There’s just something about David Foster Wallace‘s writing that makes people want to adapt it. We’ve written about this phenomenon before – there have been Infinite Jest-inspired radio tributes and music videos, series of illustrations, even a novel-in-legos. Interest in adapting Wallace’s work doesn’t seem to be slowing, and earlier this month Public Theatre put on an experimental performance of passages of his writing and interviews, A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which both Salon and Hyperallergic reviewed.
“On Stage as On Paper”
English Major Drama
At the Missouri Review blog, our own Tess Malone writes about the supposed death of the English major, which has lost a considerable amount of popularity in the last forty years in favor of “practical disciplines.” Among other things, she links to New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement speech, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
George Carlin, tireless student of language
The Atlantic on George Carlin’s seven dirty words as they turn 40 years old. You can watch a 1978 performance on YouTube, if you’ve never heard the routine. Maybe put the headphones on, though, as the language is, as you might expect, deliciously filthy, so yeah, NSFW.
Boy, Girl, Book?
Is the practice of using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, in need of an overhaul? Stephanie Feldman for Electric Literature has some strong opinions on the subject. Motherhood on the brain, now? Check out this moving essay for The Millions on mothers and sons by Rachel Basch.
●
●
Bad Boys
“An ambidextrous cardsharp, who took losing as a personal insult; a proletarian agitator, who dressed like a dandy; a germ-fearing hypochondriac, smoking 100 cigarettes a day; a lady-killer with rotten teeth, causing a string of abortions wherever he went.” On the Soviet poet Mayakovksy.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Rushdie; Williams; Oates; Evison; Powell; Rash
New this week: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie; The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams; The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates; This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison; Cries for Help, Various by Padgett Powell; and Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
One comment: