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Minneapolis Lipsky Reading
DFW Biography
Friday, 30 April 2010
Tore Simonsen has posted a report and video of David Lipsky's appearance at the Minneapolis Central Library.
 
(Thanks, Matt.)
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DFW Commemorative Poem
DFW Remembrance
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Iannis Goerlandt got in touch to let me know about Flemish poet Geert Buelens' poem in commemoration of David Foster Wallace. He introduces it much better than I do:
 
In December 2008, the Flemish literary journal "yang" (now "nY") published a substantial David Foster Wallace tribute. It consisted of a long introductory Wallace "lexicon" (Daniël Rovers/Iannis Goerlandt), a Dutch translation of the Federer essay (Goerlandt) and a commemorative poem by the Flemish poet Geert Buelens.

For "nY", translators Piet Joostens and Iannis Goerlandt translated Geert Buelens’ poem “(i.m. dfw)” into English. You can find the poem “(in memoriam dfw)” and more on Buelens here: http://ny-web.be/transitzone/poem-memoriam-david-foster-wallace.html
 
Thanks, Iannis.
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Reading DFW in Qatar
Critical Analysis
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Ibrahim N. Abusharif has a review of The Best American Essays 2007 (edited by DFW) over at The Millions, Reading Wallace in Qatar:
 
I’m a regular reader of the Best American series, but I generally skip reading the guest editors’ introductory essays, doing my best to avoid the word “Montaigne” and explanations of how the essay defies a crisp definition. But this time in Doha I went directly to Wallace’s introduction to see what I had missed, and there he mentioned Montaigne (Chesterton, too) and he remarked that “essay” is not his word of choice for what is really “literary non-fiction.” Still, Wallace’s piece turned out to be especially meaningful because he confronted some “bad news” about our times and supported it in his introduction with very clever meta-interpretation of the editor’s role, and he supported it more implicitly with his choice of essays.
 
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Statesman Lipsky Review
DFW Biography
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Joe Gross' review, Portrait of the artist as a guy in a car, of David Lipsky's book has been posted over at statesman.com:
 
What Lipsky notices for us, and then what is impossible to ignore afterward, is that Wallace is very interested in solitude and what that meant to him and his relationships with other people. ("`Alone' is a word that meant a great, complicated amount to him," Lipsky writes.) He saw books and writing as a bulwark against loneliness, but his devotion to being alone caused his romantic and personal relationships to suffer; he cannot quite find the right balance between the advantages and disadvantages of spending so much time by himself.
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Lispky Book #16 on NYT List
DFW Biography
Saturday, 24 April 2010
I just followed a link through to the New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Best Seller List to discover David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace at #16 for the week ending April 17th. Congrats, David!
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The Atlantic and Other Reviews
DFW Biography
Friday, 23 April 2010
 
Menachem Kaiser's extended piece about Wallace and the book, The Challenge of Writing About David Foster Wallace, for the Atlantic:
 
Some personalities lend themselves well to biographies and profiles. These lives can be neatly packaged, edited, and bound. They can be organized into chapters, narratives, lists, and an index. And though these biographies might not make great literature, they can be thrilling to read (cf: Richard Burton). But some lives can't be defined by the adventures therein; some possess an intellect so vast and frenetic that, consequently, it's mostly inaccessible to the profiler and, in turn, the reader. See: Wallace, David Foster.
 
 
Paul Debraski continues his initial thoughts with a Soundtrack overview and full review:
 
The focus of Lipsky’s questioning is multifold.  Lipsky is a fan of DFW’s work, and since he himself is a young writer, he seems to have a personal interest in writerly ambition, fame, the effects of fame, and the effects of fame on the writing process.  Also, his angle for the piece is clearly “what’s it like to be DFW, savior of literature?”

And the answer is interesting because of the type of person DFW is:  he’s very smart, but he’s also very uncomfortable with showing off his smartness (Lipsky describes him as being very Midwestern in this regard).  He’s a gentle generous person who is very protective of himself and his family.  And so, rather than just being a profile of a hip young author, the focus turns into what happens to a shy, unassuming hip young author when the spotlight shines on him.
 
 
 
The book contains what would have to be a significant amount of everything that Wallace said during their conversation over these five days or so, and it is clearly an important primary source for scholars interested in him. It also seems clear to me (and to Lipsky, both at the time and certainly in retrospect) that Wallace was exceptionally wary of him and was concealing himself or acting a part in much of their conversation. Lipsky seems to identify this fairly quickly, and a good part of what’s in the book is Wallace’s typically self-reflexive discussion of the various ethical and epistemological issues caused by this preparation of a face to meet the faces you meet, etc. I was somewhat annoyed by how Lipsky wanted to capture the code-switching in Wallace’s speech by phonetic spellings and such. I’m sure that just a mention of a different accent or voice pattern in the bracketed sections would work better than the inconsistent “dudn’t” and “in’”s that distract the reader.
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