Saturday, September 13, 2008

David Foster Wallace

Author David Foster Wallace has died. He apparently hanged himself in his Los Angeles area home. He was 46.

I spent the day with Wallace in 1997, shortly after he'd received the MacArthur Foundation grant and while he was on the road touring for the publication of Infinite Jest, and interviewed him for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

David Foster Wallace sits at a conference table in the International Writers Center at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, sipping coffee and chewing toothpicks, an oral substitute for the cigarettes he forswore a few months earlier.

"I'm 35 years old," the author of Infinite Jest says as he begins to describe himself. "I've been doing this for 13 years. I think I'm pretty good, but I don't think I'm real good yet."

This is a rare moment of conciseness for Wallace, whose prose is filled with convoluted but perfectly logical sentences that sometimes seem to go on for pages. Hailed by critics as the most gifted chronicler of his generation, he clearly doesn't believe — or read — his own press coverage.

Although his first two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, showed the promise of a rising new writer, Wallace really caught the attention of critics last year with Infinite Jest, his second novel. It's a 1,079-page work set mostly at a tony tennis academy and a drug rehabilitation halfway house in the near future.

Infinite Jest is actually an assortment of loosely related stories. At its center is the tale of three brothers, the Incandenzas, and the shadow cast over them by their father's suicide. A side plot concerns a band of wheelchair-bound terrorists seeking to control the eponymous "Infinite Jest," a film believed to be so entertaining that it puts anyone who views it into a blissed-out haze. Another side plot follows Don Gately, a drug addict who will found a new religion.

It is a complex book that Wallace insists is just as long and involved as it needs to be.

"The version that I turned in was about 500 pages longer than what came out," he says, "which in and of itself isn't terminal for me, but there's a lot of that 500 pages that didn't really need to be in there. It was very hard for me to listen to the editor, but I did it."

When Little, Brown published Infinite Jest, the book hit store shelves accompanied by an intense six-month publicity campaign. That, coupled with the critical notice Wallace's previous work had garnered, established the media-shy writer as the new literary celebrity.

Wallace, however, is pragmatic about the "publicity tsunami."

"Because of the economics of selling books right now, it has a lot to do with the big stores and with (the publishers) not getting a lot of returns," he says.

"The publishers don't really care if anyone actually reads it, they just want (consumers) to buy it from Barnes & Noble so they don't get a lot of copies back.

"I would rather that fewer people bought it and the people who bought it actually read it, but that's coming from my own ego."

His ego, Wallace acknowledges, is fragile and a large part of why he doesn't care to read reviews of his work.

The high that comes from celebrity, he says, is too seductive and too dangerous to the work of writing to succumb to it. Although first noting his respect for their work, he points to the examples of friends and contemporaries who enjoyed early success and weren't as sheltered from the hype.

"I thought, for instance, Bret Easton Ellis' book Less Than Zero — it's not Dante, but for the guy's age and for the moment — there was magic in it," Wallace says. "And I thought the same thing about Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City."

Wallace tries to put the attention paid to him in perspective, and he gets a lot of help from his friends.

"I'm protected in a lot of ways that I think certain other people aren't," he says. "I'll have this chat with a newspaper, which will mess me up for a few days because it makes me feel more important than I really am, but then it'll go away and I'll go home and my closest friends aren't writers and life is very real."

Home for Wallace is near the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., where he teaches writing and literature. He grew up in Urbana, where his father was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois and his mother an English professor at a community college.

"I mostly teach the freshman classes that the other professors don't want to teach and think I'm very gracious to do so when in fact I much prefer it," Wallace says.

Part of the joy of teaching entry-level courses, Wallace says, is introducing his students to works that engage them on their own turf.

"There's an Amy Homes story called 'A Real Doll' about a pubescent boy's affair with his sister's Barbie doll and that story's actually created a few literature majors at ISU," Wallace says. "They had no idea that a story could be that sick and smart and spiritually sophisticated and speak a language that's the same language as their own."

Wallace is taking the year off from teaching, thanks in part to a fellowship he received earlier this year from the MacArthur Foundation, the organization behind the so-called "genius grants." The five-year award, worth up to $75,000 annually, has given the author the freedom to concentrate on his own work.

While giving him the luxury of a sabbatical, the grant has also brought an odd kind of pressure into Wallace's life.

