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.

I went to see "Easy A" last weekend and movie wasteland or no movie wasteland I enjoyed it more than I expected.

A tidbit for the reading-oriented: The plot is a retelling or reframing of THE SCARLET LETTER -- the Hester Prynne figure being Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone), whose opening transgression is telling her best friend she slept with a (fictional) date. Olive's class in school is reading THE SCARLET LETTER and there's a running joke about her fellow students watching the movie instead of reading the book. Olive jokes to the camera that if viewers are not going to read the book they should rent "the old version" -- I think the 1926 Lillian Gish version, judging by clips we see in "Easy A" -- and not the Demi Moore adaptation because it deviates too much from the book. Later, her English teacher (Thomas Haden Church, who is very funny and underused) jokes about the number of papers he's getting about how Hester Prynne takes a lot of baths -- apparently a feature of the Moore version (really?), although he knows and gets Olive to admit that she actually read the book.

I haven't seen the 1995 Roland Joffé version they're talking about, but I knew it won a couple of Razzies and, given that I wasn't suggested or made to watch it when we studied THE SCARLET LETTER, suspected it might not be of the best caliber. There's also a case file on it in Nathan Rabin's new book MY YEAR OF FLOPS (if I may so shamelessly plug) in which he calls it a "beautiful, idiotic dream" and writes, "It seems apt that a novel about infidelity should inspire one of the least faithful literary adaptations in American film."

You'd think high school cheating would have evolved by now from the hoary days of my youth. (The popularity of Cliff's Notes, for example, given how obvious they look, has been always a mystery to me... as the sort of smug A student who would never use them.) At the rate of adaptation we're on today, English teachers of the future should hope every movie made from a book for the next 30 years is unfaithful enough to prompt such blunders as Olive's classmates are prone. But that's a terrifying future; in adaptation I always hope, as this blog's string of disappointed movie reviews can testify. It won't stop the cheaters anyway; they'll only find another workaround.

Post-Its: Oprah umps the doubleheader

Photo of the audience at the Brooklyn Book Festival's Happy Ending reading from the L.A. Times' Jacket Copy, with "proof" that I was there. (I promise this isn't going to become one of those blogs.)

Oprah.com: Oprah's latest book club selection is Uwem Akpan's SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, a collection of short stories first published in 2008 by a Nigerian Jesuit priest with an MFA. The Washington Post broke the news yesterday, saying the distributor had "accidentally" leaked the choice. Did you have your money on BRIGHT-SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA? You lost. (That's the title of the new Ehrenreich.)

Via the Book Bench: A new T-shirt company has created a line-up of baseball jerseys for an imaginary 19th-century-American-lit team. So many questions: Is it safe to mix fictional characters with nonfiction authors? How are Hester Prynne's reflexes? And would even the biggest Melville fan buy a shirt that has the number 1 and "Dick" on it?

NYT: Another literary movie goes head to head with "Bright Star" this weekend for the readin' crowd -- an Australian-helmed adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE starring John Malkovich as a recently dismissed college professor. Normally it would be a bad thing that I had never heard of this before, but perhaps it was just on the festival circuit because the consensus is good.

Via the Manhattan Users Guide: When was ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND banned and why? Most of the other titles on this kitschy Banned Books bracelet I recognize, but that one stumped me. (Is too relevant.)

Slate: Matthew Schneier's round-up of guidebooks for men on how to be men is entertaining, not least for its discussion of yeomanliness versus gentlemanliness. Having seen the other side of how men's magazines come up with their tips, though, I'm not sure I would trust any of them.

NYT/ The Lede: You probably haven't spared a thought as to what Osama bin Laden wants you to read, but he's coming through for you. Check out the books an al Qaeda leader wants all Americans to read at your own risk -- after he saw it, Glenn Beck swore never to read again.

Via Idealist: Here's a category of Things Named For Writers I never contemplated before. The first annual Runyon 5K on November 15 will memorialize journalist and short-story writer Damon Runyon with a bit of a lope through Yankee Stadium. I have not been in the new stadium yet, and I wouldn't call myself a fan, but the proceeds are going to cancer research, and this sounds downright cool. I... am seriously thinking about doing this. (Lobotomy went well, by the way.)

Likely last ever Infinite Summer corner: This week after one of their numbers was nice enough to link to my Brooklyn Book Festival coverage I joined wallace-l, the David Foster Wallace listserv, although when they find out how new I am to the magic of DFW they will probably kick me off. But that's where I learned from New York magazine via Sarah Weinman that -- are you ready for this piece of trivia -- DFW was a creative writing classmate at Amherst of none other than Dan Brown. Yes, that Dan Brown. My mind is blown like I just watched The Entertainment. (Now they've got another reason to get rid of me, my horrible jokes.)