All posts tagged David Foster Wallace

The Sunday Rumpus Book Blog Roundup

Seth Fischer  ·  February 7th, 2010

My relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china.

It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or David Foster Wallace or Marquis de Sade, and then it rubs off on me, and I end up whining and worrying and complaining more than they do, and then I stop liking myself.

So today, the book blog roundup will be made up entirely things that I think are awesome. No Amazon, no “last days” worrying, no whining, no literary celebrity fetishizing. Just things that rock.

If you only click on one link, this roundup at Pank of short stories and poems and things is really phenomenal.

Newspaper blackout poetry is one of my new favorite things. (via Bookslut)

Literary burlesque.

At Vice, a very cool photography/written collaboration between Brian Evenson and John Sellekaers. (via GIANT)

And finally, here’s a final passive-aggressive blow: “This is the title of a typical incindiery blog post.” (via @electriclit)

David Foster Wallace’s Incandenza Comes to Life

Rozalia Jovanovic  ·  January 12th, 2010

The filmography of the fictional Wild Turkey drinking filmmaker and visionary tennis instructor at Enfield Academy, James Incandenza, the central character of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, will make an appearance of sorts at the Gallery at The Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies.

Beginning January 29th, the Neiman Center at Columbia University will present A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza. The filmography is made possible by the contributions of artists and filmmakers who have been commissioned to re-create the seminal works of the storied oeuvre of the avant-garde filmmaker, all of which is included as a footnote in Wallace’s novel.

While the exhibition will be up through February 19th, the spirit of Incandenza will be celebrated at an opening reception, with film screening, on Friday, January 29th from 6:00-8:00pm.

The Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Michael Berger  ·  December 20th, 2009

With so many shopping days left until whenever, there is no end to the amount of printed matter out there that is riveting, ravishing and ultimately rewarding.

The book blogs are overwhelming to someone like me who wants to read everything. I’ll try to control myself as we venture through them.

At The Book Bench, the unique rewards of editing David Foster Wallace.

Jason Sanford poses questions as to the efficacy of science fiction in helping us confront our imminent cataclysms. (Via: Ecstatic Days.)

And because I can’t stop linking to Jeff VanDerMeer’s Ecstatic Days, here’s an interesting discussion about the connection between art and social justice.

At The Millions, the joys of writing in trains.

Does self-publishing work? That has been a hot item of dispute at 3:AM magazine. Here’s a counter-argument.

Jacket Copy analyzes our decade of bad reading.


Morning Coffee

Dan Weiss  ·  December 7th, 2009

morning coffee new sized right“Nothing can’t be made with wood.” Street legal wooden car!

I don’t know about you, but I could use some good news this Monday morning. Cell phones might not cause brain tumors after all!

Evidently the US Defense Department is way more whimsical than we’d thought.

If you are putting a brooks saddle on your kids tricycle you have way too much money.

Somehow we’ve been out of the loop and totally missed these micro-pigs.

The David Foster Wallace grammar challenge (via Gerrycanavan.)

The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement

Seth Fischer  ·  October 18th, 2009

supplement2It’s fall! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling, and I can’t seem to leave my house.  …more

The Rumpus Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Anne Yoder  ·  October 15th, 2009

My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating. “It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed. Secrets of those bearing a Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised; David Foster Wallace had explored the shadows of the psyche of his generation and had rendered them on the page in all of their dark, desperate beauty. As a woman who came of age alongside these men, who has a brother, a father, a lover, and friends, I was intrigued. …more

The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Seth Fischer  ·  September 20th, 2009

After reviewing the book blogs this week, I’ve decided that if I see the words “Dan Brown” ever again I’m going to punch myself in the eyes with a Da Vinci Code decoder ring.

To save you some time, here’s what they have to say about him: He makes a lot of money. And he’s not the greatest writer.

So today, just to be different, I’m not going to talk about him. I’m not gonna link to a single thing that mentions him. This is a Dan Brown free zone.

Who says creative writing can’t be taught? Hidden inside this article, the tidbit that Dan Brown took a creative writing class with David Foster Wallace. Damn it! OK, no more.

Alan Turing finally gets an apology from Gordon Brown. (via The Elegant Variation)

The new 25th Anniversary Edition of White Noise has some really cool artwork by Michael Cho.

