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DFW Biography
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Saturday, 13 March 2010 |
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As a book, "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is extremely odd and occasionally mesmerizing. It may be a valuable resource for scholarly appreciation of Wallace's work, but it is often tedious to read. Consumed, as it is, with Lipsky's reportorial needs--to nail down facts, to elicit colorful quotations, etc.--the transcript is as much an exploration of the exigencies of magazine journalism as of the contours of Wallace's mind. His review is a more much more critical of the format that I am (after I adjusted I found it compeling) but I do agree when Farber writes: Lipsky's transcript makes pleasant reading for academics, the literati, and hard-core Wallace disciples, but the more casual reader may be better served by reading Lipsky's Rolling Stone profile. I'm guessing a lot of Fantods readers might be part of the DFW hard-core...I loved it.
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DFW Archive
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
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Well, news about the U Texas David Foster Wallace archive is all over the web, and neat things keep popping up all over. A few choice links from today: Great little summary article by Meredith Blake over at the New Yorker, What’s in the David Foster Wallace Archive? It contains 10 pics of items from the archive including a letter from Michael Pietsch to David Foster Wallace about his second reading of the draft Infinite Jest. Statesman.com has a nice gallery of photos, #3, a newspaper clipping has a photo of young David Foster Wallace from 1974. The Guardian has posted five images to scribd and you can zoom in on these ones very nicely! The first is a high res verison of his childhoom viking poem. Indirectly related to the archive:
(Special thanks to Matt, Shawn, David, and Bonnie)
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Critical Analysis
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
When Wallace died in 2008, Wood wrote, “Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices—or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so. Of great interest to me was his own ambivalent relation with some elements of postmodernism (irony, too-easy self-consciousness, and so on), and the burgeoning presence of moral critique in his work. One had the feeling that this new work was being written under considerable pressure— and I don’t just mean psychological pressure, but the pressure of staying loyal to his fractured, non-linear epistemology while at the same time incorporating some of that admiration he had for the concerns of the nineteenth-century novel. To put it flippantly, he was aesthetically radical and metaphysically conservative, and the negotiation of that asymmetry would have been a marvelous thing to follow, as a reader.”(Thanks, Ricardo)
James Wood on David Foster Wallace If we consider some of Wood's published views about Wallace this could turn out to be a very interesting evening. I'd love to attend, so I'm looking forward to a write-up over at Emdashes. Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices — or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so. And finally, Wood's review of Oblivion: The Digressionist (the link gives me certificate errors with firefox - misconfigured server maybe?) contains this memorable quote - bold type is my emphasis (thanks for the reminder, Adam): Wallace has many ardent followers (his name is just "DFW" on some college campuses), but surely no one has ever claimed to be moved by him. Amused, impressed, challenged, even finely tormented; but not involved, quickened, raised, imparadised. Wallace may be torn between desiring the ordinary satisfactions of readerly connection and disdaining their very ordinariness. Alas, the latter impulse almost always vanquishes the former. No one has ever claimed to be moved by him? | | No comments for this item |
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DFW Archive
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 |
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Matt Bucher visited the Harry Ransom Center foyer today and took some pics of the four items on display with his iPhone (So jealous over here, Matt!) Currently on display are the cover page from the first two sections of Infinite Jest, a notebook of typescript pages from IJ, annotated galley of the Borges Bio DFW reviewed, and a poem about vikings DFW wrote when he was young(!). Thanks for heading over and taking the pics, Matt. Also, here's a similar article to yesterday's from U Texas with a different picture - this one shows corrections to IJ for the paperback release. | | No comments for this item |
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