It's true, I have removed my copy of the beloved DFW commencment speech. As I thought might be obvious, the recent publication of the text in book form brought a stern copyright enforcement letter to my door. I lack the time and money necessary to fight such a thing, so, as much as it meant to me to play a small role in making it known to people, I won't be hosting it any more.
Happy googling.
It seemed kind of weird to have that damn picture of skulls at the top of the page on a day when I'm probably getting more visits than I have in years, all due to hosting David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, which people are reading in a new way today as news of his suicide spreads.
I've read many heartfelt and beautiful remembrances today, and it's a shame that his ability to so precisely articulate the weird pain and loneliness that being wrapped up in your skull can bring, did not, in the end, give him freedom from that anguish. This passage -- from an essay on Kakfa -- has been richocheting around my brain today:
[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. ... [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward -- we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.
Goodbye Dave, and thanks.
Zadie Smith discusses the writing of On Beauty:
I find myself occupied by someone else's quote during composition. For White Teeth it was cinematic and naive; Katie Hepburn saying: "The time to make up your mind about people is ... never!" For On Beauty the following quote from David Foster Wallace (he is talking about Kafka's work) sat deep in my book, and somehow upbraided me whenever I was tempted to lie or sell something short or go for the easy joke or ... well, a lot of things. I still did all those things, but I think I did them less than I would have if this quote hadn't been bugging me: "The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle [...] our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." In struggling to be more of a Muslim you show yourself to be, in fact, a Muslim. In your battle with the idea of femininity you prove yourself a woman. If the word "blackness" doesn't cover boys like Levi, then it is the word that is lacking, not the boy. On Beauty was my old-fashioned attempt to make tight words larger so that my characters (and I) can live in them comfortably. Not too comfortably - just enough to feel alive.
For all of Wallace's reputation for logorrhea, he has a wonderful facility for concision, I don't think you could get much better than 'our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home'.
Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite authors, has a short story collection coming out, How We Got Insipid. What's odd about this is that the publisher can't promote the book in the press:
[A]ccording to the press release accompanying the book, Subterranean is contractually obliged not to promote the work via the usual channels -- it can't send the book to newspaper or magazine reviewers or to the trade magazines like Publishers Weekly or Booklist. This is apparently an attempt to make sure Insipid doesn't cannibalize the sales of Lethem's big publisher work (although since Insipid has a print run of just 1500 copies it's hard to see why that's a real worry), or cause the newspapers and magazines in question not to review Lethem's other work because they just reviewed this.
Very odd, but I can't imagine they'll have trouble selling out the print run.
I'm not a big recommender of comics, but there's no better deal going right now then the first collection of Action Philosophers, which is cheap ($8.99 at my local comic shop, $7.76 on amazon), funny, and educational. Previews here.
From a wonderful interview with Leonard Cohen in the new Brick:
SR: Do you think opinion is second-rate in general?
LC: Well, for the purpose of conversation, opinion is valuable.
SR: It gets you through.
LC: It just gets you through the dinner. You know, I could dredge up an opinion and even defend it, but I'm less and less willing to do that... We're living in a time now when opinion is becames as rigid and belligerent as religion and faith are, so we're living in this period when you're defined by opinion. People want to know are you for or against this particular issue, and will base their entire possibility of friendship with you on opinions that you may hold or not hold, so that's another reason to keep quiet about most things.
SR: Did you always feels that way?
LC: I've never had much faith in my own take on things, and I know that the world is far too complex, first of all, for a solution. This is not the realm of solutions. We were exiled from the garden, and that's what I understand is the nature of the human predicament. This is not paradise, and we can't really put the world in order.
Also this articulates the usefulness of working within restrictions very well:
LC: I've always been interested in form, maybe because I don't trust my own spontaneous nature to come up with anything interesting, and form imposes a certain opportunity to get deeper than your first thought... I think my opinions are second-rate, but when you submit yourself to a form, then something happens and you're invited to dig deeper into the language and discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion.
Two upcoming titles I'll be looking forward to:
William Gass is a wee bit of a grump:
But if the comforts of mere enumeration are shallow and illusory, so are most comforts. ... [T]he top six illusory comforts are: a Sports Car, a Winning Team, Confession, a Savings Account, a Marriage License, a White-Collar Job, a Ranch House in the Suburbs.
From the essay I've Got a Little List, collected in Tests of Time.
Also, from Were There Anything in the World Worth Worship in the same collection:
Were there anything worthy of worship, then, we should ignore it; look at it, if we must, cockeyed; keep clear; never let on; invent no curses which employ and preserve its name; await the time when the vines of all our lives will grow over and hide it so it may lie safe like a city left empty and forgotten, silent inside us, solely in the deeps of us, so we might wonder about it like some wonder about Atlantis and, lost and alone, so it may remain worthy of worship, and a star shining in the midst of our dirty earth.
Like an indulgent father offering extra helpings of dessert, Dahl was eager to give children more of what they craved: more pictures; more fantasies of mastery; more sly mockery of grouchy, boring adults; more visions of dizzying enjoyment. Recently, a nine-year-old friend of my son's wrote me a letter about why he likes Dahl: "His writing is imaginative and exciting, and after I read 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' I felt like tasting all the candy in the world." It was an excellent way of evoking the delights of Dahl, whose best stories do what G. K. Chesterton, in his essay "The Ethic of Elfland," said that fairy tales did: inspire in children a sense that life "is not only a pleasure but an eccentric privilege." Dahl's purse-lipped critics fail to recognize that his stories don't merely indulge a child's fantasies--they replenish them.
A pleasant surprise: July's Harper's has a new story by Haruki Murakami called Chance Traveler.
Update: and another new story in The Guardian - The Folklore Of Our Times.
