David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy

in Books, Literature | February 18th, 2014

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons

Like many David Foster Wallace fans, I bought a copy of J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten (previously featured here), a compilation of various famous writers’ top-ten-books lists, expressly for DFW’s contribution. Like most of those David Foster Wallace fans, I felt more than a little surprised when I turned to his page and found out which ten books he’d chosen. Here, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, we have the Infinite Jest author and widely recognized (if reluctant) “high-brow” literary figure’s top ten list:

1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis

2. The Stand, by Stephen King

3. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

4. The Thin Red Line, by James Jones

5. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong

6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris

7. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein

8. Fuzz, by Ed McBain

9. Alligator, by Shelley Katz

10. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy

Thrillers, killers, and a dose of Christianity to top it off; I didn’t blame Zane when he asked, “Is he serious? Beats me. To be honest, I don’t know what Wallace was thinking. But I do think there’s a certain integrity to his list.” Wallace himself seemed to read assiduously all over the map — or, more to the point, all up and down the scale of critical respectability. Rattling off “the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries” to Salon’s Laura Miller in 1996, for a contrast, he named, among other worthy reads, Socrates’ funeral oration, John Donne, “Keats’ shorter stuff,” Schopenhauer, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Moby-Dick, and The Great Gatsby. (You can find many of these texts in our Free eBooks collection.)

That, some Wallace readers may think, sounds more like it. But those who’ve paid close attention to Wallace’s language — that often breathlessly but hopelessly imitated mixture of high-caliber vocabulary, casually spoken rhythm, deceptively sharp-edged perception, shrugging presentation, and deliberate solecism — know how fully he simultaneously embodied both “high” and “low” English writing. Just look at the Literary Analysis syllabus from his days teaching at Illinois State University, which demands students read not just The Silence of the Lambs but another Thomas Harris novel, Black Sunday, as well as more C.S. Lewis (in this case The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and Stephen King (Carrie). Lest you doubt his commitment to the serious reading of popular fiction, note the presence of Jackie Collins’ Rock Star. In the classroom and in life, Wallace must truly have believed that there exists no low fiction; just low ways of reading fiction.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Jorge Luis Borges Chats with William F. Buckley on Firing Line (1977)

in Literature, Television | February 17th, 2014

Despite his respected facility with the English language, Argentine master craftsman of short fiction Jorge Luis Borges did his best work in his native Spanish. Though we remember prolific interviewer and even more prolific writer William F. Buckley for his formidable command of English above all else, he didn’t even learn it as his first language, starting in on his English education at age seven, having already learned Spanish (not to mention French).

This must have placed him well to appreciate Borges’ writing, and indeed, in his introduction to their Firing Line conversation above, Buckley cites Borges’ reputation as the greatest, most influential writer then alive. “We met in Buenos Aires, in 1977, during the military junta days,” Buckley recalls of the taping in a Paris Review interview. “He seemed astonishingly frail, but he spoke without a pause.”

Buckley goes on to provide many choice quotes from Borges’ answers to questions about his sight (“When you are blind, time flows in a different way. It flows, let’s say, on an easy slope”), his love of American writers like Emerson and Melville, his languages (“Of course, my Latin is very rusty. But still, as I once wrote, to have forgotten Latin is already, in itself, a gift”), and where he finds beauty and art (“A man may say a very fine thing, not being aware of it. I am hearing fine sentences all the time from the man in the street, for example. From anybody”), and how he taught (“I tried to teach my students not literature—that can’t be taught—but the love of literature”). For more on that last, see also “The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges,” a piece on the new book Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature, by Michael Greenberg in the New York Review of Books.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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New “Hemingway” App Promises to Make Your Writing “Strong and Clear”

in English Language, Literature, Writing | February 15th, 2014

I confess, I prefer Faulkner to Hemingway and see nothing wrong with long, complex sentences when they are well-constructed. But in most non-Faulkner writing, they are not. Stream of consciousness is a deliberate effect of carefully edited prose, not the unrevised slop of a first draft. In my days as a writing teacher, I’ve read my share of the latter. The English teacher’s guide for paring down unruly writing resembles a new online app called “Hemingway,” which examines writing and grades it on a color-coded difficulty scale. “Hemingway” suggests using simpler diction, editing out adverbs in favor of stronger verbs, and eliminating passive voice. It promises to make your writing like that of the famous American minimalist, “strong and clear.”

Of course I couldn’t resist running the above paragraph through Hemingway. It received a score of 11—merely “O.K.” It suggested that I change the passive in sentence one and remove “carefully” from the fourth sentence (I declined), and it identified “unruly” as an adverb (it is not). Like all forms of advice, it pays to use your own judgment before applying wholesale. Nevertheless, the suggestion to streamline and simplify for clarity’s sake is a general rule worth heeding more often than not. Brothers Adam and Ben Long, creators of the app, realized that their “sentences often grow long to the point that they became difficult to read.” It happens to everyone, amateur and professional alike. The app suggests writing that scores a Grade 10 or below is “bold and clear.” Writing above this measure is “hard” or “very hard” to read. Which prompts the inevitable question: How does Hemingway himself score in the Hemingway app?

