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Archive for the ‘David Foster Wallace’ Category

Douglas Coupland–Life After God (1994)

Posted in Airlines, Boredom, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Culture Shock, David Foster Wallace, Decadence, Douglas Coupland, Drinking, Drugs, Environmentalism, Religion, Rush, Short Books, Technology, The Future, Travel on August 17, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RUSH-“Garden Road” (1974).

So the bootleg that I mentioned yesterday was in fact incomplete.  On the Up the Downstair site, the track list includes “What You’re Doing” and “Garden Road.”  When I wrote to the cool host of Up the Downstair, he said that these two songs were available on You Tube and that he’d try to find them and add them to the site.

So in the meantime, I got to listen to the song on YouTube.  This is a song that the band wrote but which they never recorded (same is true for “Fancy Dancer”).  I have to imagine that they wrote these songs for their second album (along with “In the End” which they kept) around the time that Neil Peart joined the band.  Once they realized that Neil could write better lyrics, they scrapped these two heavy rockers.  Both songs have great riffs, even if lyrically they’re pretty poor.

The song rocks pretty well, although the solo seems to have been put to better use in “Working Man.”  I enjoy how the song breaks for the shouts of the Garden Road chorus (kind of like “Bad Boy”–perhaps it was a “thing” for them).  I rather like this song, and I think I like it better than a couple of the songs on Rush.

Check it out.

Maybe it’s time to release these old chestnuts for the fans?

[READ: August 10, 2011] Life After God

After the success of Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland wrote several short books (which were really short stories).  They were compiled in Life After God.  To me this book also stands out as another odd one from DC, because it is very tiny.  Not in length, but in height.  It’s a small book, about the size of a mass market paperback.  But it makes sense that it was made this short because it is written with lots of short paragraphs that lead to page breaks (kind of like Vonnegut).

For instance, the first story contains at most two paragraphs per “chapter” about–16 lines of text and then a page break.  At the top of each page is a drawing from DC himself which illustrates to a small degree the information on the page.  It leads to incredibly fast reading and even though the book is 360 pages, you can polish it off pretty quickly.

But what’s it about?  Well, mostly the stories seem autobiographical (even though they are classified as fiction.  And actually, I don’t know anything about DC’s personal life so I don’t know if they are based on anything real, although I do know he doesn’t have any kids, so those can’t be true at any rate).  There are eight stories.  They are all told from the first person and are more or less directed at “you.”  They all seem to deal with existential crises of some sort.  They are honest and emotional.  To my ear, sometimes they seem a little forced, maybe it’s contextual, but it’s hard to write this kind of massively introspective piece and have it sound “real.”  (But maybe I’m not very introspective about things like this myself). (more…)

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Five Dials Number 15: The November Issue (22 November 2010)

Posted in Advice, Alain de Botton, Anne Cloutier, Émilie Andrewes, Bob Mould, Books about writers, Canadian Content, Claude Mathieu, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Dana Bath, Daniel Sanger, David Foster Wallace, David Homel, David Shields, Denis Villeneuve, Essays, Fears, Five Dials, Foo Fighters, Gail Armstrong, Gaston Miron, Gil Courtemanche, Gustav Flaubert, Heathecote Williams, History, Hockey, Incendies, Jean Gautier, Julie Doucet, Leonard Cohen, Madeleine Thien, Maxime Catellier, Michel Temblay, Michel Vézina, Mireille Silcoff, Niven Govinden, Oscar Wilde, Poetry, Raymond Chandler, Rebecca Harries, Richard Thompson, Robbie Dillon, Robert Lévesque, Roxanne Bouchard, Rush, Sarah Steinberg, Short Story, Translation, Travel on July 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FOO FIGHTERS-Wasting Light (2011).

The Foo Fighters are huge.  Duh.  But when I think of that, it amazes me that a) the Foo Fighters are the band from “the drummer from Nirvana” and that b) while Dave Grohl knows his way around a melody, he is a metal dude at heart, and some of his most popular songs are really heavy.  He can scream with the best of them.

