No One Is Good Enough To Play David Foster Wallace Onscreen, Because Reasons

My Twitter timeline set itself on fire last night over the news that there will be a David Foster Wallace movie that is not a documentary. The film is technically an adaptation of David Lipsky's ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF, based on a Rolling Stone article where Lipsky followed DFW around on his INFINITE JEST book tour. (It's almost all transcripts; Lipsky fleshed it out after the author's death.) Playwright Donald Margulies ("Time Stands Still") will write the script, James Ponsoldt (the good-but-not-spectacular "The Spectacular Now") will direct and Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg will costar as DFW and Lipsky. Right now it's called "The End of the Tour."

It's a great day to be a David Foster Wallace fan and understand what this all could mean! So why is the general temperature of the discussion "No, not now, not ever, wrong"?

I'm with the New Yorker's TV critic Emily Nussbaum: I think the casting (which most people are focusing on) has a lot of potential. Just because Jason Segel has done mostly comedic work so far doesn't rule him out, and some of his turns on "How I Met Your Mother" have been very dramatic. Eisenberg would have to tamp down some of the smarminess he has deployed well in roles like Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network," but I believe in him too. We should be jumping up and down, this is a book about a cult author (sorry, but it's true) that will expose him to millions more people. 

The bottom line, though, is that no one will be considered acceptable for this role by the literary community because it's just too soon and the disappointment will hurt too much. If Meryl Streep had been cast and Martin Scorsese were directing, it would be the same. (I'd for sure see that movie as well, though. Someone Photoshop me a Streep with a white bandanna, please.) It's just -- stop throwing a fit, okay? We are become caricatures of ourselves. 

Infinite summer is infinite

If you missed 2009's Infinite Summer, you can read INFINITE JEST with an online group again this summer at Summer of Jest. Better yet, it's organized by the same people, who provided a modest update on the David Foster Wallace field since back then. They've already started but if you're just catching up, you're only 200 pages behind so get readin'.

I've been feeling a certain degree of nostalgia for 2009 recently and this definitely compounds it! Sadly my copy of IJ is summering in New Jersey in a warehouse right now.

via Peter W. Knox

GIF Reaction Friday: "Arrested Development" Returns May 26 Tribute Edition

The cumulative effects of this week including family in town, a surprise trip and a band of widely variable weather:

Here are some great things to check out across the Internets:

• Regular Commenter D.H. Sayer describes how a chance encounter with an unfamiliar name in a David Foster Wallace profile led him to discover the author Carol De Chellis Hill. A great example of the serendipity reading can provide. 
• My sometimes hometown haunt Boswell Book Company gets a splashy profile in Milwaukee Magazine for having the gumption to survive and thrive in this digital age (via The Billfold). But I still find its story partly tragic in that it was born out of the demise of a four-location indie chain (Harry W. Schwartz) and thus will always be a little bittersweet. Guess I'd better make my visits more frequent.  
• A new imprint based here in Brooklyn will reissue old YA books from the 1930s to the 1970s and bring them back into print. The name behind Lizzie Skurnick Books should be familiar to some of you; her column Fine Lines on Jezebel.com revisiting the young-adult books of her past led to a collection of essays on the same topic, titled SHELF DISCOVERY. Congratulations! 
• The great Margaret Atwood reads a story by Mavis Gallant in this month's New Yorker fiction podcast. Will the edition of Gallant's diaries about being a struggling writer in Europe be out this year? A woman can dream!
• New York note: McNally Jackson and Housing Works are hosting a downtown literary festival next weekend, including lectures, walking tours and after-parties. Better yet, it's free and you don't have to camp in a field to be there!

Lighter than a memory, anyway

I love this even though it is slightly ruined by knowing how DFW treated some of the women in his life (in short: terribly) and some of his comments in re. his fans on book tour (in short: piggish). Biographies ruin everything.

Via Peter W. Knox

On bold, fresh starts

My paperback copy of Jonathan Franzen's debut novel THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY contains in the front matter one of my favorite absurd blurbs of all time. What's wrong with this picture?

"Franzen's tour de force (to call it a 'first novel' is to do it an injustice) is a sinister fun-house-mirror reflection of urban America in the 1980s... There's a lot of reality out there. THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY, in its larger-than-life way, is a brave and exhilarating attempt to master it." --Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

Still don't see it? Let me isolate it for you:

"To call it a 'first novel' is to do it an injustice." --Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

It is factually true that THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY was Franzen's first published novel (whether it was his first written, who even knows -- but probably not). There are pejorative things to be said about first novels that have traits we associate with them -- clumsiness in plotting, overly clever character names or traits, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to detail. But a fact is neutral -- you can't call it unjust unless you are in a presidential debate.* Anyway, from what I can find Upchurch is still the critic at the Seattle Times lo these 24 years later, so maybe he can clarify that that's what he meant.

