Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace and suicide

John Wilson reflects on author Michael Chabon's recent essay about suicide and the death of David Foster Wallace. I can't find Chabon's original piece, but Wilson writes that it's part of a new nonfiction book by Chabon to be released in October, titled Manhood for Amateurs.

Interesting point:

Mr. Chabon quotes Mr. Wallace himself saying that fiction gives the reader, who is "marooned in her own skull, . . . imaginative access to other selves." But there's a problem: "that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely . . . , is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion."

Put another way, the desire for connection, for imaginative access to other selves, Mr. Chabon believes, is fundamentally a desire for escape. It drives writers and readers alike, he says, "to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it." And when "that window can't be found, or will no longer serve" -- here he returns to the question of suicide -- "small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress."

Read the whole thing via The Wall Street Journal, it's fascinating. Wilson is editor of Books & Culture: A Christian Review.

Summer reading round-up

I've been trying to slow down and not get over-busy, so that slows my reading down a little. Mainly, right now I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov. I've always wanted to read it because so many writers I love -- Dorothy Day, David Foster Wallace -- love it. I'm about a third of the way through.
It's fascinating reading, for sure, especially Dostoyevsky's outlook on religion, which he clearly takes very seriously. Also I like his characterization the dissolute father, Fyodor Pavlovich, who reminds me of a few people I know. These are all superficial impressions, I should do some more rigorous thinking on the novel, but right now I'm just enjoying all the great characters and dialogue and not thinking too terribly deeply.
I think I've also found the perfect use for SparkNotes (online Cliff's Notes for you oldsters like me). I read the plot summaries on SparkNotes to help me remember which character is which, and keep track of all the nicknames, some of which are not obvious at all, e.g. Mitya=Dmitri. So you see, there is a use for SparkNotes besides shirking your college reading!
As a lark, I finished the Michael Lewis memoir on fatherhood, Home Game. I still like him a lot but this book was too light and flip for my taste. In the last section, he gets a vasectomy, which he plays for laughs, and which I really did not need to know about. Hey, but that's OK, nobody's perfect. He's still one of my favorite authors. I think this is definitely a book for guys and only certain guys.
While I'm being kind of trivial here, guess what I found! Another volume of Jane Austen paraliterature, this time yet another book masquerading as Mr. Darcy's diary. But the new twist here is that Mr. Darcy was friends with LORD BYRON. For those of you who don't know, I was obsessed with Lord Byron is high school. I checked the dates, it's not totally implausible, though I think Darcy would have been a little bit older than Byron, but it depends on when you date the events of Pride and Prejudice. After I finish Karamazov, I will get my own copy of this book and read it and give you a detailed critique. I read the first chapter at the book store: Mr. Darcy is not so upstanding as P&P would have you think, but he's also not fully embracing of all of Lord Byron's mad, bad and dangerous-to-know ways. This is really hilarious to me -- Mr. Darcy and Lord Byron!

Dreams of DFW (DFW Memorial Part VI)

I dreamed of David Foster Wallace a few nights ago. He looked just like his photos, the ones where he has long hair and no bandana. He was smiling, and I was standing next to my spouse, and David was asking me how I was doing, and what was going on in my life. I started to cry. I was trying to tell him that I knew he had been sad and that I hoped he was OK now. In my dream, he had tried to kill himself but failed ...
He smiled and said, "I'm doing fine. I'm not sad anymore. But tell me about you. ..."
And that was it.
I know why I dreamed the dream. That day, I had finally got a look at the new, posthumous book of his.
It's a copy of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College, an essay I dearly love. It didn't have a title when he gave it. Now it's called, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." Of course, the speech wasn't really long enough for a proper book. So the publisher decided to print one sentence per page, creating a book that comes in at 144 pages.
In theory, this could be a good idea, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the language.
But I thought it made the speech seem disjointed. Kind of like someone reading aloud at too slow a pace.
On a more positive note, I love the cover. It's white with a little tiny goldfish at the bottom.

The goldfish is part of the opening anecdote:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
... If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

The parable of the fish also figured prominently into his novel Infinite Jest, which is a personally totemic novel for me.
I will end up buying the book, even though you can read the essay for yourself on the Internet here. Some people might say it's dumb to buy a book of an essay that you can read on the Internet, but this doesn't account for the phenomenon of text-as-beloved-object. I love the permanence and tangibility and symbolism of words written on bound paper. Not the same as the computer, not to me.