I’ve enjoyed the Foos for many years, but I didn’t listen to their previous discs all that much (or at least I didn’t listen to the mellow disc from In Your Honor and I don’t remember anything off of Echoes…), but this new one is fantastic.  There’s not a dull song on the disc, and Grohl has hit new heights of catchiness and singalong-ness. 

I also like how noisy the disc is.  It opens with some great discord before turning in a majorly heavy rifftastic scream fest in “Bridge Burning.”  Despite the screaming and noise of the opening, the chorus is super catchy.  “Rope” was said to be inspired by Rush.  Knowing that, I can hear a lot of little Rush-isms in the track: The main riff is very Rush-like, there’s a cymbal tapping that reminds me of Neil Peart in the verses, as well as a little drum solo in the middle (with a cowbell!) and the solo is very Alex Lifeson. (It also feels longer than 4 minutes).

“Dear Rosemary” features Bob Mould on backing vocals (but you can hardly tell it’s him).  It’s got a great chorus as well.  “White Limo” is a wonderful punk song, completely incomprehensible lyrics and all.  Meanwhile “Arlandria” (whatever that means) is another totally catchy track (I find myself singing it a lot).

“These Days” should be the next single: catchy and easy on the ears.  I wonder why it hasn’t been released yet.  “Back and Forth” has another great noisy riff.  One thing that I like a lot about the Foos is that they put different things in the same song:  so “A Matter of Time” has a very simple verse and a catchy chorus, but there’s some really buzzing heavy guitars too.  “Miss the Misery” has a kind of sleazy feel which I think is new for the Foos.  And “I Should Have Known” is a kind of angry ballad (I’d like to see Richard Thompson cover it). 

The final track, “Walk” is a fast rocker that sums up the album really well.  Bravo Dave Grohl.  I can’t get enough of this disc, regardless of how popular it is.

[READ: July 2, 2011] Five Dials Number 15

After the brevity of Number 14, Five Dials Number 15 comes back to a fuller size.  It’s strange to me that the issue is titled The November Issue, in part because they never tell us when the issues were published, but even more because this is actually the Québec Issue.  Most of the authors are Quécbecers and the issue release party was in Québec as well.

I’d like to point out that while I was looking something up about this issue (more later) I discovered the Five Dials News Page.  There are currently 43 pages worth of posts.  But most of them are short.  If there are any especially noteworthy ones, I’ll add them to reviews of future issues, but for the most part so far they’re just announcements of how well received their books are (I’ve already made notes to read two of them).  They also give release dates for the issues, which is how I have been able to retroactively attach dates to some of them.

There are many Québecois writers included in this issue (thoughtfully translated into English), as well as some standard features by Alain De Botton and frequent contributors David Shields and Raymond Chandler.

CRAIG TAYLOR-On Our Québec Issue, and Young Novelists
Taylor’s introduction discusses many Canadian’s attitudes about Québec and their (seemingly perennial) vote concerning separation from the country (“so, let them go”).

creepy beard

The confusing thing here is that it appears that Taylor is Canadian (or at least lived there in 1995/6).   But surely he is British, no?

There’s lots of information about Québec in here but no grand statement (except that Celine Dion’s husband’s beard is still creepy).

He also introduces a new section called “Our Town” which is all about London.  The final section of the note says that

we are releasing our second Five Dials list of Top Ten Novelists Under Ten (or ‘Ten Under Ten’,or ‘Ten-Ten’, or as some of the writers themselves call the list: ‘Tintin.’) As you know, many of the writers we chose for our first Ten Under Ten list went on to things such as high school.

