"I have never encountered a mind
like David's," he says. "It functioned at such an amazingly high
level, he clearly lived in a hyperalert state. But on the other
hand, I felt that David's emotional life lagged far behind his
mental life. And I think he could get lost in the gap between the
two."
Ads by Google
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The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace : Rolling Stone
Tags: david_foster_wallace, writer, tribute, depression on 2008-11-17 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (7) -About
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-
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What followed was a phased, deliberate return to the world. He
worked as a security guard, morning shift, at Lotus Software.
Polyester uniform, service baton, walking the corridors. "I liked
it because I didn't have to think," he said. "Then I quit for the
incredibly brave reason that I got tired of getting up so early in
the morning." -
Next, he worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts.
"Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a
towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. I'm sitting there, and
who should walk in to get their towel but Michael Ryan. Now,
Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writers' Award the same year I
had. So I see this guy that I'd been up on the fucking rostrum
with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize. It's two years later
— it's the only time I've literally dived under something. He
came in, and I pretended not very subtly to slip, and lay facedown,
and didn't respond. I left that day, and I didn't go back." -
"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and
manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect
of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset
that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that
writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly
considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for
them is often rather lonely." -
They made their debut as a couple with Wallace's parents in July
2003, attending the Maine culinary festival that would provide the
title for his last book, Consider the Lobster. "They were
both so quick," his father says. "They would get things and look at
each other and laugh, without having to say what had struck them as
funny." The next year, Wallace and Green flew to his parents' home
in Illinois, where they were married two days after Christmas. It
was a surprise wedding. David told his mother he wanted to take the
family to what he called a "high-gussy" lunch. Sally Wallace
assumed it was Karen's influence. "David does not do high
gussy," she says. "His notion of high gussy is maybe long pants
instead of shorts or a T-shirt with two holes instead of 18." Green
and Wallace left the house early to "run errands," while Amy
figured out a pretext to get their parents to the courthouse on the
way to the lunch. "We went upstairs," Sally says, "and saw Karen
with a bouquet, and David dressed up with a flower in his
buttonhole, and we knew. He just looked so happy, just radiating
happiness." Their reception was at an Urbana restaurant. "As we
left in the snow," Sally says, "David and Karen were walking away
from us. He wanted us to take pictures, and Jim did. David was
jumping in the air and clicking his heels. That became the wedding
announcement." -
No medications had worked; the depression wouldn't lift. "After
this year of absolute hell for David," Sally says, "they decided to
go back to the Nardil." The doctors also administered 12 courses of
electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace's medication to
become effective. "Twelve," Sally repeats. "Such brutal
treatments," Jim says. "It was clear then things were bad."
Wallace had always been terrified of shock therapy. "It scares the
shit out of me," he told me in 1996. "My brain's what I've got. But
I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it." -
Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and
walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked.
Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods —
pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him
we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling
is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't
take it."One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother
sat on the floor beside him. "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was
glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."
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Saul Bellow’s Chicago Neighborhood - Where the Words Take Shape
Tags: writer, urban, immigrant, short_story, chicago on 2008-11-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Isabel Allende tells tales of passion | Video on TED.com
makes the head spin
Tags: world, violence, women, children, feminism, writer, africa, india, olympics, video on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Saturday Breakfast RN - 14 January 2006 - The Hudson River
an Australian station
Tags: hudson_river, hudson_valley, new_york, history, interview, writer, war, wall_street, wealthy_and_decadent, bridge, poughkeepsie, landscape on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (5) -About
in list: the hudson valley
more fromabc.com.au
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The Puritans actually landed in Massachusetts, and closer to another river which is the Connecticut River But the Hudson Valley and the Hudson River was settled initially by the Dutch, and the Dutch were very, very different stock in the 17th century, from a 17th century English Puritan. The Puritans of course had come to this country to establish a religion, and to practice their religion in relative freedom. In the case of the Dutch, they came to the Hudson Valley to make money. And so it's a very, very different attitude that they brought to the river.
