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The Legacy of David Foster Wallace
Upcoming Publications
Tuesday, 06 December 2011
 
Another collection of essays about David Foster Wallace! This one is due in May 2012 and is from the University of Iowa Press:
 
 
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.
In this elegant volume, literary critics scrutinize the existing Wallace scholarship and at the same time pioneer new ways of understanding Wallace’s fiction and journalism. In critical essays exploring a variety of topics—including Wallace’s relationship to American literary history, his place in literary journalism, his complicated relationship to his postmodernist predecessors, the formal difficulties of his 1996 magnum opus Infinite Jest, his environmental imagination, and the “social life” of his fiction and nonfiction—contributors plumb sources as diverse as Amazon.com reader recommendations, professional book reviews, the 2009 Infinite Summer project, and the David Foster Wallace archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.
 
The creative writers—including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky—and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch, reflect on the person behind the volumes of fiction and nonfiction created during the author’s too-short life.
 
All of the essays, critical and creative alike, are written in an accessible style that does not presume any background in Wallace criticism. Whether the reader is an expert in all things David Foster Wallace, a casual fan of his fiction and nonfiction, or completely new to Wallace, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace will reveal the power and innovation that defined his contribution to literary life and to self-understanding. This illuminating volume is destined to shape our understanding of Wallace, his writing, and his place in history. 
 
Contributors: 
Don DeLillo
Dave Eggers
Ed Finn
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Franzen
Paul Giles
Heather Houser
David Lipsky
Rick Moody
Ira B. Nadel
Michael Pietsch
Josh Roiland
George Saunders
Molly Schwartzburg
 
 
David Lipsky on DFW 13th Dec
Appearances/Readings
Saturday, 10 December 2011
Update: Video from the event Part 1  and Part 2.
 
David Lipsky will be speaking about David Foster Wallace at The Center for Fiction in Manhattan at 7pm on the 13th of December, sounds like it is going to be a good night.
 
(Thanks to everyone who got in touch, somehow I missed this one!) 
 
And somewhat related, here's a fantastic (and really insightful) review of Lipsky's Although of Course You End  Up Becoming Yourself by Tim Personn, The Dave Show:
 
AOCYEUBY makes a similar focus possible by a peculiar doubling of its author across time and space. The book showcases two different Lipskys: one version of the man in 1996, on the road with Wallace, and an older Lipsky in 2008, sitting at home, listening to the recordings made a decade before. Sometimes this older Lipsky mutters something [intrusions that, in the text, are set in brackets] and, like a commentary track on The Dave Show, you hear his remarks against the backdrop of Wallace’s soft Midwestern speech: less bubbly, less ebullient, but also warm and observant. Lipsky 2008 is, above all, a good reader of character. His mind is anything but dulled by the tragic events of the preceding weeks. To the contrary, it is acute and, like any engaged reader’s, empathetic. He is like you, humbled by the reality of loss, and trying to figure this man out – to intuit the big something that seemed to be missing from all previous writing on David Foster Wallace.
 

 
How to Read Infinite Jest Chronologically
Infinite Jest
Wednesday, 04 January 2012
PDF Updated now ver 1.1 1.2 1.3
 
Drew Cordes has put together a neat guide for reading Infinite Jest chronologically and she's given permission for it to be available here for Howling Fantods readers. If you have not read Infinite Jest there are major spoilers to be found.
 
For reference while working on the project Drew used the IJ scene by scene guide, and Stephen Burn's David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide.
 
(But not, it appears, Greg Carlisle's, Elegant Complexity, which also has a number of different chronologies in its appendices, including some that focus on individual characters.)
 
If you notice any errors or corrections you can email drew at the address in the pdf to let her know, and we'll get any corrections up ASAP.
 