D.T. Max on David Wallace (DFW Memorial Part V)

D.T. Max of The New Yorker has a heart-breaking story about David Foster Wallace -- his career as an author and his last days. Wallace was working on a novel called The Pale King before he died. His publishers expect to issue the incomplete manuscript next year.
Max writes:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

First, I find this description so poignant, and it vibrates on the same frequency as the Alcoholic Anonymous credo that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest: One day at a time. Second, his passing yet again stikes me as so utterly sad -- an artist unable to complete his work, dead by his own hand from depression. Finally, I find it personally endearing that Wallace had become obsessed with taxes. I have my own obsession with taxes that developed relatively recently. It is its own arcane language, like a priestly code. Perhaps aliens will one day assume the IRS tax code was our holy book.
Read the entire article. Max wrote a previous article on the awe-inspiring literary archive at the University of Texas at Austin, so he has a great deal of sensitivity for Wallace's place in American letters.

DFW Memorial, Part IV

I've been reading the many tributes, memorials and critiques of David Foster Wallace since his death, and one of my favorite things so far is a map created by the Boston Globe that shows the city of Boston as portrayed in the novel Infinite Jest. It's just cool. It also would be a great starting point for someone coming to the novel for the first time ... Infinte Jest is like Joyces' Ulysses, in that it has a very interesting plot, but said plot is not easily apprehended at first look. So reading guides and tipsheets help immensely, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.)
Anyway, check out the Boston Globe's map. It really made me want to pick up IJ and read it again. Such a wonderful, mapcap, harrowing trip to an alternate universe where we begin our study of depression, loneliness, addiction and humor.

DFW Memorial, Part III

Salon has a story about David Foster Wallace's final days, with comments from his father, mother and sister. It confirms with more detail the return of Wallace's debilitating depression. It's sad reading, but it's also comforting to know that he had the support of his family and loved ones at the end. It helps explain.
I prefer this kind of straight-up reporting to some of the other things I've read about Wallace during the past days. Wallace's work over the years has consistently addressed issues like depression and suicide, and some critics now are looking back at his work for themes that might shed light on his death.
I think we have to be very cautious about this kind of reading for biography. We do authors and literature a disservice when we get carried away looking at the work this way. It trivializes the writing, which should be able to stand on its own. Yes, it is helpful to understand an author's historical and cultural milieu. And the author can and will use details of his or her everyday life, which biographers can document. But the author's artistry should transcend those details in ways that make the biographical details much, much less important to the active reader. At least that is what happens if the author is good, and Wallace was beyond good. He was great.

DFW Memorial, Part II

The act of reading is so intimate and dear to me, that I have a constant fantasy that certain authors are my friends. Good friends, too. Intellectually, I know this is a fantasy, but on an emotional level, there is a certain kind of reality there. I think anyone who loves reading knows what I'm talking about.
I was so sad this week thinking about the death of David Foster Wallace. He was my favorite living author.
But he was not the kind of author I would whole-heartedly recommend to friends, because he was just so darn difficult. He wrote about off-putting, pathetic characters in his short stories. His two novels, by any standards, are long and verbose. His nonfiction essays appeared in popular magazines, though, and the collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are brainy and accessible.
To talk about his fiction: it has to be Infinite Jest. That was his masterwork. It's on the same scale as Ulysses -- huge and complicated and daunting. But on another level, if you were willing to surrender to it and just go with it, it was remarkably funny and freewheeling, but serious and sad and touching, too. It was an inside look at the following: addicts who go to AA meetings, tennis-prodigy teens at a sports boarding school, what it's like to be a punter in the NFL, and wheel-chair bound assassins plotting next moves.
I can still remember vividly where I was when I was reading certain parts of it -- the New Mexico State Fair on a perfectly crisp and sunny late afternoon.
Wallace is often referred to as postmodernist, and I can see because Infinite Jest doesn't really wrap up its plot in any discernible way -- it just kind of stops -- and it has tons of creepy pop culture references. Also, Wallace would make these funny discursive asides about what he was trying to do as an author and whether or not he was succeeding or failing.
But he was also terribly traditional, and obsessed with moral behavior. Not ina binary good vs. evil kind of way, but a How-should-we-treat-each-other-in-the-world kind of way. His Kenyon College speech is a classic here. (If you haven't read it and have a few minutes, please do so.)
Many, many tributes this week. Here are my favorites:

