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The Pale King
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Monday, 14 February 2011 |
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Well worth a look, (I'm hoping this is the first of a few posts about the upcoming novel), Matt writes: The first excerpt of The Pale King appeared in the February 5, 2007 issue of the New Yorker under the title “Good People.” At the time, there was no indication that this was a novel excerpt and Wallace had not published anything in the New Yorker in a long time (since 1995, I believe, when a couple of Infinite Jest excerpts appeared). And it seemed a little odd. As a story it had a lot of things going on in terms of character, diction, and themes, but, to me at least, it seemed like a slightly new trajectory for Wallace after Oblivion. Continue reading...
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General Updates
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Thursday, 10 February 2011 |
I posted about the musical performance Sequitur: David Foster Wallace on twitter last week but forgot to post it here! It's on today/tomorrow, if you end up going you might like to let the readers here know what it was like. In a theatrical presentation of text in combination with music, Sequitur devotes their performance of Eric Moe's "Tri-Stan", featuring mezzo soprano Mary Nessinger, and Randall Woolf's "Everything is Green", with pre-recorded narration by Rinde Eckert, to the musical treatment of David Foster Wallace texts. UPDATE: Avi has posted a review over at The Daily Snowman.
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Conferences
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Thursday, 10 February 2011 |
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Three years after the author’s death, David Foster Wallace is increasingly seen as a catalyst for a new generation of writers—a generation that tries to reach beyond the representational aporias of postmodernist fiction. At a time when literary reputation is often influenced by Internet buzz and the surrounding hype machine, the publication of Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King in April 2011 will no doubt affect this development in a variety of ways. The Research Unit for American Studies at the University of Antwerp invites scholarly submissions for a two-day conference devoted to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, to be held on Thursday 22 and Friday 23 September 2011 at UA’s city campus. [Cheers, Toon]
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Interviews with or concerning DFW
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Friday, 28 January 2011 |
Don't forget to tune in. Listen via Vimeo On Sunday the 6th of February, Professor Geoff Ward, author of a literary history of America, will present a BBC radio Sunday feature about David Foster Wallace, Endnotes: David Foster Wallace: When David Foster Wallace hanged himself in 2008, at the age of 46, he was considered by many to be the most gifted and linguistically exuberant American novelist and short story writer of his generation. His books include the 1,000-page Infinite Jest, a novel of grand ambition and stylistic experiment that came complete with 388 endnotes. (Footnotes, digressions, constant second guessing of every thought are features of Wallace's signature style). In April The Pale King, Wallace's final, unfinished novel will be published. Few literary novels have been more eagerly anticipated in recent years. Its great subject is Boredom. Wallace set himself big challenges. Infinite Jest attacked the entertainment industry while trying to entertain and The Pale King engages with boredom as a path toward transcendence. This Sunday Feature is presented by Professor Geoff Ward, author of a literary history of America. He, like many, was convinced Wallace would be the preeminent American writer to reckon with in the years ahead, and was shocked by his tragic early death. He assesses Wallace's legacy, themes and preoccupations, talking to the precursor Wallace admired most, Don DeLillo, and to friends, collaborators and contemporaries such as Mark Costello and Rick Moody. In the company of the writer's sister, Amy Wallace, Ward travels to the Midwest of America where the writer grew up, and considers the impact of place on his imagination. He also talks to Wallace's publisher and editor Michael Pietsch about the difficult task of assembling Wallace's final fragments into The Pale King. The programme also contains some rare archive reflections by a young David Foster Wallace, recorded a year before the publication of Infinite Jest, on the role of the writer in an age of media saturation.Endnotes: David Foster Wallace (I've emailed them about the 2006 thing... Update: Which has now been corrected.)
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 03 February 2011 |
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A bit slow on the updates this week... (back at work, new school, etc.)
Look, I don’t pretend to be an objective reviewer. This is my Star Wars, my Harry Potter, my Steve Jobs keynote and Christmas morning all rolled into one. If there were a parking lot where I could set up a tent and a lawn chair months in advance and camp out and be first in line for this, I’d do it.
[...]I’m going to start reading The Pale King the day it is released and I’m going to post about it on this site until I’m finished with it. No set schedule, no forums, but I invite you to share your thoughts with me in the comments here and on twitter under the hashtag #paleking. After all the buildup, I’m especially interested in people’s first impressions of the book—and then how it feels to turn that last page and close the book and set it down and consider what might have been in light of what was.
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Philosophy
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Sunday, 23 January 2011 |
James Ryerson's article in the NYT Sunday Book Review, The Philosophical Novel, considers David Foster Wallace's contributions: David Foster Wallace, who briefly attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard after writing a first-rate undergraduate philosophy thesis (published in December by Columbia University Press as “Fate, Time, and Language ”), believed that fiction offered a way to capture the emotional mood of a philosophical work. The goal, as he explained in a 1990 essay in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, wasn’t to make “abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ ” by simplifying ideas for a lay audience, but to figure out how to recreate a reader’s more subjective reactions to a philosophical text. [Thanks, Michael]
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Critical Analysis
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Saturday, 22 January 2011 |
Last year I received an email from Michael Badger wondering if I'd like to have a look at his essay about Infinite Jest. I said sure, but didn't get around to reading it for a while. When I finally got around to it I was stunned by the piece's enthusiasm and had great fun reading it. I hope you do too. It's also interesting because the end result is not what Michael originally intended, and to clarify this, I asked him to put together a small introduction for readers. Just a warning, if you've not yet read Infinite Jest there are plenty of spoilers. Over to Michael: A Preliminary Explanation/Summarization of A Preliminary Explanation/Summarization
The piece of work you are about to embark upon was written in the summer of 2010 for an individual study contract at The Evergreen State College. My aim with the following piece is to introduce people to Infinite Jest in a way that removes them from the Oh-my-God-that-novel-is-huge mentality but also invokes the possible reader of IJ to take action and to enjoy that action.
I began it (the piece) with the idea of writing a simple 10-page essay describing the themes and ideas at play within the Eschaton debacle on pages 380-442 of Infinite Jest. This initial idea was a failure. More importantly, however, the resultant piece was, I believe, a great success. And this is why: the piece below (d)evolves from the original idea into a (at times) chaotic, yet deliberate, exploration into many of the ideas present within IJ and I think that this (d)evolution happened because of the inherent traits of IJ as its own entity. What I mean is that because of the things at work within Wallace’s novel (read as world) there is an organic need to explain and to understand all that Wallace is trying to do and say. And still even more simply: every aspect of IJ is intrinsically connected to every other aspect; and so for any singular part to make any proper sense there is a necessity for explanation of the whole.
Other than that, I think that the piece came out like it did, style-wise, because of two things: a) It is very hard not to mimic Wallace’s writing style whilst reading anything by him, and b) because I was having a great deal of fun while writing it. And mainly I want to impart that—the literal, exhilerating fun—onto any reader of this piece and Infinite Jest.
Michael Badger III Download the pdf, An Exhaustive Essay of pages 380-442 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest |
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Critical Analysis
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Wednesday, 12 January 2011 |
The Common Review has published a great article by Rebekah Frumkin about David Foster Wallace titled Our Psychic Living Room. It's a great read. The first section, Why It's Particularly Important to Read David Foster Wallace, begins: Two years have now passed since the death of David Foster Wallace in the fall of 2008. His legacy as a writer has been the subject of nonstop debate since the day of his suicide. I’ll cut to the chase: I believe he was, in his own way, a literary genius. Let me explain why. You may have opened Harper’s or Rolling Stone back around the turn of the century and read a really funny essay by a chatty, neurotic writer who had Rain Man–like abilities to recall and describe experiences as diverse as attending the Illinois State Fair, playing tennis during a tornado, and following John McCain’s presidential campaign. You may have found the essays hilarious, or quite brilliant. You may have gone so far as to say, as the critic Michiko Kakutani did in the New York Times, that they described modern life with “humor and fervor and verve,” and you may have wanted to read more of them. Regardless of how you felt, you probably dealt with the situation in a normal, adult way. That is, you looked up the essayist’s name online and maybe bought some of his collections, like Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I’ll go ahead and assume you didn’t form an obsessive attachment to the author and delve perilously deep into his essays and fiction and then have to purge all your David Foster Wallace emotional attachment errata onto a blank page and call it an “essay.” Because that’s what I did—and let me tell you, gentle reader: it hasn’t been fun. But it has given me something to do with my time, and it’s also given me this sort of quixotic sense of purpose, this mission to Tell the People about David Foster Wallace—because the people, being a well-educated and discerning people, deserve to know. But this is an embarrassing mission, to be sure, because what if the people already know about David Foster Wallace? The majority of readers of this magazine will probably test out of David Foster Wallace 101, having already read some of his essays and maybe some of his fiction or, failing that, the numerous adoring profiles. But what do these readers actually think about David Foster Wallace? Isn’t all the postmortem hype confusing and disorienting? Isn’t he the kind of dense novelist who gets touted by stoner twenty- and thirty-somethings? Is liking Wallace just a grad school affectation, like watching Danish art films? Is liking Wallace a fun and cool thing to do because he had a history of substance abuse and underwent electroconvulsive therapy? Or does liking Wallace have nothing to do with grad school or stories of Genius in Its Byronic Youth and everything to do with patience and an earnest desire to be a better human being? I think so. I think it’ll become quite obvious if you grit your teeth and hack away at all the melodramatic bullshit. Continue reading Rebekah Frumkin's Our Psychic Living Room. [via @ankurthakkar]
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