Austin Chronicle Interview with Doug Dorst

I got the chance to sit down and talk with Doug Dorst, author of the book S. (with JJ Abrams), Jill Meyers of A Strange Object,  Jodi Egerton, and Wayne Alan Brenner of the Austin Chronicle.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/books/2013-12-09/doug-dorst-puts-the-s-in-ship-of-theseus-with-jj-abrams-collaboration/

Here’s an excerpt of the conversation:

Bucher: For me, a lot of the book reminded me of Melville.

Brenner: I thought you were kind of tipping your hat with the quote from “Bartleby” in there.

Dorst: Which, there are so many tips of the hat I’ve made – for several different reasons. Because I was invited to write a book-y book, it feels interesting to have a tip-of-the-hat, whether it’s one that I’m putting in and leaving uncommented upon, or having a character make, it all can go in there.

Bucher: And with the authorship thing, you kind of created another one just by having two authors’ names on the front of the book. Have you had people ask you, “So, did JJ write this?” Is there any confusion there?

Dorst: I’m sure there will always be. But actually JJ has been really clear from the beginning, “No, I did not write this – Doug wrote it.”

Bucher: But even saying that, it’s not something normal authors have to say that. “No, I swear I didn’t write this.” I mean, I get what you’re saying, but it’s funny: You’re talking about authorship, and you’re traveling around and you’re on these shows and you’ve got a guy next to you saying “I didn’t write this.”

Dorst: And in some cases I’m not there, and the interviewer is asking JJ if I exist.

The State of Street View Art

I just published an essay on Google Sightseeing about the state of art projects using images from Google Street View. The essay was a long time in the making and I hope to move on now and post more location-specific stuff about Street View.

http://googlesightseeing.com/2013/11/the-past-present-and-future-of-street-view-art/

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.

Twelve Underappreciated Novels

These are some of the books that I often find myself recommending to people. Usually these are people who have read David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Cloud Atlas, and Moby-Dick (or whatever) and are interested in something a little more offbeat. But these aren’t too offbeat. You’ve likely already read at least one or more of these, too.

1. Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

This short novel (novella?) tells the story of a marriage aboard a gigantic barge. Like most of these books, it’s hard to accurately describe. The narrator has a unique voice and the fact that it’s set aboard a ship calls to mind a postmodern Melville and Waterworld. It’s the kind of book that other writers read and think “Damn, I wish I’d written that.”

2. This is Not a Novel by David Markson

Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress got a huge plug from David Foster Wallace, but Markson’s index-card tetraology of Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, are to me, more rereadable. (I even started a twitter account dedicated to them.) Evan Lavender-Smith called them “like porn for English majors.”

3. From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith

Speaking of EL-S, his book, From Old Notebooks, takes the form of Markson’s books (although he also traces the form back to Evan S. Connell’s Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel) and updates it, giving us insight into the modern mind of the writer. If you liked Markson’s books, you’ll love Evan Lavender-Smith’s. I can’t say enough good things about it. Read biblioklept’s review.

4. The Journalist by Harry Mathews

Mathews is best known as the only American OuLiPo member, and all of his work bears some formal mark of constraint, but this novel stands out to me as his best. It’s the story of a journalist trying to make sense of his life and organize his thoughts–and of course, he slowly goes insane. If you liked Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Pale Fire, I am sure that you will like The Journalist.

5. Live Girls by Beth Nugent

This book is seriously, direly under-appreciated. I remember the day the book came out and every year or so since then I go back and read a few pages of it and can’t believe how incredible it is. The characters are strange and quirky and completely original and the story itself is just incredibly heart-rending. By my accounting, Live Girls should be considered one of the best novels published in the 1990s. If you like Steve Erickson or Vollman’s The Royal Family, you’ll probably like this, too, but I wouldn’t limit the appeal of it there.

6. Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is now considered part of the pantheon of not just great graphic novels, but great contemporary novels. I agree and would g0 a step farther to say that fans of Chris Ware need to read Adrian Tomine. Summer Blonde is one of his best, but you can’t go wrong with Shortcomings, or any single edition of his Optic Nerve series. The latest issue of Optic Nerve contains an interesting allegory about art that deserves greater attention outside of comics circles.

