New stuff on David Foster Wallace

I started working on this post about David Foster Wallace (a longtime favorite author of mine), and as I was looking for interesting links, I discovered even more interesting news and miscellaneous about Mr. Wallace. This is a just another example of how I get so much out of writing this blog -- much more, I'm sure than the 12 people who read it.
So here we go:
The good folks at literary magazine n + 1 have posted an essay from their first issue on Wallace's fiction, particularly his last collection of short stories, Oblivion. I have "Oblivion" but have not yet read it -- But now I think I will use the n + 1 essay, which is by Chad Harbach, as a mini-reading guide for "Oblivion." I think I will like very much.
The essay explores what Wallace has accomplished with his fiction and where he might go next. Harbach writes:

(Wallace) is fascinated by the way corporations use psychological cunning and sophisticated observation to discover their constituents'’ most basic needs and fears, to find the salient detail that will grant them access to a soul. It is, ultimately, a novelist's work, turned to sinister purpose. Wallace knows this
well, and he knows how to pass his fascination along to readers. The narrator of "Mr. Squishy," for instance, spends dozens of pages dissecting the intellectual underpinnings of an ad campaign for an upscale Ding-Dong. Even though the consequences for plot and character are scant, it'’s riveting stuff.

This insight gets at part of what I find so compelling about Wallace. He writes about the way consumerism leaches the meaning out of our lives, commodifying and commercializing every kind or cruel impulse we have. I am not against markets, but it seems we are living in a period of hypercapitalism, when the civilizing force of the market has reached the proverbial tipping point and become a brutalizing, inhuman force. This is arguably the most important issue of our day, and Wallace is very much in touch with that.
Wallace is at his best in his novel Infinite Jest when he is writing about his characters' search for meaning in a consumerist world. A lot of people who write about IJ concentrate on the tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, but I think the more compelling character is ex-thief Don Gately and his quest for sobriety at a Boston halfway house. Gately looks into the dark yawning maw of insatiable desire -- in this case, desire for a substance -- and turns away, and he finds a community to help him do that. Gately's observations are so compelling.
You may have heard that Wallace has a new book out, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. This is a collection of his funny, usually penetrating journalistic work. Most, maybe all of it, has been published in other magazines. I read the title essay about the morality of boiling lobsters in Gourmet magazine last year.
This is a really fun bit of multimedia that his publisher Little, Brown has put up on the web for the book release. It's called "VidLit," and features Wallace reading from "Consider the Lobster" to an animated short. I love Wallace's voice, and the music is really cool, too. Check it out here. (Warning if you're reading at work: It has sound.)
Finally, I found this on the web: Wallace commencement speech at Kenyon College in May. It's posted on a blog, apparently transcribed by a fan, and I did a bit of checking just to make sure that Wallace did indeed give a commencement address at Kenyon this year. (You can't be too careful about these things on the web.) But he did indeed give the address, and I'm going to go ahead and believe this is the actual speech. It sounds just like him, and the little joke it starts with is straight out of "Infinite Jest."
If you don't read any other link associated with this post, please read this speech. It is so worthwhile and important, and I fervently hope David Foster Wallace finds a way to get it published as an essay. It's about the importance of what we choose to think about. It's great, great stuff.
Sample passage:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Read the whole speech here.