|
General Updates
|
|
Tuesday, 24 January 2012 |
|
My webhost has some planned downtime scheduled in the next 24/48hrs so the site may be up and down over the next few days. UPDATE 1: The update WILL break the site. Unfortunately, I will not be able to apply the fix until the site breaks... UPDATE 2: To ease the downtime I'm performing some updates and database migrations. If you can read this things are going well so far! I've disabled registration for commenting (and thus logins) for the time being. I'll re-enable them once we're up and running again. Later in the week things will look a little different/worse while I update/tinker/change the template. I've also moved to a newer, nicer and more efficient comments system which will has some neat features once I enable it after testing. (There should be a comment appended to this post as a test shortly) The RSS feed will also deliver more than just a 1 line summary next week if all goes well, but you'll probably need to subscribe to a new feed. And yes, I have backups. :) UPDATE 3: Nearly there... UPDATE 4: Things are slower, but it's all working for the time being. The migrated site is performing very well - just got to configure the SEF urls... and clean it up a bit and we'll go live. But that's a job for the weekend.
|
|
Conferences
|
|
Sunday, 08 January 2012 |
|
This looks super exciting. Live webcast too! April 5–6, 2012 Writers, editors, journalists, and critics will gather to discuss David Foster Wallace's life and work. The David Foster Wallace papers reside at the Harry Ransom Center. Registration is limited and opens Monday, January 23, 2012 at 11 a.m. (CST). For details, see Registration section.
|
|
Upcoming Publications
|
|
Wednesday, 18 January 2012 |
Word just in via Hamish Hamilton news over at Five Dials about the under the radar uncollected non-fiction of David Foster Wallace, apparently titled, Both Flesh and Not: David Foster Wallace’s previously uncollected non-fiction has just arrived, for publication as Both Flesh and Not later this year, as have four new scenes to be included in our paperback of The Pale King this Spring. (Thanks, Jan)
|
|
The Pale King
|
|
Sunday, 15 January 2012 |
|
I can now confirm, after contacting David Foster Wallace's literary agent and Little Brown, that the upcoming paperback will indeed have 10-ish pages of new material.
|
|
Upcoming Publications
|
|
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 |
|
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors. In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky—and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch, reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life. All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history. Don DeLillo
Dave Eggers
Ed Finn
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Franzen
Paul Giles
Heather Houser
David Lipsky
Rick Moody
Ira B. Nadel
Michael Pietsch
Josh Roiland
George Saunders
Molly Schwartzburg
|
|
Appearances/Readings
|
|
Saturday, 10 December 2011 |
|
(Thanks to everyone who got in touch, somehow I missed this one!)
And somewhat related, here's a fantastic (and really insightful) review of Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by Tim Personn, The Dave Show: AOCYEUBY makes a similar focus possible by a peculiar doubling of its author across time and space. The book showcases two different Lipskys: one version of the man in 1996, on the road with Wallace, and an older Lipsky in 2008, sitting at home, listening to the recordings made a decade before. Sometimes this older Lipsky mutters something [intrusions that, in the text, are set in brackets] and, like a commentary track on The Dave Show, you hear his remarks against the backdrop of Wallace’s soft Midwestern speech: less bubbly, less ebullient, but also warm and observant. Lipsky 2008 is, above all, a good reader of character. His mind is anything but dulled by the tragic events of the preceding weeks. To the contrary, it is acute and, like any engaged reader’s, empathetic. He is like you, humbled by the reality of loss, and trying to figure this man out – to intuit the big something that seemed to be missing from all previous writing on David Foster Wallace.
|
|
Infinite Jest
|
|
Wednesday, 04 January 2012 |
|
PDF Updated now ver 1.1 1.2 1.3 (But not, it appears, Greg Carlisle's, Elegant Complexity, which also has a number of different chronologies in its appendices, including some that focus on individual characters.) If you notice any errors or corrections you can email drew at the address in the pdf to let her know, and we'll get any corrections up ASAP. Over to Drew: A couple quick acknowledgments. This project was fun but also quite maddening. It would’ve taken three times as long if not for two sources that aided me. The basic layout of IJ’s scenes I used as a template is here: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm. And Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest was helpful, too. However both sources ultimately are incomplete and sometimes erroneous in their dating. That being said, they still both helped tremendously.
Some final advice before you embark. If this is your first time reading Infinite Jest – stop. Read it the way Wallace intended first. Hell, you should probably read it at least twice as it is before opting for this route. Wallace had very good reasons for ordering the book the way he did. The book’s sequencing is just as big a part of its artistic/philosophical statement as any sentence or character. (Also, this guide has spoilers.) If you have read it already and you are looking to experience the book in a new way, I think you’ll find this approach enlightening. Seeing when scenes play out in relation to the other things that are going on sheds a lot of light on the characters as well as some scenes you may have found more cryptic in your other go-arounds. Gaudeamus Igitur!
Drew CordesVassar CollegeClass of 2004
|
|
Upcoming Publications
|
|
Wednesday, 04 January 2012 |
First up, it would appear Amazon has the cover for the paperback release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King up, I noticed the now hand-written title, but didn't notice the 'With Four Previously Unpublished Scenes' (A wallace-l reader pointed it out. Cheers, Dan). Clarification on this 'unpublished scenes' statement as soon as I have more, but I'm going to assume that because the words scenes and not chapters is used it's not going to be that much material.
|
|
General Updates
|
|
Sunday, 01 January 2012 |
|
Happy New Year everyone! I've got some catching up to do around here so I might as well start with something I've been meaning to post for a while. Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”
|
|
