Couple of DFW things

1) My essay on the “Year of David Foster Wallace” originally published in Fiction Advocate has been translated into Spanish by Maria Serrano and published online under the new title “DFW, DT, y Yo.”

http://thisistheswitchboard.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/el-anyo-de-david-foster-wallace-dfw-dt-y-yo-por-matt-bucher/

2) The Found Poetry Review recently published an issue dedicated to works from David Foster Wallace and I had a small contribution titled “David Foster Wallace Titles Roughly Translated into Other Languages (and Roughly Translated Back Into English).”

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/wrt-david-foster-wallace/david-foster-wallace-titles-roughly-translated-into-other-languages-and-roughly-translated-back-into-english/

Nature’s Nightmare

About a year after SSMG Press published Greg Carlisle’s reader’s guide to Infinite Jest, Elegant Complexity (in December 2007), Greg emailed me and said he was toying with the idea of writing a shorter guide to Oblivion. Greg started writing this book in 2009 and, after many revisions and delays, I’m happy to see it completed now. It’s available for preorder on Amazon. There will also be a Kindle edition.

The Cubicle Life

In his long interview with David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky brings up the issue of the decreasing cultural relevance of books (in 1996, mind you). Wallace cuts right to the heart of the problem:

“Today’s person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago when the big thing was, I don’t know what, havin’ a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And living and dying in the same town that you’re in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there’s just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different.  The trick, the trick for fiction it seems to me is gonna be to try to create a kind of texture and a language to show, to create enough mimesis to show that nothing’s really changed, I think. And that what’s always been important is still important.”

Essay on Fiction Advocate

I recently wrote an essay about David Foster Wallace and my experience with the D.T. Max biography here on Fiction Advocate.

Recent Update

I haven’t updated this site for a while because of a bizarre WordPress error, but all seems well now.

I’ve been busy the past six months! I’ve posted a lot of new things at SimpleRanger.net, tons of new images at Apres Garde, and started posting a lot over at mlkshk. I’ve started one mlkshk for Breaking Bad (new favorite show) and one for modern homes. I think I only have one new post up at GoogleSightseeing, but I have a couple more in the works.

I was quoted in this CultureMap series about the DFW archives at the Ransom Center in Austin (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5).

And just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Arlo’s first birthday!

Austin Meetup 4/15

The Ransom Center event for The Pale King in Austin on April 15 will begin at 7pm (doors open at 6:30) in Jessen Auditorium. The readings will be held in conjunction with the New Fiction Confab. Readers include Julie Orringer, Jake Silverstein, Doug Dorst, and Kevin Brockmeier.

Before the event, we are going to have a wallace-l meetup at Scholz Garten, starting at 4pm. We’ll walk over to the auditorium from Scholz. There is no evite or anything. You can just show up and you don’t have to be a member of the list to show up, all DFW fans welcome.

There will be a reception after the reading at The Ransom Center. They will have books for sale.

The next day, April 16, we will have another wallace-l meetup, ostensibly to discuss TPK, at Opal Divine’s Freehouse on Sixth Street at noon. If you are coming from out of town and want to RSVP or just chat about Austin, feel free to email me at mattbucher at gmail.com.

See you then!

The Pale King

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous, unfinished novel The Pale King will be published on April 15 and I am really excited about it. Of course, it’s the complete opposite reality of how I’d like to read it—without Wallace alive to finish it and talk about it. But the fact is, the book is being published in this reality and it’s the last novel of his we’ll ever see (I assume). When the book comes out, I’m going to be writing about it over on my site Simple Ranger. In fact, I’ve already written a couple of posts about it (The Pale King approaches, The Pale King so far) and there will be more posts about it over there before April 15.

Goings on

I’ve been busy lately! Last month I was interviewed for this article on the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/15/david-foster-wallace-his-secret-life-as-a-philosopher/

If the movement to which Eckert is alluding has a head, it is probably Matt Bucher of Austin, Texas, whose day job is editing textbooks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For the past eight years, Bucher has administered Wallace-L, the largest list-serve connecting Wallace fans across the United States. … Bucher explains that Wallace-L spun off from a Thomas Pynchon emailing list in the late 1990s. It has swelled from about 100 members in 1996-97 to 1000 at present. Bucher, who started monitoring the list in 2002, reports that there was a roughly 25% increase in membership in the months following Wallace’s death. Though generally pleased, Bucher complains that some of the information online has gotten less reliable.

Also, I was mentioned in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Afterlife-of-David-Foster/125823/

Meanwhile, Sideshow Media Group, run by an independent Wallace scholar named Matt Bucher, just published Consider David Foster Wallace, a collection of critical essays born out of the first academic conference on Wallace, held at the University of Liverpool in 2009. (Another Wallace conference took place that year at the City University of New York.)

In Street View news, my Apres Garde blog was mentioned in this Italian news article: http://notizie.virgilio.it/esteri/blog-fotografici-da-google-street-view-fenomeno-web-2010_142053.html

Over at my other site, Simple Ranger, I’ve posted some things that weren’t right for Apres Garde:

Street View Essay – Macau

Vending Machines of Yokohama

And a bunch of “Best of” Apres Garde posts that collect thematic posts there:
Best of Apres Garde – People
Best of Apres Garde – Roads
Best of Apres Garde – Fields
Best of Apres Garde – Darkness
Best of Apres Garde – The Sea

As of Late

I wrote a short essay about David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy, out this month from Columbia University Press, page titled Fate, Time, and Language.

Also, I interviewed one of the coeditors of that volume, the philosopher Steven Cahn, about Wallace’s work in philosophy.

The Texas Book Festival panel on Wallace I moderated back in October was mentioned in this article in the local NBC affiliate.

Sam Potts created an awesome poster of all the characters in Infinite Jest: http://sampottsinc.com/ij/

I’ve started a new site called Simple Ranger. Right now it just has “Best of” posts collected from my Apres Garde site, but I have big plans for it.

Consider the Archive

My Apres Garde blog was mentioned in an Italian news article about Arcade Fire’s video project involving Google Street View.
http://www3.lastampa.it/musica/sezioni/news/articolo/lstp/313472/

My latest post at Google Sightseeing is on the distilleries of Islay.

Also, next month I’ll be moderating a panel on David Foster Wallace at the Texas Book Festival.
The video of this event is now available here: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/

I was quoted in a story about the DFW event here: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/content/fans-celebrate-late-author%E2%80%99s-works

My latest posts at Google Sightseeing are about Isla Mujeres: http://googlesightseeing.com/2010/09/isla-mujeres-island-week-5/ and the Tribal Art of Taiwu Township, doctor Taiwan http://googlesightseeing.com/2010/10/tribal-art-of-taiwu-township-taiwan/ (did you even know Taiwan had aborignes??).