PBS Digital Studios, with Blank on Blank, does another great video. This time it’s an interview with David Foster Wallace, who speaks softly on ambition, perfection, and limitations:
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For more, PBS Digital Studios remixes Reading Rainbow here.
Author Archives: Mike
David Foster Wallace on Ambition
Filed under Other People's Stuff
The Hung Over, Part II
I never watched The Hangover: Part II. I loved the original movie deeply, but was told by multiple sources that the second was a trudging, shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor, and what had been so charming and fresh–even in the tired genre of drunk buddy films–lost its appeal with repetition. So with that in mind, let me be the first to ever say: The closest I’ve come to watching The Hangover: Part II was reading Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.
Bodies was the 2012 Booker Prize winner and one of my most anticipated reads after loving, deeply, its 2009 Booker Prize winning predecessor, Wolf Hall. But throughout the novel, I consistently felt as if I’d seen this all before, and that what had been so engaging in the first go round–even in the tired genre of historical fiction–was less so with repetition.
This is not to say that Bring up the Bodies is not worth your time, or anywhere near as bad as the second Hangover was rumored to be. Continue reading
Filed under Hooray Fiction!, review
Fiction Opponent and Advocate of the Day
Opponent: Today’s copyright laws, changing technology, market pressures and, as usual, Amazon.
Advocate: Scott Turow, who explains in the New York Times this morning how today’s copyright laws, changing technology, market pressures and, as usual, Amazon, are creating huge disincentives for novelist to actually write novels for a living.
…the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at authors’ expense.
This is not a matter of greed and avarice; as Turow points out, authors have been generally accepting, and usually outright supportive of, libraries that give their work away for free — not to mention second-hand bookstores. Anyone who wants to write books for a living knows better than to entertain champagne wishes or caviar dreams. But current trends are steadily taking authors into something more like a nightmare. For example, the way search engines enable easy piracy: Continue reading
Filed under Fiction Advocate of the Day
BREAKING: Infinite Jest LiveBlogger to LiveTweet Taped Show’s References to Infinite Jest
Earlier today, Parks and Recreation creator and Infinite Jest fan Michael Schur tweeted this:
(Also, for you David Foster Wallace fans, tonight’s #ParksandRec contains a few IJ references. ["A few" = like 18])
— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) April 4, 2013
Then I tweeted this:
Tonight #ParksandRec contains IJ references says @kentremendous I’m livetweeting what I see. And hoping my wife won’t leave me.
— Mike Moats (@MikeMoats) April 4, 2013
I will be livetweeting this event @MikeMoats starting at 8:30 p.m. EST in what I hope will be the nerdiest thing I ever do. Here is a little taste of what Schur is capable of:
-Michael Moats
Filed under Liveblog
The Hitchens Trajectory
I first read Christopher Hitchens in college, when I was gifted a copy of The Trial of Henry Kissinger. This was in the post-9/11, Bush Administration days when I was reading books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, marching in rallies, and attending lectures like the one where I picked up a large, yellow, homemade button reading I KNOW KISSINGER IS A CRIMINAL and quickly pinned it to my messenger bag. The childhood naiveté I had recently shed left me vulnerable to Hitchens’ moral confidence and chilled outrage, and I adopted a more adult naiveté, where solutions took the form of boycotting logos, starting zines, going to poetry readings in campus common rooms and calling on the Hague to bring a former American official to trial on war crimes.
My affinity didn’t last. Hitchens had a book out about how Mother Teresa was some kind of monster. This seemed odd, but not damning. My greater concern was Hitchens’ great complaints about Bill Clinton — which I actually could have accepted had they not been followed by his support of George W. Bush, a man who couldn’t match Clinton in competence, intelligence, or even folksiness. And yet here was Hitch, mobilizing a mind fortified by philosophy, history, literature and poetry to defend a dangerously incurious and incompetent president. I gave Hitch’s line on Iraq no quarter because it coincided with the Bush line, and ultimately concluded that Hitchens was someone who didn’t mind a few thousand people dying if it meant that we could forcibly shove The Enlightenment into new acreage. Continue reading
Filed under review
Assent to the Dissent of the Day
A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish” urges Sullivan to dump Amazon and link to indie bookstores like the one where s/he works:
As the fine arts book buyer and assistant manager for an independent bookstore [seen above] in your newly-adopted city, I am disheartened to learn that you’re continuing to make affiliate revenue from Amazon, a corporation hell-bent on destroying print culture and, along with it, my job. From their loss-leading book pricing to their vile price-check app, Amazon has made itself the scourge of small booksellers everywhere.
[...]
It’s wonderful that you provide healthcare for your interns, but I had hoped the revenue from subscriptions would have covered this. Maybe I’m overstepping my bounds, but I’d love to see you link to indie bookstores like Strand, McNally Jackson, or Community Bookstore in the future.
This is the best idea I’ve heard all day, followed closely by my own idea to visit the Rizzoli bookstore ASAP. For the record, Fiction Advocate is part of the Powell’s Partner Program.
- Michael Moats
Filed under Other People's Stuff
Happy 51st, David Foster Wallace
Today would have been David Foster Wallace’s 51st birthday. In remembrance, here is a particularly nice dream Matt Bucher had, and shared with us in “Consider the Year of David Foster Wallace”:
A year or two after he died, I had a dream that David Wallace did, in fact, have children: a boy and a girl. And for some reason, in the dream, I’m looking at the photos he’s posted of his kids to his Instagram account (or some dreamlike variation thereof) and as I scroll down, I watch them grow up together: a bald baby in a high chair, riding on dad’s shoulders, first day of kindergarten, laughing in the mud, birthday parties, little league games, sweet 16, prom, college graduation with the proud parents high gussy in the sun, and finally, at the end of the feed is a picture of a slightly grayer, more-creased David Wallace holding a little swaddled baby, his grandchild. And his smile in that picture is so simple and pure and real that it’s become part of my fantasy, too. That is how I choose to remember him.
Here is a whole bunch of stuff you can read about DFW from the last year — including five new books.
- Michael Moats
Filed under YEAR OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
“Everyone in the theatre will go home mortified and full of good cheer.”
The New Yorker asks: “Is Louis C.K. our Gogol?“
I couldn’t tell you. I always just assumed that Yakov Smirnoff covered the entire Russian canon. But this seemed close enough to literary to warrant a link.
- Michael Moats
Filed under New Yorker