In a blog post yesterday for The New Yorker, Ian Crouch ran a few of the master’s passages through the online editing tool (a concept akin to John Malkovich entering John Malkovich’s head). The opening paragraph of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” received a score of 15. Hemingway’s description of Romero the bullfighter from The Sun Also Rises also “breaks several of the Hemingway rules” with its use of passive voice and extraneous adverbs. Does this mean even Hemingway falls short of the ideal? Or only that writing rules exist to be broken? Both, perhaps, and neither. Style is as elusive as grammar is constricting, and both are mastered only through endless practice. Will “Hemingway” turn you into Hemingway? No. Will it make you a better writer? Maybe. But only, I’d suggest, inasmuch as you learn when to accept and when to ignore its advice.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis

in Film, Literature, Radio | February 13th, 2014

Peter Capaldi is best known in the States for being the most recent actor to play Doctor Who. But did you know that he is also an Oscar-winning filmmaker? His brilliant short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life took the prize for Best Short Film in 1995.

The movie shows Kafka, on Christmas Eve, struggling to come up with the opening line for his most famous work, The Metamorphosis.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Capaldi wrings a lot of laughs out of Kafka’s inability to figure out what Samsa should turn into. A giant banana? A kangaroo? Even when the answer is literally staring at him in the face, Kafka is hilariously obtuse.

Richard E. Grant stars as the tortured, tightly-wound writer who is driven into fits as his creative process is interrupted for increasingly absurd reasons. The noisy party downstairs, it turns out, is populated by a dozen beautiful maidens in white. A lost delivery woman offers Kafka a balloon animal. A local lunatic searches for his companion named Jiminy Cockroach.

You can see the film above, helpfully subtitled in German. Also find it in our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More, plus our list of 33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Kafka’s Famous Character Gregor Samsa Meets Dr. Seuss in a Great Radio Play

in Literature, Radio | February 13th, 2014

If you don’t have enough existential angst in your life — and if you’re operating on the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Kafka (see our post from earlier today) — then check out this radio play called Samsa & Seuss, which aired originally on the CBC show Wiretap before appearing on This American Life. The piece is based on an epistolary short story by the late, great David Rakoff and is performed by Rakoff along with Jonathan Goldstein.

The story begins with a desperate Gregor Samsa reaching out to Dr. Seuss looking for some way to cure him of his malady — i.e. being a bug. Seuss’s reply is written entirely in verse — “Rest assured, I’ll endeavor to glean and deduce. You’ll be better than ever or my name isn’t Seuss” – which confuses Samsa to no end. At one point, Samsa asks, “Is metrical rhyme an American mode of correspondence?”

Yet what could be a one-joke novelty grows surprisingly poignant in Rakoff’s deft hands. When it becomes clear that the doctor’s eccentric health regime – “magnolia custard and rosehip soufflé and some dew drops with mustard” – has failed to fix the ailment of the increasingly depressed Samsa, Seuss’s cheery can-do attitude turns reflective:

I’m astonished at times when I think of the past, of my thousands of rhymes, of how life is so vast. I’m left, then, to wonder how anyone gleans a purpose or sense of what anything means. It’s not ours for the knowing. It’s meaning abstruse. We both best be going. Your loving friend, Seuss.

And you thought The Lorax felt a little bleak.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958)

in Literature | February 13th, 2014

Today we feature recordings of Langston Hughes reading two of his earliest and best-known poems from his debut 1926 collection The Weary Blues. The first, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes wrote in 1920 when he was only 17. In her very close reading of this poem, Alexandra Socarides tells us that Hughes was just “emerging from a distinctly Midwestern childhood” and taking a train to Mexico City to spend a year with his estranged father when he wrote the lines: “I’ve known rivers: / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins.” (You can hear Hughes tell the story of writing the poem here). The short poem spans four rivers in three different continents, though “at the moment of its composition, it was the landscape of the Midwest [Hughes] knew best.”

Even before he had traveled the globe, Hughes’ concerns were global in scope. But he is most often associated with the jazz-age Harlem Renaissance scene, and rightly so. After his year in Mexico City, Hughes moved to New York to study at Columbia and helped pioneer a jazz poetry that anticipated Beats and Black Arts poets alike. The title poem of The Weary Blues is firmly situated in Harlem—“Down on Lenox Avenue” where a bluesman “made that poor piano moan with melody.” It’s a poem meant to be read aloud, and in the video above, you can see Hughes do so with accompanying jazz ensemble The Doug Parker Band for a 1958 Canadian program. That next year, Hughes collaborated with Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather on an album of jazz readings called The Weary Blues.

