Slow accretion of ice on a window in winter Note: The following post is pulled from the Slow Muse archives. What caught me on the reread was the note left by David Foster Wallace with his final manuscript: “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in […]
David Foster Wallace
The Island Becoming the World
Robinson Crusoe Island Has it happened to you yet? Have the plethora of responses to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, worn your interest thin? If yes, then this isn’t for you. I am not yet finished observing and partaking of the phenom that is DFW, of the increasingly long shadow that has […]
- Aesthetics
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Deep Attention
The publishing of David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, unfinished at the time of his death, has brought on yet another torrent of writing about DFW. I can’t think of another writer whose legacy is shaped quite like his. His writing is brilliant and penetrating, and the cadence of his style is infectious […]
Book Markers: Stay Strong
Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Don DeLillo’s Players (Photo: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) Thank you Sue Halpern for a great article on the New York Review of Books blog. Book markers, unite!! When I saw David Foster Wallace’s annotations at the top of the blog page, […]
Choose Ye This Day
Outside a Hindu shrine in Maharashtra, India In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. –David Foster Wallace If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If […]
I Feel Your Pain
Desert landscape near Alice Springs, Australia I’ve gone through creative dry spells. Everybody does, but when it is happening to you, it is hard to not take it personally and forget that the condition is common. It is easier to talk about it when the episode is over. It’s a little like childbirth: Give me […]
Boredom and Bliss
The essay on the last page of the Sunday Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler this week is provocative. Her topic: Boredom. Ah, that dreaded word. Full of moral implications. Antithetical to everything I learned (and probably inherited through epigenetics) from my pioneer heritage. You never left yourself get bored, and you never admit if […]
Relentless
I’ve given it a week to settle or to slink off. But it just won’t. The profile of David Foster Wallace in last week’s The New Yorker has taken a front row seat, kind of like a big and slightly smelly guy, and will not move to the back. Hats off to D. T. Max, […]
- Creativity
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Going to the Mat To Move Someone
It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still […]