The Howling Fantods

Katie Roiphe's Sunday Book Review essay in the New York Times, The Naked and the Conflicted, considers the representations of sex in novels by "Great Male Novelists" with some discussion of DFW and Infinite Jest. (Thanks again, Adam)

 

 

Having read some spectacularly intelligent refutations to Roiphe's essay (particularly the Wallace parts) over at wallace-l I'm very pleased Seth Colter Walls has responded at length over at The Awl with An Incredibly Un-Fun Misreading of David Foster Wallace that Katie Roiphe Should Never Do Again. Seth writes:

 

The Guardian has posted Living in the memory  A celebration of the great writers who died in the past decade. It includes a remembrance of DFW by George Saunders - which itself is a shorter version of his talk at the New York memorial. (Thanks, Adam)

I've been following the great Noughtie List maintained by Jenni Leder over at Kottke.org and thought I'd link to one of today's highlights.  Sam Anderson's When Lit Blew Into Bits over at the New York Mag - it contains more than just passing reference to DFW.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave me permission to post her wallace-l report of the DFW Session at MLA09 here on the fantods, but before I got my act together she'd already posted it to her blog, Planned Obsolescence. Thanks for the update, Kathleen.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Hi, Kathleen!) was a member of the DFW panel at MLA09 and posted some news about the session to wallace-l. It sounded like a very interesting session, with some great presenters, hopefully I'll be able to post more about it later.

 

Michael Pietsch was also a panel member and spoke about The Pale King:

 

Kathleen's report revealed:

• DFW had been working on TPK since 1996.
• It's had a number of working titles: "Glitterer," "SJF "(which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and "What is Peoria For?"
• Some of the pieces of short fiction collected elsewhere are chapters of the novel including "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Incarnations of Burned Children." (No clarification if this means they are part of TPK, Nick)
• Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, an so forth. (Check out the DFW Research notes at the bottom of the page here)
• There are more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. (With a number of publication date changes already I'd say this is not yet set in stone, Nick)
• The subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity.
• The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled "An Unfinished Novel"; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we've heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn't there to argue with.

(Thanks for taking such detailed notes, Kathleen! Check out her blog, Planned Obsolescence)

Here's the final new content item for the thesis page.

 

Zac Farber contacted me early in December about a short paper he had written about DFW's relationship with his editors. It is an excellent piece of work, and does a great job of bringing together comments by DFW and various people that have edited his work or worked with him. The best thing about this paper is that it draws from numerous articles and interviews that I'd read before but never put together in quite this way.

 

I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did. Thanks, Zac.

 

Zac Farber's ‘Neurotic and Obsessive’ but ‘Not too Intansigent or Defensive’: Editing David Foster Wallace (pdf)