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DFW Remembrance
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Monday, 11 April 2011 |
Jonathan Franzen has an essay with sections about David Foster Wallace in the latest New Yorker, “Robinson Crusoe,” David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude. If you have a subscription (or a Facebook account and you're prepared to 'Like' the New Yorker) you can get access here. Although if you have Facebook's security settings set to high and thus forcing https:// for each session, it won't work... The Facebook New Yorker pages require you to disable it for a session. It would be a good enough reason not to bother - except for that the article is worth reading: On the eve of my departure for Santiago, I visited my friend Karen, the widow of the writer David Foster Wallace. As I was getting ready to leave her house, she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera. I said I would, and she found an antique wooden matchbox, a tiny book with a sliding drawer, and put some ashes in it, saying that she liked the thought of part of David coming to rest on a remote and uninhabited island. It was only later, after I’d driven away from her house, that I realized that she’d given me the ashes as much for my sake as for hers or David’s. There's also a section with Franzen's thoughts about David Foster Wallace's suicide in the second half of the article in case you're are trying to steer clear of that kind of stuff (I found I was not prepared for Franzen's thoughts and reasonings..).
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The Pale King
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Sunday, 10 April 2011 |
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Reviews: The Pale King is impossible to review properly, and for so many reasons. One, of course, is the fact that it’s been pieced together -- by loving hands, sure. But still. We will never know exactly had Wallace had in mind. And it doesn’t matter what the reviews say in this case, does it? Those who loved Wallace will read The Pale King no matter what is said about it. And they should because, in this instance, reviews are really not the point. Wallace’s genius was that he could absorb the infernal logic of data — all those vectors of complexity, its relentless torrent — and still give us the magic of narrative. That moment when we, as readers, become co-imaginers of a text because there are characters in whom we believe, and a story we learn how to anticipate. Information and storytelling: They are opposing forces, like certainty and faith, yet Wallace stood across this divide and proved that if there was, in fact, a social novel of our time, here is where it would be built. Not by papering over the ruptures in realism, but by writing right through them. Non-review Updates:
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DFW Remembrance
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Saturday, 09 April 2011 |
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The very public appropriation of the ultimate private act made it less possible for her to cope with it. He was everywhere she looked. She still avoids Google: "What do you do when your husband's autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?"The only other time she has talked to a newspaper was at the opening of her last art show when she spoke to a journalist from the New York Times. "I did it on the basis that her story would not include the words "hanging" or "discovered body," she says now. "I'm an idiot, of course they did all that. I know journalism is journalism and maybe people want to read that I discovered the body over and over again, but that doesn't define David or his work. It all turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince, the good part of him. It has defined me too, and I'm really struggling with that."Ulp. I'm part of all this aren't I? I've been running this website since way back in 1997, inspired by my discovery of Infinite Jest in 1996. It wasn't until he died that I started posting more material about his life, and, I guess, his death. I'd always avoided the stuff about David Foster Wallace, the person. I was more interested in his writing, and as The Fantods became more popular I became aware that online discussions about his work, and about him, made Wallace feel... uncomfortable. Avoiding that stuff felt like the right thing to do. It's also why I never wrote to him. There was always that voice in my head, "Do it. Write to him. Thank him. You'll never meet him living in Australia. Let him know how much his work means to you." And based on all reports I know he would have likely replied. When people write and thank you personally, you return the favour. I've lost count of the number of times people have said that David Foster Wallace was, "a good person." But I didn't write. That felt like crossing the line I'd drawn for myself in the sand. And then he was gone... From that point on I linked to more articles about his life, and death, than I'd done before. I linked to some pieces because I knew that some of you out there would follow the link and put the writers in their place in the comments. Sometimes I did it because even though there was something tasteless, or hurtful, there was something concrete or thoughtful or meaningful alongside. And then there are the things I haven't linked to because they were just plain mean, or idiotic, or both. There were other personal reasons too... David Foster Wallace's passing gave me a reason to promote awareness about depression. Check out www.beyondblue.org.au (I'm not affiliated in any way, they're just an amazing Australian non-profit organisation aiming to increase awareness and improve the treatment of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders and related mental disorders). I hope that because The Fantods was here long before David Foster Wallace's death readers don't see my efforts here as opportunistic or self serving. To be honest I know most of you don't think that... but I do worry sometimes. We're all people who read David Foster Wallace and have found within his work a way to look at the world anew. To listen, to accept, and to learn from people who have completely different opinions, ideas, and views to our own. I love David Foster Wallace's writing. It has made me a better person in many ways. But I think I have to accept that some of what I've done here has contributed to, " [turning] him into a celebrity writer dude." To Karen, to Sally, to James and to Amy. I'm sorry for the times I've made things harder for all of you. Nick
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 09 April 2011 |
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Okay, so conspiracy is my word.
