|
Critical Analysis
|
|
Wednesday, 24 March 2010 |
|
It's great reading multiple reports about this event:
Fantods reader, Joe Winkler, also made it to the event and wrote up his take on it. Thanks, Joe!
James Wood Lecture - Joe Winkler
The speech began with Wood dropping his sports jacket on the floor next to his podium. I guess this was a symbol of the overall informality of the night. From there, he started the actual speech with some examples of Wallace’s “Brilliant ear for speech”, such as his use of the mistaken word reciplicate instead of reciprocate and also chicken presto instead of chicken pesto. He then listed other examples, and had an interesting observation about a small line in the B.I. of the man who uses Victor Frankl, something along the line (I don’t have the book in front of me) that the person says “just like the saying whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, whoever said that, that there shouldn’t be a knee jerk reaction to suffering…” Wood pointed out that the sound of the phrase knee jerk makes you think of the person who did pen that quote i.e. Nietzsche, and how Wallace here undercuts the statement because the man is describing how a woman being raped, after the fact, has value by quoting Nietzsche, but when you think of Nietzsche and women you think of Nietzsche’s misogynistic statement of whenever there is a woman around have a whip….
He then contextualized Wallace’s great ear for speech to other writers such as Norman Rush, and put Wallace in a strong American tradition of writers exploring consciousness expressing itself. [continued after the jump]
|
|
DFW Biography
|
|
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 |
|
I can’t tell you how much fun this book is; amazingly fun, even for a Wallace fan who is still devastated by his death. You wish yourself into the back seat as you read, come up with your own contributions and quarrels. The form of the narrative, much of which is a straight transcription of the interview tapes, together with the wry commentary of the now-mature and very gifted Lipsky, is original, and intoxicatingly intimate. "Intoxicatingly intimiate" sums up the book better than my whole upcoming review.
|
|
Critical Analysis
|
|
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 |
|
This was a wholly worthwhile experience mostly because Wood is an incredibly astute reader. This should come as no surprise to people familiar with his writing, but part of the joy of the talk was to hear how a great reader approaches some really good fiction. And Wood, in fact, started off the talk by reading several passages of exceptional writing, including such gems as "Whereas but your basic smoothie" (p. 31) and "Trim and good and good legs--she'd had a kid but wasn't all blown out and veiny and sagged" (p. 27). Wood referred to these examples of speech--repellent and horrible as they are--as the locals pleasures of the book, noting that there is a good American tradition of capturing speech and consciousness. (Glad you managed to get tickets, Avi. Thanks for the summary!)
I'm aware of a few more reports that will appear here, and elsewhere, over the next few days.
|
|
General Updates
|
|
Sunday, 21 March 2010 |
David Foster Wallace mailing list members over at wallace-l (myself included) are about to embark on a group read of DFW's 1989 short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair. Kindly coordinated by George Carr (Hi, George!), the stories are being tackled in reverse order because we all want to start with the novella that concludes the collection, Westward The Course Of The Empire Takes Its Way.
