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Philosophy
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Wednesday, 15 December 2010 |
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There's a piece by Moira G. Weigel over at the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog about David Foster Wallace's Philosophy thesis that is worth checking out - welcome to anyone who's made it to this site after reading it. David Foster Wallace: His Secret Life As a Philosopher, refutes a few points of speculation that keep cropping up about the publication. Namely, it was submitted for peer review, it is seen as an important philosophical work, and David Foster Wallace had tried to publish it: Edited by Steven Cahn and Maureen Eckert, both professional philosophers, “Fate, Time, and Language” surrounds Wallace’s thesis with the academic articles to which he was responding. The book also includes an introduction by New York Times Magazine editor, James Ryerson and an epilogue by Jay Garfield, one of Wallace’s advisors, who now teaches at Smith College. The novelist Mark Costello, who was Wallace’s college roommate and close friend, confirms that Wallace, who had briefly enrolled as a philosophy graduate student, tried to publish his thesis with Harvard University Press in the 1990s. “Dave felt the manuscript solved a problem which was still being talked about in academic circles as ‘unsolved.’ He said to me that he sent it to Harvard with the idea that ‘in case anyone actually wants to know the answer, here it is.’” Eckert, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and had long admired Wallace’s work, met Costello at a memorial service for Wallace held at Amherst in the fall of 2008. Costello told her how important the thesis had been to his friend. Eckert contacted Cahn, a legendary professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, who supervised her dissertation and whose research Taylor himself had supervised at Columbia in the 1960s. “I called and asked: Steve, did you know that this famous writer wrote a whole thesis on you and Taylor? And Steve was like, really? He had never heard about David Foster Wallace! I managed to get a PDF to him.” Cahn contacted Wendy Lochner, who acquires titles in philosophy for Columbia University Press. Lochner submitted Wallace’s thesis to the usual strenuous process of academic peer review. “I was asking people not so much would this be interesting because it was Wallace’s but is it interesting in its own right as a work of philosophy. The reviews confirm that it was.” “There is no doubt about it,” Cahn echoes. “This is a serious piece of philosophy. It stands on its own.”
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Philosophy
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Sunday, 12 December 2010 |
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Update: Biblioklept review added. Reviews: Depending on where you source your books from, some lucky readers have already received their copies in the mail.
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Critical Analysis
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Friday, 03 December 2010 |
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (of Planned Obsolescence - previously) posted a draft of her article about Infinite Summer online for comment today. It's to appear as part of a collection of essays entitled The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Critical and Creative Assessments, edited by Lee Konstantinou and Samuel Cohen, and to be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. What made Wallace’s work so phenomenally powerful for so many readers, I would argue, has to do with its ability to connect three consistent impulses in contemporary fiction in a way that no other writer has managed quite so well. In Wallace’s work, we repeatedly see wed high-modern/postmodern experimental pyrotechnics not only with an incisive cultural critique but also with a deeply personal concern for quotidian human suffering. That is to say that Wallace’s fiction combines rich investments in form, in ideas, and in emotion. Any number of writers of the last fifty years can be read as bringing together two of these strains in contemporary fiction, but hardly anyone else has managed all three in a way that feels to the reader not simply sincere but unflinchingly honest. And it’s these three factors together, I would argue, that have something to do with the degree of connection that readers have felt with Wallace’s writing: not only is that writing serious enough to make the reader work non-trivially in its apprehension, and not only does the writing cause the reader to think seriously about the world in which she lives, but it also helps the reader, on some too often devalued level, to understand herself within that world.