• McSweeney's
  The literary Web site run by author Dave Eggers has posted a number of lovely, heartfelt reminiscences of people who met Dave Wallace, as he liked to be called. It really hit home with me what a good man this was -- a kind, caring person.
• A.O. Scott
  I liked this remembrance by A.O. Scott, especially its title: "The Best Mind of His Generation." How I agree with that compliment. Scott compares Wallace to Ezra Pound (my friend Ezra) but I think there are many more parallels between Wallace and James Joyce. Not just that they wrote big, doorstop novels with anti-plots, but also that they were concerned with the theme of exile of the mind, and fashioning your own belief system in a society in which the belief systems has become dessicated and hollow (Catholic Ireland under English rule and the corporate, consumerist United States, respectively).
  That latter point is really brought to the fore by ...
• Steve Almond in the Boston Globe
  Headline is "A Moralist of Hope." This gets at what a moral writer Wallace was, something I never felt like he got his just due for. Almond writes
  

  This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can
  rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it's
  the very reason we should mourn Wallace's death. He was one of the few popular
  writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the
  reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and
  hope.

  
  Then he writes about Wallace's appreciation of Dostoevsky. I really need to read Dostoevksy soon. Too many signs and portents are telling me to read him.

David Foster Wallace archive at Harper's

Harper's magazine has posted all the stories David Foster Wallace wrote for them. Go there now and read one of my favorite stories of his, "Everything is Green." It's short, not even a whole page.
It begins:

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to make you believe her. So I feel like I know.

Read the whole thing here.

NYT Obituary on David Foster Wallace

The New York Times has published a moving obituary:

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

Well worth reading here.
His parents confirmed that he was suffering from terrible depression, that he had been hospitalized over the summer and had tried numerous therapies, to no avail.

I hope and pray he's gone to a better place.

DFW Memorial, Part I

One of my favorite bits from David Foster Wallace was this little joke, which is featured prominently in his novel "Infinite Jest":

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

Wallace used this joke to begin a commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. He further explained:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

This really very quickly gets at what I love about Wallace.
And a bit later:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché 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 cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Read the whole speech here.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

I learned today that David Foster Wallace has died.

This is sad, shocking news. 

Regular readers will recall he is a particular favorite of mine. His novel Infinite Jest affected me deeply, and I would venture to say even changed my life in the way that only great works of literature can.

The news reports are frustratingly brief -- that he committed suicide by hanging at his home, that his wife found him, that he was 46. There is no mention of depression or illness or other explanation. I doubt we'll learn more -- the human response from his readers is a mournful, incredulous Why? -- but Wallace was an extremely private person.

I'll be gathering my thoughts on his passing and posting more soon. 

This is a very sad day for American fiction, and my sincere condolences to his family and friends. 

1001 Books

I love lists, and really, who doesn't? So first thing, I went through the new list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," and checked off all the ones I've read. My haul was pretty pitiful. I've read 80 of the books on the list. William Grimes of The New York Times has read 300! Don't I feel inadequate.

I was also startled because if I were to divide the books I've read into categories, the number one category would probably be books I read in high school, followed by books I read with my book group. It really depresses me that I didn't read more in college. Sure, I read some, but not nearly as much as I could have. I wasted so much time in college hanging out, partying, etc. Very dumb on my part. I also read -- by my own choice -- a lot of literary theory in college that has not held up well over the years. That's a whole other post, but I think theory was useful as an analytical tool in some contexts. Now, though, I would prefer that I had had a broader exposure to the history of literature.

I hope to create a new master list of books I would like to read, and then methodically read them, to make up for lost time. But is this realistic? I work a 40-hour job and have friends and family members to attend to. I also have library school and my beloved violin lessons.

College-goers, may this sad tale be a warning to you!

Here are the 10 favorite books of the most recently published 80 books I have read:

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
• The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

George Saunders and "The Braindead Megaphone"

A lot of books I read are just OK, so it's like a lovely little gem when I read one I really, really love. That was the case with The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Here's my short review for the books page:

Saunders' unique aesthetic carries over to his first book of journalism, The Braindead Megaphone, where he reports on illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the awesome greed and friendliness of international tourism in Dubai, and a meditating teenager in Nepal.

Saunders writes about American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, quixotically, the young adult classic Johnny Tremain. His conception of narrative is as complex as a difficult fiction writer like David Foster Wallace, but his own writing style is marvelously direct, much like that of Kurt Vonnegut, whom he praises as a model. He describes Vonnegut's books as a sort of black box that readers enter. "The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some resemblance to 'real life.' What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit."

