David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library

in English Language, Literature | July 17th, 2013

“I didn’t think much of Infinite Jest in the beginning,” writes Jacqueline Munoz, librarian at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. But as she read further into Wallace’s seemingly “wordy and unfocused” landmark novel, the author’s mind, and how it dealt with “how unforgiving it is to be human” and how different generations “struggle internally with the same issues,” won her over: “I thought, this man is a genius; I want to know him better.” Many of us Wallace fans harbor the same desire, and now that the Ransom Center has acquired and made available a considerable chunk of the writer’s heavily annotated library, a few more of us can. The books in Wallace’s library, as Munoz puts it, reveal “a philosopher, mathophile, physics buff, grammarian, pop-fiction reader, lit professor, creative writer, and spiritual seeker,” and Maria Bustillos, writing in The Awl back in 2011, traced Wallace’s seemingly strange but ultimately meaningful presence of titles like The Spirituality of Imperfection and The Drama of the Gifted Child.

Bustillos’ exploration of Wallace’s proclivity for self-help brings in a volume written by Sally Foster Wallace, David’s mother: a grammar textbook called Practically Painless English, “the only book of English grammar I know of that can hold a candle to the works of the Fowler brothers.” Her book has a place in the Ransom Center’s collection, and anyone who’s read Wallace’s Harper’s article “Tense Present” may smile at its presence, remembering stories of the songs about solecisms and other linguistic misuses his family would sing on car trips. Ostensibly a review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a copy of which also made it into the collection, the piece reveals Wallace’s thoroughgoing interest in the mechanics, well-functioning or otherwise, of English. You can follow the thread through several other titles in his possession, including Albert Baugh’s A History of the English Language, John D. Ramage’s Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, all the way to Peter Ladefoged’s Elements of Acoustic Phoenetics. And when you’re done, you will want to keep following the thread a little further by checking out our previous post: David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in the English Language.

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus

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

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Read Ulysses Seen, A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | July 16th, 2013

You’ve started reading Ulysses, James Joyce’s modernist classic, and never quite made it the whole way through. Sound familiar? You’re in good company.

So here’s another approach. Start reading Ulysses Seen, the graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s tome. The artist behind Ulysses Seen is Rob Berry, and he’s devoted to using “the visual aid of the graphic novel” to “foster understanding of public domain literary masterworks.” He’s clear to point out that Ulysses Seen isn’t meant to replace Ulysses. Rather it’s meant to be a visual companion to the original work. It uses the comic narrative to “cut through jungles of unfamiliar references” and to help readers “appreciate the subtlety and artistry” of Joyce’s text. So far Berry has completed about 138 pages of Ulysses Seen, and more pages will be coming online at the Joyce Center web site in the near future. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the artist estimates that it will take roughly a decade to complete the full adaptation. (The original novel spans more than 700 pages after all.) In the meantime, here are some more resources to help you get through Joyce’s great work:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast

James Joyce Manuscripts Online, Free Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

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Watch a Whimsical Animation of Italo Calvino’s Short Story “The Distance of the Moon”

in Animation, Literature | July 15th, 2013

“What was Italo Calvino?,” asks sci-fi doyenne Ursula K. Le Guin in a Guardian review of the Italian author’s collection of short stories Cosmicomics. “A prepostmodernist? Maybe it’s time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes.” Calvino certainly exists in a category all of his own. In short novels like Invisible Cities and his numerous story collections, the “prepostmodernist”—or whatever—created a voice as wondrous and individual as his contemporary, Borges. Calvino coined his own genre, which he called “Cosmicomics,” and which Le Guin describes as “a subspecies of science fiction [which] consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq.”

One of the stories from the collection, “The Distance of the Moon,” gets an animated treatment in the video above, scored by Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1.” The fantastic story, narrated by the mysterious Qfwfq, also includes characters like Captain Vhd Vhd and Xlthlx, and, like all of Calvino’s work, it combines a child-like wonder with his playful, mythic imagination and scientific intelligence. The animation, narrated in Hebrew with English subtitles, beautifully illustrates the strange whimsy of the story with stop-motion cut-outs. And in the audio above, you can hear actor Liev Schreiber explain the scientific theory behind Calvino’s story, then read the story itself. The reading took place at a live event hosted by Radiolab and originally aired on WNYC and PRI’s show “Selected Shorts.”

And if this leaves you desiring more animated Calvino, then don’t miss our previous post: John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Animated Fairy Tale, The False Grandmother.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Animated in Two Minutes

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Animated Not Once, But Twice

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

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The Writing Life of Joyce Carol Oates

in Books, Literature, Writing | July 15th, 2013

Joyce Carol Oates is often described as America’s foremost woman of letters. Since 1963 she has published more than 50 novels and a great many short stories, plays, essays, poems and children’s stories — all of unusually high quality. Her productivity has been legendary, almost from the start. When her former Syracuse University classmate Robert Phillips interviewed Oates for the Paris Review in 1978, he recounted a rumor that circulated campus about how she would finish a novel, turn it over, and begin composing another one on the other side–only to throw the manuscript away when both sides were covered and begin again. Oates didn’t deny the rumor. “I began writing in high school,” she said, “consciously training myself by writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them.” But sheer volume was never the point, as Oates told Phillips:

Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones — just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one. Each book as it is written, however, is a completely absorbing experience, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to write.

Oates has won many honors for her work, including the National Book Award, the Pen/Malamud Award, the National Medal of the Humanities, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. Her latest novel, The Accursed, is a Gothic tale of a supernatural curse visited upon Princeton, New Jersey, the town where she lives and teaches. Last month the New Yorker visited Oates at her home in Princeton. The short film above offers a rare look inside the writer’s private world. Oates talks about her work routine, her interest in language and structure, and her sense of her own personality. “I can basically write almost all day long with interruptions,” she says in the film. “It’s not really that I sit down to write as if it were some extraordinary act. It’s basically what I do.”

You can read online Oates’ early short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. It was written for Bob Dylan in 1966.

via Page-Turner

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Can Science Fiction Save the Liberal Arts? (Asks The New Republic)

in Education, Literature | July 12th, 2013

Both the literary and science fiction worlds have come out in the past few weeks with poignant tributes and accolades for recently deceased Scottish writer Iain Banks. The remembrances from both quarters are very well deserved, and very rare. Banks was an unusual kind of artist; he maintained a highly respected presence as both a writer of realist literary fiction (as Iain Banks) and superbly well-crafted, highly imaginative science fiction (as Iain M. Banks). In the brief video interview above, you can hear Banks recount the origin of the two names and make an impassioned case for science fiction as “the most important genre” of fiction.

Banks’ accomplishments are all the more extraordinary given that so-called literary fiction and so-called genre writing—sci-fi, horror, romance, etc.—have for so long occupied entirely different cultural spheres, worlds, to use the words of Thomas Pynchon, as different as “the hothouse and the street.” There were the obvious exceptions—the work of Franz Kafka, Dracula and Frankenstein, 1984, Fahrenheit 451—that slipped through the gates, grandfathered in as legacy cases or exemplars of “Speculative Fiction,” the respectable term for genre writing deemed “serious” by academics and the literati. Literary scholar Frederic Jameson has long been a fan of sci-fi. Critical theorist Felix Guatari once wrote a science fiction film script. Again, more exceptions.

All of this has changed. After the success of popular culture studies programs in the freewheeling postmodern 90s, even the most traditional departments have begun turning toward genre fiction—the current popular obsession with vampires and zombies, for example—as a means of re-invigorating the liberal arts and reclaiming relevance. (I myself once helped an academic press acquire and publish a fun collection called Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human.)

Is this a cynical piece of strategy to market struggling humanities programs to increasingly business- and science-minded students? A generational turnover in the professorate? An attempt to expand the market share of the humanities in the overall picture of university funding? In a recent article in the New Republic, science editor Judith Shulevitz argues, like Banks, that sci-fi is a genre of fiction that the academy should take more and more seriously on practical grounds—sci-fi writers show us the future of technology more accurately than any technologist. Shulavitz also writes that doing so will raise the profile, and funding, of humanities programs.

As you can see from the charts above, the arts and sciences have reached a dire funding asymmetry. Shulevitz quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, “There is no science without fancy and no art without fact” as part of her case for the importance of literature to the “practical arts” and vice-versa. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced, but Shulevitz’s argument is worthy of consideration, unless you believe, with Oscar Wilde, that “all art is quite useless” and in no need of an apologetics or a defense to bureaucrats.

Andy Samberg Announces Death of Liberal Arts, Coolness of Science Majors at Harvard Class Day

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

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

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Virginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssinian Princes” and Fool the British Royal Navy (1910)

in History, Literature, Random | July 11th, 2013

Click image for larger version

On February 7th, 1910, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and five of her Bloomsbury companions—painter Duncan Grant, Woolf’s brother Adrian, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, dressed in blackface and outlandish stage costumes. (In the photo above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dreadnought Hoax,” the six convinced the Dreadnought’s officers that they were the “Emperor of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high honors.

The hoax, masterminded by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a visit from some North African dignitaries. Once on board, the group spoke in accented Latin (quoting the Aeneid) and gibberish. Woolf kept quiet so as to disguise her gender. One of the officers on the ship was a cousin of Virginia and Adrian, but he failed to recognize them. It wasn’t a flawless performance on either side: at one point, Buxton sneezed and almost lost his mustache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssinian flag, flew the flag of Zanzibar instead.

