Dave Eggers, as you may have heard, was tapped to write a new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The piece glows with praise for the gigantic novel, as one might expect (since such intros are, in many cases, packaging to sell the novel.) However, as The Rake has discovered, this isn’t the only time that Eggers has written about Infinite Jest. He was, in a 1996 review, very disparaging of the book. Perhaps Eggers has changed his mind about Infinite Jest, or perhaps the offer to write the intro was simply too tempting to turn down. As ever, I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this smacks of opportunism.
Dave Eggers Waffles
Will This Be the Most Profitable Super Bowl Ever?
The WGA writers’ strike (should that all be capitalized? has it been trademarked yet?) has hit the economy of Los Angeles in a big way, hurting everybody from the top down. Some idiot actually predicted that the strike would be over by Christmas (D’oh!). Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and LA has really suffered. But will anyone actually benefit from the writers’ strike? It seems to me that Fox and the NFL might.With the Super Bowl looming this weekend, it would seem to me that Fox is in a position to demand record prices for its ad time, already the most expensive TV ad time of the year. Networks have been running reruns, game shows, and reality TV for the past three months, leaving TV advertisers with smaller and smaller audiences (or eyeballs, as they apparently say in the biz). The Super Bowl, already the launching pad for many national advertising campaigns, might be the only interesting programming on TV for some time, especially if the Academy Awards end up airing a watered-down version of its annual show (The Academy Awards are set to air on Sunday, February 24), as is planned unless the WGA and the studios reach an agreement by then. Couple this with the fact that there’s major national interest in the game, with the undefeated Patriots facing a team from the nation’s largest media market, the New York Giants. It has the makings of the proverbial perfect Super Bowl storm.On the subject of the writers’ strike, I recommend anyone interested in the history of screenwriting check out Marc Norman’s excellent book What Happens Next. His book provides terrific context for how the entertainment industry has dealt with previous technological changes (which, after all, is exactly what this strike is all about).
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Ombudsman
Arts and Letters Daily recently linked an article from the National Journal that takes stock of an interesting development at the New York Times. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and a good amount of internal and external strife about wavering journalistic standards, the Times has appointed an ombudsman, a position more commonly found at campus newspapers than at the world’s most important dailies. This ombudsman happens to be an author and journalist, Daniel Okrent, whom I admire for his baseball book Nine Innings and who was recently named a Pulitzer finalist for his book, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center. His columns bring an impressive amount of transparency to a very powerful newsroom, and I suggest everyone read them before Okrent’s fellow employees stage a coup and kick him out. The most recent column can be found here.
A lost Classic
Jonathan Yardley is probably my favorite book critic. Since I’m from Washington DC, and he is the elder statesmen of book reviewing for the Washington Post, my affinity for Yardley probably is at least in part due to home town bias. But Yardley also manages to go beyond the simple grading of new books that so many crics engage in. He also delights in guiding his readers to the myriad great books that are out there yet somehow hidden from view, be they long forgotten or merely obscure. Having such a trusted guide to the literary world can prove invaluable. His assesment of the year 2002 in books alone is enough to provide a plentiful pile of great new books to work through. State of the Art is a truly enlightening assesment of the last 125 years of American literature, and a must read for anyone who thinks they’ve covered all the classics. Finally, his occasional series, Second Reading, “reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.” The latest installment is a look at The Autumn of the Patriarch, the most overlooked of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s. As a big fan of Marquez, this article is really a treat for me, especially since I have never gotten around to reading Patriarch. By the way, did I ever mention that I once met Marquez.More Leonard MichaelsFolks must have really dug the fantastic Leonard Michaels story in the New Yorker this week, because many of this week’s visitors arrived here by searching for his name.
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Salinger on the Web
I know this is the sort of thing that threatens to erode our moral fabric and turn us all into communists, but I thought you might like to know that much of J.D. Salinger’s published work, including many hard-to-find uncollected stories, is available for free here. So hurry and take a look before this website is shut down by a blizzard of threatening letters from angry intellectual property lawyers. Also of note: I posted this link at Metafilter a few days back and it generated a rather lively discussion.
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Windmill News
Wow, the Venezuelan government has printed one million free copies of Don Quixote to celebrate the book’s 400th anniversary. That sure beats the “one book one city” thing we have in the states. Read about it at the BBC. (via bookglutton). Also, anyone who has endured the long wait for the Edith Grossman edition of Quixote to come out in paperback, take heart, it arrives on May 1. See also 400 Windmills.
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The Little Bookstore That Could
I’m pleased to report that Freebird Books & Goods, the terminal stop on our “Walking Tour of New York’s Independent Booksellers,” has reopened its doors. With its packed wooden shelves, comfortable chairs, creaky floors, selection of fine teas, and breathtaking view of Manhattan, Freebird has been my favorite used bookstore since I first moved in around the corner three years ago. I’m not alone in my enthusiasm; guest-blogging at The Elegant Variation earlier this year, Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End, wrote of “a palpable feeling that you’re in a place where books, no matter how old, are alive and well.”Premature nostalgia afflicted me and many of my neighbors when we heard that owners Rachel London and Samantha Citrin were moving on to other endeavors. But it turns out that Freebird is in good hands. New owner Peter Miller is a bibliophile and all-around nice guy. He’s dedicated to building on the traditions of the store, while introducing new amenities to draw in new customers.One such innovation is the Freebird blog, where Mr. Miller’s been posting images of (and commentary on) the wonderful oddities he’s come across in his journey through the stacks. Lively events and a renewed liquor license (coming soon, I’m told), should further burnish the store’s reputation. As Mr. Ferris put it, “It’s the kind of place that reminds you why you read.” So if you’re in New York this holiday season, hop the F train to Bergen and make your way down to the waterfront…and be reminded!
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On the other hand…
There is no doubt some opportunism in an author taking advantage of an opportunity to look wise in hindsight, but Eggers also has a record of publishing Wallace stories–most notably the EXTREMELY recondite "Mr. Squishy," printed 5 years ago, pseudonymously, when there was no suggestion that any back-scratching would take place in return.
More generally, I think that Eggers' mediocre 1996 review is exactly what happens to great books in our hyperspeed culture. It is nearly impossible for a reviewer to tell how something is going to look in six months…not with respect to its strengths and weaknesses, but with respect to its staying power. I think I wrote a fairly glowing review of The Known World when it came out and I didn't know anything about EPJ, but I had little inkling that, in retrospect, it would appear monumental. Conversely, I really liked Aleksandar Hemon's "Nowhere Man" when I read it, but I don't think I'll be telling my grandkids about it.
This point is particularly relevant because certain blowhards who have had about three weeks to read the new Pynchon in advance readers' copies are now spouting off about it, both positively and negatively. How can one seriously evaluate something so big so quickly?
Though people do want to know about a book immediately, in order to decide whether to read it, it seems to me that the seriousness with which we take the insta-poll reactions to contemporary fiction should be in inverse proportion to the ambition of the work, or at least the page count.
What kind of opportunism would this be? Eggers is certainly the bigger name.
Good points here guys. People should have a right to change their minds, and an introduction to the book probably isn't the right place for Eggers to explain that initially he didn't like the book, but now he does (although it would be interesting to see him write about this somewhere.) For the record, I termed this as "opportunistic" because having his name attached to DFW in such a high profile way helps further burnish Eggers' cred in the world of contemporary fiction… But it's true, piling on Eggers here is probably unfair and just a little too easy… For more on why this isn't a big deal, check out Matthew Tiffany's thoughts on the subject.