The nontrivial thing that happens with Saunders is we contemplate the big question he's trying to answer, something along the lines of, How are human beings supposed to live in the world? The final piece is a tongue-in-cheek press release from the organization People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction: "At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place."

He concludes: "We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail."

I like that the book was published directly to paperback, so it's not too expensive -- $9.80 on Powell's for goodness sake!
My mom asked me recently, "What's Powell's?" Well, it's online bookseller much like Amazon. But in my opinion they are more supportive of book culture than Amazon, so I'm linking to them more. Not that there's anything bad or wrong about Amazon, I just like Powell's better. And actually, I buy most of my books at Tampa's independent bookstore, Inkwood Books. Check out their cute little bookshop here.
So I was browsing at Inkwood and ran across the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, featuring an interview with ... George Saunders! So I picked that up and I'm now looking forward to that too.
In fact, I'm looking forward to reading lots of the interviews. I'm surprised at how many I've read: Zadie Smith (loved On Beauty), John Banville (I picked The Sea for my book group before I left for Ireland), Ian McEwan (I read Saturday), Edward P. Jones (The Known World is probably the best American novel published in the last 10 years), Marilynne Robinson (Gilead might give "The Known World" a run for its money) and Haruki Murakami (how beautiful and trippy was Kafka on the Shore?). OK, I'll stop now. You get the picture.
Now I know what else you're thinking. Spoonreader, look at this long post you've created on a Friday morning! Well I've got a new computer with wireless, so la la la la (singing and skipping). Perhaps this will increase production here at spoonreader.com.

My personal library

Every time a new book comes into my house, an old one must go out. Why? I only have three bookshelves. And maintaining a simple, clutter-free home where I enjoy spending my time is more important to me than keeping every book I've ever read.
I accept this, but it's still hurts to say good-bye. I try to avoid it, stacking books on tabletops and even on the floor. This goes on for a month or two before I become disgusted and approach the shelves ready to purge. Which should go? Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky? Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick? Or The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum? (All actual books recently purged.) These are good books, so it's not a question of quality. Instead, I use two criteria to decide which books to pitch. Is the book going to be difficult to find at a local library? And do I see myself reading this book for a second time, ever? If the answer to both question is no, then out it goes.
(Obviously, I do not throw these books away. They get donated to the local library or given to friends.)
In this way, I have built my own personal canon. Which books will never be pitched? Hard to say with certainty. But off the top of my head, I would put the following random books high up on the list: East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Pretty Birds by Scott Simon. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The list goes on ....

Wallace on YouTube

A YouTube user called dazzlecomm has posted a bunch of video on YouTube from a writers conference held last year in Italy called Le Conversazioni. The attendees last year included my favorite David Foster Wallace along with Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others. (I vow to finally read Eugenides' Middlesex now that it's Oprah's pic.)

Check out the above clip from David Foster Wallace. I transcribed what he's saying, it's just a short couple of sentences. It seems to be a response to a question about whether he belongs to a school of writers, though we don't get the question. So I'll notate it Wallace-style:

Q.
A. One symptom of what you could call the American disease, is that I don't know any writers who think of themselves as like other writers. Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more the techniques of postmodernism and experimentation, and then there's a group of traditional, sort of more realistic writers. Many of the writers I admire, and (unintelligible) whether I'm one of them, are interested in using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic, but using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional human veritities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community, ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old-fashioned. So that there's a kind of melding -- It's using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there is a group -- and some of whom I think are here this week with me -- If there is such a group, that's the group I want to belong to.

I think that description is right on the money as far as Infinite Jest goes. (Have I mentioned lately that I love that book?) Some of his other writing, I'm not so sure about. The book that continues to vex me is his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" -- I just don't know what to make of it. And they're making it into a movie, can you believe that? I think I need to read that book again. I read it at a point in my life when I was very melancholic, and I have often wondered if I saw it through a dark lens, so to speak.
On another issue, in light of the recent New Yorker article on the Ransom Center's literary archive, how does a library preserve video like this? The reason I transcribed the quote is because the video could go away for any number of reasons (not least of which would be complaints from conference organizers or DFW himself). I think it's valuable from a literary-historical point of view to hear what writers have to say about their own writing, and the fledgling librarian in my instinctively says such video should be preserved for research purposes. I wonder if the Ransom center has multimedia archivists? Hmmm ...
On a related note, the spouse is always hassling me to archive this blog is some way, but I'm lazy, and I have confidence that the Google servers will keep chugging along. From an archival point of view, I should print it out though, on acid-free paper and store it in a fire-proof box somewhere. (The difficulties inherent in digital archives are a post for another day; I'll put it on my list of future posts.)