If that's indeed what he meant, then Upchurch is incorrect because Franzen's debut does bear some of these thumbprints of The Debut Novel as I have suggested. Packed with characters who get one scene in the spotlight and are barely mentioned again, inconsistent in timeline, it sprawls completely out of control and the ending doesn't do much to rein it in. But its biggest failure is also its biggest strength: The novel introduces a high concept and sticks to it even when introducing a thousand other things in the middle. It's a crazy concept, but it interested me enough to pull me through a crowd of largely unlikeable errors.

The conceit that Franzen is faithful to, to a fault, can be summed up like this: "What if the political conspiracy a bunch of cranky old white men think is happening in their city is real?" The city in question is St. Louis (the titular 27th city -- I assume that was its ranking in the 80s when this book was published, it's now something like 58th) and the triggering event is the appointment of a new police captain, S. Jammu, from India. Jammu's commitment to cleaning the city up is called into question by a number of successful businessmen who view her as an interloper (some of them with clear racist overtones) and who are skeptical of her popularity and determination; the book is largely told through the perspective of one of them, construction magnate Martin Probst, best known for owning the company that built the Arch. A few even posit that the coincidence of Jammu's arrival and the marriage of another of the city's leading lights to an Indian heiress is proof that there's a conspiracy to change St. Louis' direction. And guess what? There is! (I didn't spoiler-tag it because you find that out in the first 50 pages -- well ahead of poor Probst.)

This week I finally finished D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY, in which Franzen plays a minor role as DFW's friend who encouraged him to write more sincerely and less to cleverness. When they met Franzen was (I think) already 2 published books in to Wallace's 1, and appeared at least to Wallace to have more direction in his life; Max suggests that Wallace looked up to him more than he envied him, although there was probably some of both on both sides.

This charge to write moral, sincere fiction is a little funny but not outright contradictory when looking at THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY, because I did feel sympathetic toward Martin Probst -- to a point. Like Charlie Chaplin, he is caught up in this great mechanism of city politics that he doesn't understand, even though he believes he does. The soul of this book is still fairly cynical, though; having read Wallace's first novel THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM I felt more attuned to its central character Lenore's search for meaning and self-definition. (Then again, maybe I would have anyway given that Lenore's a 20something recent graduate and not a 50something captain of industry.) In any event, it seems that Franzen took his own advice.

*ZING! Guess what I spent too much time watching last night! 

Wallaceblogging: What should we call my morning

"I'm still riding on this high from the DFW biography, so hey, why don't I break out this Slate podcast on INFINITE JEST?"

"Hi, I'm Katie Roiphe..."

(I'm exaggerating, she wasn't terrible, but she clearly wasn't a fan.)

Wallaceblogging: Ghost story

Last night I went to see D.T. Max read from his new biography of David Foster Wallace, EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY. Max is soft-spoken with floppy bangs and referred to Wallace often by his first name, describing writing the book as an "incredible blessing" of spending "3 years in his presence." He often began his sentences with "One thing you need to know about David..." Even when addressing questions about Wallace's addictions and death, he seemed happy to be talking about him. This was often touching but occasionally weird.

I haven't had a chance to crack the biography yet, so the two excerpts he read were new to me -- well, at least one of them was. A passage Max read about how Wallace started dating Karen Green (who he would later marry) offered an unforeseen view of his sentimental, eccentric side, without foreshadowing. The other passage Max read, about Wallace's stay in a halfway house outside of Boston during his mid-20s, was familiar to me in that most of his real-life experiences in there were chunked directly into INFINITE JEST -- so directly, in fact, that some details had to be changed in draft to make them less libelous. (Among the resemblances Max pointed out: a house supervisor/ addict named "Big Craig" believed to be the inspiration for Don Gately, who in interviews with Max said he was suspicious of Wallace because he thought he was looking for material. Accurate.)

The book grew from a Rolling Stone story Max wrote (sadly no longer online) called "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace," published about six weeks after his death. Max's 2009 New Yorker story "The Unfinished" about Wallace working on THE PALE KING. (Thanks to Peter W. Knox for the correction; I mixed up Max and fellow DFW-studier David Lipsky, who wrote the aforementioned Rolling Stone story. I regret the error a lot.) Max described one of the drivers to write the biography as the sense that the story left out the "part that was funny" about Wallace in its focus on his unhappier episodes, and that its structure and the way it was pegged to Wallace's suicide made that death feel inevitable. One challenge he said he faced in writing it was Wallace's tendency to write to his public, even in private letters and a diary he kept for his sponsor, and his connected exaggerations and inventions.

