Looks like UT-Austin has acquired David Foster Wallace’s archive. From the press release:

Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed “Infinite Jest,” the earliest appearance of his signature “David Foster Wallace” on “Viking Poem,” written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.

You can look at some of the notes he made inside the books in his library here. And here are some notes he made in his dictionaries. The archive will be available to researchers next fall.

(Thanks, jh, for the tip)

[Parts 2-10 available from the end of part 1. Thanks Gene Kwak]

Guess I gotta start making plans again to go back to NY:

The Gallery at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Presents:

A FAILED ENTERTAINMENT
Selections from the filmography of James O. Incandenza
Exhibition Dates: Jan 29 – Feb 19th
Opening Reception: Friday, Jan 29th, 6-8 pm
Film Screening to take place during opening reception.

Included as a footnote in Wallace’s novel is the Complete filmography of James O. Incandenza, a detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works. The LeRoy Neiman Gallery has commissioned artists and filmmakers to re-create seminal works from Incandenza’s filmography.

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A post re:– neither repost nor riposte–Blake’s wichtige Liste and (only at first) about Infinite Jest in German. Maybe a chair is a good metaphor for who gets translated. Have you been translated? Have the Important Writers on Blake’s list? And not 25 because Saramago, Ouredník, and Zizek are already others, Ben Lerner’s a poet, Aase Berg’s both, and I’ll write about poets in translation and translation in poets at an other time.

Not sure if anyone went there during all the well DFW grammar talk (thanks, Amy), but imagine translating, say, Oblivion. Good that one of Wallace’s German translators, Ulrich Blumenbach, did just that, presumably (it first appeared in 2006), while whittling away at Infinite Jest, which took him six years and has had, as Unendlicher Spass (literally, the less Shakespearean Unending Fun), endless success: ten times the expected five grand copies have been sold since it appeared at the end of August, on the heels of Infinite Summer, which the publisher, KiWi, has translated too, as 100 Days of Infinite Jest (in German–it ended on 12-1).

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blumenbach (pictured–in German) regrets that the author never answered his many questions, “a list always growing longer”: it seems Wallace had grown weary of taking translator’s queries, and, according to The Complete Review’s useful paraphrase of a slippery summary (still looking for the original source), considered the Spanish La broma infinita (tr. Calvo and Covian | Mondadori, 2002) and the Italian Infinite Jest (Nesi w/ Villoresi and Giua | Einaudi, 2006) and apparently other attempts (anyone know more?) to have “all failed, more or less.”

In a warm war, France is responding with (900 pp. of) Vollmann’s Rising (not translated by the great Claro, see below, who did six previous tomes, but by one Jean-Paul Mourlon, translator, it seems, of Jimmy Carter and Hilary Clinton). There’s also German Vollmann (3 titles), Spanish Vollmann (3 more), Japanese Vollmann (2), Greek Vollmann (2), and Czech Vollmann, all (not counting the French) with only one title (Butterfly Stories) repeated.

American Genius is only a Great American Novel for now (does it even have a British publisher?), despite Tillman’s first book of stories, Tagebuch einer Masochisten, having appeared in Germany in 1986, four years before her first collection in English, READ MORE >

First, thanks so much to all of you who read/took/RT’d/linked to/commented on the Dave Wallace grammar challenge. I wanted to pay a small, quiet tribute to someone who did a great lot for me, and I am floored by the response. I’m beginning to feel like a broken record in the comments sections, though, as they are increasingly hard to navigate, and many readers have taken similar but separate umbrage with the idea of teaching or testing Standard Written English in the first place. Wallace addresses this in the essay I linked to in the answers post, but as the comments keep rolling in, I want to summarize some of what he taught me about this issue.

So. The quiz was intended to help writing workshop students spot errors w/r/t the current conventions of Standard Written English (SWE). The point is NOT to teach students to lord little rules over their friends; the point is to be more careful writers. And why does knowing the current conventions of SWE help us become careful writers?

Probably the most important reason is to avoid ambiguity. We want to make our meaning clear. Putting modifiers far from what they modify creates extra work for the reader, so we learn to spot this trouble area. Professor Wallace distinguished between good, rich ambiguity (even in grammar–cf the brilliantly dangling modifiers of Barry Hannah) and bad, distracting ambiguity, where we cause our reader to wonder whether we’ve made a calculated nonstandard choice (which is fine as long as our readers can tell) or merely don’t know the current accepted standards are in usage in grammar. He wanted us to avoid the latter kind of ambiguity. READ MORE >

The answers to the other night’s grammar challenge appear haphazardly throughout that post’s comments section, but it seems like people are still taking it, so I thought I’d hide the answers here under the fold for ease of checking.