This is how I discovered the Five Dials News page, because there certainly was no Ten Under Ten section in a previous issue of the magazine.  Of course, nor is there any mention in the news that I have seen.  So I can’t decide if the whole thing is just a big joke or what.  I assume it is (but I’d hate to not give credit to the waaaay precocious kids at the end of the issue). (more…)

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Zadie Smith Introduces The Burned Children of America (2003)

Posted in A.M. Homes, Aimee Bender, Amanda Davis, Arthur Bradford, Consumerism, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Death, Decadence, Fears, George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Judy Budnitz, Julia Slavin, Ken Kalfus, Matthew Klam, Mogwai, Myla Goldberg, Oddities, Rick Moody, Romance, Sam Lipsyte, Sex, Shelley Jackson, Short Story, Stacey Richter, Technology, The Future, Threats, Zadie Smith on June 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI: GovernmentCommissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003 (2005).

It’s unlikely that Mogwai will ever release a greatest hits (well, someone probably will, but the band themselves don’t seem likely to do so).  As such, this compilation of BBC Recordings will certainly work well as one.

As I’ve mentioned many times, the BBC recordings are universally superb.  The quality of the recordings is unmatched.  And, typically the band takes the sessions very seriously.  The major different between these sessions and the official studio release is that the band is playing these songs live.  They are mixed well and sound great but they are live, so you can catch occasional subtle differences.

Mogwai, despite their seemingly improvised sound (all those noises and such) can recreate everything they do perfectly, and their live shows are tight and deliberate (except for the occasional moments where they really let loose).

The ten songs here span their career and are not played in chronological order.  This allows all of these wonderful songs to play off the tensions of each other.  And it shows that their later songs, which are less intense than their earlier ones, are still quite awesome and in a live setting don’t really lack for intensity after all.

The highlight of this disc is the scorching eighteen minute version of “Like Herod.”  The original is intense and amazing, and this live version allows them to play with the original in small ways, including allowing the quietness to really stretch out before they blow the speakers off the wall with the noise section of the track.

Even though I’m a fan of Mogwai, I don’t hear a radical difference between these versions and the originals.  Or should I say, it’s obvious which song they are playing.  There are some obvious subtleties and differences as befitting a live album, but unlike some live discs you don’t immediately notice that this version is “live.”

And that works well for both fans of the band (because as you listen and you hear the subtleties) and for newcomers–(because you’re not listening to weird, poorly recorded versions or versions that are for fans only).  And so, you get ten great Mogwai tracks.  Just enough to make you want to get some more.

[READ: June 11, 2011] The Burned Children of America

I found this book when I was looking for other publications by Zadie Smith.  This book kept cropping up in searches, but I could never really narrow down exactly what it was.  As best as I can tell, it is a British version of a collection of American authors that was originally published in Italy (!).  Editors Marco Cassini and Martina Testa work for minimum fax, an Italian independent publisher.  In 2001, they somehow managed to collect stories from these young, fresh American authors into an Italian anthology (I can’t tell if the stories were translated into Italian or not).

Then, Hamish Hamilton (publisher of Five Dials) decided to release a British version of the book.  They got Zadie Smith to write the introduction (and apparently appended a story by Jonathan Safran Foer (which was not in the original, but which is in the Italian re-publication).  This led to the new rather unwieldy title.  It was not published in America, (all of the stories have appeared in some form–magazine or anthology–in America), but it’s cool to have them all in one place.

The title must come from the David Foster Wallace story contained within: “Incarnations of Burned Children,” which is one of his most horrific stories, but it sets a kind of tone for the work that’s included within (something which Zadie addresses in her introduction): why are these young successful American writers so sad?  So be prepared, this is not a feel good anthology (although the stories are very good).
Oh, and if you care about this kind of thing, the male to female ratio is actually quite good (for an anthology like this): 11 men and 8 women.

ZADIE SMITH-Introduction
Zadie Smith was a fan of David Foster Wallace (she wrote a  lengthy review of the ten-year anniversary of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men which is republished in her book Changing My Mind), so she is an ideal choice to introduce this book.  Especially when she provides a quote from DFW’s interview in 1995 about how living in America in the late 90s has a kind of “lostness” to it.  With this in mind, she sets out the concerns of this collection of great stories: fear of death and advertising.

