One measure of a writer may be the quality of the thinking he elicits in others. Here, in advance of The Pale King, is an uncommonly perceptive BBC radio documentary about David Foster Wallace.
Listening to David Foster Wallace
More Barthes
In part because I loved Sam Anderson's riff on Barthes in this weekend's NYT Magazine so much, I was thrilled to see Maud Newton tweet this link this 2010 article on Barthes's handwriting, featuring a slideshow of note cards Barthes used to compose his Mourning Diary.
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Hey Dr. Sandman
“During various periods of my life I have succumbed to the siren call of sleeping pills. It is hard to resist their promise: one tablet, and your night will be purged. Your brain may be in overdrive, its receptors working away, hungrily awaiting more images and information, but like a computer it is forced into another mode. Yet the little white disks with a dent down the middle are no panacea; whenever I take one of these thought guillotines I feel trapped in a grey zone, seesawing between mid and shallow slumber, mind and body dulled but not of their own accord.” A lifelong insomniac recounts her long struggle with the illness.
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Your Lowest Depths of Misery?
"In 1865, Karl Marx confessed that he considered his chief characteristic 'singleness of purpose,' and that his favorite occupation was 'bookworming.' Five years later, Oscar Wilde wrote in an album called 'Mental Photographs, an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions' that his distinguishing feature was 'inordinate self-esteem.'" Over at The New Yorker, take a look at how Marcel Proust's questionnaires inspired a generation of question-by-by-question introspection.
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This Land Press
This Land Press, which launched in 2010 as a project to “bring literary journalism to Middle America,” will suspend publication of its magazine this spring, and there are no immediate plans for future publication.
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Thanks for posting that link. The documentary was very interesting — it’s a good primer explaining why DFW’s work is valuable.