The Howling Fantods

The first of a few posts 'celebrating' 20 years of The Howling Fantods.

Check out The Wayback Machine's earliest scrape of my website. This one is the Jan 1999 Wayback capture (it looked even worse earlier than this!) - how on earth did I think this was palatable?

I was hosting on Geocities at the time (it was free and I was poor) anyone remember the address?http://www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/8175/dfw.htm

Athens and Acropolis were nods to culture and my Greek heritage (and I think the areas 'literature' sites were supposed to be hosted) and the 75 in 8175 was for the year I was born.

So it's March 1st here in Australia which means it's now 20 years that I've been updating The Howling Fantods. I've never been one to celebrate big occasions, but it feels like I should at least acknowledge the moment.

Thanks to everyone out there for reading, promoting, supporting and sending me stuff. Special thanks to guest posters and every single person I've met that has thanked me for doing this. Thanks also to my family - I know there are times when The Howling Fantods has taken up an almost unhealthy proportion of my time.

Do you have a memory about reading this site (no matter how small) that you'd like to share? Hit up the comments below or share it with me here.

I've got some things I'll be revisiting over the next month. I hope you can join me.

Nick

The Wallace criticism publications keep rolling in! Big thanks to Lucas Thompson and Bloomsbury for my copy of Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature. I can't wait to get stuck into it, the table of contents looks incredible. A very interesting direction in Wallace studies.

I always like dipping into group reads of Infinite Jest as they occur. Two that are currently in progress are the GURGLL and Sacred Jest reads.

Glasgow University's Reading Group for Length Literature (GURGLL) is in its fifteenth week of reading Infinite Jest - the blog summarises their discussion, but I particularly love their word of the week from the section. This week it's whingeocide (p. 441). You can find them on Facebook too.

The other group read, Sacred Jest, has started only very recently and is reading Infinite Jest as though it were a sacred text. It's not a lens with which I'm particularly enamoured, but as with all group reads, there are numerous interesting observations that are more than enough to keep me checking in. Follow along on twitter @SacredJest too.

Massive thanks to the teams that run group reads of this magnitude!

The David Foster Wallace podcast, The Great Concavity, keeps getting better and better.

Episode 25 has just been released, but since I last posted, there have been some absolutely cracking episodes!

Episode 21 - Clare Hayes Brady - An excellent episode, one of my favourites.

Episode 22 - Nicolas Giacobone - One of the co-writer's on Academy Award winning film Birdman!

Episode 23 - Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts

Episode 24 - 2016 Year in Review

Episode 25 - Lee Konstantinou

(Follow the show on twitter @ConcavityShow and subscribe to the podcast here)