"There are a whole lot of things about it that are real nice that aren't what people would imagine," Wallace says. "They very nicely did a thing in my hometown newspaper that made it sound like you get all the money at once and it's tax-free, so every friend of mine who is some wacko investor came to me with ideas about silver futures and like that. In fact, what it is is like five years of a teaching salary.

"But I quit smoking a few months ago, so I haven't been working very well. It's very easy to run this guilt thing on myself, like when your parents are paying for college and you're screwing off. You feel like 'Oh, God, I just cost the MacArthur Foundation 50 dollars and all I did was watch a movie.'"

Wallace is working on several projects now, mostly short fiction. He says he feels no real pressure to produce another work on the scale of Infinite Jest anytime in the near future.

"I don't have any real desire to have a best seller," he says, "mostly because I think the sorts of books that become best sellers are not really books. They're sort of like television you can carry around with you."

He's content just to write and enjoy his time away from academia. He's not concerned with the critics who have branded him the literary spokesman for his generation.

"I feel that there's such an irony about anybody talking about a spokesman for my generation," Wallace says. "By definition, there can't be a spokesperson because there isn't a collective.

"I do love the term 'Generation X,' though. I don't know why people roll their eyes at that.

"A generation identified by a variable. That's deep."

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Friday, July 20, 2007

Weekend not so Harry

Well, my weekend productivity outlook suddenly took a turn for the upside: I realized today that although eight months ago, I'd pre-ordered the newest (and last) Harry Potter book to be delivered on the day of its release, I mistakenly told Amazon to send it to my office, not my home. I won't be in tomorrow and no one will be around to receive it, so the earliest I'll have The Deathly Hallows in my hands is Monday.

That opens up a wide window of time tomorrow and Sunday for house cleaning. Woo!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Tomorrow is Mouse Day in San Francisco

The City by the Bay celebrates my fictional avatar tomorrow, June 12; San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has declared it "Michael Tolliver Day", celebrating, among other things, Armistead Maupin's newest novel, Michael Tolliver Lives. Therein, we find Mouse a little older, perhaps a little wiser and still living in the San Francisco wonderland.

Of the new book, Maupin says:

"I wanted to illuminate the process of growing older as a gay man, and make it easier for people who think life is over," he says. "Gay men who are growing old are incredibly lucky to be here."

Maupin's life hasn't been untouched by AIDS; like so many, he lost a loved one. The optimistic outlook he has today has been hard won.

"But if I'd known that 63 was going to feel this good, I would have been a lot more cheerful along the way," says Maupin.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Boy, finally

After about a million years (well, 12), the movie adaptation of Matthew Rettenmund's witty, sexy novel Boy Culture will open in March. Here's the official website and, naturally, Rettenmund's got a blog.

Derek Magyar, who geeks may remember as Kelby on Star Trek: Enterprise, is a great choice to play X, and Patrick Bauchau also as Gregory. Looking forward to this one.

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Oh, my lucky star!

I have been, for me, pretty patient and my uncomplaining perseverance has been rewarded. My first edition of Joe Keenan's new book, My Lucky Star, arrived today and it's taking every ounce of my sense of duty not to abandon the piles of work on my desk and steal away to a quiet coffee bar where I can read it cover to cover.

The long-awaited third novel from the author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz is here! The Booklist precis:

Struggling playwrights Philip and Claire are summoned to Tinseltown by their calculating friend Gilbert to be screenwriters for a legendary diva, Diana Malenfant, and her megastar son, Stephen Donato. When the budding screenwriters are revealed as inadvertent plagiarists, Philip is forced to ghostwrite the memoirs of Diana's toxic has-been sister, Lily, and turn over all potentially damaging pages to Diana and Stephen. Lily is threatening to expose the silver screen's best-kept secret, that Stephen is gay. All are coexisting in a glittery detente until L.A.'s most fashionable madam gets the goods on the entire cast and demands a production credit, prodding the ever-capable Claire to devise the most madcap of rescues.

I have yet to read a word, but I can nonetheless recommend My Lucky Star without reservation to anyone who enjoys smart, fast-paced farce. My friends who have no doubt tired of my endless enthusing over the first two books about the misadventures of Philip and Gilbert, and anyone into whose hands I have thrust copies of the same and refused to speak with further until they've read them, will no doubt be relieved that I have something new to obsess about.

