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Our editor Lorin Stein writes a letter to the New York Times editor regarding Paul Elie’s essay “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?.”
The “two-would-be adulterers” piece is called “Think” and is from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and it gives me chills every damn time I read it.
And yes, the religious impulse is hard to miss.
“While they tripped, Wallace and McLagan would listen over and over to ‘The Big Ship’ by Brian Eno on McLagan’s expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs.”
—DT Max, Every Love Story is A Ghost Story. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite songs in college was “The Big Ship,” and he would listen to it on repeat when he was depressed, later in life.
“The Big Ship” appears on Another Green World, which is my favorite Eno album and one of my favorite albums of all time. I discovered it in 1996, the same year Wallace published Infinite Jest, and it was one of many factors that helped lift me out of a particularly nasty bout of freshman-year-of-college-related anxiety and depression.
- David Foster Wallace
(Source: thesn00zebutton)
Look what came in the mail today!
YAYYYYY
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An anonymous essay presumed to have been written by David Foster Wallace about his time in a twelve step AA program at Granada House in Boston. This is presumed to also be the inspiration for the Ennet House in Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (via possible-leakage)
(Source: magical-markers)
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Yet another beautiful book! @FuelPublishing @GrantaBooks
ONE MONTH until it comes out! (aaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
idrewyouasquirrelbecauseiloveyou:
Another quote from the halfway house learnings part of Infinite Jest.
Been dwelling on this quote recently. Glad to have it here on the ol’ tumblr.
Because I was reading about testing my 5th and 6th graders for reading fluency this upcoming year, I became distracted by curious about the difficulty level of a DFW passage.
Yup. Even for a mainstream magazine Gourmet, the essay’s on a 13th-15th grade level (i.e. college). Considering this is one of his easier essays to read, I’m curious now how it rates against “E Pluribus Unum” and the like (or good GRAVY an IJ passage).
Just for fun, I ran the same diagnostic (OKAPI! - found here) on another article from the Gourmet 2000s Archive and found its readability scored about an 11-12th grade level.
(the things I’m supposed to be doing like lesson plans are not the things I am doing. tohoho ;D Also, sorry about the wonky size of the text. The program I was using to screencap is new to me—urgh Windows 7)
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“No male lead in the history of U.S. action films even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls — she makes Stallone, Willis, et. al. look muddled and ill.” - David Foster Wallace, “F/X Porn”
