The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.
The David Foster Wallace Conference
“O Warbling Beauty!”
“It can be difficult to talk about Uzbek without soaring into Orientalist flights. ‘O warbling beauty of the steppe!’ I started to write, like a 19th-century lady traveler.” Our own Lydia Kiesling is in the New York Times writing about studying Uzbek and speaking Turkish.
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You can file me under Ishmael.
Have you ever wanted to convert a book into a patent application? Well now you can.
Writing About Oneself
Recommended Reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti discuss literary ambition and the price of success.
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Only Connect
Recommended Reading: Anything that Vivian Gornick writes. Here’s an essay from The New York Times on how literature ages and rereading E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Our own Lydia Keisling also wrote a fantastic piece on the Forster classic.
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David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello Talk Hip-Hop
The book David Foster Wallace co-authored with Mark Costello about the pair’s “uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop” will be re-released in the US next Tuesday. UK readers look like they’re going to get a reissue of the book on their shelves as well.
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Litterae Publicae
Azar Nafisi thinks the best way to pin down a culture is to take a look at its canonical works of literature. In The Republic of Imagination, as Adam Begley details in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, she examines a few of America’s classic novels, including Babbitt, Huck Finn and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book for The Millions.
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