That AV Club gateways to geekery feature might just be the best thing on that awesome site. What a good idea, giving primers on artists and art every dude should know and instructing where exactly to start. There were a couple I read because I haven't started on certain daunting ouvres and needed some hand-holding. Granted I did watch White Ribbon and knew Cache is where I gots to go next, but I was, before reading this, a little intimidated. What if I really like Cache? Will that be the end of my liaison with Hanneke since the rest of his stuff sounds so scary? (Tortured families and dying fish). I also read the Peckinpah one, but I'm also excited about finally going past Stax and Motown to Philly Soul and Northern Soul.
Most useful about an ouvre I know a little about is the piece on David Foster Wallace. Love the dude, but not sure if I've read him thoughtfully enough (at least his fiction) to have felt comfortable in suggesting a certain work to a DFW virgin. Originally, I thought suggeting an essay would sell his fiction short, but I won't feel uncomfortable about doing that any longer! His seminal essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (.pdf download here) not only has all the DFW stylistic tics and obsession with details, it also exemplifies the stress dude has with genuinely connecting with the Other:
"Most of Wallace’s trademark tricks and tics figure in: his keen self-consciousness, his electrifying way with words, his almost psychedelic fixation on detail. So does the abiding sense of purpose he brought to writing of every kind—a sense exemplified by a sentence tucked within a wry cataloguing of all he saw and did during a week alone among a mass of alien beings: “I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”
BTW Anthony, DFW is better looking than Dave Eggers.
