The Howling Fantods

The Harry Ransom Centre has finished the upload of their official videos from the David Foster Wallace Symposium.

1. "Everything and More: A Conversation About David Foster Wallace." Literary agent Bonnie Nadell and Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch spoke with Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin about their work with David Foster Wallace.

2. "A Life through the Archive." Cultural critic and reporter Seth Colter Walls and D.T. Max, staff writer for The New Yorker, spoke with writer and historian Douglas Brinkley about the life and work of David Foster Wallace through his archive. Wallace's archive is housed at the Ransom Center.

3. "Writers on Wallace." Authors Elizabeth Crane and Amanda Eyre Ward spoke with Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch about their connections with David Foster Wallace and his work.

4. "Editors on Wallace." Editors Colin Harrison, Bill Tonelli, and Deborah Treisman spoke about their involvement with David Foster Wallace's work with Wallace's literary agent Bonnie Nadell.

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King was nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction along with Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

No winner was awarded.

Joe Winkler over ar JoeTalk, The Stupidity of A No Vote - Way To Go Pulitzer! (18/4/12)

Ann Patchett for the NYT, And the Winner Isn’t ... (17/4/12)

NPR, Pulitzer Jurors Are Shocked That No Fiction Prize Was Awarded - with audio from juror Susan Larson. (17/4/12)

Juror Maureen Corrigan for The Washington Post, Pulitzer’s no decision on fiction prize exposes flaw in process. (19/4/12)

From The New York Times Magazine, The Great Pulitzer Do-Over (7/5/12) Both Sam Anderson (on page one) and Macy Halford (on page three) contribute about The Pale King.

Update: Pinch Pulitzer goes to David Foster Wallace (16/5/12)

Wallace related bits and pieces from the last week or so.

• FEST – A David Foster Wallace Poetry Project

There are two separately organised DFW reading meet-ups (using www.meetup.com):

• The Short Story Book Club (London based) has scheduled their June 20 meeting to focus on some stories from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
• The David Foster Wallace Fantods (unrelated to this site) are Berkeley, CA based and meeting on June 4 at the Diesel Bookstore.

Letters to DFW has a couple of guest posts up:

• Paying Attention
• Poor Tony Krause was on my train

Erick Kelemen writes for Fair Matter about a couple of recent DFW related pieces, Old and New Ways of Reading David Foster Wallace:

Over at The Millions, A-J Aronstein's experience of the DFW Symposium, Out of Reach: Notes from the David Foster Wallace Symposium.

There's some good in this, the second half particularly, but some of the earlier comments frustrated me:

I think I expected to vindicate my own normal-seeming degree of Wallace fandom by exposing myself to the extremist sect of his readers — folks who wear Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirts (ETA being the fictional setting of Infinite Jest), or who are apparently in the process of trying to memorize the entirety of that 1,000-page novel (endnotes and all), or who participate regularly in the longstanding Wallace email listserv (1,200 strong, according to its creator and moderator Matt Bucher), and have ready responses to questions like “How do you characterize the influence of Lacan on Broom of the System?”

I also troubled by the inaccuracies - see JT's response in the article's comments sections.

Regardless, it's worth checking out.

This week's episode of The Simpsons is titled, "A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again".

Will it be more than just a title reference? Looks like I'll be watching The Simpsons for the first time in years this week!

[Thanks, Judd!]

Update: A family cruise? Thanks, @avi_kelin

Update: Home from work. I haven't watched the ep yet, just skipped through for these screen caps. Anything else? Let me know.

Nadir (5:54-ish)

DFW (Tuxedo T-shirt 10:05-ish)

Matt Rubinstein has a neat write up over at ma.ttrubinste.in, check it out:

The Fleet Bar was also the site of Elegant Tea Time later that same day, where elderly female passengers wore long white stripper-gloves and pinkies protruded from cups, and where among my breaches of Elegant Tea Time etiquette apparently were: (a) imagining people would be amused by the tuxedo-design T-shirt I wore because I hadn’t taken seriously the Celebrity brochure’s instruction to bring a real tux on the Cruise…

I think The Simpsons is important art. On the other hand, it’s also—in my opinion—relentlessly corrosive to the soul, and everything is parodied, and everything’s ridiculous. Maybe I’m old, but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it, and I sort of have to walk away and look at a flower or something.