Ellis on Wallace
Everybody’s innovator-buddy Bret Easton Ellis, during a q/a in Hackney:
Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…
[via The Howling Fantods]
5 moth-beaten mumblings
14. Flash, prose, short thing? This is your last day to enter the Fineline contest.
2. There is a Gordon Lish Facebook page.
7. Ten best short story collections? Maybe…
5. Here is that David Foster Wallace piece about Federer you should read every year around Wimbledon.
1. Sexcast # 8: Interview/podcast with Roxana Shirazi, author of The last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage.
4 cups of world
14. Sometimes people write stupid shit just hoping for a response. Example, at Huff: Comparing Dave Barry and David Foster Wallace…right. (Next week David Stoesz will examine a midnight dinner of two bottles of white wine [fling cork into air, don't need it]/rooftop blanket making out/grappling versus a quick lunch at Cracker Barrel.)
2. Over at The Short Review: Richard Yates Collected Stories.
4. June 30 is Indy Underground Reading Series. Donald Ray Pollock, Andrew Scott, The Brick Windows. Music, words, alcohol–what do you need in life?
7. Ernaux’s autobiographical books are breathtaking in their level of disclosure and unflinching as they rehash real-life experiences—obsessive love, bereavement, abortion, marriage, illness, sexual jealousy—that are not bizarre or uncommonly tragic, nor by any stretch uplifting or inspirational in the Eat, Pray, Love vein.
Amazing expose of Annie Ernaux at The Second Pass. Do you know her well? You should. Summer is here–get to jumping.
Catherine Lacey—
Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace:
Somebody could write a whole monograph on how deliberately and artfully he deploys the modifier ‘sort of.’
11
David Foster Wallace’s undergrad thesis
Ok, the book length interview was interesting, and the uncompleted final novel in near-form makes sense (and is compelling, even in its incompleteness), but this, this, is exploitation, and a bad idea:
Columbia University Press is publishing David Foster Wallace’s undergrad thesis next year? [more info at GalleyCat].
Undergrad thesis? I’m sorry, I love the man, and I am interested in marginalia of great minds, but this to me seems not only too much, but just incorrect. Undergrad papers, particularly ones called things like Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, are almost always embarrassing, and even if they have some merit, don’t really belong in a body of work, unless, you know, the author is alive and willing to OK that thing to come into the world. It hadn’t cropped up since his college years for a reason.
Though I am sure I will purchase and read it (as seems their point here), I think this is a big shame on you waiting to happen. God knows if anyone ever saw what I wrote as undergrad I’d want a fork in the eye, even if I was gone. I can’t imagine that there are many who wouldn’t. Clearly, from the design of the cover of this, these people have no taste. Let a man rest.
Trying to Review the Lipsky/Wallace Book
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
by David Lipsky (Available now from Broadway Books)
I’m trying to write a full review of this book right now, but it’s proving difficult.
First, I must admit that unlike many of my literary colleagues, I am not and never have been a fan of DFW’s writing, so my reading of this text is biased accordingly. I actually only requested a copy of this book for review because so many people I respect recommended it, and because I figured that perhaps by reading it I might be seduced into reconsidering my position.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really change my opinion or offer any compelling reason to reconsider Wallace’s work. (Except for maybe Broom of the System, which Wallace seems to have come to dislike because of the heavy theoretical influence, which is actually the reason I think I would probably like it).
Going back to this thing about me not being a fan, I think that’s really important. If, for instance, someone were to come out with a posthumous book-length interview transcription with Alain Robbe-Grillet or Gilles Deleuze, I would savor every line in much the same way I sense others savor these lines. But for a reader who isn’t already in love with DFW, the book isn’t that appealing. I found it uninterestingly repetitive, and I got an uneasy “someone trying to capitalize on the death of a famous person” feeling from it. I mean there are these parts where DFW asks Lipsky not to include something in the interview and there it is on the page, which sort of feels icky – but at the same time it works to give us a more well-rounded picture of DFW – but then again, dude was a real dude, not a “well-rounded character.”
Also, it made me feel really, really bad for DFW. It made him seem so sad, so lonely. Here’s a couple lines that, for me, characterize the overarching sentiment of the book, this is DFW speaking:
That story at the end of [Girl With Curios Hair], which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn’t going to write anymore. (61)
I just don’t know about this book.
Have you read it? What did you think?
Uncategorized / 78 Comments
May 20th, 2010 / 4:30 pm
May 20th, 2010 / 4:30 pm
Justin Taylor—
Slate is claiming an exclusive on this list of “The words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.” So if that’s something you’d like to know about, you can know about it now.
Critics on Criticism: Dryden and Pope on the Evils of Hating, Loving Parts
Apparently something about the Restoration, after all the Charleses and Jameses and Cromwells and who is Catholic and who is Anglican or Puritan, got poets to thinking about the whole versus the part, w/r/t criticism. Thus John Dryden, who was politically moderate but eventually found he had some inclinations toward Rome, on critics who “think this or that expression in Homer, Virgil, Tasso, or Milton’s Paradise to be far too strained”:
Tis true there are limits to be set betwixt the boldness and rashness of a poet; but he must understand those limits who pretends to judge as well as he who undertakes to write: and he who has no liking to the whole ought, in reason, to be excluded from censuring of the parts. (from “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Heroic License,” 1677)
This seems a good rule. I perhaps unfashionably quite enjoy reading good criticism for its own sake, and I believe a person can display a purely critical genius, though their work ought to follow Wilde’s dictum of being a creative act in its own right. I think, here, that Dryden makes a key distinction. He is taking to task critics who profess no taste for any muscular poetry, for the “the hardest metaphors and the strongest hyperboles,” and who then critique individual works of heroic verse that by definition display that muscularity, hardness, and strength.
Archive of David Foster Wallace @ UTAustin
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)
10 Part David Foster Wallace Interview 2003
[Parts 2-10 available from the end of part 1. Thanks Gene Kwak]
Sean Lovelace—
Brief, but interesting: Lincoln Michel on DFW, Junot Diaz. Begs to ask the novel of the ’80s, the ’70s, the ’60s, ’50s…?
A Failed Entertainment
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.
Blake Butler—
A list of remembrances of writers who passed in the 00s, by other writers, including one of David Foster Wallace by George Saunders, plus JG Ballard, Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, many others, at the Guardian.
20 Important Books in Other Languages; or, “a list always growing longer”
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 >
Blake Butler—
The New Yorker has an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, ‘All That’. Feel kind of immensely scared to read.
Grammar Challenge: Reiterations of Some Explanations in the Now-Unwieldy Comments Section
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 >
Grammar Challenge: Answers and Explanations
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 >
Grammar Challenge!
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.