The “princes” asked for prayer mats, presented the officers with fake military honors, and exclaimed “bunga, bunga!” each time they were shown some marvel of the ship. The Dreadnought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, “the flagship of the Home Fleet, the most formidable, the most modern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This incident is said to be the origin of the ludicrous phrase “bunga, bunga,” most associated with the exploits of the recently convicted Silvio Berlusconi.) The next day, Cole anonymously sent the photograph at the top to The Daily Mirror, revealing the hoax. According to Woolf scholar Mairead Case—who sees the incident as a precursor to Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando—the Mirror described the “Abyssinians” thus:

All the princes wore vari-coloured silk sashes as turbans, set off with diamond aigrettes, white gibbah tunics, over which were cast rich flowing robes and round their necks were suspended gold chains and jeweled necklaces … They also all wore patent leather boots which, Oriental fashion, tapered to a point, the ends projecting fully six inches beyond the toes. White gloves covered the princes’ hands, and over the gloved fingers, they wore gold wedding rings – heavy, plain circlets, which looked very impressive.

In a recently discovered letter, Cole wrote to a friend that the hoax was “glorious” and “shriekingly funny.” The group intended to mock what they saw as an outmoded Victorian imperialism, and they succeeded, at least in the popular press. The Mirror published the cartoon above and the Royal Navy was a laughingstock for weeks afterward. None of this pseudo-racist pranksterism (which reflected just as badly on the officers) struck the actual Emperor of Ethiopia—Menelik II—as particularly funny. When he visited England later that year, he was taunted in the streets by children shouting “Bunga! Bunga!” and denied permission to inspect the navy’s fleet for fear that his visit might cause further embarrassment.

Looking Inside Darwin’s Room (and Also Where Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, & Kipling Did Their Thing)

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Drag (1916)

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

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Annotated Photographs of Beat Writers Featured in The Allen Ginsberg Festival, Starting Today

in Literature, Photography | July 11th, 2013

Starting today, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) begins its four-day celebration of Allen Ginsberg with The Allen Ginsberg Festival in San Francisco, produced in cooperation with The Beat Museum, City Lights Bookstore, and several other organizations. The festival, which runs from the 11thto the 14th of this month, celebrates Ginsberg’s life and art with a host of events (some free, some ranging from $10 to $15 for admission). While the literary tours, panel discussions, and lectures promise to be a treat for those lucky enough to attend, perhaps the centerpiece of the Ginsberg Festival is an exhibition of the poet’s annotated photographs, on view at CJM until September 8th.

The photos, which moved through NYU’s Grey Art Gallery earlier this year, show Ginsberg and his beat buddies in intimate and unguarded moments, such as the snap above of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. In his tidy script handwriting, Ginsberg writes below the photo:

“Now Jack as I warned you far back as 1945, if you keep going home to live with your ‘Memère’ you’ll find yourself wound tighter and tighter in her apron strings till you’re an old man and can’t escape…” William Seward Burroughs camping as an André Gide-ian sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac who listens soberly dead-pan to “the most intelligent man in America” for a funny second’s charade in my living room 206 East 7th Street Apt 16, Manhattan, one evening Fall 1953

Flavorwire has compiled 25 of these photos, including the portrait of the young merchant marine, Allen Ginsberg, below, which he annotates as, “Allen Ginsberg, utility man S.S. John Blair just back from Galveston-Dakar doldrums trip, I handed my camera to the radio-man on the ship’s fantail, smoking what? In New York harbor, circa October 30, 1947.”

As the CJM page notes, “the late 1940s and early 1950s marked a crucial period for Allen Ginsberg as he found his poetic and sexual voices simultaneously.” The photos in this exhibit document not only Ginsberg finding himself, but also finding himself among a group of men—Burroughs, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso—whose restlessness and erudite enthusiasm changed the course of twentieth century literature.

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

Allen Ginsberg’s Personal Recipe for Cold Summer Borscht

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

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Listening to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, (Maybe) the Longest Audio Book Ever Made

in Audio Books, Literature | July 9th, 2013

I’m impressed by the undertaking. Neville Jason and Naxos Audio Books have completed an unabridged audio version of Proust’s epic, seven-part novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Proust published the first volume, Swann’s Way, one hundred years ago, in 1913, and completed the last volume, Time Regained, fourteen years later, in 1927. By that time, Proust had a masterpiece on his hands — a very long masterpiece. The classic (available in our collection of Free eBooks) spans some 3,000 pages and contains more than 1.5 million words. Until now, Remembrance of Things Past has never been available in an unabridged audio format, perhaps because it would amount to the longest audio book ever made (or something approaching that). But Neville Jason has pulled it off, producing a 151-hour recording that’s now available on Audible.com. Below, we’ve provided seven free audio excerpts (one from each volume), and if you care to sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial, you can download any one volume for free. NB: Audible is an Amazon.com subsidiary, and we’re a member of their affiliate program. If Proust isn’t your cup of tea, you can find many other great works in our collection of 630 Free Audio Books.

Swann’s Way