To read the article click here
Another chance to see the film "A Matter of Size", discussion on the concept and feeling of "home", and "Jews and Spain" (worth checking out, especially if you missed December's symposium & music festival).
To read the article click here
Another chance to see the film "A Matter of Size", discussion on the concept and feeling of "home", and "Jews and Spain" (worth checking out, especially if you missed December's symposium & music festival).
News Release — March 9, 2010
David Foster Wallace Archive
Acquired by Harry Ransom Center
AUSTIN, Texas—The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of "Infinite Jest" (1996), "The Broom of the System" (1987), "Girl with Curious Hair" (1988) and numerous collections of stories and essays.
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace's books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace's college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.
Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed "Infinite Jest," the earliest appearance of his signature "David Foster Wallace" on "Viking Poem," written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.
Materials for Wallace's posthumous novel "The Pale King" are included in the archive but will remain with Little, Brown and Company until the book's publication, scheduled for April 2011.
"The Ransom Center is delighted to be the home of this remarkable archive," said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. "Wallace was undoubtedly one of the most talented writers of his generation. His works are intricate, complex, often humorous, sometimes challenging, but almost always brilliant, and his archive not only records his creative process but also demonstrates the dedicated choices he made in his works. I will always remember Wallace's description of a topspin forehand shot in one of his essays on tennis. It was the most accurate description of a tennis shot that I have ever read. This same acuity and perception pervades all of Wallace's works. We are delighted that his papers will be preserved and made accessible here."
In addition to offering fellowships to support scholarly research in the collection, the Ransom Center is planning future programs and events related to Wallace's work and the archive.
First page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Harry Ransom Center.
"The work of David Foster Wallace, so vitally and fearlessly attached to the culture around it, will be a source of exploration for generations to come," commented novelist Don DeLillo.
Wallace's materials at the Ransom Center will reside alongside the papers of contemporary writers such as DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing and James Salter, as well as those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Wallace's publisher Little, Brown and Company is donating its editorial files relating to the author to the Ransom Center. Wallace worked with Little, Brown and Company beginning in 1993.
"Little, Brown and Company is happy to donate all of our correspondence and internal memos relating to 'Infinite Jest,' 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men' (1999), 'Oblivion' (2004), 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' and 'Consider the Lobster' to the Ransom Center," said Michael Pietsch, Little, Brown and Company's executive vice president and publisher and Wallace's longtime editor. "David's letters are delightful to read in themselves, and we hope that scholars will benefit from finding his notes to his editors and copy editors in the same archive with his draft manuscripts, journals and other correspondence."
The Wallace materials are being processed and organized and will be available to researchers and the public in fall 2010.
Some items from the archive can be viewed at www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw, and a selection of materials will be on display in the Ransom Center's lobby through April 9.
High-resolution press images from the collection are available.
News Release — March 9, 2010
David Foster Wallace Archive
Acquired by Harry Ransom Center
AUSTIN, Texas—The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of "Infinite Jest" (1996), "The Broom of the System" (1987), "Girl with Curious Hair" (1988) and numerous collections of stories and essays.
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace's books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace's college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.
Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed "Infinite Jest," the earliest appearance of his signature "David Foster Wallace" on "Viking Poem," written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.
Materials for Wallace's posthumous novel "The Pale King" are included in the archive but will remain with Little, Brown and Company until the book's publication, scheduled for April 2011.
"The Ransom Center is delighted to be the home of this remarkable archive," said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. "Wallace was undoubtedly one of the most talented writers of his generation. His works are intricate, complex, often humorous, sometimes challenging, but almost always brilliant, and his archive not only records his creative process but also demonstrates the dedicated choices he made in his works. I will always remember Wallace's description of a topspin forehand shot in one of his essays on tennis. It was the most accurate description of a tennis shot that I have ever read. This same acuity and perception pervades all of Wallace's works. We are delighted that his papers will be preserved and made accessible here."
In addition to offering fellowships to support scholarly research in the collection, the Ransom Center is planning future programs and events related to Wallace's work and the archive.
First page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Harry Ransom Center.
"The work of David Foster Wallace, so vitally and fearlessly attached to the culture around it, will be a source of exploration for generations to come," commented novelist Don DeLillo.
Wallace's materials at the Ransom Center will reside alongside the papers of contemporary writers such as DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing and James Salter, as well as those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Wallace's publisher Little, Brown and Company is donating its editorial files relating to the author to the Ransom Center. Wallace worked with Little, Brown and Company beginning in 1993.
"Little, Brown and Company is happy to donate all of our correspondence and internal memos relating to 'Infinite Jest,' 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men' (1999), 'Oblivion' (2004), 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' and 'Consider the Lobster' to the Ransom Center," said Michael Pietsch, Little, Brown and Company's executive vice president and publisher and Wallace's longtime editor. "David's letters are delightful to read in themselves, and we hope that scholars will benefit from finding his notes to his editors and copy editors in the same archive with his draft manuscripts, journals and other correspondence."
The Wallace materials are being processed and organized and will be available to researchers and the public in fall 2010.
Some items from the archive can be viewed at www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw, and a selection of materials will be on display in the Ransom Center's lobby through April 9.
High-resolution press images from the collection are available.
That got your attention, didn’t it? It snatched mine—not because I had never seen the advertisement from Sinclair Institute (“helping you achieve a better love life since 1991”), but b
ecause there it was, incongruously, on the back of the Mar. 7 New York Times book review. That real estate is usually claimed by Bauman Rare Books or Bose, the maker of pricy headphones and speaker systems.