Critic Donald B. Gibson once noted that Hughes may have “read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.” His generous populism didn’t always mean critical success—the two are often at odds—such that in 1969, Lindsay Patterson called him “the most abused poet in America” for the neglect or outright scorn his accessible poetry received from both black and white critics at the time. In a review of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s hard-to-find recorded readings of 50 of Hughes’ poem, Patterson wrote that Hughes’ work “must be heard, rather than read silently, for one to realize its emotional scope.” I disagree. From early short poems like “A Wooing” to later, longer works like “Prelude to Our Age,” Hughes’ work on the page is deeply evocative, complex, and rewarding. But while Hughes was steeped in history, he was also steeped in poetic tradition of a very American variety—Walt Whitman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen—that privileged musical language, vernacular expressions, and an exuberant personal voice, and that makes his work a particular joy to hear read, especially by the poet himself.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Mark Twain Creates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

in Books, Letters, Literature | February 12th, 2014

In January of 1887, Mark Twain wrote the above letter to a Reverend Charles D. Crane, pastor of a Methodist Episcopal Church in Maine, to advise him of the most suitable reading for both children and adults. Twain’s letter—which, as he did nearly all his letters, he signed with his given name of Samuel Clemens (or “S.L. Clemens”)—came in response to a query in three parts from the Rev. Crane. But we do not seem to have Crane’s letter (at least a thorough search of the exhaustive catalog at the online Mark Twain Project yields no results.) Nonetheless, we can reasonably infer that he asked the famous author—who was between Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—something like the following:

1) What books should young boys read? 2) And young girls? … 3) [and both/either] What should grown-ups read? [and/or] What are Mr. Samuel Clemens’ favorite books?

Twain, in a hurry, “took a shot on the wing” and replied with the letter below, which, despite his protestations of haste, seems fairly well-considered. I’ll admit that the ambiguity of the last sentence, however, gives me the researcher’s buzz to go back and dig through more archives for Crane’s original letter.

Dear Sir:  

I am just starting away from home, & have no time to think the questions over & properly consider my answers; but I take a shot on the wing at the matter, as follows:  

1.Macaulay;
Plutarch;
Grant’s Memoirs;
Crusoe;
Arabian Nights;
Gulliver.  

= 2. The same for the girl, after striking out out Crusoe & substituting Tennyson.   

I can’t answer No. 3 in this sudden way. When one is going to choose twelve authors, for better for worse, forsaking fathers & mothers to cling unto them & unto them alone, until death shall them part, there is an awfulness about the responsibility that makes marriage with one mere individual & divorcible woman a sacrament sodden with levity by comparison.   

In my list I know I should put Shakspeare [sic]; & Browning; & Carlyle (French Revolution only); Sir Thomas Malory (King Arthur); Parkman’s Histories (a hundred of them if there were so many); Arabian Nights; Johnson (Boswell’s), because I like to see that complacent old gasometer listen to himself talk; Jowett’s Plato; & “B.B.” (a book which I wrote some years ago, not for publication but just for my own private reading.)  

I should be sure of these; & I could add the other three — but I should want to hold the opportunity open a few years, so as to make no mistake.  

Truly Yours  

S.L. CLEMENS  

See all six manuscript pages of Twain’s letter (and zoom in to examine them closely) at the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. We’ve added links to Twain’s recommended texts above. You can find many in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

David Foster Wallace’s Sharp Letter to His Editor: “Don’t F with the Mechanics of My Piece”

in Letters, Literature | February 11th, 2014

Click for expanded version

We might imagine that David Foster Wallace worked out his neuroses primarily in his voluminous fictional and critical output, but as we see from a fax above to Harper’s editor Joel Lovell, the painful self-consciousness that drove his writing manifested in even the most mundane of documents. Wallace submitted the faxed letter with a short essay on Kafka that appeared in Harper’s in 1998. The essay itself—an account of the difficulties of teaching the arch Czech author to American undergraduates—slices through commonplaces, arriving at the conclusion that “the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” Reassuring stuff this ain’t, but then, neither is Kafka. Even amidst all of its elaborate defensive strategies, Wallace’s writing also exposes the unheimlichkeit of human embodiment, and in the Kafka essay, it’s a point he wanted to make in a very particular way, unmediated by any editorial intervention.

His faxed letter to Lovell anticipates and resists criticism and alternates between dismissive, self-effacing, and mock-threatening in his expressed desire that the Harper’s staff “not copyedit this like a freshman essay.” He explains the conversational style of the piece as an effort to “protect me from people’s ire.” The body of the letter finishes with Wallace’s footnoted promise to “find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.” It’s classic DFW: completely idiosyncratic, a prose style induced by his “horrific struggle” to establish an authentic self. Read a transcript below, courtesy of Letters of Note. All, of course, sic.

ATTEMPTED FAX COVER SHEET

From: David Wallace

To: Joel Lovell, Harper’s [redacted] (Office [redacted])

This is pretty much the best I can do, I think. I feel shitty sticking a lot of what you wanted in FN’s, but I didn’t see any work to work it into the main text w/o having to rewrite whole ¶s and throw the thing’s Styrofoamish weight off.

The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax (“stuff,” “lightbulb” as one word, “i.e.”/“e.g.” without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.

Let Me Know,

Dave Wallace

* (It may take years for the oportunity to arise. I’m very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis.)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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David Foster Wallace’s Sharp Letter to His Editor: “Don’t F with the Mechanics of My Piece”

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