Over to Drew:
 
A couple quick acknowledgments. This project was fun but also quite maddening. It would’ve taken three times as long if not for two sources that aided me. The basic layout of IJ’s scenes I used as a template is here: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm. And Stephen Burn’s Reader’s Guide to Infinite Jest was helpful, too. However both sources ultimately are incomplete and sometimes erroneous in their dating. That being said, they still both helped tremendously.

Some final advice before you embark. If this is your first time reading Infinite Jest – stop. Read it the way Wallace intended first. Hell, you should probably read it at least twice as it is before opting for this route. Wallace had very good reasons for ordering the book the way he did. The book’s sequencing is just as big a part of its artistic/philosophical statement as any sentence or character. (Also, this guide has spoilers.) If you have read it already and you are looking to experience the book in a new way, I think you’ll find this approach enlightening. Seeing when scenes play out in relation to the other things that are going on sheds a lot of light on the characters as well as some scenes you may have found more cryptic in your other go-arounds. Gaudeamus Igitur!

Drew Cordes
Vassar College
Class of 2004
 
 
 
 
 
 
Covers of Upcoming DFW and Related Books
Upcoming Publications
Wednesday, 04 January 2012
First up, it would appear Amazon has the cover for the paperback release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King up, I noticed the now hand-written title, but didn't notice the 'With Four Previously Unpublished Scenes' (A wallace-l reader pointed it out. Cheers, Dan).
 

 
Clarification on this 'unpublished scenes' statement as soon as I have more, but I'm going to assume that because the words scenes and not chapters is used it's not going to be that much material.
 
As for Wallace criticism, in April we've got Stephen J. Burn's, Conversations with David Foster Wallace due (available for pre-order over at Amazon).
 

 
And in May from editors Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (which has an awesome cover! Thanks for pointing it out, Matt) 
 

 
Happy New Year 2012
General Updates
Sunday, 01 January 2012
Happy New Year everyone!
 
I've got some catching up to do around here so I might as well start with something I've been meaning to post for a while.
 
At the end of November Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace's syllabuses for Slate, The Extraordinary Syllabus of David Foster Wallace (23/11/12):
 
Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”
 
 
 
 
Holiday Update
General Updates
Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Due to the lack of updates it is probably obvious I am on holidays!

If David Foster Wallace is a new discovery (or Christmas gift) don't forget to check out the New to DFW section!

The Pale King has been making it to a few best of 2011 lists which is nice AND deserved, I think.

For semi-regular updates follow my (mobile) twitter feed. http://twitter.com/nick_maniatis

Also some good updates over at the Infinite Jest Liveblog, and Letters to DFW.

 
Infinite Jest Visualisation
Infinite Jest
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Check out Chris Pudney's interactive visualisation of Infinite Jest over at Visilives!
 
It's really quite cool. 
 
Here's the direct link to the interactive version.
 
[Cheers, Chris]
 
Come On, Pilgrim: A Visit to the Archive
DFW Archive
Friday, 09 December 2011

Elizabeth Lopatto visits The Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace Archive and studies the drafts for DFW's Kenyon commencement speech in, Come On, Pilgrim:

A kind older librarian explains to me for what is the third time that day that she’ll be putting a box on a table, and I can have one folder at a time at my workspace. Due to the rush from South By, one of the folders I want is out. No one else seems to want the Kenyon College commencement address, so I settle in with it.
Wallace’s handwriting is small and neat, with distinctive capital “D”s generally written in one stroke that appears to begin at the bottom part of the straight line, go up, curve back around and release. He corrected a typewritten draft in red pen, green pen, and what appeared to be a blue marker.
A lot of the speech is tightened in this draft, with whole subclauses reduced to a word or two. Some paragraphs are cut entirely. One of the cut sections was an account of Wallace’s own commencement, some of which is overlaid in red ink with the word “stet”...
Continue reading

 

 
DBC Reads Pale King Review
The Pale King
Wednesday, 07 December 2011
Check out a new review of The Pale King over at DBC Reads, David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King”:
 
I’ll offer two reasons for why you should definitely read The Pale King, directed at two different groups of people: those who don’t have a particular love for Wallace, and those who cherish him.
 