Here is the essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” that Wallace published in Harper’s in 2001. Those of you who give knowing the rules a bad name by correcting other people’s spoken and casual English really need to read this. So do those of you who think fiction writers and poets don’t need to know the rules. Both groups are lazy. It’s lazy to learn some rule in elementary school and continue to lord it over people while failing to pay attention to shifts in usage. And it’s lazy to distract readers unnecessarily because you don’t realize that your misplaced adverb causes ambiguity. Every writer would do well to invest in a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage. I took quite the browbeating from Wallace  before I bought mine for putting “over all” (should be one word) in a story. And yes, the shakedown took place in Footnote 7 in his letter of critique.

But Wallace would recommend another, older essay–the one that inspired his own subtitle, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Read that here.

Answers to worksheet, once you’re ready, are below. READ MORE >

Seemed like people enjoyed talking about the finer points of grammar and usage a month or so back, so I thought I’d provide a little morsel from a nonfiction workshop I took in college taught by someone who, among other accomplishments, was the most obsessively precise user of English I have ever and will ever encounter. I have, or, well, had, David Foster Wallace to thank for my own peevishness about mistakes in what he called S.W.E., or Standard Written English. So what follows is the complete text of a worksheet from his class. Whoever can come up with the most correct corrections will win something (currently taking prize suggestions/donations). I’ll post the answers once it seems as if nobody is trying anymore. Don’t worry if someone else posts their answers first; they may not be right! Not as easy as it may first look. All sentences have one crucial error in punctuation, usage, or grammar. Okay go! ANSWERS HERE when you’re ready. And HERE is an explanation of why he took the trouble to teach us these conventions.

183D

25 February 2004

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION

1. He and I hardly see one another.

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

6. From whence had his new faith come?

7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.

Again, some bits from the Sonora Review DFW Tribute Issue, which I’m still reading through; this time I’ve excerpted Rick Moody’s interview of Michael Pietsch, who edited Infinite Jest while at Little, Brown. The whole interview is interesting, as Pietsch talks about how he acquired IJ, how he and Wallace worked together to edit it, and how ‘it felt as if [they'd] published a book that mattered, and that would last.’ Pietsch calls it ‘one of the great thrills’ of his working life.

Of the editing process, Pietsch says that ‘every decision was David’s. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his.’

After the jump, you’ll find some responses Wallace made to Pietsch’s requests for cuts.

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Last Tuesday afternoon, someone in my Introduction to Fiction class asked me if we would ever read a ‘happy’ story this semester, and I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t feel comfortable saying ‘no’ or ‘yes,’ because I have a hard time understanding what is a happy story and what is a sad story. For those who don’t know, all of our readings have come from The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and we’re about to start reading My Happy Life by Lydia Millet for the novel portion of the course. I like to think that the kinds of things we’re reading are somewhat varied; however, another student disagreed, and criticized the selections Ben Marcus had made. The student pointed at what Marcus says in the introduction (“What I found in my reading was an amazing range of styles, beliefs, methods, ideologies, and instincts.”) and commented that despite the differences Marcus intended to show, the stories in the anthology, in the student’s opinion, are all generally sad and depressing. And if we categorize stories that way, and if we assume that we share the student’s definition of sad, then there isn’t much variety in that, right?

But, and this is my question, are there really happy stories and sad stories? If they exist, how do you define one or the other, or is it even a matter of one or the other?

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The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted an article about a few years old DFW/Delillo-related prank authored by a Jay Murray Siskind and published in Volume 11, Issue 4 of Modernism/Modernity, a scholarly literary critical quarterly review. According to the Chronicle, Mark Sample, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University, discovered the article, a review of Oblivion, in 2005 when one of his graduate students cited it in an essay. He forgot about it, time passed, then he got curious and dug some more to discover a good bit of humor behind the whole thing. I won’t go on to summarize all of the details, as plenty of information is out there already and many other blogs have covered it – see the following links:

Mark Sample’s original post regarding the ‘hoax.’

Sample’s follow-up post in response to an open letter written by the editor and former editor of Modernism/Modernity.

The Chronicle of Higher Education article, written by Peter Monaghan.

