In an interview with Andrew Mitchell Davenport for Full Stop, Steven Moore (His essay, The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest, can be found here) recalls a memorable encounter with David Foster Wallace:
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Along about then I met David Foster Wallace for the first time (after corresponding with him for a few years), who was very quiet and polite. I saw him a few more times after he moved out to Normal, Illinois: by then I was working for Dalkey Archive Press, which was located there, and he took a teaching position there in 1993. As you probably know, he was a championship-level tennis player when younger; one summer we got together to play, but it was too beastly hot and humid to exert ourselves, so we just volleyed lazily back and forth, and he gave me some tips on my serve. At one point he politely asked if he could play full out, after which he blew me off the court. I could barely see his serves, much less get a racket on them.
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Continue reading the interview...
From Alexis Coe over at The Awl, For Sale: The Private Letters of David Foster Wallace:
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On June 3rd, Sotheby’s is auctioning off a small lot of correspondence sent to Jackson by Wallace over the course of a decade or so—four postcards and eight letters—in addition to an unpublished manuscript of “Shorn,” a short story written for a seminar that would eventually be rewritten and included in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and a presentation copy of The Broom of the System. The auction is expected to fetch between twenty and thirty thousand dollars.
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Continue reading...
Sotheby's Lot 150 here.
Last Updated on Saturday, 31 May 2014 15:47
Rachel Hatch writes about the ISU DFW conference for Stateside, Footnotes from Illinois State’s first David Foster Wallace Conference:
Packed among their conference programs and presenter notes, attendees of the first-ever David Foster Wallace Conference in Normal carried along copies of the behemoth books Infinite Jest and The Pale King as if they weighed nothing at all.
More than 125 people gathered from all over the world on May 22 and 23 to explore, dissect, and digest the works of the author, who has been called one the most influential writers of his generation.
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Continue reading...
You can read about the two sessions Ryan M Blanck presented at the ISU Wallace conference last weekend over at his Letters to DFW blog.
(Image from Ryan M Blanck's sessions via ISU)
Reimagining Wallace - Lego sculptures based on some of his favourite scenes in Wallace's stories and essays.
and
No One Ever Says... About addictions and recovery.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 May 2014 08:42
Infinite Jest exhibition at Schirn in Frankfurt, Germany opens 5 June until 7 September:
Ever faster, ever higher, ever further – the credo of postmodern society does not necessarily lead the human being to Mount Olympus. On the contrary, in the early twenty-first century man wavers between euphoria and depression, and is confronted with the enticing opportunities of a global and virtual world as well as the challenge of using them to optimize his own life on an ongoing basis. The exhibition will propose an image of today’s world with the individual at its center. In analogy to the narrative structure of the eponymous novel “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, the exhibition will spin a web of relationships between the various demands made on individuals today, demands in which the resistances and contradictions of reality – a reality often described as lacking any alternative – make themselves felt. The visually stunning films and installations by the American artist Ryan Trecartin, for instance, create a world that looks like a computergenerated version of itself moving and changing at a tearing speed and zooming in frontally on its permanently nervous, blathering protagonists. The show will feature some twenty artists, including Andrea Fraser, Alicja Kwade, Judith Hopf, Maurizio Cattelan, Kris Martin, and Daniel Richter.
Curator: Matthias Ulrich (SCHIRN)
Info here.
[Thanks, Martin]
The closest I can get to DFW14 is here at my pc monitoring twitter and social media...
I hope #DFW14 twitter sees a little more activity before I fall asleep. 1:37am here.
Last Updated on Saturday, 24 May 2014 02:38
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I know quite a few of you are attending the Illinois State University David Foster Wallace Conference this coming Friday, it's shaping up to be a fantastic day.
If you are attending and would like to report on any of the sessions you attend I'd love to reproduce them here for readers that are not able to be there. (You'll get full credit, of course).
Contact me here, either with a short report, or for more info and an email address to send your session reports to. Photos most welcome too!
Enjoy the conference!
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