THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AUDIO PROJECT | Audio archive of interviews with, profiles of, readings by, and eulogies to David Foster Wallace. Speak, Butterfly - Issue 8: Home The life and work of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov referenced many symbols, none so much as the butterfly. Butterflies prompted Nabokov’s travels across the United States, exposing him to the culture and physical environment that he would transform into his best-known novel, Lolita. Butterflies motivated his parallel career in science, culminating in a then-ignored evolutionary hypothesis, which would be vindicated 34 years after his death using the tools of modern genetic analysis. And it was the butterfly around which some of Nabokov’s fondest childhood memories revolved. Nabokov was born in St. Lepidoptera and his childhood home were inseparable to Nabokov, an idea he explored in his letters and his science. Even in his scientific writing, hints of the playful wordsmith emerge, as when he calls himself ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.’ In sorting and ordering the Polyomattus, Nabokov identified seven new species, and rearranged the group’s taxonomy.
Joyously Domestic: Crispy Potato Roast I about died when I saw a version of this recipe on Martha Stewart's website. I am a huge potato fanatic and these just looked stunning! I altered a couple of things in her recipe, but followed her technique and concept. I used some pancetta in my version. Bacon may work fine, too. The key to this recipe is getting the potato slices as thin as you can, so prepping the potatoes takes a little time. This is a dish that is super impressive-looking and would really wow at a dinner party! For nutritional value information, you can visit my post of this recipe on My Recipe Magic. Ingredients: 3 tablespoons butter, melted 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 10 - 12 russet potatoes, peeled Kosher salt 1 small onion or 4 shallots, peeled and sliced very thin 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional) 4 - 6 fresh thyme sprigs About 3 ounces pancetta, cubed Directions: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine the oil and melted butter in a small dish. Slice the potatoes as thin as possible crosswise.
David Foster Wallace on Writing, Death, and Redemption by Maria Popova “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.” On May 21, 2005 David Foster Wallace took the podium at Kenyon College and delivered the now-legendary This Is Water, one of history’s greatest commencement addresses — his timeless meditation on the meaning of life and the grueling work required in order to stay awake to the world rather than enslaved by one’s own self-consuming intellect. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” Three years later, on September 12, 2008, Wallace murdered his own terrible master — not by firearms, but by hanging himself. This dark whimsy is what lends literature its mesmerism, and in it Wallace sees both redemption and remedy for our existential dance with anxiety: Donating = Loving
Ten Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries from 2013 In 2013 we lost two Nobel laureates, a revered editor and teacher, plus writers of crime fiction, literary fiction, poetry, history, essays, biographies, screenplays, mega-bestsellers, movie criticism, and memoirs. Here is a highly selective compendium: Evan S. Connell While it may not be accurate to pin Evan S. Connell with that grimmest of labels, “a writer’s writer,” it is probably fair to say that his restless intelligence and refusal to settle into a niche prevented him from attracting as large an audience as he deserved. For many readers, Connell’s most indelible novels are Mrs. Mrs. She really intended to force a discussion on election eve. Connell never married, never owned a computer, never sought notoriety. Chinua Achebe Achebe, who died on March 21 at 82, produced five novels and many short stories over the next three decades. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Elmore Leonard In the matter of Alvin B. Seamus Heaney They seem hundreds of years away. Carolyn Cassady Tom Clancy Oscar Hijuelos
16 Reasons Why Gin Is The Best supposedly fun | david foster wallace Towards the beginning of E Unibus Pluram, Wallace makes the distinction between the observance of the fabricated and the observance of the authentic. On one end of the spectrum, Wallace derides television for its articificiality, its psuedovoyeurism that allows the masses to peer into a world behind the screen, unnoticed and uninterrupted. Wallace describes this one-way mirror, saying “television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself” (Wallace, p. 22). Among many others, one of Wallace’s main qualms with television is the sense of false intimacy it creates with the watcher. While the viewer feels as if they are witnessing the technicolor, private lives of the characters behind the glass, they are in fact viewing the creative whimsy of tv writers, the end product of mass-market demands. What’s more, the actors know that they are being viewed. Enter Wallace in “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”.
A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges Dr. Johnson was already fifty years old. He had published his dictionary, for which he was paid 1,500 pounds sterling—which became 1,600 when his publishers decided to give him one hundred more—when he finished. ….The truth is, in spite of his numerous accomplishments, he had a natural tendency toward idleness. Johnson had a peculiar temperament. ….Johnson was in a bookstore when he met a young man named James Boswell. It could be said that Boswell had a premonition of his destiny. There is something very strange about Boswell, something that has been interpreted in two different ways. He then recounts a series of instances in which Boswell appears as a ridiculous character. Now, let us take a look at the opposite opinion, that of Bernard Shaw. Then we have Boswell, who created the character Johnson. ….So, now we will return to the relationship between Boswell and Johnson. It is true that at times Boswell annoyed him with questions that were difficult to answer.
Run-n-Read As Featured In Reading from an electronic display is difficult for people while performing cardiovascular activities or while riding in a moving vehicle. Run-n-Read, a cool clip-on device, makes reading possible in such dynamic scenarios. Run-n-Read can be used with most cardiovascular workout machines, such as treadmills, elliptical trainers, stepmills, stairmasters, and stationary bikes. It can also help reduce eye strain while riding in a train, bus, or car. You can clip it to your headband or to your shirt. The device tracks your head movements and then moves the text on the screen in real time to always be in sync with your eyes. It's packed with sophisticated electronics - an accelerometer, a low-power micro-controller, and a low energy Bluetooth module - to provide the best experience. Run-n-Read comes with a free mobile application and is compatible with all new generation iOS and Android devices. Run-n-Read also comes with its own gesture recognition system!
David Foster Wallace on Why You Should Use a Dictionary, How to Write a Great Opener, and the Measure of Good Writing By Maria Popova “Readers who want to become writers should read with a dictionary at hand,” Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker asserted in his indispensable guide to the art-science of beautiful writing, adding that writers who are “too lazy to crack open a dictionary” are “incurious about the logic and history of the English language” and doom themselves to having “a tin ear for its nuances of meaning and emphasis.” But the most ardent case for using a dictionary came more than a decade earlier from none other than David Foster Wallace. In late 1999, Wallace wrote a lengthy and laudatory profile of writer and dictionary-maker Bryan A. At one point, the conversation turns to the underappreciated usefulness of usage dictionaries. True to his singular brand of intellectual irreverence, Wallace offers a delightfully unusual usage of the usage dictionary: A usage dictionary is one of the great bathroom books of all time. Reading is a very strange thing.
J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary Fame Last weekend’s revelation that J.K. Rowling is the author of the critically acclaimed and -- until now -- commercially unsuccessful crime novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling” has electrified the book world and solidified Rowling’s reputation as a genuine writing talent: After all, if she can impress the critics without the benefit of her towering reputation, then surely her success is deserved. And yet what this episode actually reveals is the opposite: that Rowling’s spectacular career is likely more a fluke of history than a consequence of her unique genius. Whenever someone is phenomenally successful, whether it’s Rowling as an author, Bob Dylan as a musician or Steve Jobs as an innovator, we can’t help but conclude that there is something uniquely qualifying about them, something akin to “genius,” that makes their successes all but inevitable. The Experiment What we found was highly consistent with the cumulative-advantage hypothesis. False Results (Duncan J.
How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” The other day I was reading a book and I came across a little anecdote. It was about the great Athenian general Themistocles. Before the battle of Salamis, he was locked in a vigorous debate with a Spartan general about potential strategies for defeating the Persians. When I read this, I immediately began a ritual that I have practiced for many years–and that others have done for centuries before me–I marked down the passage and later transferred it to my “commonplace book.” In other posts, we’ve talked about how to read more, which books to read, how to read books above your level and how to write. What is a Commonplace book? A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Not only did all these famous and great individuals do it. How to Do It (Right) –Read widely. -Wisdom, not facts. -Use them!
What Would Machiavelli Do? The popular imagination gets Machiavelli all wrong — he was a patron saint of class struggle and a staunch republican. I keep a portrait of Machiavelli over my desk at work — an interior design choice that, I have learned, dismays some of my coworkers. Amid a recent mid-afternoon zone out, I received an email from one of them with the title “Who Wants to Serve a Billionaire?” The message contained a link to an article in the Guardian about a growing group of international multi-billionaires, their so-called “superyachts,” and the desperate lower-class Britons and Eastern Europeans who serve them as deckhands. The report is an indelible document of our time, something like the “Newsreel” scenes from John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. Trainees must memorise correct forms of address from a training manual, which informs them that it is unacceptable to ask “Why?” Like Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Machiavelli is one of those canonical thinkers who are much more widely quoted than read.