7. The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara

This is one of the great “big” novels of the 1990s. It’s also probably the least known. Dara, almost certainly a pseudonym, plays with form and voices in a way that calls to mind Gaddis in his prime. The story is almost incidental, but part of it is an ecological thriller.

8. The Last Western by Thomas Klise

This is an obscure novel I learned about from Maria Bustillos on wallace-l. I looked for a cheap copy for years before finally picking one up on ABE for $25. Maria’s appreciation of the book is required reading. I’m certain that a publisher will re-issue it at some point and will make a good profit. The story is about an unlikely hero–a pope from New Mexico.

9. I Know Many Songs But I Cannot Sing by Brian Kiteley

Kiteley’s short novel takes place in Cairo during Ramadan. An American named Ib gets lost and wanders through an almost hallucinatory set of experiences. If you are a fan of Paul Bowles or Amitav Ghosh, you need to read this book. Also recommended is Kiteley’s masterful first novel, Still Life With Insects.

10. The Method Actors by Carl Shuker

Shuker’s novel immediately garnered comparisons to David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell when it was published in New Zealand. The voices and set pieces are dazzling. For me they call to mind the great Henry Green’s books full of characters in medias res, leaving the reader to sort out who is who and what is really going on. Shuker’s other books are also all highly recommended.

11. Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard

Ballard may be known for Crash, but for me, this book best represents his critique of modern society. The picture he paints of Cannes is a mirror of almost every luxurious suburb and his eye for detail helps create an image that is compelling and abhorrent at the same time.

12. The Story of a Million Years by David Huddle

This one is a little different in that it is a love story, but Huddle deserves to be mentioned alongside Updike or Roth because he is more compassionate and able to craft believable female protagonists. This is not a book I frequently re-read (although it’s short), but one I’m glad I read when I did. I also liked his book La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl. My wife, Jordan, gets credit for introducing me to Huddle!

Update

Here are a few things I’ve written lately, or places where I’ve been quoted or mentioned online.

Back in June I was quoted in this ABC News article about dad blogs.

I wrote a weird little thing about what Ringo Starr thinks about while he’s drumming. It was on the blog of the Missouri Review.

My most recent piece for Google Sightseeing was about Colima, a volcano in Mexico.

Several places have mentioned my Street View blog, Apres Garde, including this Italian newspaper (TMNews) and anrick.com.

I contributed a short piece on The Pale King to an Italian DFW site for their Pale Winter project. It was kindly translated into Italian by Roberto Natalini and Andrea Firrincieli.

On my Roberto Bolaño site, I wrote an essay about his novel The Third Reich.

A lot has changed in the online world since I got my first email address in 1995. A lot has changed in my own expectations of a creative and successful career. My day job is working as a Project Manager for Pearson Assessment. My main job is being a dad to two little boys, and wooing my wife. All of my creative projects are thus relegated to “side” projects, pretty much all of them online at this point. The metrics for what makes a successful project (or even a good day spent online) are somewhat subjective and personal to me. I don’t go by pageviews or hits (unless they were all astronomical numbers & I had ads – then I would care!), so here are a few things that make me happy online:

– when one of my Metafilter comments or posts gets 100+ favorites

– when Emily Gould “likes” one of my posts on Tumblr

-when one of my Tumblr posts ends up on the Tumblr radar or Staff Blog

– when Hari Kunzru retweeted one of my tweets (though he doesn’t have as many followers as @sarahw or @goldman or @noradio who have also retweeted me). I’ve also had twitter interactions with people I admire like Craig Newmark, Anil Dash, and Rogers Cadenhead.

– any time my name appears on kottke.org

-a pic I post on mlkshk gets 1000+ views or 100+ likes

Maybe this is gauche to admit, maybe it’s not cool to admit you like “favorites” or stars or karma or whatever, but I don’t care. This is me.

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!

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