I suggest that you pick up The Pale King and read and experience for yourself just why TPK is awesome and worthy of publication. Something David Foster Wallace most certainly wanted us to read. Occam's razor comes to mind... Based on some of the (long term) correspondence I've had with people involved in the publication of The Pale King, the time was spent making sure this was done so as to be respectful to, and worthy of, everyone involved. She is not sure about many things concerning the death of her husband but she is certain about one thing, the first thing I ask her: that Wallace wanted The Pale King to be published, even in its unfinished state. "The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything."
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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Review first: There aren't many novels featuring white-collar work in America, and it's not hard to figure out why: Not much happens, and what does can be mind-numbingly boring. But are those good enough reasons for ignoring the office, given that so many of us spend our adult lives working in one? What does it say about the (ir)relevance of our fiction when it doesn't have the guts - or just plain doesn't know how - to figure out what we do there, and how that makes us feel? One of the late David Foster Wallace's many gifts - as well as his curse - was his constitutional inability to duck such questions, coupled with an unswerving commitment to seeing things as they really are. It's therefore no accident that "The Pale King," the unfinished novel on which Wallace labored during the last decade of his life, is set in an office. And not just any office. Never one to do things by halves, Wallace chose the most boring workplace he could imagine: an IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill. James Campbell's review for The Wall Street Journal, A Cure for Head-Exploding Brilliance . Spoilers, plenty of them, including things about its conclusion... Probably the least positive review, and one most focused on reading his life into his work, that I've seen. I don't feel it's representative of the book at all:
There are almost 550 pages of wispy narrative threads, some of which show signs of what once seemed boundless linguistic and narrative gifts. The kindest way of looking at it is as an attempt at a cure, self-prescribed: For head-exploding brilliance, try boredom, the last-ditch remedy. By writing in excruciatingly tedious detail about tax accountancy—he took classes in the subject as part of his preparation—Wallace hoped to dull himself into the state that those fortunate enough to know it call normality. Mr. Pietsch, a loyal and conscientious editor, says that he felt "unexpected joy" at the discovery of the files in Wallace's office, but not even he can expect the ordinary reader to rejoice in passages like this [...] Non-review updates:
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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The focus for this release is Chapter 9. There are six drafts to look at, beginning with David Foster Wallace's workbook , all the way through to the Final Draft. This is seriously fascinating stuff. I can't wait for more! I'm guessing I don't really need to warn you about the spoilers here... do I?
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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Some readers have pointed out, however, that in addition to passages of breathtaking brilliance, the novel, like the tax code, also contains sections so eye-glazing they ought to come with a warning advising readers to wait a while before driving or operating heavy machinery. Wallace’s following verges on the cultlike, and some of his admirers will doubtless argue that such passages are deliberate, an attempt to evoke one of the novel’s main themes, which is the nature of boredom itself. Others may wonder whether the author, a renowned perfectionist, would have revised the text had he lived, and even whether, in its unfinished state, “The Pale King” should have been published at all. Wallace, the maximalist author of “Infinite Jest” and lover of the extended footnote, was such a fusser that when it came to the mechanics of editing, a suggestion to add or delete a comma could turn into a debate over the history of punctuation itself. “He would never have wanted it to be published in an imperfect form if he had lived to finish it, but he was not alive to finish it,” Mr. Pietsch said. He added that Wallace, normally a ruthless tosser of notes, correspondence and drafts that he didn’t want, had not only preserved the “Pale King” manuscript, but left an apparently finished 250-page section in the center of his desk. “To me, the fact that he left those pages on his work table is proof he wanted the book published,” Mr. Pietsch said.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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How did you go about ordering a novel that, by its own design, seeks to be non-linear, seeks to challenge, seeks to strain the limits of a reader's expectations?
I had the extraordinary guidepost of Infinite Jest, which I think the reader is something like 350 pages into before they've met all the characters and have all the elements of the story up in their heads. I think one of David's methods was flood the reader with pleasure with many different kinds of stories that were so entertaining and so funny and so interesting and so beautiful that they kept opening up, and taking more and more—and then he'd work with that enormous assemblage to create something even larger.
So I read again and took notes, and read again and took notes, and read again and took notes. I tracked everything I read in terms of whether it was a unique piece, or whether it was a version that existed in other forms. If other versions existed, I'd look at all the multiple versions to find what appeared to be the last version. Once I had all of the distinct pieces, I read them again to try to understand the story that was within them. And gradually, I saw that there was a chronological sequence and spine to the novel. There were characters who arrived at a particular date, and things happened in a particular order.
So the main work of assembling the novel was finding those things that needed to happen an order for the reader to make sense of what was happening—and then arraying the other pieces, which are less time-specific, around those in a way that creates what I hope will be a pleasurable flow of David Wallace—of his brilliant, brilliant range of voices, and narrative techniques, and ideas.
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