Here's the schedule (pagination from the original Norton Hardback): Mar 29 - Westward The Course Of The Empire Takes Its Way, part 1 (pp. 230-257)
Apr 5 - Westward, part 2 (pp. 257-287)
Apr 12 - Westward, part 3 (pp. 288-319)
Apr 19 - Westward, part 4 (pp. 288-319)
Apr 26 - Westward, part 5 (pp. 319-346)
May 3 - Westward, part 6 (pp. 346-373)
May 10 - Everything Is Green (orig. appeared in Puerto de Sol and Harper's)
May 17 - Say Never (orig. appeared in the Florida Review)
May 24 - My Appearance (orig. appeared in Playboy under the title "Late Night")
May 31 - Here And There (orig. appeared in Fiction)
Jun 7 - John Billy (orig. appeared in Conjunctions)
Jun 14 - Lyndon (orig. appeared in Arrival), part 1 (pp. 76-97)
Jun 21 - Lyndon, part 2 (pp. 97-118)
Jun 28 - Girl With Curious Hair
Jul 5 - Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR
Jul 12 - Little Expressionless Animals (orig. appeared in the Paris
Review), part 1 (pp. 1-26)
Jul 19 - Little Expressionless Animals, part 2 (pp. 26-52)
|
|
DFW Biography
|
|
Friday, 12 March 2010 |
|
As a book, "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is extremely odd and occasionally mesmerizing. It may be a valuable resource for scholarly appreciation of Wallace's work, but it is often tedious to read. Consumed, as it is, with Lipsky's reportorial needs--to nail down facts, to elicit colorful quotations, etc.--the transcript is as much an exploration of the exigencies of magazine journalism as of the contours of Wallace's mind. His review is a more much more critical of the format that I am (after I adjusted I found it compeling) but I do agree when Farber writes: Lipsky's transcript makes pleasant reading for academics, the literati, and hard-core Wallace disciples, but the more casual reader may be better served by reading Lipsky's Rolling Stone profile. I'm guessing a lot of Fantods readers might be part of the DFW hard-core...I loved it.
|
|
DFW Archive
|
|
Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
|
Well, news about the U Texas David Foster Wallace archive is all over the web, and neat things keep popping up all over. A few choice links from today: Great little summary article by Meredith Blake over at the New Yorker, What’s in the David Foster Wallace Archive? It contains 10 pics of items from the archive including a letter from Michael Pietsch to David Foster Wallace about his second reading of the draft Infinite Jest. Statesman.com has a nice gallery of photos, #3, a newspaper clipping has a photo of young David Foster Wallace from 1974. The Guardian has posted five images to scribd and you can zoom in on these ones very nicely! The first is a high res verison of his childhoom viking poem. Indirectly related to the archive:
(Special thanks to Matt, Shawn, David, and Bonnie)
|
|
Critical Analysis
|
|
Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
When Wallace died in 2008, Wood wrote, “Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices—or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so. Of great interest to me was his own ambivalent relation with some elements of postmodernism (irony, too-easy self-consciousness, and so on), and the burgeoning presence of moral critique in his work. One had the feeling that this new work was being written under considerable pressure— and I don’t just mean psychological pressure, but the pressure of staying loyal to his fractured, non-linear epistemology while at the same time incorporating some of that admiration he had for the concerns of the nineteenth-century novel. To put it flippantly, he was aesthetically radical and metaphysically conservative, and the negotiation of that asymmetry would have been a marvelous thing to follow, as a reader.”(Thanks, Ricardo)
James Wood on David Foster Wallace If we consider some of Wood's published views about Wallace this could turn out to be a very interesting evening. I'd love to attend, so I'm looking forward to a write-up over at Emdashes. Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices — or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so. And finally, Wood's review of Oblivion: The Digressionist (the link gives me certificate errors with firefox - misconfigured server maybe?) contains this memorable quote - bold type is my emphasis (thanks for the reminder, Adam): Wallace has many ardent followers (his name is just "DFW" on some college campuses), but surely no one has ever claimed to be moved by him. Amused, impressed, challenged, even finely tormented; but not involved, quickened, raised, imparadised. Wallace may be torn between desiring the ordinary satisfactions of readerly connection and disdaining their very ordinariness. Alas, the latter impulse almost always vanquishes the former. No one has ever claimed to be moved by him?
|
|
DFW Archive
|
|
Tuesday, 09 March 2010 |
|
Matt Bucher visited the Harry Ransom Center foyer today and took some pics of the four items on display with his iPhone (So jealous over here, Matt!) Currently on display are the cover page from the first two sections of Infinite Jest, a notebook of typescript pages from IJ, annotated galley of the Borges Bio DFW reviewed, and a poem about vikings DFW wrote when he was young(!). Thanks for heading over and taking the pics, Matt. Also, here's a similar article to yesterday's from U Texas with a different picture - this one shows corrections to IJ for the paperback release.
|
|
