Did David Foster Wallace predict our anxiety over selfies? At The Wire, Danielle Wiener-Bronner argues that Wallace was prescient in Infinite Jest. Although videophony, his concept of video-chatting, isn’t the same thing as a selfie, the paranoia over looking good is strikingly current. “This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen.”
Selfie Sadism
Waffle House Accuracy
If your characters go on a road trip, do you have to take one, too? When Mary Miller wrote The Last Days of California about a family driving from Alabama to California to meet the rapture, she hadn’t even been to the desert herself. To ensure it was accurate, though, she mapped important destinations on the route. “For Western Louisiana, I thought, ‘Is there actually a Waffle House within forty miles of this border?’ because I wanted it to be accurate. So I had maps, and I was tracking mileage,” she told Down & Out.
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Fifteen-Love
Recommended Reading: Gerald Marzorati on why Tolstoy played tennis.
That’s A Wrap, Says Alice Munro
Alice Munro announced her retirement from writing this week. “Perhaps, when you’re my age,” she told a National Post reporter, “you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be.” Previously the Canadian author announced her retirement in 2006, but that didn’t stop her from publishing two more books – including her latest story collection, Dear Life (Millions review). The uninitiated can get a primer on her entire oeuvre by checking out our comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro. See also: “Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways”
Once more about Martin Amis, dear friends, once more
Did you dig Mark O’Connell’s review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo so much that you yearn for more? Well, here’s the author’s interview with Capital, and here’s Parul Sehgal’s take on how the book’s “taut mousetrap ready to go off” sadly “never snaps.”
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HBO Turns Down The Corrections
HBO turned down the television adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, despite an all-star crew: Franzen himself adapted the novel to television, Noah Baumbach promised to direct the series, and Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal were cast as leads. Novelist A-J Aronstein can now breath a sigh of relief; they won’t be filming The Corrections at anyone’s house.
Song of Myself
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell delves into the history of the self-interview, which you can find many examples of over at The Nervous Breakdown. Mark cites examples of self-interviews by prominent writers, including Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Year in Reading alum John Banville.
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Litquake’s Lit Cast
Litquake, the West Coast’s largest literary festival, now offers downloadable bi-monthly podcasts via their website and iTunes. On the site presently are episodes with Geoff Dyer, Carolyn Burke, Adam Johnson, Joshua Cohen, and Molly Ringwald, and the group plans to livestream and post events from their upcoming festival (Oct. 5-13) as well.