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General Updates
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Monday, 29 August 2011 |
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My hosts swapped servers and forgot about me... The old server got switched off AND there were no backups after the move to the new one. But as you can see, we worked something out.
I'm still having issues getting a full backup done, so expect things to be up and down over the next week or so. Most of all, thanks for all of your support! The best way to keep track of any updates if access disappears again is by checking my twitter feed, just head to @nick_maniatis. Nick P.S. Thanks to everyone who has offered donations... I'm not going to set up anything formal. If you'd like to (and you don't NEED to - this site has always, and will always, be free) consider buying a book or two from Amazon by following the links. I get a small percentage from every sale which I put to gift credits on Amazon. Maybe grab that Wallace book you haven't read yet? Then at least some of the money is going to David Foster Wallace's estate too. His work is the reason this site exists.
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General Updates
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Sunday, 21 August 2011 |
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Hi everyone, Please be patient with me over the next three weeks or so, I'm moving to a new house, which means proper updates will happen when I have the energy... i.e. not as often as I'd like. Take this example: I retweeted a link to this hugely popular article by Maud Netwon, Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace (19/8/11), nearly 48 hours ago but it's only just now making it here to the site. The article, by the way, has sent many people into a tailspin over the 'voice' of bloggers. Lots of over-simplification in many of the retweets I've read (no surprises there). I enjoyed reading it and I expect you will too. I'm still updating my twitter feed regularly (it's hard for me to ignore my phone) and it's 95% David Foster Wallace related, so until I'm properly settled you might like to keep an eye on that too. If you're not a twitter user you don't have to be, just head to @nick_maniatis. Thanks to those of you sending me news via the ' Contact us' page (and keep doing so if you think I've missed something big). |
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Conferences
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Wednesday, 10 August 2011 |
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You can now register for the conference. The registration fee is set at 25 euros, which will include lunch on both days and coffee and drinks between sessions. You can choose to pay the fee by bank transfer, by credit card, or in cash upon arrival. [Cheers, Toon]
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The Pale King
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Monday, 01 August 2011 |
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Let's see if this works... THE MOST AMERICAN thing about Wallace, though, is his conviction that his unhappiness is a specifically American condition. Like many classic American writers but few contemporary ones, he experienced being American as a bitter and significant fate, a problem that the writer had to unravel for the benefit of his fellow sufferers. In a late story, “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace theorizes about “the single great informing conflict of the American psyche,” which is “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance.” All of Infinite Jest can be seen as a demonstration of the thesis Wallace advances early in the novel: “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.” When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-’60s cohort known as Generation X. “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of Infinite Jest, “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he observes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades ... Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded so strongly to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 29 July 2011 |
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David Foster Wallace, whether unwittingly, uses realism in a new way, as a weapon against conceptualism. Conceptualism demands art as product of a concept, which results in reproducible paintings or sculptures (like readymades), and in prose, a plotted idea which is explained in prose produced via a schema. Because of conceptualism, one can divine “Soylent Green” to be about people being turned into food without ever having read the text of Harry Harrison; this is a problem which the anti-conceptualistic avant-garde tackles. In denying a plot, David Foster Wallace denies the reading community an easy way to discuss the book. By eliminating plot, he forces the description of the novel as “About the IRS”, and makes null conceptualism’s bane of letting a literary community discuss matters literary without reading the discussed works. Knowing this, he could comfortably let plot be forgotten, for he knew the plotless work must be discussed and therefore his need for conclusion on themes was unnecessary, as made clear by his minimalist’s schema titled “Embryonic outline” (available in the notes section at the end of the novel).
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DFW Archive
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Friday, 29 July 2011 |
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Parts four and five of Samantha Pitchel's series of David Foster Wallace Examinations have been posted at Culture Map Austin. “If you look at his fiction, especially the fiction that he taught, you’ll see in the margin, he’ll write ‘do’ next to a block of text,” Whiteside explains. “[HRC curator Molly Schwartzburg] has an essay coming out about Wallace, about how the Ransom Center got the archive, how it was processed and why it’s organized, how it’s organized. And she writes in this essay, she couldn’t figure out what the ‘do’ meant. And I’m making the argument to her, that’s the teacher in him, he’s saying ‘do this passage.’“ Whiteside made this discovery while browsing through paperbacks in the collection. “The smoking gun here is page 140 of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, where he actually wrote ‘do in class.’” While the endless parade of visitors is a boon for the archive, can the material itself handle the attention? Constant handling can damage the carefully preserved papers, and some boxes are checked out on a near-daily basis. “We are digitizing quite a bit of the collection in order to make a second copy available in the reading room for researchers who are here at the same time as other researchers,” Schwartzburg explains, “but because of copyright, none of that material will be visible outside of our reading room. That’s one of the challenges of contemporary archives, that we can’t make it available on the web the way we might, say, Edgar Allen Poe.”
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The Pale King
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Friday, 29 July 2011 |
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In this way, the theme of information processing is folded into Wallace’s work so that its very mode of delivery (fiction, essays, book reviews - whatever) might coax the reader into not just recognizing but thinking critically about the data swirl around them. This is not, obviously, an effect exclusive to Wallace -- some of his early works, like The Broom of the System and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (a novella now presented as the concluding story in Girl With Curious Hair) directly grapple with predecessors and influences in fiction and theory -- but it’s his uniquely personalized style, formal inquiry married to ‘self-analysis’ (as you put it), that I think has attracted even casual readers.
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