Filed under: Uncategorized, Visual, Words, Work | Tags: burn after reading, david foster wallace, fight club, mcsweeneys, micah blue smaldone, n+1, office space
– In this week’s Phoenix, I review Micah Blue Smaldone’s new album, The Red River. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to listen to a local album and not have to grade it on a curve. This gentleman is a massive talent.
– Continuing on the David Foster Wallace eulogy watch (because that’s all I care to pay attention to this week): a friend and colleague wrote a beautiful one for the Boston Phoenix; Benjamin Kunkel has another for n+1; the McSweeney’s thread continues to be a little bit heartbreaking; and the New Yorker has finally chimed in (and made a couple more stories of Wallace’s available).
– One surefire way to make me like Fight Club less: compare it to fucking Office Space. Can’t convey to you all how depressing it is to me that people enjoy that movie. It’s even more frustrating than the revisionist blather about The Big Lebowski being a Great Movie. I beseech anyone who likes Office Space to read this book and refer to it ad nauseum instead.
– Speaking of the Coen Bros, I saw Burn After Reading this past weekend, and I think I liked it. Maybe a lot, even. I’ll try to check it out one more time before I comment further.
– Via Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, these maps ranking each state by qualities of character are pretty fascinating. Apparently, Maine is both one of the most extraverted and least open states in the country. That means we’re shallow, right?
– And we’re continuing other peoples’ David Foster Wallace tributes week. I highly doubt anyone reading this is as big a closet tennis nut as I am, but I forgot how awesome DFW’s profile of Roger Federer in the NYT‘s sports magazine is. (Gawker’s got a handy wrapup of freely available online articles.) The McSweeney’s tributes – including bits by Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith – have begun, and the reminiscences by his former students almost made me cry. More of those coming throughout the week. And at Zoilus, Carl Wilson gives another lovely tribute, and links to an online community of DFW freaks, where I take it there are loads more stories and articles.
– Also, I forgot to provide a link last week to my review of Why?’s album, Alopecia. He’s at SPACE Gallery on Saturday.
Harper’s magazine has just made their collection of David Foster Wallace stories freely available as PDF files. Click here for the list. I don’t recognize all of the titles, but at least a few of these would later be featured in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster under different titles. “Shipping Out…,” from Jan 1996 (later retitled as “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”), is hilarious, essential reading. I’ll be going back to it tonight.
One of the unique tragedies of a death like this is that no one could have written a more precise eulogy than David Foster Wallace. Of anyone. The man’s ability to grasp a person, moment, or occasion in all of its complexities and eccentricities was quite literally jawdropping, something beyond what you thought one human mind was capable of. He was as authoritative as he was encyclopedic. It’s impossible to read his non-fiction works and not come out more alert, thoughtful, and most of all, humble.
So, to read. Yes, read Infinite Jest (or yes, try to read it again). But more, read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a giddy rollercoaster of opinions and perspectives. It’s a book I do and will return to annually. Read his piece on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign (which was recently released as a stand-alone book). Read this simple, disarming fiction story from the New Yorker last year. Read what will likely be a lovely week of remembrances at McSweeney’s. Read this one at Salon. Ignore the needlessly critical one at the Times. Keep reading. We’ve got some serious slack to pick up.
of Maine 