Ryan M. Blanck (owner of the Letters to DFW blog, https://www.facebook.com/RyanMBlanck, @RyanMBlanck) has published a collection of narrative and critical essays influenced by David Foster Wallace, Supposedly Fun Things:
"Chaperoning Grad Nite at Disneyland… Spending eight hours in the Prospective Juror holding room… Reading AP exam essays for fifty-six hours… Detoxing from an addiction to prescription narcotics… Travelling 7000 miles to present a paper at a literary conference in Antwerp, Belgium… In this collection of narrative and critical essays, Ryan M Blanck explores the “irony of the banal” in these situations and others. Influenced by the writing style of David Foster Wallace and heavily footnoted, Supposedly Fun Things… offers candid reflections on some of life’s most ordinary – and extraordinary – events."
Ryan's book is available now over at Amazon.com.
Last Updated on Monday, 12 August 2013 23:02
A positive new review over at the Toronto Review of Books blog by Shannan Minifie about last year's, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.
There's a lot going for this short little collection, and Minifie thinks so too:
[...]
In his interview with his alma mater (Amherst Magazine) he elaborates on his revision practices, lamenting the comparatively “terribly first-draftish” nature of interviews, in which “no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered.”
This is interesting since the collection manages to reveal more about the writer than he perhaps imagined. And this is where the book’s major appeal lies: in the way it answers the question of why his readers continue to hanker after All Things Wallace. The collection doesn’t offer new material or exclusive access to Wallace ephemera, but TLI&OC conveys to new Wallace readers his profound interest in the “magic” of fiction. The interviews collected here introduce a common and persistent thread in Wallace’s lifelong contemplation of, and commentary on, his art: his belief that “good” literary art enables the imaginative identification inherent in “real” human connection.
[...]
Continue reading here.
Order David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations at Amazon.com.
Last Updated on Monday, 12 August 2013 23:35
A couple of months ago I was contacted by Evana Ho (regular contributor to ACTWrite, the ACT Writers Centre’s monthly member magazine) because she was reading Infinite Jest in 30 days and planning to write about the experience. I agreed to an interview and we ended up meeting at The National Library of Australia to share my experiences reading the novel. Just like pretty much any time I end up discussing Wallace with someone (regardless of how well I know them), time flew by.
A month later and the article, Why Some Hard Books are Worth Reading or How I Read Infinite Jest in 30 Days, has now appeared in the August 2013 issue of ACTWrite.
I would read, and write about reading, Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. And I would read it in 30 days, which was how long I had to write this article.
Ordinarily, 30 days would be more than enough time to read a single book. But this isn’t an ordinary book. Printed in 8 point font, it spans 1,079 pages, including 96 pages of “endnotes and errata” in even smaller print. Infinite Jest jumps back and forth chronologically, features a massive cast of interconnected characters, and is best read using two bookmarks and with the Oxford English Dictionary secure in your lap.
Read it here: Why Some Hard Books are Worth Reading or How I Read Infinite Jest in 30 Days by Evana Ho.
[Thanks, Evana!]
Last Updated on Friday, 09 August 2013 01:44
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Nick
Caleb Crain has released the complete audio from his 2003 Boston Globe interview with David Foster Wallace, Approaching Infinity, (a version of the interview was also collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace).
Some amazing stuff here. The preamble to the interview is a fantastic insight into how Wallace dealt with interviews in general.
Caleb Crain writes:
On 17 October 2003, I interviewed David Foster Wallace at New York’s Park South Hotel about his book Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞, which was then just being published. A week later, a condensed and edited version of the interview was published in the Boston Globe, a version that has since been reprinted in Stephen J. Burn’s Conversations with David Foster Wallace.
After Wallace died in September 2008, I went back to my transcript of the original interview and posted on this blog a few passages that I hadn’t been able to shoehorn in to the published version, including some to-and-fro about God and infinity that verged on the mystical. I intended even then to make audio files of the interview available some day, but at the time, I was a bit shy about the fact that during the interview, Wallace briefly turned the tables and spent a few minutes interviewing me (fortunately, he let me turn the tape recorder off for most of those minutes). Also, it turned out to be trickier than I expected to connect an old-fashioned cassette player to a newfangled laptop. In fact I didn’t figure out the proper Radio Shack doohickey until a few days ago. [...]
Continue reading and grab the audio here.
Other David Foster Wallace interviews can be found here.
Last Updated on Friday, 26 July 2013 01:36
In response to Signifying Rappers being re-released in the US and the UK Alexander Nazaryan's makes a case for reading it in an article for The Atlantic Wire, White Boy Beats: Why You Should Read David Foster Wallace's Book on Rap:
A book about rap written a quarter century ago by two very white guys has tremendous potential to be embarrassing. I am happy to report that Signifying Rappers did not make me cringe a single time, though I did have to look up both cultural references (Schooly D) and words from DFW’s famously capacious lexicon (epiclesis; seriously, Dave?). It is also probably the only book about popular music to seriously discuss the origins of synecdochal imagery.
At heart, this book has heart. Its message is simple and humane. “Rap is poetry,” Costello writes in the introduction — a poetry of protest, that is, speaking to what Wallace calls later in the book (the two write in alternating chapters) “the carcinomoid Other…inside Us” that frightens “Concerned Citizens” who do not want to hear about the macabre imagery of what Wallace and Costello call “Hard Rap.”
Continue reading White Boy Beats: Why You Should Read David Foster Wallace's Book on Rap
Last Updated on Friday, 26 July 2013 02:04
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