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The New Yorker profiles the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, one of the largest literary archives in the world and part of my dear alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.
It's a fascinating article -- the sheer size of some of these collections of writers' papers; the business of buying collections; the ambition of the center to be the top scholarly archive in the country; and the personality of its raconteur director Thomas F. Staley (a James Joyce scholar, no less -- the center's holdings on Joyce are remarkable). Read the article online at The New Yorker web site while it's still available here.
The story, written by D.T. Max, fills me with admiration for archives and what they mean to literary history and heritage. It also makes me want to read more Don DeLillo, because of his connection Joyce and David Foster Wallace, as this excerpt shows:

One day this spring, I flew to Austin to take a look at the Don DeLillo archive. The Bronx-born writer, whose papers Staley acquired in 2004 for half a million dollars, fits into the Ransom’s collection well: for one thing, DeLillo is part of a node of expansive American fiction that goes back to Philip Roth and forward to novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace; DeLillo has corresponded with all of these writers. DeLillo counts Joyce as an influence, so he connects to the modernist node. And he has kept engaging, detailed notebooks that shed light on the intellectual foundation of his novels. Most important, he writes on a manual typewriter, producing draft after draft of his work, allowing scholars a chance to see his creative mind at work.

D.T. Max is my new favorite journalist. He also wrote a really good NYT mag piece on Happiness 101, about researchers who study true happiness.
As for the Ransom Center, it's that kind of UT effort that makes me wanna shout "Hook 'em, Horns!"

Introduction to IJ's 10th Anniversary

While I was working on a review of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers, I was surfing around the Internet looking for stuff about Eggers. One of the things I found online was the introduction he wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I really love the introduction. It begins:

In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction. In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis — that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.

Read the whole introduction here. (And you really should!)

Today spoonreader; tomorrow -- Oprah!

So I was thumbing through the most recent issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. (Yes, I am a proud reader!) And what do I find but David Foster Wallace's compelling commencement address that I blogged about back in January! At the time, I opined, "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."
The new Oprah issue isn't yet on her web site, I will update this post when it is.
To quote from his essay again:

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.

UPDATE: The essay is not on the Oprah web site, but you can see more about the December issue here.

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

David Foster Wallace wrote a new essay on his old obsession -- tennis -- for last week's New York Times. He waxed rhapsodic about Roger Federer. (Too bad, though: It looks like Wallace got bit by the correction bug, too, involving the mechanics of a Federer vs. Agassi match. The correction is appended to the story.)
In other Wallace news, The Howling Fantods, a fan site, says a 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest arrives later this year, with an introduction by David Eggers. The Eggers intro is a little weird to me. I like and respect Eggers (especially for his work with teaching writing to underpriviledged children), but I think Wallace is better known and more accomplished, so why is Eggers writing the intro? On the other hand, maybe Wallace asked Eggers to write the intro, because Wallace has published pieces before in Egger's literary project McSweeney's. All just speculation on my part.
I was thinking the other day how much I would like to read IJ again. Maybe the anniversary is just the occasion.

NYT's Best Work of the Last 25 Years

The New York Times has declared the best American fiction of the last 25 years, and it's Beloved, by Toni Morrison. That's a great choice, and I won't argue it.
But the rest of the finalists and runners-up are tired, tired, tired. I'm particularly bored by the preponderance of work by Philip Roth and John Updike.
Roth has a new novel out called Everyman, which is getting the expected stellar reviews, for the most part. It's about a man who's dying, and it's a chronicle of his body breaking down, kind of a like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (a masterful novella of a dying man's relationship with his doctors).
Frankly, though, I'm not terribly interested in Roth's work ... It's more of the old establishment authors narcistically whining that they're gonna die, and they don't believe in anything, and it's so hard to be them. I think those themes are really worn-out, especially given how the issues of terrorism, war and genocide have revived in recent years. (You can hear a radio interview of Philip Roth obsessing about himself here.) Interestingly, Updike's newest will look at the issues of the day; his latest is titled Terrorist.
Another gripe with the NYT list: Where is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace?
Wallace himself criticizes Roth and Updike in a similar vein in his new book of essays Consider the Lobster. Just a coincidence -- OR IS IT???