The Howling Fantods

Leonard Lopate and D. T. Max talk about David Foster Wallace on The Leonard Lopate: Show A Life of David Foster Wallace (15 mins - listen online or download).

Also, here is Vagant's interview with D. T. Max from Nov 2012, The shadow of the pale king. (17/1/13)

Update: Errata and Concordia link added.

If you're a regular reader here then you'll know it has been a big year for David Foster Wallace news. For a re-cap you could click back to January, and then navigate your way page by page to the present. But that would be tedious compared to Michael Moats' fantastic two-part Year of David Foster Wallace piece for Fiction Advocate.

Fiction Advocate's Year of David Foster Wallace Pt. 1. (20/12/12)

Fiction Advocate's Year of David Foster Wallace Pt. 2. (29/12/12)

Fiction Advocate's Errata and Concordia. (21/1/12)

Claudio and Jess and working on a project and they need your help. Please get in touch with them via, cldsnsn (at) gmail.com (insert @ etc.) if you can!

• Blake Butler has written thoughtfully and in depth about David Foster Wallace over time; he knows his stuff. I think this piece by him for Vice is probably overly cynical - he's letting other things get in the way, How Will the David Foster Wallace Legacy Survive Itself?. (8/1/13)
• A review of Both Flesh and Not over at The Last Passage. (6/1/13)
• Ryan M Blanck has finished Infinite Jest (yay!) and is giving things a break for a little while over at Letters to DFW.
• Irony in Music. (12/12/12)

Finally, my copy of David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series) arrived, so far it's great. Worth the purchase.

Fantastic guest post by Matt Bucher (@mattbucher, wallace-l administrator, Simple Ranger, Las obras de Roberto Bolaño to name just a few...) over at Fiction Advocate, Consider the Year of David Foster Wallace.

Packed with news about future Wallace related publications (including Burn and Boswell's, A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, and a new reader's guide by Greg Carlisle, this time for Oblivion - I'm so excited for this one!), personal insights, thoughtful comment, and reflections about the D.T. Max biography of David Foster Wallace:

Click here to read Consider the Year of David Foster Wallace.

A couple of days ago Scott David Herman (@erasing) posted a great little piece to wallace-l about the source of the Anthony Burgess epigraph for David Foster Wallace's story/novella (and one of my very favourite Wallace shorts), Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (from the Girl with Curious Hair collection).

I've reproduced the post below with Scott's permission. Thanks, Scott!

If anyone's interested, I recently dug up the source of the Anthony Burgess quote that Wallace used as the first epigraph to "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way":

"As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse." -- Anthony Burgess

I was surprised to find that this is kind of a misquote, or at least it's an alteration -- maybe deliberate, maybe not. There are two issues:

1. The epigraph's two sentences aren't adjacent in Burgess's original piece. In fact they're almost antipodal from each other.
2. The second sentence changes Burgess's wording a bit.

The original piece is "The apocalypse and after", a book review Burgess wrote for the March 18, 1983 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. He was reviewing an academic book entitled Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things by W. Warren Wagar (what a name) and musing generally about end-of-the-world literature. Burgess also included the review in his 1986 essay collection Homage to QWERT YUIOP, under the title "Endtime" (and its text appears to be unchanged, from what I can see on Google Books).

The first sentence of the epigraph is the second sentence of Burgess's opening paragraph:

We have had the end of the world with us ever since the world began, or nearly. As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Of course, we suspect that our relicts are going to live on, though we have no proof of it, and there is a possibility, again unprovable, that the sun will heartlessly rise the morning after we have become disposable morphology. Perhaps it is rage at the prospect of our ends that makes us want to extrapolate them onto the swirl of phenomena outside.

The unaltered version of the second sentence appears nearly 2000 words later, as the last sentence of the piece:

And if H.G. Wells emerges in this survey as the only giant in a genre which he virtually invented, it is, almost in spite of himself, because he was interestingly ambiguous, which few of his successors are, and because he dealt in the minutiae of human experience. The man in "The War of the Worlds" who, facing the probable endtime, mourns the loss of tinned salmon with vinegar remains more memorable than the Martian death-rays. Only very minor literature dares to aim at apocalypse.

(I do like that "dares to aim at" rather than "aims at"...)

I guess either Wallace wrote down the lines from memory and misremembered them, or he was pulling some sort of Reality-Hunger-ish remix of Burgess's words in order to generate the epigraph he preferred. Or both -- i.e. deliberately combining non-adjacent sentences without an ellipsis, and misremembering the wording of one of them?

If anyone wants to read the whole Burgess piece, I've got a PDF of it here.

PS: I should probably confess that it was all the tongue-in-cheek Mayan apocalypse stuff from last month that reminded me of Wallace's epigraph and spurred me to look it up.

Scott David Herman (@erasing) - Jan 2013