Zadie gives some wonderful insight into each of these stories. The introduction was designed to be read after the book, and I’m glad I waited because while she doesn’t exactly spoil anything, she provides a wonderful perspective on each piece and also offers some ideas about the stories that I hadn’t considered.  And it’s funny, too. (more…)

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Five Dials Number 10: Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008 (9 December 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Books about writers, David Foster Wallace, Death, Don DeLillo, Five Dials, George Saunders, Gogol Bordello, GQ, Harper's, Jonathan Franzen, Religion, Suicide, Zadie Smith on June 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: GOGOL BORDELLO-East Infection (EP Extra) (2005).

I learned about Gogol Bordello from some live shows available on NPR.  I enjoyed their sets so much I decided to check out their albums as well.  And I love them.  The albums are full of frenetic energy (they give Sarah agita, she says).  But everything that I love about fun, spirited, gypsy music is present here.

The band is essentially a band of gypsies, headed by wonderfully-mustachioed Eugene Hutz.  And their live show (as demonstrated by the included video) is a wild circus of fun (curtains and dancers and fire buckets and bowling pins and musicians jumping out of boxes), it’s like a wild party.  The video is for “Never Young Again” which would appear in full on their next album. It’s a fun song that reverses the age-old lament of wanting to be young again.  But mostly you watch this for the live footage.

This EP is probably not the best place to start as an introduction to Gogol Bordello (but it was really cheap so I bought it first).  Although it does offer many of the different aspects of Gogol’s music.  The EP features 6 songs and the video.  The songs are intense, hyper, crazy and wonderful.  “East Infection” opens with some nonsense lyrics (“Lee lee lee lee lee, la la la la la”) and morphs into what may be more nonsense, although there’s actual lyrics here.  “Ave B.” (which is also on their following album Gypsy Punks) is a more acoustic-based song, but it still has loud parts to it.

“Mala Vida” is a cover of a song by Manu Chao.  This version is a super fast punky track sung in Spanish (despite Eugene Hutz’ origins in the Ukraine, he has lived in Brazil for years and sings many songs in Spanish).  The original is very similar in temperament, although GB version is a bit more frenetic.

“Copycat” is the odd track on the disc, it’s a kind of dub track with big fat bass and a very slinky sound.  It and “Mala” were produced by Steve Albini.

“Strange Uncles from Abroad” is to me a very typical GB song: lots of violin, lots of dah dah dahs and a great melody.  It has a total gypsy feel, and goes through some loud and quiet moments.   The final track, “Madagascar-Roumania (Tu jésty fáta)” is the longest track by far (6 minutes).  It sounds like a demo and lacks the punch of the rest of the disc, but it showcases the softer side of the band (and yes there is one).

So, maybe this EP is a good place to start after all.  It’s certainly not throwaway material.  And the EP cover alone is pretty outstanding.

[READ: June 14, 2011] Five Dials Number 10

This is the issue of Five Dials that introduced me to the publication.  It is a special issue devoted to the memory of David Foster Wallace.  The entire issue is comprised of the eulogies given at the DFW memorial.  [The details are a little sketchy here…I’m not sure if these are all of the eulogies or just the eulogies from well known people.  I’m not even sure who would have been in the audience for this memorial.  The notes say “These tributes were given on 23 October, 2008 at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University” and yet the Jonathan Franzen entry says “here at Pomona.”  So… details are sketchy].  Nevertheless, the tributes are heartfelt, informative and very moving.

Of course, I’m not going to ‘critique’ them, I’ll just try to summarize them.  But really, they’re all worth reading if you’re a fan. (more…)

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Zadie Smith–2 book reviews (Harper’s, June 2011)

Posted in Book Reviews, Books about writers, David Foster Wallace, Essays, Harper's, Joan Acocella, Jonathan Franzen, Paula Fox, Research, Scholarship, Tindersticks, Zadie Smith on June 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TINDERSTICKS-BBC Sessions (2007).

Another great entry in the BBC Sessions series, this collection of 26 recordings, shows the band in fine form.  This works as a pretty excellent Greatest Hits collections (and surprisingly for a BBC Sessions recording there is only one duplicate song).

