Good People, new fiction by David Foster
Good People, new fiction by David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.
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kottke.org posts about David Foster Wallace
Singer Ben Gibbard, from The Postal Service
Singer Ben Gibbard, from The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, is playing a part in the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, to be directed by John Krasinski, who plays a character on the US version of The Office, which is based on the original UK version by Ricky Gervais. To sum up: indie rock book nerd tv junkie explosion!
The NY Times Book Review’s 100 notable books
The NY Times Book Review’s 100 notable books of 2006. Making the list are several kottke.org notable books: The Ghost Map, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Consider the Lobster, and The Blind Side.
I mentioned earlier the new paperback version
I mentioned earlier the new paperback version of Infinite Jest; here’s Dave Egger’s introduction to the new edition. “[Wallace] was already known as a very smart and challenging and funny and preternaturally gifted writer when Infinite Jest was released in 1996, and thereafter his reputation included all the adjectives mentioned just now, and also this one: Holy shit.” (thx, nick)
A new paperback version of David Foster
A new paperback version of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is out. You get 1104 pages of Wallacian goodness for $10 (it’s only $8 on Amazon) and I’ve heard it’s physically a lot thinner than the previous paperback.
Zadie Smith active and passive reading
Zadie Smith on the distinction between reading like you passively watch TV and reading like you actively interprete a musical piece at the piano. “When you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.”
Bill Simmons, who writes at ESPN and
Bill Simmons, who writes at ESPN and is one of my favorite sports writers, recently penned a rave review of The Wire (scroll all the way down at the bottom). “Omar might be my favorite HBO villain since Adebici. And that’s saying something.” He also sings the praises of David Foster Wallace’s article on Roger Federer.
Oh happy day, a new nonfiction article
Oh happy day, a new nonfiction article by David Foster Wallace! This one’s on Roger Federer. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.” The footnotes appear on a separate page and almost comprise an article of their own. I love reading his writing about tennis. (thx, stephen)
Update: Here’s a short clip of Wallace on NPR talking about Federer. When asked about the similarities between great athletes and great novelists, Wallace suggested that great athletes possess the ability to “empathize without sympathy” with their opponent, something that is useful in fiction writing when putting yourself in the shoes of a character.
Update: This YouTube video shows the Federer/Agassi volley that Wallace describes in the epically long sentence in the second paragraph…look for it starting at 8:10. (thx, marco)
The CSM reviewed a book called Special
The CSM reviewed a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl last week, saying if you like Eggers and footnotes (a la Clarke’s Strange & Norrell or, presumably DFW), you might like this one. Anyone read this? Worth a shot?
Who else writes the kind of essays
Who else writes the kind of essays that David Foster Wallace writes? (thx, ryan)
Inspired by the hypertextish sidenotes in David
Inspired by the hypertextish sidenotes in David Foster Wallace’s Host, a piece from the Atlantic Monthly about radio host John Ziegler (screenshot of the article), arc90 whipped up a way to add sidenotes to any web page. Here they are in action.
Amazon updates their online book reading interface…
Amazon updates their online book reading interface…here’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Matt has a screenshot and a bit about it. Coolest new feature: you can read some books online immediately after purchase (before the paper copy arrives) and use the reader interface to add notes and bookmarks to your online copy.
The Broom of the System
Following a long tradition on this site, I’m going to make a prediction based on very little evidence: David Foster Wallace will never write another novel. My feeling after reading The Broom of the System is that it’s basically a rough draft of the novelized “version” of his “life” that eventually became the lovingly polished Infinite Jest. (That’s right, two is a trend!) Or if he does, it’ll be 20 years from now, when enough time has passed for him to reflect on his experiences in long-format fiction as a writer, husband, teacher, famous personage, and (if he ever has kids) father.
As for Broom itself, I haven’t read enough philosophy for a proper review. The best I can do is compare it to Infinite Jest. If you want to read IJ but just can’t handle its 1000+ pages and 300+ footnotes, read Broom first. If you hate it, no big deal…it’s only 480 pages. But if you like it, you can safely devour IJ.
1996 NY Times review of David Foster Wallace’s
1996 NY Times review of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and a profile of Wallace from that same month by current Times food critic Frank Bruni.
Short interview with David Foster Wallace in
Short interview with David Foster Wallace in the San Antonio Current.
Representation of the London Tube map if
Representation of the London Tube map if the stations were sponsored by products or companies. I love the Pizza Hutney, Upministry of Sound, and iPoddington stops. Rather DFWesque. (via bb)
How do audiobook producers deal with things
How do audiobook producers deal with things like footnotes, photos, interesting punctuation, and the like? “The voice manipulation, for which audiobook producer John Runnette used a ‘phone filter’ — a voice-through-the-receiver effect used in radio dramas — was an attempt to aurally convey Mr. Wallace’s discursive, densely footnoted prose.” Includes sample audio with examples. (thx, bill)
Joe Woodward profiles David Foster Wallace for
Joe Woodward profiles David Foster Wallace for Poets & Writers magazine.