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The Hudson was the scene of the two greatest battles of the American Revolution, and those were the first and second battles of Saratoga, a place not very far from where I'm sitting right now. And what happened in those battles was that the American Generals made use of the remarkable topography of the river at that place, to halt the British advance down river. And the British had no choice but to meet the American rebels at that place, and on two occasions they fought, and on both occasions the British withdrew, and ultimately lost, and ultimately surrendered.
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The houses after the American Civil War, 1865 to about 1890, those houses were extraordinary. We would call those people today nouveau-riche. They were people who'd made enormous killings in stocks and bonds on Wall Street in New York, and the houses that I have seen, and I've seen probably all of them, are opulent. One of the Vanderbilt houses, one of the Vanderbilts said, 'Make it like the Trianon', that is in Paris, Versailles, 'only larger.' So it was just be as opulent as you can. There was the notion that great wealth and displays of great wealth knew no bounds in the middle and late 19th century. And especially after the Civil War.
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major bridges there are I think about eleven. But there's some wonderful ones that are strikingly beautiful, and the ones that I particularly love and care for, are the great suspension spans, the George Washington bridge, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, the Bear Mountain bridge (I'm working up the river), which is near West Point United States Military Academy, and then working further up the river, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie. These are wonderful suspension bridges, graceful, with wonderful catenary curves. And the bridges, don't forget, are the creation of the 1920s and 1930s. The width of the Hudson made it impossible to span it reasonably up until really the 20th century.
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We take things for granted, in all of your listeners and certainly anyone I know, and even myself, we look around and we don't really see things. We take our natural landscape for granted. And our landscapes should not be taken for granted. They are places of civilisation, they are places of history, and if we don't know that history, we're not just professing ignorance, we're actually professing a kind of rudeness.
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A Modern Use for Thoreau’s Notes on Flora - Linking Patterns to Climate Change - NYTimes.com
see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/earth/16moho.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=all
Tags: climate_crisis, biology, biodiversity, thoreau, writer, massachusetts, history on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (1) -About
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On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long.
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Chris Abani muses on humanity | Video on TED.com
ubuntu - "the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me"; "there is no way for us to be human without each other"
Tags: africa, nigeria, writer, story, ubuntu, family, women, feminism, religion, war on 2008-10-26 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist - October 10, 2008
Tags: academia, education, writing, writer on 2008-10-24 and saved by11 people -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.thesmartset.com
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The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren't very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT. That meant to use simple English; nothing's worse than a client calling back to ask a broker — most of whom had no particular academic training — what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn't "know a lot about Plah-toe." Distance learning meant that he'd never heard anyone say the name.
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In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college.
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The second type of client is the one-timer. A chemistry major trapped in a poetry class thanks to the vagaries of schedule and distribution requirements, or worse, the poet trapped in a chemistry class.
-
The third group is perhaps the most tragic: They are well-educated professionals who simply lack English-language skills.
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Term paper work is also extremely easy, once you get the hang of it. It's like an old dance routine buried in one's muscle memory. You hear the tune — say, "Unlike the ancient Greek tragic playwrights, Shakespeare likes to insert humor in his tragedies" — and your body does the rest automatically. I'd just scan Google or databases like Questia.com for a few quotes from primary and secondary sources, create an argument based on whatever popped up from my search, write the introduction and underline the thesis statement, then fill in the empty spaces between quotes with whatever came to mind.
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YouTube - My Transiberian by Paulo Coelho - Part 1
"A book also can link people. It does not change people, but it provokes a reaction."
(with Italian subtitles)
Tags: writer, video, travel, rail, russia, books on 2008-10-08 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The Grunge American Novel
Tags: literature, fiction, publishing_industry, marketing, book_review, writer, david_foster_wallace, 1990s on 2008-10-05 -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromquery.nytimes.com
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To create that elusive, ephemeral entity known as buzz, the company compiled a list of 4,000 booksellers, industry insiders and media types and sent out a staggered series of six postcards that cryptically heralded the release of an at-first-unspecified book that gives ''infinite pleasure'' with ''infinite style.'' And when blurbs to that effect became available from other authors and critics, Little, Brown put them on postcards and dispatched another series of three. Says Paul Slovak, senior vice president of publicity for Viking Penguin, ''The promotional campaign has been brilliant.''
