Posts tagged as David Foster Wallace
A David Foster Wallace Conversation
Tune in here at 1PM to hear Awl pals Maria Bustillos and Evan Hughes (among others) discuss David Foster Wallace.
A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces. I wasn’t there, but after reading Eric Alterman’s summary Friday, and finding no mention of the incident in any other coverage of the festival, I watched the conversation online. READ MORE
David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Books Removed From Archive
In the spring of this year I wrote a piece about David Foster Wallace's self-help books that was published here in April. It appears that all the books referenced in that piece have since been removed from the Ransom Center's collection of Wallace's papers. The collection, which used to contain 320-odd books, now contains 299. The remaining book list can be searched here. READ MORE
The Decemberists, "Calamity Song"
Colin Meloy of the Decemberists: "I wrote 'Calamity Song' shortly after I'd finished reading David Foster Wallace's epic Infinite Jest. The book didn't so much inspire the song itself, but Wallace's irreverent and brilliant humor definitely wound its way into the thing. And I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy's round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that's played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace's work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we've come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud." There's more here.
This Is Probably Why We Blog This Way!
"I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The 'sort ofs' and 'reallys' and 'ums' and 'you knows' that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had 'folks' been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread. And! They have sort of mutated since to liberal and often sarcastic use of question marks? And exclamation points! 'Oh, hi,' people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there." READ MORE
Is 'The Pale King' Funny? No One Seems Sure
I'm starting to get the sense that no one's sure if the new (posthumous, unfinished) David Foster Wallace book is "funny" or not.
Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library
"Humility—the acceptance that being human is good enough—is the embrace of ordinariness." —underlined by David Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz's The Spirituality of Imperfection. READ MORE
For David Foster Wallace Fans
"I think of myself as a fiction writer. I'm real interested in fiction, and all elements of fiction. Fiction's more important to me. So I'm also I think more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I'm any good or not, or I'm on the wrong track or not. Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, it's not that I didn't care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, I'll try this. I'm not an expert at it. I don't pretend to be. It's not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me." READ MORE
The David Foster Wallace Files
Awl pal Seth Colter Walls put in some serious time scouring the David Foster Wallace archives in Austin. There's a gallery of some of Wallace's notes and annotations here, and, for Infinite Jest fans, a collection of deleted scenes here.
The World's Worst Record-Listening Party
What's the least fun thing you can think of? I mean, excepting the obvious, like performing your own root canal without anesthesia or watching your pet die or something. How about going to a Black Eyed Peas concert? How about going to a Black Eyed Peas concert where Tom Cruise comes out on stage in sunglasses and a leather jacket to plug his new movie, to which the Black Eyed Peas contributed a song? And then how about if Will-I-Am tells you that you get to be one of "the first cats" to hear the new song? READ MORE
