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DFW Remembrance
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Monday, 21 March 2011 |
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On Wednesday night Rick and I went to the Lannan Foundation’s moving tribute to David Foster Wallace, a writer of verve and passion and genius. The passages read aloud by Rick Moody, David Lipsky, and Joanna Scott from his new book, his old work, and from his interviews were exuberantly intelligent, achingly sensitive, and, from a craft perspective, brilliant, innovative, and for lack of a better word, new. Even the interview responses had craft; the man was an epic stylist even when he was casually riffing about war, art, writing, or American Psycho. After the readings (“spellbound” doesn’t begin to capture it) Michael Silverblatt, long-time host of the radio program Book Worm, asked each of the readers to recount personal anecdotes about Wallace, who hung himself in 2008. Wallace, we learned, was someone others had the urge to call when things went wrong, a guy who saw the world intimately, in almost painful detail, and who tried to bring everything into the experiences rendered in his essays and novels, all that was absurd and profound, all that made us human and horrible, without aligning himself with a particular ideological position that excluded some and exalted others. (As he said in the interview, “I’m not going to line up behind Tolstoy and Gardner.”) He could describe the sky and the weather in ways you’d never think possible (David Lipsky’s chosen excerpts were especially powerful in the ways in which they showed the magic Wallace could make with words). His penetrating insights into all that was weird and wonderful, his obvious genius, his status as a true original with no literary heir — all were celebrated. That there exists a big fat hole in the literary world where his voice once spoke so eloquently and honestly and outrageously was acknowledged. Let's hope, like many of the Lannan Foundation events, that the audio and/or video is eventually posted over at their podcast page. |
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Critical Analysis
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Monday, 21 March 2011 |
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There's some great stuff buried in here including this one from “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood” (Harper’s, December 1991): But the biggest, most amazing excision comes on page 70 (article). Three paragraphs which basically tell the origin of the “mold” story in IJ. (Remember, this was published in 1991–IJ in 1996). The entire story is told almost exactly as it will be in IJ including what the mold eater says and his mother’s reaction. It is a FASCINATING look at how a true story turns into a novel. And for that reason alone, it is worth checking out this article.
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The Pale King
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Sunday, 20 March 2011 |
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It took me a while to read the reviews of the soon-to-be-released David Foster Wallace novel The Pale King. I think I am the only academic who has cried at the two conferences I’ve attended where Wallace papers were presented. I might be the only contemporary literature scholar who is not eagerly anticipating the arrival of his final novel. And I’ve been saying that since Michael Pietsch announced that Little Brown would be publishing whatever he could agglomerate of Wallace’s final, incomplete work. (Quick note: I am of the school that Pietsch and Green knew and loved Wallace and his work well enough to know whether they had enough to publish and honor the art and artist. I find it ludicrous that some people are alleging that this novel is about cashing in or commodifying Wallace’s death. Those people should, with no respect due, shut their pie holes.)
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The Pale King
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Friday, 18 March 2011 |
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Wallace battled depression for most of his life, and readers may find it troubling that his mental state was so entwined with the frustrations of the unfinished work. One early reviewer admits that “it’s hard not to wince at each of the many mentions of suicide.” Wallace left behind his last draft, neatly organised for others to find, but not every dying writer has done the same. Should some posthumous works remain unpublished? And can unfinished books really be considered alongside finished ones? “It’s difficult to justify [posthumous publication] if a writer has said categorically they don’t want it published,” says Jamie Byng, the publisher at Canongate Books. “But if that’s truly the case, then they should probably destroy it. If you leave it so that someone could theoretically read or publish it, there’s a little part of you that thinks ‘actually, they do want it published.’”Vladimir Nabokov expressly ordered the destruction of his final, unfinished novel The Original of Laura before his death. When it was published by his son in 2009 the critical response was damning, of both the book and its publication. Yet among the many incomplete books to be posthumously printed are – to give just one example – the complete novels of Franz Kafka. The few early reviews of Wallace’s last work are predictably glowing, and its publishers are confident that they have a critical hit in the offing, if not a commercial one. “I’ve heard that The Pale King is pretty extraordinary,” says Byng, “so I’m certain more good than harm will be done by its publication. Even if it’s not exactly as David Foster Wallace would have wanted it, potentially a brilliant book is about to appear.”
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 15 March 2011 |
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Benjamin Alsup's review of The Pale King can now be found over at Esquire, Saint David Foster Wallace and The Pale King. It's a positive review with minor spoilers: And let's state this clearly: You should read The Pale King. You don't have to read it in a couple days or even a couple months. I'm not sure you even need to read it in any particular order. It's not that kind of book. If it keeps you up at night, it won't be because you've got to know what happens next. If you're up, you'll be up because D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe. You'll be up because again and again he invites you to consider some very heavy things — like what it means to consider heavy things and how we go about deciding what's worth our consideration. The Pale King asks you, for instance, why it is that you haven't spent more time considering the morality of our tax code. It asks what it means to be a citizen of Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Beloit, Wisconsin, or Peoria, Illinois, and whether being an American really means anything at all.
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Critical Analysis
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Tuesday, 15 March 2011 |
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The group read of this book seems to have come to a halt. Coincidentally, so had my reading of it. So, I decided to finish up the last few essays of the book to have it done in time for the April 15th release of The Pale King (yay!). It’s been three months since I last posted about this book so I’ll give my disclaimer: because I don’t have a lot to say about the pieces (I’m not an academic anymore), I’m only going to mention things that I found puzzling/confusing. But be assured that if I don’t mention the vast majority of the article it’s because I found it interesting/compelling/believable. I don’t feel comfortable paraphrasing the articles’ argument, so I won’t really summarize. This is a collection of 7 essays that DFW wrote from 1990-1996. Three were published in Harper’s, two in academic journals, one in Esquire and the last in Premiere. I devoured this book when it came out (I had adored “Shipping Out” when it was published in Harper’s) and even saw DFW read in Boston (where he signed my copy!).[...] The epigram about these articles states: “The following essays have appeared previously (in somewhat different [and sometimes way shorter] forms:)” It was the “way shorter” that intrigued me enough to check out the originals and compare them to the book versions. Next week, I’ll be writing a post that compares the two versions, especially focusing on things that are in the articles but NOT in the book (WHA??). But today I’m just talking about the book itself. Note that this post is about the book itself and a future one will be about differences between the original essays and the versions published in the collection. I can't wait to read the next instalment.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 15 March 2011 |
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The book’s lyrical opening sentence, printed below, may be familiar to Wallace completists. It opens a brief piece called “Peoria (4)” that appeared in the fall 2002 issue of Triquarterly. That piece, in its entirety makes up the opening sentences of The Pale King. (Recently, according to handful of blogs, the opening of The Pale King was read on a BBC radio program and some incomplete transcriptions of this appeared online.)
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The Pale King
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Monday, 14 March 2011 |
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General spolier warning: As reviews appear I will make every attempt to avoid spoilers appearing on the front page of the Fantods. If you don't want to know anything, don't follow the links... Jonathan Segura has a review of The Pale King up over at Publishers Weekly (reasonably heavy spoilers). In response to the review, Nina Shen Rastogi from Brow Beat over at Slate.com writes (including minor spoilers): The verdict? The Pale King isn't "the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction." But parts of it are "nothing short of sublime," others are "pants-pissingly hilarious," and the chapters that center on [spoilers] are "tiny masterpieces of that whole self-aware po-mo thing of his that's so heavily imitated." Even in its incomplete state, reviewer Jonathan Segura notes, "the book is unmistakably a David Foster Wallace affair."
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Conferences
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Wednesday, 02 March 2011 |
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Update: It's on today, wish I could be there.
Something I posted on the twitter feed but only just found the note to myself to post here... David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel _Infinite Jest_ imagines a not-too-distant future in which the equivalents of Hulu and Netflix streaming kill the advertising business to such an extent that the government decides to save the economy with 'sponsored time': hence, a great deal of the novel's action takes place in the 'Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment'. The book is deeply (if hilariously) pessimistic about people's chances of connecting with one another in a culture built on one-way media consumption -- this pessimism, of course, is represented most baldly by The Entertainment, a technology-enhanced movie so entertaining that anyone who once sees it becomes incapable of doing anything other than watching it over and over again. This panel will, broadly speaking, address the question of whether David Foster Wallace was or would have been a Clay Shirky fan. In other words, would (did) Wallace believe that the Internet is better for us than TV because we are active participants in the creation of Internet content? Why are the digerati enamored of _Infinite Jest_, and what can the book tell us about the Internet's potential to help or hinder human connection?
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