a Simpson's paradox in the table because the difference column on the right hand side shows men are less likely, in percentage terms, to be accepted than women for each individual subject (except medicine, where there is no difference), but overall men are 1% more likely to be accepted than women. I presume this is to do with rounding...

  • British council doesn’t talk about a control group or effect sizes because it is less focused on results and measuring the effects numerically. The TES is more numerically focused, whereas the BC account includes more qualitative measures. One would be better for aiming at measurable effects on attainment but the other would be better for things like...