“Humans in every recorded era seem to have had that after-the-end feeling.” Elizabeth Bachner writes about “reading the 60’s” on Bookslut.

A guest writer can be seen by the kids he’s speaking to, but he’s not allowed to see the kids.

An instant book machine from Google.

Don’t Miss the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival: Sunday September 13

Rozalia Jovanovic  ·  September 12th, 2009

Reasons to attend the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival: 1) it’s one of the most hip, smart and diverse American literary events, 2)  because Ben Marcus, Sarah Manguso, Thurston Moore, Heidi Julavits and Tao Lin are just some of the stars and emerging writers who will be talking/reading, 3) panels will talk about DFW , rappers and upward mobility, among a lot of other great things read and discussed, and 4) because it’s free (though for some events you need to secure tickets in advance).

While great things will be happening in several venues throughout the day, and you can see a full listing of the events and locations here, here’s a suggested itinerary (a personal cheat sheet with some Tough Draw Alternates). Enjoy! …more

Where Celebrities Go to Die

Karen Laws  ·  September 12th, 2009

  Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes a crack at the underworld in a hit-and-miss new novel. …more

Details on DFW’s Pale King

Jeremy Hatch  ·  August 13th, 2009

As you probably already know, David Foster Wallace left an unfinished novel called The Pale King upon his death. Today Tim Martin of the Telegraph UK wrote a remembrance  of DFW that, among many other things, includes details of the novel, a version of which will be published in the spring. …more

By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld

Eric B. Martin  ·  July 23rd, 2009

imagesPART I: WHY RUMSFELD, WHY THIS BOOK?

Donald Rumsfeld is my grandmother. …more

Infinite Summer Roundup

Jeremy Hatch  ·  July 14th, 2009

I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like to participate and somehow haven’t heard of it yet, there’s still enough time to catch up with the other participants!

First, there’s the website itself: Infinite Summer. The challenge is to read the 1,000 pages of Infinite Jest from June 21 to September 22, which amounts to 10 pages a day, 75 pages a week. If you started tomorrow, you’d have to read 100 pages a week: still pretty do-able, even for busy people.

Salon has a comprehensive article about the background to the challenge, what it’s like to participate, and the founder of the site, Matthew Baldwin.

There is a wiki for participants here.

Back in February, our own Elissa Bassist wrote an incredible essay, right here on the Rumpus, about her feelings about Infinite Jest, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining the appeal of the book. (She has 95% convinced me to pick it up in the fall.)

And Scott Esposito, in the course of dismissing some silly qualms about the challenge that another blogger had, offers some interesting reflections on the continuing relevance of a doorstopper published in 1996.

Tye Pemberton: The Last Book I loved, Remainder

Tye Pemberton  ·  June 15th, 2009

picture-9Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was a bit of a darkhorse darling when it first arrived on the scene, enjoying attention from everyone and their mother, the latter of whom rightly celebrated it and nearly exhausted it, marking it as possibly “one of the great English novels of the past ten years.” I can do nothing much here in the way of aesthetic appreciation but agree, reiterate and repeat, and thus much of the customary cuddling I might do with what the book is I’ll leave to my precursors in the interests of an appreciation of what the book represents—which is, to say the least, promising. …more

Infinite Summer

Elissa Bassist  ·  June 8th, 2009

clouds-in-blue-sky-a

Infinite Summer is a Web site presenting the world with the following challenge/life-better-maker:

“Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week.” Plus endnotes.

The site features notable participants and four guides/writers, “who have never before read Infinite Jest [and] will do so for the duration of Infinite Summer. And each will be posting here weekly, not only to report on their thoughts and progress, but also to promote and facilitate discussion.” Their names: Matthew Baldwin, Eden M. Kennedy, Kevin Guilfoile, and Avery Edison. There will be some guest guides as well. (P.S. I’m available.)

There are no rules, except mandatory bragging with your completion of the novel.

Do this. It’s doable. Even if you don’t, read the book some other season.

