Category: David Foster Wallace

Field Reports, East, West, and Midwest

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, Marilynne Robinson

Mark Sarvas caught Marilynne Robinson discussing her new novel, Home, at the Los Angeles Public Library last night. My favorite of her comments that evening: “I don’t like plot very much—please contain your surprise. … It becomes a big machine that carries everything after it.” Sarvas also shot a brief video of Robinson reading from Home:

Yesterday New York University hosted a memorial for David Foster Wallace attended by fellow writers, publishers, editors, and agents, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Sarah Weinman has a thoughtful summary of the event in which she expresses some reasonable concern about the whole thing being overdone. “Every time letters were mentioned or read from, I projected to the inevitable book containing DFW’s edited correspondence,” she writes. “There are public memorials slated for Vancouver, Arizona and probably many other places. But how much is too much? When does group memorial stop being genuine and start being disingenuous?”

On a different note: My current object of book lust is University of Chicago Press’ forthcoming The Chicagoan, a lengthy, extended tribute to a short-lived Jazz Age cultural magazine of the same name. The PDF sampler of some of the magazine’s pages floored me—the magazine’s model is clearly the New Yorker, but there’s plenty of evidence that its makers knew they were in a working-class town, even if the target audience was the folks in charge. (H/T Pete Lit)

Links: Curse Words

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Curtis Sittenfeld, David Foster Wallace, Dennis Lehane, George Saunders, Jack Kerouac

Dennis Lehane on just how easy it is to spend five years writing a historical epic: “How the fuck am I gonna finish this? What did I get myself into? This is going to be the one everyone figures out I’m full of shit.”

The publication date for Curtis Sittenfeld‘s American Wife in the U.K. has been moved up from Feb. 2009 to, uh, yesterday.

Jack Kerouac‘s early days as a football prospect and wannabe sportswriter.

Writing in Prospect, Julian Gough finds a way to whack David Foster Wallace and George Saunders simultaneously. The complaint—which you may have heard recently—is that a writer’s ambition and creativity gets stifled when he or she is planted in academia. Bring it, Julian:

[I]t happens to most American academic novelists (like the superbly gifted writer George Saunders who, at 49, has still never written a novel or left school.) They waste time on America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop culture. They attack it with an energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.

Links: Wallace, Robinson, Beattie

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Beattie, David Foster Wallace, Marilynne Robinson

Nothing like one writer’s death to prompt idiotic overstatements about the state of a nation’s literature.

Marilynne Robinson explains the rationale behind the simple-as-air title of her third novel, Home: “There’s nothing in the world that suggests comfort in the same sense as the idea of home, and home is the absolute base in America…. And if you say, of a 45-year-old man that he’s gone back home, it tends to mean that the world hasn’t worked out.”

Ann Beattie addresses the state of the short story:

It’s always evolving. Probably it’s more various than the novel. The short story is often praised by critics for the wrong reason, though —for the subject matter. There are a lot of writers now writing short stories who don’t much interest me, because their stories are no more than shoehorning overtly weird stuff into the form. You know all those reviews that praise the story and say: “The cross-dressing leprechaun with TB turns out to be the second wife of the King of Sweden, and both are having a secret affair with Prince Charles.” Too many story writers feel they have to add MSG. The best stories have to be searched out: they’re in Narrative and Tin House and Mississippi Review.

Roundup: The Ghost Writer

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury

Today is “Indignation Day,” Philip Roth‘s anti-book-tour book tour, in which he’ll read via Web to audiences at various shops (PDF) around the country. (The only store in the D.C. area taking part is the Georgetown University bookstore.) As much as I like Roth, and Indignation, this seems destined to be a cold, uninteractive experience.

“Why is there no opera of The Scarlet Letter?” asked Alfred Kazin in 1992. David Mason and Lori Laitman at the University of Central Arkansas are working on it. “We considered a number of different kinds of books,” Mason tells the Log Cabin Democrat. “The shorter novels of Henry James, Willa Cather and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ which I continue to think would make a good opera in an odd way.”

Somebody bring that last bit of news to Texas. As part of the Big Read, the NEA’s effort to promote classic American literature, David Kipen (an acquaintance) is driving a hybrid around the country and meeting with reading groups. Today he’s talking up Fahrenheit 451 in Mesquite, Texas.

Wikipedia trolls, keeping it classy. (David Foster Wallace‘s entry looks OK now.)

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Foster Wallace

Edward Champion first delivered the sad news that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. I have nothing to add, really, except to express bafflement that a person who seemed to so clearly understand the lives of people in recovery couldn’t reach out for help himself. (That’s not to suggest that Wallace’s death was addiction-related, just that healing depression similarly demands that you say something. Why on Earth didn’t he?) Back in 1996, I spent a lot of time lugging Infinite Jest to my dreary Web 1.0 job in San Francisco’s South Park, and the book made those bus trips and lunch breaks a lot livelier; I doubt that I could pass a quiz on the novel’s plot points now, but I recall the powerful feeling that he had crafted a postmodern novel whose metatextual games were inviting and respectful instead of cold and esoteric. That is a terribly difficult thing to pull off, even if you’re good. (Who here has finished Ratner’s Star? Anybody? Anybody? Right.) He was a fine reporter, an artful essayist, and the closest thing the generation that doesn’t read had to a writerly voice of a generation.

A source for a good laugh line too, if it’s not too indelicate to mention. Even at this glum moment, the bit at 1:20 in this video still makes me smile. Who else could so climactically turn on a pair of bright minds?

News and Notes

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adam Langer, David Foster Wallace, Mark Sarvas

I woke up this morning–just like in blues songs!–and discovered the blue screen of death on my creaky laptop. So we’ll make this quick, pointing to a few relevant notes from the feedreader:

* Beatrice points to the trailer for Adam Langer‘s Ellington Boulevard.

* The Millions is excited at the prospect of a new David Foster Wallace novel.

* The Elegant Variation honcho Mark Sarvas is arranging a giveaway of an ARC of his upcoming debut novel, Harry, Revised.