DFW: Miscellania

looking forward to that, pyro, thanks!

4:
Yep. That's how I did it. You can cancel your account right after downloading it.

If I were going to start a religion, my Old Testament would be Leaves of Grass, and my New Testament would be Infinite Jest, with Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram" appended. Thoughts?

Nice essay on what knee-jerk haters miss about Wallace:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/smarter-you-think/?page=1

7: Great article.

More of Lipsky's audio emerges...

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/hear_unreleased_david_foster_w.html

#7 - Thanks for the link. I posted it on the work page under published reviews.

I can't find where I posted all the IJ reviews by the Jesters, so I'll post Martin's recent review here: http://www.librarything.com/work/903/reviews/62638549 It's quite good.

I was at Borders the other day and noticed that Penguin has released a new sporty looking edition of The Broom of the System, fwiw.

over here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/91897

thanks for the love, yall$!

Official release date for The Pale King http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/unfinshed-david-foster-wallace-nove...

Woot. Love the cover. And that was a great idea letting Green design the cover--she's an artist after all.

Green doing the cover art - idea or condition of publication? Doesn't seem super inspired to me, especially considering the source.

Fyi: I just jumped on the Freedom: A Novel bandwagon, and wanted to alert those of you DFW completists who simply must possess every thing associated w/DFW even in the remotest way, that Franzen acknowledges "David Wallace" in the beginning.

Franzen, DFWs best friend, is about as close as one gets (outside DFWs own work) to DFW, imo.

21:

Really? I haven't read much Franzen, but the excerpt from Freedom that I read in the New Yorker a while ago pretty much confirmed my impression of him as being (brace for pretentiousness) oppressively bourgeois. Seemed like he just recapitulates white middle-class values, with a dash of irony so as not to lose all literary credibility. His stuff just seemed tailor-made for Oprah's book club, in other words, whereas can you imagine Oprah suggesting that her legions read IJ?

As I said, my familiarity with Franzen is pretty superficial, so please disabuse me if you'd care to.

I like Franzen the more I read him. The Corrections was bleak satire; complexly stuctured; Freedom is funny satire, straight ahead rollicking structure. He's sort of skewering white middle-class values, I think, that you'd probably not pick up on in an excerpt pulled from its greater context.

I used to be an Oprah snob myself, until Raymond Federman, in an email last year, said I had to read The Road, and I loved that book. Franzen is no DFW by a long shot, but dude can write.

Oprah may eventually recommend IJ. Don't laugh. It could happen someday. Who'd of ever thought she'd get the first interview with Cormac? The right people whisper in her ear re. IJ; yeah, a long, long shot, but a minute possibility. The Pale King probably has a better shot right now ...

David Foster Wallace on Jonathan Franzen's, The Corrections:

"Funny and deeply sad, large-hearted and merciless, The Corrections is a testament to the range and depth of pleasures great fiction affords".

--The Corrections jacket blurb

Cool!

Way Cool! I've got 55 of the 265 you've input so far, Pyro! Also, I friended DFW. Do you think he'd be interested in being my friend? Please!'

excellent idea! thanks for your hard work, pyro.

Pyro, you are amazing.

Pyro, is DFWs legacy library now complete? Thanks again for doing this! I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm envious that you thought of doing it first, you damn thought-of-it-first-DFW-obsessed pyro!

Here's some Wallace minutia for you all: From the inside blurb of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (thank you, slick, and you too, Ricky Butler, for alerting me to this wonderful book (so far at least!), anyway, here's how Skippy Dies is blurbed:

"First the Enfield Tennis Academy in Infinite Jest ...

Then Hogwarts School in Harry Potter ...

And now Seabrook College for boys: the funniest and most fatal of the three."

I guess you have all seen that Newsweek's Culture section leads off with an article about the DFW archive newly opened in University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center. That's in the Nov. 29th edition.

Yes, Lizzie, I believe either pyrocow or Sutpen was all over that when it originally came out, but it's worth being reminded of. In fact, pyrocow has been busy actually creating an LT Legacy Library based on the books DFW owned as per itemized by the Texas's Harry Ransom Center, right here: http://www.librarything.com/profile/DavidFosterWallace

Chocolate Muse posted this over in the salon and I thought it'd be more appropriate here:

http://sampottsinc.com/ij/

It's a diagram of all the characters in IJ and their geometric-like interconnections/interrelations. The PDF works fine for me. But the guy who made it is also selling this as a 36" x 24" poster. It shows characters relationships in a way previously not conceptualized. I think its an impressive accomplishment.

I love it.