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David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
Tags: 2005, commencement, speech, writer, david_foster_wallace, religion, education, development on 2008-10-04 and saved by19 people -All Annotations (16) -About
in list: religion
more fromwww.marginalia.org
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As if a person's most basic
orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were
somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically
absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct
meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. -
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. -
petty, frustrating crap
like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines
give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about
how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and
miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default
setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all
about me. -
If you're automatically sure
that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default
setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that
aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay
attention, then you will know there are other options. It will
actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow,
consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on
fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the
mystical oneness of all things deep down. -
The
only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for
maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship --
be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the
Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is
that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. -
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness
and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to
sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every
day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race,
the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite
thing.
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Remembering David Foster Wallace
Tags: david_foster_wallace, tribute, writer, interview on 2008-09-18 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.kottke.org
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James Patterson: 'Publishers are lost in the Middle Ages' - Features, Books - The Independent
Tags: writer, publishing_industry, novel, children, fiction on 2008-09-16 -All Annotations (3) -About
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I insisted we do this as
nothing but anecdotes that seamlessly tell the story -
I'm a big fan of
teamwork anyway. I think the individualism thing is overrated. -
"One of
the problems," he says, "is that there is not enough stuff that's
written with the kind of pace that their world is about."
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On David Foster Wallace
"I've never been a huge David Foster Wallace fan, so I'm not sure why I find his suicide so achingly sad. But I do."
Tags: david_foster_wallace, writer on 2008-09-14 -All Annotations (0) -About
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An Appraisal - Writer Mapped the Mythic and the Mundane - An Appraisal - NYTimes.com
Tags: writer, tribute, david_foster_wallace, lit_crit on 2008-09-14 -All Annotations (3) -About
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In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.
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A review of a memoir by the tennis player Tracy Austin became a meditation on art and athletics and the mastery of one’s craft. A review of a John Updike novel became an essay on how the “brave new individualism and sexual freedom” of the 1960s had devolved into “the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.”
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An ardent magpie, Mr. Wallace tossed together the literary and the colloquial with hyperventilated glee, using an encyclopedia of styles and techniques to try to capture the cacophony of contemporary America. As a result, his writing could be both brainy and visceral, fecund with ideas and rich with zeitgeisty buzz.
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if:book: a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era
Tags: writer, writing, reading, networked_book, e-books, publishing, publishing_industry, digital_media on 2008-09-08 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (59) -About
more fromwww.futureofthebook.org
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Ever since we published Ken Wark's Gamer Theory I've tended to think of the author of a networked book as a leader of a group effort, similar in many respects to the role of a professor in a seminar. The professor has presumably set the topic and likely knows more about it than the other participants, but her role is to lead the group in a combined effort to synthesize and extend knowledge. This is not to suggest that one size will fit all authors
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A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy's reading behavior: “He'll be reading a (printed) book. He'll put the book down and go to the book's website. Then, he'll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He'll put the book down again and google a query that's occurred to him.”
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once we acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation — we can begin to redefine the roles of publisher and editor. An old-style formulation might be that t publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject.
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Authors should be able to choose the level of moderation/participation at which they want to engage; ditto for readers.
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It's not necessary for ALL projects to take this continuous/never-finished form.
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main distinction of this new model is not type of media but the mechanism of distribution
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in the long term arc of change i am imagining, novels will not continue to be the dominant form of fiction. My bet now is that to understand where fiction is going we should look at what’s happening with “video games.”
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emergence of celebrity editors and readers
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Over time we are also likely to see the emergence of "professional readers" whose work consistus of tagging our digitized culture
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It’s important to design sites that are outward-looking, emphasizing the fact that boundaries with the rest of the net are porous.