Go get it!

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Mister Horse

In this week's The New Yorker, Paul Rudnick outlines Further Proof That Lincoln Was Gay. Among his discoveries:

The first draft of the Gettysburg Address began, “Four score and seven years ago-ish . . .

When Lincoln was a boy, he would walk twenty miles through the snow every morning to buy magazines.

Lincoln was raised in a log cabin with a dirt floor, which he vacuumed.

Lincoln liked to say, “All men are created equal, except at the beach.”

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Obscene Interiors

Ooo, baby, that's a mighty big chifforobe but what's with the chintz?: My dear friend and spiritual adviser Eric sent me a copy of Justin Jorgensen's new book, Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Décor, personally inscribed by the author and with a kicky foreward by interiors dude Todd Oldham his own self. It is, of course, the dead-tree cousin of this site, a pretty book filled with pretty wretched home "decorating" that's such fun to read.

(Justin's site also has a great gallery of pages from The Witch's Catalog, one of my favorite books as a wee sprout. Oh, how I wanted an Invisible Suit!)

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Virtual Book Tour Announcement

Virtual tour, real author: This website -- in fact, this very weblog -- will be a stop on the "virtual book tour" for Dennis Hensley's Screening Party next Friday. A few years ago, Dennis penned a delightfully frivolous comic novel, titled Misadventures in the 213 (which was based on a series of columns he wrote for Detour magazine), that's gotten passed around quite a bit in The BradLands and which unfortunately led my friend Jeff to dub a particularly young former suitor of mine "This Many", after one of its characters.

If the Postal Service cooperates, I'll be receiving a copy of the book to read over the next few days and then, on Friday, you'll find out more about Screening Party. In the meantime, you may enjoy learning more about the Virtual Book Tour, organized by the one and only (that we know of) Kevin Smokler.

Thursday, May 9, 2002

To say nothing of the blog…

BOOK 'EM: I shuffled a few things on my reading pile and tore into Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys, a delightful (and physically beautiful) comic novel following a rudderless student through two semesters of art school in the 1950s. Now I'm nearly finished with Connie Willis' thoroughly enjoyable time-travel-mystery-comedy To Say Nothing of the Dog, the first historically speculative sci-fi I've really devoured since Simon Hawke's Time Wars series. (Literati will note Willis' title is derived from the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's century-old classic account of Victorian England, Three Men in a Boat.)

Supplemental: The ever-charming Anita Rowland posted some great notes on the historical and literary allusions in To Say Nothing of the Dog in the "Reading and Writing" forum at Bad Hair Days. Good stuff!

Both of my latest reads, I hasten to mention, were sent along as gifts from my wishlist by visitors to The BradLands. I am very, very grateful for the hours of diversion and enjoyment. Thank you.

Monday, July 27, 1998

Buddy Cole does not go quietly

Some new additions to "Cute Guys With Cool Webpages": Xzigboy, Mark Chou, Eric Powers.

After four (!) years on the New York Times bestseller list, John Berendt contemplates life and another novel after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. [Washington Post]

Rating the Willie Wonka kids. [Brunching Shuttlecocks]

A few years ago, I read a compelling book — the title and author of which escape me at the moment — about the birth and subsequent ascendance of CNN. Of course, this was before the Gulf War when the network really took off. Now, a similarly compelling cable success story might be spun about kid's web Nickelodeon. [Philadelpha Inquirer]

Talk about "portals" on the Web is all the rage right now, megasites that are mere launch sites to other parts of the great untamed net. AOL wants to be one, and so do Snap! and the Mining Company. But portals work best when, like this weblog, they're free — or relatively free — of commercial interruption and influence. And so concurs the Net Skink with this look at alternative portals. [San Francisco Examiner]

Speaking of commercial interruption, I am thisclose to boycotting GeoCities. Don't get me wrong: providing free webspace is a great thing and there are tons of worthy sites thereabout, but their stupid pop-up Java windows with ads seem to perpetually crash whatever browser I'm using. Let me know if this happens to you.

The Kids in the Hall are more or less splitsville, but Scott Thompson is doing his best to make sure Buddy Cole does not go quietly, and tells about Buddy's latest adventures in Salon. (Also, check out Scott's very own domain, the ever-amusing ScottLand.) [Salon]

Plenty more links to add, but so little time, so little time. More soon!