DFW biography, of sorts.

Thanks to the fine folks at Longfellow Books, I got a copy of the forthcoming Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky. Lipsky’s a writer with Rolling Stone magazine, and the two of them spent four days together during DFW’s book tour supporting Infinite Jest. I started it yesterday; mixed opinion so far. I’m not sure how much of that ambivalence comes from the odd presentation – it’s looking like a 300+ page interview transcript.  Lipsky’s contributions are a sometimes confusing mix of question, comment, observation, and aside. DFW’s portions are interesting – but I think I’ll save writing about that for another time, after I’ve gotten further in.

Excerpt from THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET.

I want to put the whole thing here. Can I do that? No, I guess not.

Go here.

(via, in the comments)

Why blog?

I found my way to a new (for me) blog, Corresponding Fractions, which has a sensible answer to the what keeps me blogging question. Over to you, Ralph and Daniel:

This [blog] is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.
—Emerson, Journal (1834)

You must collect things for reasons you don’t yet understand.

—Daniel J. Boorstin

Typical blog post.

This is where the “author” copies and pastes a representative paragraph, links to the rest, and calls it a day:

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

…

Read the rest here. (Or anywhere, I guess.)

Ruland v. Hunt.

Part two (with a link to part one) of an interview with Laird Hunt (author most recently of Ray of the Star) is available now at Hobart’s website.

Virginia Woolf speaks.

Here’s the last surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, from a 1937 BBC radio program.

(via)

WELL NOW. Here’s the cover for the forthcoming David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, mofos) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. That little fellow on the bridge is me, contemplating jumping, but wait here comes my good friend with a review copy of the new David Mitchell novel! Life continues.

I’ve never liked Leno. He’s always seemed to have a hateful, bitter undertone that he’s holding back. His “comedy” isn’t funny, most of the time. When he does manage a funny bit, it’s always derivative – usually a blatant rip-off of something Letterman did better when he was at NBC.

Conan is funny. He also should be given more support at the 11:35 spot – say, something at 10:00 that doesn’t suck and is a brand of “humor” that wouldn’t carry its fans over to watch Conan.