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Books can have momentum, not in the current sense of position on a best-seller or Amazon list, but rather in the size and activity-level of their communities.
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Books can be imagined as channels, especially when they "gather" other books around them.
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imagine google searches that make visible not just the interconnections between hits but also how the content of each hit relates to the rest of the document and/or discipline it’s part of
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The World's Fair : Richard Powers on Biography and Memory
!important
Tags: richard_powers, writer, memory, history on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
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if:book: the year of the author
note the couple of DUHs in the comment section.
Tags: publishing_industry, publishing, writer, writing, music, industry, natalie_merchant, radiohead on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
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It is the year of the author, because they will be the ones who drive the paradigm shift. They may begin to use online publishing and distribution tools to bypass traditional publishers and put their work out there en masse.
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we are poised at a point where writers could completely transform the publishing industry, if only we would sit up and notice.
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a huge ecosystem that supports and is supported by the book.
I am actually suggesting that cutting the middlemen out could have negetive repercussions for authors and artists. Authors could do it now if they wanted. Lots of authors do, but that means they have to find and hire their own editor, proofreader, and designer. They have to get an ISBN number, apply for copyright, get a library of congress number, and a tax ID number (if they plan on selling the book). Then they have to get bids from printers, prepare the manuscript, and pay out of their own pocket to have the book printed. Once it's printed they have to pay for shipping and storage. To sell enough to cover costs they will probably need help with their marketing strategy which might include a book tour (which they will also pay for out of their own pocket), book fairs, ads, articles, interviews, reviews, an author blog, etc... Oh, and if they want to sell to bookstores or even to Amazon, they have to contract with a distributor. If they are lucky enough to sell the books, they might need an accountant to sort out how much they owe Uncle Sam. And they will have to make sure to pay quarterly and in the midst of all this how will they find time to concentrate on writing the next book? Point is, without those "middlemen" the author is stuck doing all of this him or herself. It's difficult, it's a lot of work, and it's not something many authors are willing or able to take on.
The Kindle is the first platform to solve a handful of big problems for the self-publishing author.
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that other stuff is old-world dead-tree crap.
-
love affair
between authors and the audience, which will be
rekindled (sorry, couldn't help myself) by their
return to a relationship of mutual gift-giving... -
the solution is _collaborative_filtering._
and i can also understand that some people,
like sara here, will completely and utterly
fail to comprehend it. fortunately, however,
their failure to grasp it has no consequence
bearing on the ultimate success of the tool.
it's not superstition. it will work even if
you don't "believe" in it...tomorrow's authors won't waste one _minute_
of their time doing "marketing", because it
will be clearly understood as a kiss of death.
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The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Tags: JK_Rowling, writer, commencement, speech, video, audio on 2008-06-11 and saved by36 people -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromharvardmagazine.com
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There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
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failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive
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Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
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The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet.
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this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.
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Gore Vidal: Literary feuds, his 'vicious' mother and rumours of a secret love child - Features, Books - The Independent
cher confrère
Tags: interview, writer, gore_vidal on 2008-05-31 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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The Sound of Fury - New York Times
Tags: theater, new_york_city, writer on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromquery.nytimes.com
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Guirgis is one of those people to whom good stories seem to happen. Good storytellers usually are, but even so, his background is unusual. His mother grew up in Newark, the daughter of a deaf alcoholic printer. She stood up to his rages, often to shield her mother and sister. It was a loving but difficult upbringing, Guirgis says, and ''she grew up in a household terrified of intimacy and marriage.'' Nearly 40 and still single, she was volunteering as an adviser to foreign exchange students when a grateful Egyptian told her to call his family if she were ever inclined to go to Cairo. She was, and she did, and there she met the student's brother, who was in his 40's and assumed to be a confirmed bachelor. Three days later they were engaged.Add Sticky Note
- The Little Flower of East Orangeposted by taryn930 on 2008-04-28
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