Buy IJ here: Powell’s Books

Morning Coffee

Dan Weiss  ·  April 28th, 2009

Morning Coffee, now two hours earlier for our friends on the east coast. Count on it every weekday at 7, Atlantic!

morning coffee Our Rozalia reviews Throw Down Your Heart, the documentary of Bela Fleck’s travels in Africa.

Heavypetting. A blog about amateur porn gone wrong. Safe for work, actually.

Tom Bissell on This Is Water. (via Goodjobbb)

Mediocre but Arrogant. Australian radio documentary on the problem with business school. (via Boingboing)

One in three children fear earth apocalypse.

Glenn Kenny on Editing David Foster Wallace

Michelle Orange  ·  April 9th, 2009

Film writer and former Premiere editor and critic Glenn Kenny talks about his experience editing David Foster Wallace for that magazine in the mid-to-late 90s and his friendship with the author in this wonderful interview at The House Next Door. Links are available to Wallace’s pieces on David Lynch, Terminator 2, and the AVN Expo, an essay who’s handling at the magazine angered both Wallace and Kenny: ‘I had threatened to quit, and Dave had made it clear that I should not. He called me up and said, “Look, I am mad about what happened to the piece. I will not write for Premiere ever again. I’d love to work with you if you’re ever at another magazine. I don’t think you should quit, though, because you’re doing good work over there.”’

Notes and Errata*: A Companion Guide to “The Unfinished”

Elissa Bassist  ·  March 31st, 2009

dfw-yorker*The Rumpus presents endnotes (and some additions and/or digressions) w/r/t “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max (The New Yorker, Mar. 9, 2009), …more

A Reading List as Suggested Posthumously by David Foster Wallace

Elissa Bassist  ·  March 31st, 2009

Compiled from “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max. …more

Morning Coffee

Stephen Elliott  ·  March 20th, 2009

morning coffee Where the Wild Things Are, posters, previews, and a review of the film site unseen.

Inhabitat, human hamster cage or Ikea tower?

Poe regrets drunkenness.

On Burke’s David Foster Wallace portrait.
Twenty-one years after a crippling accident, a paraplegic man is cured by a spider bite, then promptly gets arrested. (via Metafilter)

David Foster Wallace Mega-site

Stephen Elliott  ·  March 10th, 2009

The Howling Fantods is an incredibly useful and informative David Foster Wallace fan site full of frequently updated links to discussions of DFW. Some recent nuggets: D.T. Max discussing Unfinished on NPR, Michael Pietcsch telling Entertainment Weekly that Little Brown intends to make large chunks of The Pale King manuscripts available online so readers can see DFW’s writing process, and the full press release for The Pale King.

THE EDITOR’S DESK: Unfinished Notes On David Foster Wallace

Stephen Elliott  ·  March 8th, 2009

I just finished “The Unfinished,” D.T. Max’ fantastic posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace. The article was so sad, but also profound. “His goal,” Max writes, “had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled and meaningful life.” It was also Wallace’s goal to lead that kind of life. But it was elusive. Wallace was engaged intimately with the question of meaning.

Some brief notes:

Wallace had been taking Nardil, an antidepressant, since college. “He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant.” To me, this is among the more important modern questions. Are we distant, or is it the drugs? We have no control group. We need clones to live our lives for us without pills so we can look at them and see if we were more or less, and what the trade-offs were.

51az7saqbflThe Broom of The System was published while Wallace was in the second year of an MFA program at the University of Arizona. “The day after he handed out copies of Broom he was upset to find one at the secondhand bookstore.” I’ve had this experience twice, both times with my novel What It Means To Love You, which I had inscribed to friends whose copies found their way into used bookstores.

Max also covers the disappointment Wallace felt when Girl with Curious Hair came out in August, 1989, to mixed reviews and little attention. “He thought he’d written a better book than Broom and then the publication was this big fat zero.” Almost every writer I know goes through this. You spend years on a book and nobody 031396reads it. You lie to yourself, say it’s enough just to be published. But it isn’t. Because the book comes out and it doesn’t get reviewed, and it doesn’t sell. The honest writer knows that there are better books out there. Why would someone read their imperfect first novel or “really good” story collection when that person hasn’t read 1984 yet, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The White Album, Valencia, Catch-22, etc. There are very few books that demand to be on the top of the pile. So many writers become so resentful. All they see is the more undeserving books, i.e. The Nanny Diaries, that make some author millions of dollars. It’s never a question of admitting your book isn’t as good as On The Road. Instead the author asks, “Why is that other crappy book having more success than my ‘Really Good’ book?” I don’t think I’ve ever known an author who was happier after her book came out than before. I’m not referring to Wallace here. Wallace actually did write books that belonged on the top of the pile. Books that were unique to their time, generous, heavy with genius. Infinite Jest is many people’s favorite book, the ultimate goal of the serious writer. Consider The Lobster is my personal favorite non-fiction collection.imagedb-1

