...is what I will again be forced to do this year, my darling, barring some eleventh-hour issuing of press credentials or a sudden reduction in ticket prices.For a while now, you - the greatest
magazine in the history of American magazines - have tantalized me annually with your
Festival's smorgasbord of literary talent. And yet, as much as the word-hungry reader in me would love to see, e.g.,
Lorrie Moore in conversation with
Jeffrey Eugenides, the starving artist in me rebels.To be frank, your $25 cover charges cheapen you,
New Yorker. After all, in this city which not to look upon would be like death, any given night already offers the discerning gentleman a bevy of comely talent reading for no charge. A nd then, several times per year, events like the
PEN World Voices festival present stimulating citywide literary programming for free or at a nominal price.Indeed, with the notable exception of events like your dance party or your gastronomic tour with
Calvin Trillin, your Festival strikes this correspondent as a way of charging the public for a publicity junket. And, at current ticket prices, the Festival highlights your worst feature, dearest: your habit of reaffirming the upper class's satisfaction with its own refined sensibility and unimpeachable taste. I mean, who else can afford to get in the door?
New Yorker, don't you know you're at your best when you're challenging the status quo from your perch within it? Wouldn't it be subversive to take Conde Nast's money and put on these readings for free, so that any old philistine could attend? I love you,
New Yorker, more than you'll probably ever know, but I can't support your Festival. I can't afford to. Why would I buy your cow when I can enjoy your milk for the low, low price of $52 per year?
I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but Mr. Wallace was working on a novel back in 2000 when he spoke to a few of us at Illinois State.
I'll be the first to offer an over/under: A new novel from wallace = +/- 2014?
Mr. Wallace got 250 pages into that novel and then, deciding that it wasn't working, stripped it for parts–his words, ca. 2003, also at ISU, where I was a student of his in a couple of grad classes. I'm as eager as anyone to see another long-form thing, but whatever he was working on in 2000, I don't think this is it.
"The Suffering Channel," in Oblivion, felt like it might have been a novel that didn't work out. I can only imagine the difficulty of trying to follow up Infinite Jest – witness, e.g., the ontological self-laceration of "Octet," from Brief Interviews (some kind of line's end's end indeed.) What I liked about the Harper's excerpt this month is how relaxed it seemed. Wallace seemed to have found room to breathe again. Interestingly, one of the core competencies returned to here – one that I had never really thought about – was meticulous, journalistic inhabitation of a subcultural milieu. In IJ, it was AA; here, it was the IRS. Maybe the time doing the essay books has really been nurturing some of the fiction muscles. More optimistic than zk, I'm remembering that Wallace wrote IJ in something like 3 years. Once he catches the right wave…
The clip in Harper's was so wonderful not only because of signature control of language (check out the two sentence paragraph just before the child speaks) but also because of how many metaphors one can draw from this element: a child taking on the characteristics of his father's govermental agency.
William Gaddis let twenty years slip by between Recognitions and JR. If we have to wait until 2014 for DFW's next novel, that's just fine with me.