The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.
The David Foster Wallace Conference
The Happiest Meal
Do you want a book with your Happy Meal? McDonald’s will replace Happy Meal toys with books for two weeks next month. Don’t expect to pull out Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs with your fries, though. The books were created for McDonald’s by Leo Burnett and discuss nutrition. Did they miss the irony?
Carl Köhler in Toronto
The University of Toronto now has a webpage up for its current exhibition “Beyond the Words: Author Portraits by Carl Köhler.” See some of Köhler’s remarkable portraits of artists and intellectuals and read about him here.
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Weird: from wyrd
Odds Against Tomorrow author Nathaniel Rich has three words of advice for would-be writers, and he holds those words to be his personal mantra.
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Quilting Anew
Recommended Reading: Bernadette Murphy on how knitting can be instructive for writers.
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Film Time with Steve
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Steve Buscemi’s ranked his top ten films in the Criterion Collection.
The Tragedy Interviews
One of Tumblr’s most consistently enjoyable accounts belongs to Ben Dewey, comic book artist and proprietor of The Tragedy Series. This past week, Mr. Dewey gave two interviews about his work.
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Roberto Bolaño in the NYRB Blog
“The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup.” The New York Review of Books Blog posts an essay by — you guessed it — Roberto Bolaño.
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One-Night Reads
“Ever since, I have added a new layer of rules for my casual sex partners, especially when I end up in their space: I ask them for a book prior to exiting. I might phrase it more diplomatically, saying ‘I just want to read something on my train-ride back,’ or ‘I just finished my last book and I have been looking for the next one.’ Via this simple action I can estimate a lot more on a broad scale of very personal information and variation of taste than what I could possibly collect through hours of post-coital, emotional interrogation.” Seven books Elias Tezapsidis acquired through casual sex.
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