An example he gave, which Max described as a standout instance of truth distortion in Wallace's journalism, was describing John McCain's press liaisons shrinking away from him in "Up, Simba," about the senator's 2000 presidential bid; in fact, other reporters there noted that Wallace and the campaign had a good, joking working relationship. Surely a lot of biographers face this challenge, but maybe here it's magnified by Wallace's style, at play with the same forces that make fact-checking him difficult.

The theater director who gave us David Foster Wallace onstage is going after Franzen next with an adaptation of his essay "House for Sale."

"Fiction for me is a conversation for me between me and something that May Not Be Named"

D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace is out next week; here's an excerpt. New Yorkers, I hear the author is reading on September 4 at that weird underground bunker Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side.

Wallaceblogging: LA BROMA INFINITA

My Spanish was never good enough to be able to read this even at its peak, but I find this cover both unbearably creepy and strangely compelling, despite it having nothing to do with the book.

Wallaceblogging: Well played, "The Simpsons"

This is a screenshot from last night's episode, "A Supposedly Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again." (Source: the Howling Fantods.)

Pulitzer Prize 2012: And the envelope is... empty

Very funny! Now go back in your room and don't put the ceremonial branches on the fire until you're finished.

"I think it's an outrageous insult. Only one finished real novel among the finalists, AND they can't pick a winner. DO YOUR FRAKKIN' JOB." --Ron Charles of the Washington Post Book World

Wallaceblogging: Taking a tennis ball to the face for literature

Over the weekend I went to "A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (after David Foster Wallace)," a conceptual theater piece based on the work of DFW in Long Island City, Queens. The performance consisted of five actors listening to Wallace read from several of his works (and clips from an extended interview) on headphones and simultaneously performing them, including when audible the mannerisms they could hear in his voice. Sometimes just one actor spoke, and sometimes they all did, but it wasn't so much a performance of Wallace the man as of Wallace the body of work; for one thing, four of the five actors were female and none of them wore, say, the characteristic white bandana or some other kind of physical signifier linking them to the man.

The pieces read include "Forever Overhead" and "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," from BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, the 9/11 essay "The View From Mrs. Thompson's" (PDF) published in Rolling Stone and the titularly referenced essay (PDF).

I heard about this show from fellow Foster fanatic Peter W. Knox and it sounded like exactly the kind of 'thing' I would be 'into' even if it weren't about DFW, being into various forms of experimental theater and small, crazy productions. What struck me the hardest about "Supposedly Fun Thing" was how individual it seemed in the moment. Without knowing anything about creator and director Daniel Fish (although I found out after I had seen him direct a Charles Mee play in 2008) his curation of the particular pieces felt very personal, even if it wasn't at all. Undoubtedly if I had been tasked to assemble the same piece I would pick a few different passages, if not completely different. (There was nothing from THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM nor INFINITE JEST included, to begin with.) Anyone with an affinity for a particular author will take different pieces away from it.

While nothing onstage was as interesting as the text being read to me (although I appreciated the sound cue for "Thirteen") and I found one actor's pronunciation actually subtracting from the work she was saying, watching this show, being gathered for it, felt like the kind of public event I never was able to go to for this author. Living authors get book tours, when they're lucky, but it's harder to organize read-alouds for the ones who can't. At the beginning (knowing almost nothing about what was going to happen) I wasn't convinced that being read aloud is the best delivery mechanism for Wallace's text, and you guessed it, I'm still not convinced that it is. Yet it has a scrabbly rhythm all its own, even one that might call for an impossibly Herculean set of lungs.

David Foster Wallace would have been 50 today.

Wallaceblogging: David, Jon and Jeff and everything after that

Today among other things I read "Just Kids," Evan Hughes' feature in New York magazine about (a little about) the relationships between David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and most timely Jeffrey Eugenides (whose new novel THE MARRIAGE PLOT comes out this week) when they were young, frustrated, up-and-coming writers. Not a lot of its information is new or surprising, but it does provide some tidbits like Eugenides' firing from his publishing job that will further flavor the stew for people who enjoy things like this, and I am a person who enjoys things like this.