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Interviews with or concerning DFW
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Monday, 22 November 2010 |
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UPDATE: Parts 4 and 5 now posted. Tom Scocca interviewed David Foster Wallace by phone in February of 1998 and used the material for a Boston Phoenix article. Tom recently found the tape of the interview and has put part 1 of the transcript online over at The Slate - "I'm Not a Journalist, and I Don't Pretend To Be One": David Foster Wallace on Nonfiction, 1998, Part 1. Part 2 Part 3: Q: How do you handle being responsible for facts, writing nonfiction, after writing fiction? Coming to a genre where the things you say have to be on some level verifiably true? DFW: That's a real good question. And the first one of these that I did, in order, the first one I did was the very first one, about playing tennis as a Midwesterner. Where I had some shit that I just, that was likeimpressionistic, and I didn't know, and I'd never dealt with a fact-checkerbefore. And they're like, "We discovered there is no yacht and tennis club in Aurora, Illinois, what are we to do?" And I was like, oh, God.So after that I just started to take better notes and be willing to back stuff up. The thing is, really—between you and me and the Boston Phoenix's understanding readers—you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.Not to mention the fact that, like, when people tell you stuff, very often it comes out real stilted. If you just write down exactly what they said. And so you sort of have to rewrite it so it sounds more out-loud, which I think means putting in some "likes" or taking out some punctuation that the person might originally have said. And I don't really make any apologies for that. Part 4: Q: How much gag writing do you do? To what extent when you're doing these things do you try to be deliberately humorous, and how much do comic effects just sort of arise from the thought processes? DFW: I'll tell you. I think another reason why I'm not doing any more of these for a while is, by the end, I think the last one I did was the Lynch thing, there really was kind of a shtick emerging. And the shtick was somewhat neurotic, hyper-conscious guy, like, showing you how weird this thing is that not everybody thinks is weird. I think it's more that kind of trying to—trying to notice stuff that everybody else notices but they don't really notice that they notice? Which I think a fair amount of good comedians do that, too. I don't think, I would never go, oh, it's time for a gag, and just stick in a gag or something. Part 5 : Q: How much distance is there between David Foster Wallace—the narrator—and yourself? DFW: I don't understand the question? Q: How crafted is that persona? Because it has the appearance of course of, like, nakedness, and an actual opening up of the thought process. But at the same time, you said, like with the David Lynch thing, you felt it sort of turning into shtick. DFW: Yeeeah. Well. Huh. You know, I think sincerity can be a shtick. I know people, just in private life—you know the kind of person who takes great pride that they will never have an unuttered thought, and there will never be a truth, you know, they're like, "So how do I look in this?" "Wellll, I'd love to tell you you look good, but I've just gotta tell the truth, you look awful"—you know what I mean, those people? Q: Mm-hmm. DFW: And uh—[sighs]. The hard thing about any of this stuff is, after a while, almost anything becomes this kind of postmodern pose. And I think really the first four or five of those, particularly like through the cruise, I don't think there was really any persona there at all, except what emerged through the fact the thing was getting cut over and over again, and I'd cut out the lines that were clunky or whatever. I don't think anybody thinks entertainingly at all times.
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DFW Archive
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Thursday, 25 November 2010 |
Choire Sicha (one of the editors of The Awl) and Seth Colter Walls (check out his DFW piece and the images in Newsweek if you haven't already) spend the first 15 minutes of this episode of Bloggingheads.tv discussing Seth's time at The Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace archive. They cram heaps of stuff into the early part of the conversation, but the best bits include Seth talking about David Foster Wallace's 'creative non-fiction' syllabus (including a definition of creative non-fiction by DFW), extended versions of his non-fiction, and previously unknown David Foster Wallace stories. 'The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer' ( in container 27.9) which Seth reminds us is a title from The Broom of the System and discussed by characters as bad undergraduate fiction... and 'The Piano in the Pantechnicon' (from The Allegheny Review in 1984). Seth also mentions the possibility of an official publication of uncollected David Foster Wallace material (which I'd heard about in passing, so it's great to be able to mention it!). [Thanks, Aryeh]
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Critical Analysis
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Monday, 22 November 2010 |
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Blake Butler has posted an extensive article over at HTMLGIANT about David Foster Wallace's Mister Squishy (from Oblivion) The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy”: I can remember with unusual clarity the feeling in me the first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy.” It was published under the name Elizabeth Klemm in the 5th issue of McSweeney’s in 2000, but by the time the magazine reached my hands I’d already heard on the Wallace listserv that this rather lengthy piece of fiction could only ever be written by him; there could have been nobody else. I was already a rabid Wallace freak; I’d pretty much begun writing fiction as a direct byproduct of reading Infinite Jest, and since then become obsessed. I read this story, long as perhaps 3 normal stories, on a futon in a house in one sitting under a skylight with legs crossed, already ready to be lit. And yet, the particular instance of “Mister Squishy,” even having then been well versed in a way that somehow placed the author’s presence in my daily thoughts (which has not since then stopped), rendered in me that the first time something different even than what I’d been ready to expect: some odd confabulation of provocation, confusion, inundated awe; a feeling rare not only for any kind of language, but particularly for a shorter work. This was something singular beyond even the already neon body of Wallace’s work in constellation, and in particular, beyond the confines of what a story as a “story,” or a novel even, or text as text, traditionally operationally assists to construe.
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Infinite Jest
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Friday, 19 November 2010 |
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There's some seriously awesome stuff in here. I've just spent four hours of my Saturday morning in a meeting trying to read this stuff on my phone (and discovering a bug in the webkit browser that stopped me from being able to update the site from my phone. Arrgh.) Thanks, Seth!
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Philosophy
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Monday, 15 November 2010 |
I've been making my way through an e-book pre-pub version of the upcoming Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will (publication and analysis of David Foster Wallace's philosophy thesis, Due Dec 14) and enjoying it quite a bit. The essays do a very good job of contextualising Wallace's work and explaining the complexity and importance of the philosophy behind it, and the book is worth it for the supporting material. He does an excellent job of summarising the thesis and the supporting essays in the collection giving it a positive review. Check it out over at I Just Read About That...
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