However, I do have this to add. I’ve got the email exchange between the graduate student, who asked to remain anonymous, and Sample, who kindly gave me permission to share it with you here. It’s a great little exchange, pretty funny. Enjoy after the break.

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The withered priest reads his lecture about Vermeer and limpidity and luminosity and about light as attachment/vestment to objects’ contour. Died 1675. Obscure in his time you see for painted very few. But now we know do we not, ahm. Blue-yellow hues predominate as against ahm shall we say de Hooch. The students wear blue blazers. Unparalleled representation light serves subtly to glorify God. Ahm, though some might say blaspheme. You see. Do you not see it. A notoriously dull lecturer. An immortality conferred upon implicit in the viewer. Do you ahm see it. ‘The beautiful terrible stillness of Delft’ in the seminal phrase of. The hall is dark behind Day’s glowing row. The boys are permitted some personal expression in choice of necktie. The irreal evenness of focus which transforms the painting into what glass in glass’s fondest dreams might wish to be. ‘Windows onto interiors in which all conflicts have been resolved’ in the much-referenced words of. All lit and rendered razor-clear you see and ahm. It meets TuTh after lunch and mail call. Resolving conflict, both organic and divine. Flesh and spirit. Day hears an envelope ripped open. The viewer sees as God sees, in other ahm. Lit up throughout time you see. Past time. Someone snaps gum. Whispered laughter somewhere up in a rear row. The hall is dimly lit. A boy off to Day’s left groans and thrashes in a deep sleep. The teacher is, it is true, wholly dry, out of it, unalive. The boy next to Day is taking a deep interest in that part of his wrist which surrounds his watch.

- from ‘Church Not Made With Hands’ in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, pp. 203-04

Perhaps this is old news for some, but Tin House has republished an early David Foster Wallace story, which was, according to Rob Spillman, only previously available in Wallace’s college literary magazine, The Amherst Review. The story is titled “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing” and is available online in various PDF forms (though I hadn’t even known of its existence until I saw this issue of Tin House).

I’m happy to have discovered the story.

Here’s the first paragraph:

I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.

You can read the rest of the story by clicking over to this PDF file.

At the height of my obsession with David Foster Wallace, garnered after reading ‘Infinite Jest’ over several weeks in 2001, an act which literally changed my life, I began going after any and every piece of writing not only of his, but that he had recommended, blurbed, mentioned in interviews, taught, etc. Many of these books also had a profound influence on my brain, including Gass’s ‘Omensetter’s Luck,’ McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘Suttree,’ Donald Barthelme, and countless others.

During this period I began constructing a list of these texts as I found them. The list, which I remember as being several pages long, is now likely floating somewhere in one of my many expired computers. I was able, though, to find at least what makes up part of the list in an old email folder, and as such it appears below.

I know this is not an exhaustive list at this point, and if I find a later draft of it I will repost: in the meantime, however, if you have any other knowledge of blurbs or etc. (and any that might have occurred later in his life, after I stopped making the list, will obviously be absent) please comment them. Where I could, I tried to include the actual blurbs and/or comments, and in other places just included the names of authors mentioned in passing or other ways.

(It likely should be noted that many of these refs came from the amazing and wonderful interview conducted with Wallace by Larry McCaffery for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which if you have not yet, you should read.)

Also included is a Reading List from a class Wallace taught on postmodern fiction (I believe), which is a pretty fantastic collection of texts.

Incomplete list is after the break:

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Rumpus regular Elissa Bassist offers up “Notes and Errata: A DFW Companion Guide to ‘The Unfinished’ by D.T. Max.” (I think we reported on the Max piece when it first came out, but anyone needing a refresher can get one here.) Basically, her piece catalogues any DFW work, interviews, or otherwise relevant points of reference in Max’s piece and, if that work or parts of it are available anywhere online, she links to it. Por ejemplo:

5. “Anything comforting put him on guard. ‘It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,’ he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State.”

6. “The critic James Wood* cited Infinite Jest as representative of the kind of fiction dedicated to the ‘pursuit of vitality at all costs.’”
*Two pertinent links: Book Review: James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self, by Nigel Beale(the quotation “pursuit of vitality at all costs” is given context here); Remembering David Foster Wallace (Wood’s comment is last)

Thanks for the good work, Elissa! I’m sure putting something like this together was tedious and time-consuming, but there are a lot of people out there who will be grateful you took the time to do it.

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