Referring to a time when the writing was going well, “I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later there’d be this mess of filled up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well fucked and well blessed.”

I’m in love with Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr. He tattooed her name on his arm inside a heart. They split up. “One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was ‘the brokenness.’” Later, when Wallace meets his wife, he puts a line through Karr’s name and an asterisk and has his wife’s name tattooed further down, like a footnote.

Regarding Infinite Jest Wallace was uncomfortable with some of the attention. He wrote to Don DeLillo, he had, “tried my best best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the ‘hype’ around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype.”

From a letter to Wallace from DeLillo: “Some writers may have to do 2, 3 books, say in midcareer, before they remember that writing can be fun.”

To DeLillo, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does.”

Toward the end of the profile Max quotes an early short story, “The Planet Trillaphon,” that Wallace wrote while still in college, about a character on antidepressants. “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old earth.”

**

More from The Rumpus on David Foster Wallace

Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike

Reese Okyong Kwon  ·  March 4th, 2009

img071This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the thirty-minute interview is posted in its entirety. They talk of religion, The New Yorker, sex, the Apostles’ Creed, the suburbs, and, of course, each other’s work. Watch for Updike’s smile when the senior Cheever says that Rabbit is Rich is the most exciting novel he’s read “in a great many years,” and listen for Cheever’s magnificent voice.

Kottke on David Foster Wallace

Stephen Elliott  ·  February 11th, 2009

An interview with David Foster Wallace from 1993.

The Infinite Jest vocabulary glossary.

A photo tour of Boston locations mentioned in Infinite Jest.

A belated appreciation of “Consider The Lobster.”

One of the first profiles of David Foster Wallace from 1987.

All links via Kottke.org. Illustration by David Levine from The New York Review of Books.

A Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Elissa Bassist  ·  February 3rd, 2009

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.” – Infinite Jest …more

Morning Coffee

Stephen Elliott  ·  January 30th, 2009

the links you need to start your day right

Words I learned reading David Foster Wallace.

Coffeerama.

London from above at night.

Goodjobbb recommends Siltblog.

Business-instruction manuals that cite Henry V as a leadership model miss the play’s complexities.

The Missouri Review releases its first audio book.

Stacy Abramson has been making lists since she was ten.

Iraqi shoe thrower inspires art in Saddam’s home town.

John Krasinski on Adapting David Foster Wallace

Stephen Elliott  ·  January 20th, 2009

John Krasinksi talks to the Los Angeles Times about adapting David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, currently screening at Sundance.  Video teaser for the movie after the jump. …more

David Foster Wallace Reads From A Ticket To The Fair

Stephen Elliott  ·  December 29th, 2008

David Foster Wallace on Effete

Stephen Elliott  ·  December 18th, 2008

Maud Newton finds David Foster Wallace‘ usage note from the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

Random Media Notes

Stephen Elliott  ·  December 13th, 2008

Sean Hannity is going solo.

Nintendo and HarperCollins are teaming up to turn the Nintendo DS into an eBook reader.

Judge Judy makes $38 million dollars a year.

Rupert Murdoch is a consummate miner of human weakness from the newsstand to the boardroom, an idiot savant who instinctively understands people want a justification for giving into their lowest impulses. (via Arts and Letters Daily)

The New York Times announced a wage-freeze for all non-union employees.

One or both Detroit major dailies likely to cease home delivery later this week.

The New York Times Magazine honors David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace

Stephen Elliott  ·  December 3rd, 2008

David Foster Wallace interviewed by Dave Eggers, originally published November 2003, now available on The Believer website.

Tributes to David Foster Wallace.

The Weekly Standard.




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