At a time when the book review section looks distressingly cadaverous at 24 pages, any ad beats no ad. Moreover, there’s something bracing about the subliminal suggestion that reading is sexy. That is, until you realize that Sinclair is suggesting that if you’re reading the ad, you’re probably in need of help when it comes to lovemaking—in the way that stroke victims need rehab to learn how to walk again: “These videos show couples how to overcome sexual problems so common with middle age, including: erectile dysfunction … reentering the dating scene … and rekindling passion when sex has become boring or predictable.”
Another reminder, as if anybody needed one, that if you’re the kind of person who reads the book review section, you’re probably… old. It’s the same clap to the head you get while watching 60 Minutes or network news while having to endure all those ads for Cialis and Flomax. What’s next on the back page of the Times supplement, pitches from makers of respirators? Hospices?
What we ageing readers may lack in animal magnetism, we more than make up in marketing muscle. Older folks, 46 years and upwards, buy more books than any other age group. According to a year-plus old study—in Publishers Weekly, citing PubTrack Consumer, a unit of R.R.Bowker, owned by Reed Elsevier, the giant publisher and data peddler—seniors spent $3.2 billion in 2007 for 371 million books; boomers, $4.3 billion for 427 million hardbacks and paperbacks. The same report claims that Gen X shelled out $3.4 billion on 285 million titles; Gen Y, $2.7 billion for 180 million; and teens $655 million for 57 million books. Current and upcoming recipients of Social Security are keeping this dying business alive. Geezers are also taking to e-books faster and in greater numbers than younger folks. The Mar. 7 Book Review also has a full-page ad for the Amazon Kindle.
Still, it’s hard to shake the association between literacy and senescence. No wonder a lawyer friend of mine, who last year turned 50, shrinks from some of the books I recommend to him. Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Ulysses? “No,” he almost shouts, “they’re too long.” I used to think he was intimidated by their complexity or the sheer weight of lugging around a fat volume. Now I know the truth: He’s afraid he won’t live long enough to finish any one of them.
Far better, I think, to embrace the inevitable with brio. Something very much like the narrator and subject of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). His hilarious digressions—on his uncle’s obsessions with siege warfare, his father’s theories of how a name and the size of one’s nose determine character and destiny—delay the promised subject of the story (and his own birth) for hundreds of pages. The novel opens with his mother’s interrupting the act of conception to ask his father if he has remembered to wind the clock; everything that follows seems designed partly to arrest time and to keep death, lurking everywhere, at bay.
Still, it’s hard to shake the association between literacy and senescence.
That got your attention, didn’t it? It snatched mine—not because I had never seen the advertisement from Sinclair Institute (“helping you achieve a better love life since 1991”), but b
ecause there it was, incongruously, on the back of the Mar. 7 New York Times book review. That real estate is usually claimed by Bauman Rare Books or Bose, the maker of pricy headphones and speaker systems.
At a time when the book review section looks distressingly cadaverous at 24 pages, any ad beats no ad. Moreover, there’s something bracing about the subliminal suggestion that reading is sexy. That is, until you realize that Sinclair is suggesting that if you’re reading the ad, you’re probably in need of help when it comes to lovemaking—in the way that stroke victims need rehab to learn how to walk again: “These videos show couples how to overcome sexual problems so common with middle age, including: erectile dysfunction … reentering the dating scene … and rekindling passion when sex has become boring or predictable.”
Another reminder, as if anybody needed one, that if you’re the kind of person who reads the book review section, you’re probably… old. It’s the same clap to the head you get while watching 60 Minutes or network news while having to endure all those ads for Cialis and Flomax. What’s next on the back page of the Times supplement, pitches from makers of respirators? Hospices?
What we ageing readers may lack in animal magnetism, we more than make up in marketing muscle. Older folks, 46 years and upwards, buy more books than any other age group. According to a year-plus old study—in Publishers Weekly, citing PubTrack Consumer, a unit of R.R.Bowker, owned by Reed Elsevier, the giant publisher and data peddler—seniors spent $3.2 billion in 2007 for 371 million books; boomers, $4.3 billion for 427 million hardbacks and paperbacks. The same report claims that Gen X shelled out $3.4 billion on 285 million titles; Gen Y, $2.7 billion for 180 million; and teens $655 million for 57 million books. Current and upcoming recipients of Social Security are keeping this dying business alive. Geezers are also taking to e-books faster and in greater numbers than younger folks. The Mar. 7 Book Review also has a full-page ad for the Amazon Kindle.
Still, it’s hard to shake the association between literacy and senescence. No wonder a lawyer friend of mine, who last year turned 50, shrinks from some of the books I recommend to him. Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Ulysses? “No,” he almost shouts, “they’re too long.” I used to think he was intimidated by their complexity or the sheer weight of lugging around a fat volume. Now I know the truth: He’s afraid he won’t live long enough to finish any one of them.
Far better, I think, to embrace the inevitable with brio. Something very much like the narrator and subject of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). His hilarious digressions—on his uncle’s obsessions with siege warfare, his father’s theories of how a name and the size of one’s nose determine character and destiny—delay the promised subject of the story (and his own birth) for hundreds of pages. The novel opens with his mother’s interrupting the act of conception to ask his father if he has remembered to wind the clock; everything that follows seems designed partly to arrest time and to keep death, lurking everywhere, at bay.
Still, it’s hard to shake the association between literacy and senescence.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