To the first group: this is the most readable, the most mature, and the most focused fiction David Foster Wallace ever wrote. If you’re of the opinion that Broom of the System is some precocious, waffling, meandering text written by a too-smart college senior, or you think Infinite Jest is a slog not worth the slogging through, then The Pale King might just be for you. The individual vignettes are poised and confronting and jarring; they may not come together in the most graceful way, but there are moments in The Pale King that are just plain great, the moments that make Wallace fans go, yep, that’s why.
 
And to the latter, who I guess needs no reason to read The Pale King other than the fact that they love him, that they miss him, and that they will read anything by him: you ought to know that The Pale King features multiple characters who might as well be Wallace; and not David Foster Wallace, but Dave Wallace. You know, the guy we all spent time reading about after David Foster Wallace committed suicide? There’s David Cusk, who suffers from a majorly distressing sweating disorder. There’s Meredith Rand, who despite her seeming normality, ended up in the looneybin. There’s David Wallace himself, who resents Philo, Illinois for its IGA groceries and reminders of his less-than-stellar high school years.
 
 
 
 
Colin McEnroe Show: The Life & Legacy Of David Foster Wallace
Interviews with or concerning DFW
Tuesday, 06 December 2011

If you missed it you can now listen online and/or download the David Foster Wallace special on The Colin McEnroe Show: The Life & Legacy Of David Foster Wallace.

With guests, Donald Brown, Evan Hughes (Just Kids), Maria Bustillos (Psychotic jest and infinite reactions: How David Foster Wallace didn’t invent the Internet’s voice - a response to the Maud Newton artivle brought up during the show) and Ryan Walsh (The DFW Audio Project).

 

A listener asked for reading suggestions, some of the titles suggested by the guests were:

Don DeLillo - White Noise and Underworld: A Novel

John Barth (I'll suggest The Sot Weed Factor and Lost in the Funhouse)

Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides

Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

Thomas Klise - The Last Western

 
Marriage Plot Character is Based on Aspects of DFW
General Updates
Monday, 05 December 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides spoke to Michael Silverblatt on the most recent radio episode of Bookworm and acknowledged that elements of the Leonard character from The Marriage Plot are based on David Foster Wallace.

The important part of the interview starts around the 23 minute mark.

I've added a quick transcript of it below (apologies for any errors):

Silverblatt: Now, I want to ask because at a certain point I couldn't help it. There's a character who I felt I knew from life who is dipping into a tobacco tin and chewing tobacco and wearing a bandana and dealing with manic depression and I liked this person very much in life. And I know that you, to some extent, were drawing on this person as well. Yes?

Eugenides: In a few places it's been much discussed and for a while I wasn't talking about it because it seemed to give too much weight to it, we're obviously talking about David Foster Wallace, and this book is not a roman à clé. As I said I began it in the late '60s and I didn't know David Wallace very well. I had some correspondence with him in the '90s and then in 2006 when this book was already well advanced I spent a week with him in Italy. When I make up characters I try to draw on every person that I know that has some of the qualities of the character I'm trying to create. So in this case with a manic depressive I put every depressive person that I'd had met or heard about into that character and some of the things that Leonard does have nothing to do with Wallace. The tobacco chewing was actually very rampant at Brown when I first got there. All of my friends chewed tobacco and I had him chewing the tobacco. The thing that comes from him, however, from Wallace, is that he used to keep his Skoal can, I noticed, in his sock when we were in Italy and Leonard's always sticking it down in his boot. So there's a few things that I will admit to, but it was never an idea, I just didn't know him well enough to recreate him.

A most interesting (compared to previous answers), but not really surprising, turn of events. I hope this will stop speculation (for everyone involved, but particularly Eugenides) so that the focus will be The Marriage Plot, and not the Wallace stuff.

[Thanks, Adam]

 
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