The Franzen/DFW friendship is fairly well trod particularly in the past year or two as Franzen has spoken and written about it (most notably in the New Yorker). I had no idea Eugenides was friends with them, although I appreciated the early reference to the road trip he took with fellow graduate of the best university ever Rick Moody after graduation. (Moody covers a little of this in his memoir THE BLACK VEIL, which somewhat addresses his literary ambitions before getting down to the business of linking his addictive history with the man he believes to have been his Puritan ancestor, as told about in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil.") Nor does it address, although I'm sure this will be discussed in some interview soon, what in the blue hay Eugenides has been doing for the past 9 years since MIDDLESEX came out, whether he lives in Europe now (I want to say it's Paris?)

I guess this is my disgruntled way of saying I wish the essay had been longer -- say at least the length of the Atlantic cover story on single women in the U.S. which I also read today (, is also worth a read,  could also be book-length etc.)

As to how it relates to THE MARRIAGE PLOT, I believe that was just a convenient temporal hook; although the book is about 20somethings with ambitions, they aren't writerly ones.

What draws me to these pieces, personally, is not just the temptation of some long-preserved literary gossip, the hiss of a jar lid being opened, the whiff of something musty and strange. The glimpses of these writers who were not all that noble and good to each other, nor easy on each others' work, nor frank about their jealousy for each other, are also nice... but not just that either. I think it's because of the coincidence as presented here of these authors all coming up at roughly the same amount of time and being friends, or friends of sorts, what you prefer.

I'm sure there were gaps in time and communication Hughes elided to make his portrait and I don't begrudge him doing so, to overcome the odds of having this kind of group persist over time and varying levels of success. It humanizes them and makes them figures of envy at the same time.

Also, whenever the city of Syracuse decides to start offering authors-who-lived-here-for-a-while tours I will be the first one standing next to the tour guide, expectantly. Or, road trip? I probably have at least two weeks before it starts to snow there.

"'Cause an English major will get me, like, any gig that I want"

John Krasinski educates Diablo Cody, author, about David Foster Wallace.

Music Video By The Decemberists Invokes INFINITE JEST's Eschaton

Sorry we need to digest this so we're not doing anything else for the rest of the day.

Video is directed by Michael Schur of "Parks and Recreation" and Mose Schrute fame. Source: NPR's All Songs Considered.

Notes:
1. The beanies. The beanies!!
2. The bandanna'd one I assume is Jenny Conley, who just returned to the Decemberists' tour after taking most of the summer fighting breast cancer. Don't mess with her.
3. Is it just me or were you also imagining the students at ETA as somewhat older and less conventionally attractive? I mean, the age thing is just a chronological error in my mind but something else is off.
4. For more like this, although without the literary tie-ins, check out the Decemberists' "Sixteen Military Wives" -- probably my favorite song by them.
5. If BHD (bookworm hipster douchebag) could be assessed on a score from 1 to 10, this video would probably get a 9. Agree/disagree?

Maud Newton's right about two things in her essay "Another Thing To Sort Of Pin On David Foster Wallace": Qualifiers have snuck into our written language recently, and the Internet has a lot to do with it. But I disagree with her diagnosis of this type of language as "soothing." -- I personally find it interruptive at first until I get the hang of the rhythm of it. If anything I strive to eliminate those qualifiers from speaking and let them slide when I'm writing, say, a blog post. (Also to consider: Have qualifiers truly -- ha! -- been sneaking into the written work as a whole, or is it largely confined to online writing? Just because it's more common in this medium doesn't say anything about the medium as a whole. Given how much of, say, INFINITE JEST is from the perspective of one teenager or another, that's a more accurate picture of how they talk and put word pictures together. There are far fewer qualifiers in a work like EVERYTHING AND MORE.) Ultimately, the argument takes a turn into "There is the correct way to write, and then there are the other ways."

NYC: Center for Fiction Reading Groups announced for fall

Thomas Mann, David Foster Wallace, Herman Melville, et al. "For information on our ongoing Proust groups, click here"? Don't mind if I do! Maybe I also could read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME in a year!

But wait... people will pay for the same kind of question-asking I do here for free?

STOP READING THIS BLOG RIGHT NOW and pay me my $2. And I promise I will never refer to "writer's cannons," because for the love. (It's in the PALE KING blurb. I know, right?!)

Top 10 Books Of 2011 So Far (The Freedom To Judge!)

Published in 2011
Kate Christensen, THE ASTRAL
Tina Fey, BOSSYPANTS
Douglas Kennedy, THE MOMENT
Jim Knipfel, THE BLOW-OFF
Arthur Phillips, THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR

Published earlier
Brooke Berman, NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Vera Brittain, TESTAMENT OF YOUTH
Glen David Gold, CARTER BEATS THE DEVILKathrine Switzer, MARATHON WOMAN
David Foster Wallace, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM