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DFW Remembrance
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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Over to Chris: I work at Broadcastr, a new social-media platform from Electric Literature. To celebrate the release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, we're compiling a series of audio appreciations--short recordings (+/- 2 min) by writers, bloggers, journalists, and fans--that memorialize readers' most memorable experiences with DFW's work. We want fans to consider their first (or most memorable) moment with a DFW piece. Reactions, thoughts--any memorable experience you may have had involving DFW. We're asking our contributors to have their recording posted by the end of the first week of April--we want to be sure to have as many posts as possible up and running before the book's release. We're hoping this will spread to at least 1,000 fans, so if you have any friends who you think might like to contribute as well, feel free to pass along the instructions below. Here are your instructions: Visit www.Broadcastr.com, or download the free app by searching "Broadcastr" in the iTunes store. Hit the red "record" button in the top left-hand corner to add your message to the map. Your reaction or message can be up to three minutes long; if you don't like what you recorded, just hit "redo" and try again. If you find yourself getting stuck on what to say, let me know and I can suggest some prompts. When you like what you've got, add a title, tag, and category. (For category, we suggest "Arts & Culture"). IMPORTANT: Be sure to add the tag "PaleKing", so that your message will be displayed to other Wallace fans. Finally, pin your recording to the map. Hit the "Pin it to the Map" button, then move the pin to wherever is most appropriate for your story, and click. Share your story on Twitter, Facebook, and email your friends to encourage them to join our appreciation. |
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
Lovely review of The Pale King over at The Hipster Bookclub, The Pale King and I. This one is by Marie Mundaca, who I had the amazing opportunity to catch up with when I was in NYC for the Footnotes conference a year or so ago (Hi, Marie!). If you don't want to know anything about The Pale King there are quite a few little spoilers in this review. But make sure you come back and read it once you're done. There's some neat stuff about the design of the text... did I mention Marie designed The Pale King? Super cool: The Pale King is the most recent David Foster Wallace book I’ve designed. It may be the last, but who knows what will pop up? (3)
When I design books, I usually read most or all of the book before I start designing—not a close read, but I want to know the plot and the characters so I can think about what fonts would best represent them. Do I want a dense, gray page, or a light, airy page? Are the characters more masculine or more feminine? If there are long sections of letters, how will the reader react to the italic font of this face? And can I use Dalliance? I love that font.I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with TPK(4), but I also was anxious to read it in manuscript form. We Wallace fans had been hearing about “this longer thing” he was working on, “a brick”—those were two ways he referred to it. And we’d all followed the story of his widow, Karen Green, along with his agent Bonnie Nadell and editor Michael Pietsch, gathering up years of disks and manuscript pages, piecing everything together. I even had a dream about it once, running into Pietsch getting off a bus with a duffel bag full of pages. As it turned out, it was too distracting and sad for me to read while I was designing it. Wallace’s tiny, pointy notes were all over the manuscript copy, mostly name changes and corrections and small additions...
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DFW Archive
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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There are some very minor Pale King spoilers in this one, with most of the article considering other archive contents: "Good Old Neon", a short story that appears in the 2004 collection Oblivion, is perhaps Wallace’s most deliberate, unadorned conversation with himself. I first read it in a car ride from Montreal to New York on a sunny, summer day. Through the Adirondacks, with my sister on my right and my parents in the front, I was totally destroyed and absolutely electrified. When I finished the story, I couldn’t speak, I just thought to myself remembering the time before I read the story, who I was then, a couple hours ago. In it, a man sees a "therapist" (a word he later changed to "analyst"), finds it useless, and, without alternative, decides to kill himself. In BOX 24, at the top of the first page of this first handwritten draft is "FRAUD" followed by, "This is the bad part, the foggy part where there's way more than I can ever make you see." Wallace, and the reader, has no choice but to go on. In different pen colors, blue to black to red to green, the story gets better, shorter, fuller. Where there was once an "analyst" with a "mustache", there is later an "analyst" with a "small ginger mustache", a mustache that is likely taken seriously by its owner and not by anyone else. In his revisions, Wallace would not only correct himself but comment, taunt. Unsatisfied with the first few pages, he wrote at the top of four above the first line, "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)." This aside made it into the final version of the story. But even the thin sheen of self-defacing humor fades away: "Everything gets so abstract all this free-writing I can't be bothered to even type up. We tried to bombard our problems with will power instead of bringing it into alignment with God’s intention for us." Wallace did not write or talk in extremes, he lived in them. "Good Old Neon" ends with an oracular exhale, a portion of prose that makes the reader at once alive, aware, terrified, and tired. After going over it for probably the hundredth time, he wrote in a tidy box, "incoherent, but moving." The story is dense, bleak, again necessary, but not incoherent. The last line on that page is also that, "[Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.]" It is no longer the "I" of the protagonist, or the writer, but a "we" that includes us in the nightmare, a self-imposed nightmare, though it feels inevitable.
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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When credit first crunched at the end of the last decade, some commentators worried the economy was fraying because of the complexity of market mechanisms that were stalling. How could the public have an opinion on, or demand politicians better scrutinise, financial transactions seemingly designed to outwit all comprehension? Related to that, critics pointed out that high finance was one sector of life and work that novelists had on the whole shied away from chronicling, an observation that showed a touching, perhaps nostalgic, faith in the power of narrative to galvanise collective consciousness.
David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide at the moment the stock market began its prolonged nervous breakdown, left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King. It addresses the gap between taxpayers and the masters of their money. Despite tax’s centrality – the only certain thing, according to the saying, alongside death – and the emotions it arouses, it is rarely directly written about. And Wallace knew why: it’s boring.
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
A few more pieces about the confusion surrounding the release of The Pale King. One of the year’s most anticipated publishing events has become just a fraction less anticipated. It was commonly believed that David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King was due to be published on April 15. But pre-order copies of the novel have been available to buy on Amazon since March 22 – and some booksellers in the US are already selling the novel. On the strength of this alone, the book is already topping the March Top Ten list at The Millions. For months, Hachette Book Group has been counting down to the April 15 release of the late David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King. (A gimmick, see: the plot revolves around the IRS and, as everyone knows, April 15 is tax day.) Hence the counter above, which can be downloaded from the book page at Hachette.
So when word began spreading Wednesday morning that the novel was available on Amazon and the Barnes & Noble website two weeks before its "official" publication date, independent booksellers--yours truly among them--were left to wonder why the book was not yet on our shelves. (As if Amazon, with its predatory pricing scheme, needs the boost it surely got by having an in-demand book available before most retailers.)
While it's not uncommon for books to be shipped and sold before their official publication date, there's reason enough in this case, given the cult status DFW has attained since his suicide in 2007, for even the NY Times to wade into the controversy with this article, in which several booksellers express their dismay at Hachette's seemingly underhanded (or, at best, willfully naive) act. In its defense, the publisher's representatives state that the official on-sale date of the book was, in fact, March 22, while the official publication date remained April 15. Confused yet? |
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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I can't help but feel like Hachette botched something with the release of the Pale King. And not because they screwed over independent bookstores for the almighty Amazon or because all the launch parties are now significantly less exciting, but rather because the publication of this book is an event (for a very particular niche, mind you, but an event nonetheless: see articles in Time, GQ and Esquire as proof that this is something worthy of mainstream discussion and coverage) and there is a particular communal bliss in getting hold of something at the same time as many, many other people (see Harry Potter launch events like the photo above or, at a smaller but still significant scale, the way Radiohead can get thousands of people simultaneously downloading their music) that has now been somewhat ruined by the scrambling of people like myself who drop everything when a tweet by @mattbucher makes their day and informs them that Amazon has started to ship the book, push aside relatives and loved ones, stepping on the cat, ruining someone's game of Bejeweled for access to the computer for the fastest click on a button since those weeks spent on the Impossible Quiz in 2008. This behaviour says something about our society, I'm sure, I just don't know what.
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
The Daily Maverick's Kevin Bloom writes about The Pale King and David Foster Wallace in A Morality Tale from the Grave. The most interesting part of this article is Bloom's mention of Bill Hicks. Last year a great friend of mind brought up some parallels between the themes in comedian Bill Hicks' stand-up and some of DFW's re:marketing/advertising: In one capitalised phrase, Wallace, who committed suicide in September 2008 after unsuccessfully attempting to wean himself off anti-depressants, encapsulates the debilitating cumulative effect of “marketing” on the human soul – kind of like the comedian Bill Hicks did before he too died young (“You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage,” Hicks famously told anyone in his audience who happened to work in advertising or marketing), although with the author it’s a bit more subtle. The Professional Smile, according to Wallace, is dishonest and sinister for the following reason: “[Since] it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.” Here's a Youtube clip of Bill Hicks' marketing stand-up mentioned in Bloom's article (some NSFW language). I didn't know who Bill Hicks was until the conversation last year, and now I've watched almost all of his available performances and I'm working my way through a biography written by Kevin Booth. When watching some of Hicks' stand-up I sometimes get a feel for a decidedly Wallace view of the world, although Hicks defaults to anger and aggression in ways DFW never did.
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
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Wallace dug into his subject by taking accounting classes starting as far back as 1997. As it turns out, his longtime agent Bonnie Nadell tells Raz, Wallace was also quite good at math. "He could take very advanced accounting classes and follow them." Papers left in his office reveal Wallace started correspondences with various accountants around the country. He took great interest in his own accountant, Nadell says, "who loved him to pieces, because no one ever asks about all the minutia of doing someone's taxes." Wallace sought these details, Pietsch says, because he wanted to write a novel that connected to peoples' true lives. "He's trying to write about what's it's like to go home every day to the same spouse for 40, 50 years," Pietsch says. "How do you look into the face of a job that you know you're going to do again and again for 40 years? "How can you find meaning? How can you find delight? How do you find love? How do you find someone who will sit with you while you talk about what happened to you in line waiting to get to the bank teller?" Those are questions Wallace grappled with until his death, Pietsch says. The evidenceof that struggle was found in nearly 3,000 pages of drafts left in Wallace's office. Some were typed. Some were handwritten. Some were on floppy discs. "When I first encountered it, it was this mass of material," Pietsch says, like a puzzle with no directions for assembly.
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
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Online confessions are a bit disgusting and have the distinct odor of guilty conscience so I’ll keep the self flagellation and buck passing to a minimum.
Today I purchased David Foster Wallace‘s “The Pale King” from Amazon.com. Yes … I read the New York Times article this morning about bookseller fury at Amazon being given the book before brick-and-mortar retailers, and I felt the characteristic frustration any retired indie bookseller would feel. Then mere hours later I surrendered to temptation and bought the book online.
I’d like to claim that there was a moment of hesitation, that I wrestled with the better angels of my conscience but that would be a lie.
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