Review of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the
Review of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster compares him to Mark Twain, which I’d never heard before but seems apt.
Consider the Lobster
If I remember correctly, Tense Present (published in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s) was the first bit of writing I ever read by David Foster Wallace. I didn’t fall for him immediately. I liked the article fine, but as I thought more about it in the following weeks — particularly in light of other nonfiction I was reading in magazines and newspapers — the more I liked it. A quick search on the Web revealed that not only had this Wallace written more nonfiction for magazines, he’d written entire books and was considered by some to be the best young author writing in America. A few months later I read Infinite Jest and it was love.
Tense Present is one of the essays included in Consider the Lobster, a collection of nonfiction by Wallace due out on December 13th. It’s included under a new name (Authority and American Usage) and is, like many of the other pieces in the book, the “director’s cut” of the original, but re-reading it brought back good memories about, well, how good it was to discover Wallace’s writing.
Several of essays in CtL I’d read before, including the title essay from the Aug 2004 issue of Gourmet (which according to Gourmet EIC Ruth Reichl almost didn’t make it into the magazine at all). I read The View From Mrs. Thompson’s in Rolling Stone shortly after 9/11 and remember thinking that it was the best reaction to 9/11 that I’d seen, but reading it again 4 years later, the impact wasn’t quite the same…until the last 2-3 paragraphs when you remember that he spends the whole essay setting the table so he can hit you with the whole meal in one mouthful and you then spend several hours attempting to digest what you’ve just read.
The View… and Up, Simba, a piece on John McCain’s 2000 bid for President that also ran in Rolling Stone (at half the length under the title The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub), were my favorites, but they’re all so good (if you enjoy reading nonfiction in Wallace’s signature style, which I very much do). A common complaint of Wallace’s writing is that it’s not very straightforward, even though clarity seems to be his purpose. I don’t mind the challenge the writing provides; I read Wallace for a similar reason Paul is reading surrealist poetry, to make my brain work a little bit for its reward. In The End of Print, David Carson outlined his design philosophy in relation to its ultimate goal, communication. Carson used design to make people work to decipher the message with the idea that by doing that work, they would be more likely to remember the message. I’d like to think that Wallace approaches his writing similarly.
David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address
As much as I enjoyed reading the transcript of Steve Jobs’ commencement address to the graduates at Stanford (here’s an audio version), I preferred the similar** sentiments of David Foster Wallace in his Kenyon College commencement address:
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
As in his writing, Wallace has a knack for depicting the world as a pretty messy place that one must navigate with a certain amount of uncertainty in order to really experience anything, which, for me, holds a little more truth than Jobs’ “grab the tiger by the tail and live, dammit” thoughts.
See also some other graduation speeches:
Conan O’Brien’s Harvard Class Day 2000 speech
Will Ferrell’s Harvard Class Day 2003 speech
Jon Stewart’s William and Mary 2004 commencement address
** Yeah, I know, all commencement addresses are pretty much the same.
New collection of nonfiction by David Foster
New collection of nonfiction by David Foster Wallace due out in December.
Oblivion
Salon nails the gist of Oblivion:
With his new story collection, David Foster Wallace has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story — so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book’s reviews, few of his readers even realize that’s what these stories are.
Exactly right. It’s Stephen King for the literary crowd. In many of the stories, there’s always something lurking off frame…the oblivion, as it were. Wallace knows, as does Scott McCloud, that what happens between the frames makes the narrative. Wallace never shows us the monster…the reader just gets glimpses of its shadow and is left with a feeling of unease. As opposed to the horror movies of today with their gore and choreographed multimedia frights, the seeming normalcy of Wallace’s stories set the reader up for a later sense of discomfort.
Lobstergate
Lobstergate: David Foster Wallace and his Gourmet article about the Maine Lobster Festival. Wallace’s article is fantastic.
Everything and More
DFW is a favorite of mine, but I was disappointed in Everything and More. Perhaps I wasn’t part of the intended audience, but with an interest in all things Wallace, a college degree in physics, a general interest in mathematics, and avid reader of popular science books, if not me, then for whom was this book written?
Mostly I was bothered by Wallace’s signature writing style, which usually challenges the reader in delightful ways. In E&M, he ratcheted his style up to such a degree that it became as obfuscating as the math he was trying to explain. Not that he should have used only words of four letters or less, but a greater degree of clarity and simplicity would have been appreciated to let the parodoxical beauty and the beautiful paradox of transfinite math show (which Jim Holt did more successfully than Wallace in his New Yorker review of the book).
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