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DBC Reads Pale King Review
The Pale King
Wednesday, 07 December 2011
Check out a new review of The Pale King over at DBC Reads, David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King”:
 
I’ll offer two reasons for why you should definitely read The Pale King, directed at two different groups of people: those who don’t have a particular love for Wallace, and those who cherish him.
 
To the first group: this is the most readable, the most mature, and the most focused fiction David Foster Wallace ever wrote. If you’re of the opinion that Broom of the System is some precocious, waffling, meandering text written by a too-smart college senior, or you think Infinite Jest is a slog not worth the slogging through, then The Pale King might just be for you. The individual vignettes are poised and confronting and jarring; they may not come together in the most graceful way, but there are moments in The Pale King that are just plain great, the moments that make Wallace fans go, yep, that’s why.
 
And to the latter, who I guess needs no reason to read The Pale King other than the fact that they love him, that they miss him, and that they will read anything by him: you ought to know that The Pale King features multiple characters who might as well be Wallace; and not David Foster Wallace, but Dave Wallace. You know, the guy we all spent time reading about after David Foster Wallace committed suicide? There’s David Cusk, who suffers from a majorly distressing sweating disorder. There’s Meredith Rand, who despite her seeming normality, ended up in the looneybin. There’s David Wallace himself, who resents Philo, Illinois for its IGA groceries and reminders of his less-than-stellar high school years.
 
 
 
 
Colin McEnroe Show: The Life & Legacy Of David Foster Wallace
Interviews with or concerning DFW
Tuesday, 06 December 2011

If you missed it you can now listen online and/or download the David Foster Wallace special on The Colin McEnroe Show: The Life & Legacy Of David Foster Wallace.

With guests, Donald Brown, Evan Hughes (Just Kids), Maria Bustillos (Psychotic jest and infinite reactions: How David Foster Wallace didn’t invent the Internet’s voice - a response to the Maud Newton artivle brought up during the show) and Ryan Walsh (The DFW Audio Project).

 

A listener asked for reading suggestions, some of the titles suggested by the guests were:

Don DeLillo - White Noise and Underworld: A Novel

John Barth (I'll suggest The Sot Weed Factor and Lost in the Funhouse)

Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides

Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

Thomas Klise - The Last Western

 
Marriage Plot Character is Based on Aspects of DFW
General Updates
Monday, 05 December 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides spoke to Michael Silverblatt on the most recent radio episode of Bookworm and acknowledged that elements of the Leonard character from The Marriage Plot are based on David Foster Wallace.

The important part of the interview starts around the 23 minute mark.

I've added a quick transcript of it below (apologies for any errors):

Silverblatt: Now, I want to ask because at a certain point I couldn't help it. There's a character who I felt I knew from life who is dipping into a tobacco tin and chewing tobacco and wearing a bandana and dealing with manic depression and I liked this person very much in life. And I know that you, to some extent, were drawing on this person as well. Yes?

Eugenides: In a few places it's been much discussed and for a while I wasn't talking about it because it seemed to give too much weight to it, we're obviously talking about David Foster Wallace, and this book is not a roman à clé. As I said I began it in the late '60s and I didn't know David Wallace very well. I had some correspondence with him in the '90s and then in 2006 when this book was already well advanced I spent a week with him in Italy. When I make up characters I try to draw on every person that I know that has some of the qualities of the character I'm trying to create. So in this case with a manic depressive I put every depressive person that I'd had met or heard about into that character and some of the things that Leonard does have nothing to do with Wallace. The tobacco chewing was actually very rampant at Brown when I first got there. All of my friends chewed tobacco and I had him chewing the tobacco. The thing that comes from him, however, from Wallace, is that he used to keep his Skoal can, I noticed, in his sock when we were in Italy and Leonard's always sticking it down in his boot. So there's a few things that I will admit to, but it was never an idea, I just didn't know him well enough to recreate him.

A most interesting (compared to previous answers), but not really surprising, turn of events. I hope this will stop speculation (for everyone involved, but particularly Eugenides) so that the focus will be The Marriage Plot, and not the Wallace stuff.

[Thanks, Adam]

 
Wallace Feature on The Colin McEnroe Show
General Updates
Saturday, 03 December 2011
Hi everyone, this has come to my attention:
 
On Monday, Dec. 5, from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there will be a show about David Foster Wallace on The Colin McEnroe Show, Connecticut Public Radio.
 
 
 
The IJ Liveblog - New Posts
Infinite Jest
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
There are a few new posts over at Words, Words, Words, the ongoing Liveblog of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Spoiler warning if you haven't read Infinite Jest):
 
 
 
Thanks, Mike.
 
Literary Smackdowns - Wallace vs Pynchon
General Updates
Monday, 28 November 2011
The latest literary smackdown via Salman Rushdie's twitter feed:
 
@SalmanRushdie: The return of #LiterarySmackdowns, at least for a day. Thomas Pynchon v David Foster Wallace, masters of 2 generations. Go!
 
As of four hours ago:
 
#LiterarySmackdowns Thomas Pynchon still leads David Foster Wallace, but not by much. Close contest. In my mind too...
 
If you have a twitter account it might be time to get your vote in...
 
 
 
 
 
Pac-Man Pale King
The Pale King
Monday, 28 November 2011
(Busy couple of weeks and end of semester reports looming explains the lack of updates here. Here's the first in a series of catch-up posts, based on some of my tweets over the last week or so.)
 
 
In Italian, and one of the most unusual treatments of The Pale King I've seen!
 
Conversations with David Foster Wallace
Upcoming Publications
Friday, 11 November 2011
Updated link to paperback ($16.50 vs $65.00) New details.
 
Edited by Stephen J. Burn, Conversations with David Foster Wallace is due to be released in April 2012 and is available for pre-order over at Amazon now.
 
Blurb from Amazon:
 
Across two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays, to a book about transfinite mathematics, to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent.
 
Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer "could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise." Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns--irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.
 
Check out Burn's volume after this below... letters:
 
Since his 2003 book appeared, Burn has edited a collection of interviews with Wallace, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, and he is editing a volume of Wallace's letters in collaboration with the writer's estate. 
 
 
English Majeure - Who Took My Saliva?
General Updates
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Web Comic English Majeure's take on the 'Wallace' character in The Marriage Plot: Who Took My Saliva?
 

 
The IJ Liveblog - The Pursuit of Happiness
Infinite Jest
Thursday, 10 November 2011
There's a new post over at Words, Words, Words, the ongoing Liveblog of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Spoiler warning if you haven't read Infinite Jest): The Pursuit of Happiness.
 
Thanks, Mike.
 
What Just Happened: The Pale King
The Pale King
Sunday, 06 November 2011
An engaging review of The Pale King - What Just Happened: The Pale King (31/10/11):
 
Most reviews of The Pale King followed the same wary pattern: an acknowledgment of David Foster Wallace's seemingly unstoppable posthumous ascent in the literary firmament, a list of traits commonly held against the author (sentence length, infinite spirals of neurotically involuted thought, a socioeconomic milieu and cast of characters mostly limited to the first-world problems of the white American middle-class), a carefully measured evaluation of the book as worthy yet flawed, a mention of his suicide, a cursory notice of his recently published modal philosophy thesis. No one wants to be the person declaring war on the recently, tragically dead (except for those who do; more in a second), yet these sympathetic-minded reviews seem flawed and unhelpful, leaving two questions unaddressed: what does it mean to be a DFW fan, and (how) does that affect The Pale King's stand-alone literary value?
 
 
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