On the other hand, there’s not a whole lot of difference between these recordings and the originals.   Some notable exceptions include “Traveling Light” and “Buried Bones” which do not feature the female duet.  “Her” is also notably different since it’s on piano and not guitar.

But I have no criticism about the quality of the recordings. The band sounds wonderful.  Staples’ voice is great and the orchestration is perfect.  And, of course the recording quality is superb (as are all of the BBC sessions that I have are).

If you have the Tindersticks records already, there’s no compelling reason to get this set, but if you’re a fan of the band, it’s nice to have some slightly different versions of these great songs.

[READ: May 18, 2011] 2 book reviews

This month’s review is of two books.  The first is Paula Fox’s new book, News from the World: Stories and Essays.  (The book is also reviewed by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011 issue–she takes a much different angle than Zadie, and has a lot more biographical background, so the reviews work in conjunction very nicely).  I don’t know Fox (although perhaps I should, she has written a number of adult books and tons of children’s books), but Fox’s Desperate Characters has been championed by Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.

Fox sounds like an interesting character (her father was “a writer and a drunk”) and her granddaughter is Courtney Love.  And Zadie asserts that Fox has cultivated self-control and empathy and (in Fox’s own words) “a living interest in all living creatures.”  And in this new collection the interest spreads across fiction, memoir, lecture and essays (with no formal distinction between genres).

Although Zadie is fond of Fox (especially her fiction) she’s harder on Fox the essayist.  She suggests that many of Fox’s essays seem to boil down to the cliché: things were better back then.  But Zadie does make her fiction sound wonderful.  Acocella’s review is similar, saying that no one should start reading Paula Fox with this collection–the reader should go back and start with Fox’s earlier, better works. (more…)

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New Yorker essays about 9/11 after the death of Osama bin Laden (New Yorker, September 24, 2001)

Posted in Ahron Appelfeld, Airlines, Amitav Ghosh, David Foster Wallace, Death, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Essays, Fears, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Rebecca Mead, Religion, Roger Angell, Susan Sontag on May 12, 2011| 3 Comments »

[READ: September 24, 2001 & May 9, 2011] Talk of the Town

After 9/11, I read everything about the incident (like the multiple comics that came out).  About a week after 9/11 my friend Al and I went down to Hoboken and absorbed the decay (and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why I’ve developed adult asthma).  My 9/11 story is no more compelling than anyone else’s and may even be far less compelling (you can read a snippet at Al’s blog, should you care to).  Anyhow, when this issue of The New Yorker came out (with the amazing cover that you can’t really see here–the towers are in a shiny black that reflects the light), I read all of these accounts and recollections.

I came upon them again recently when I was doing a New Yorker search for Jonathan Franzen.  I recently read all of his New Yorker entries, but when I saw that he had one that was part of this 9/11 issue, I decided to put it off.  It was reasonably close to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, and I told myself I’d wait until then to reread and see what I thought.

And then President Obama gave the order to capture and kill Osama bin Laden (hooray!) and that seemed like a far more propitious reason to go back and re-read these articles.  Now I can feel a bit lighter about the whole thing (just a bit, but a bit can be a lot).  And so, here’s a somewhat facile reaction to these reactions.

I’ll preface by saying I can’t imagine what it must have been like to write something, anything at that time.  Some people respond well to pressure and tragedy and perhaps that’s what happened here.  I can’t help but wonder how paralyzing it must have been for other writers (as it was for most people).  So that these writers had the wherewithal to write anything coherent is pretty amazing.  And the fact that the could express the range of emotions that they do is extraordinary. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (2011)

Posted in Boredom, Culture Shock, David Foster Wallace, Funny (ha ha), Humiliation, Marriage Trouble, Morality, New Yorker, Oddities, Suicide, Tiny Desk Concert, Wu Man on May 2, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: WU MAN-Tiny Desk Concert #124 (April 27, 2011).

Wu Man is considered the master of the pipa. If that sentence was complete gibberish, the pipa is a 4 stringed lute-like instrument and Wu Man is a Chinese virtuosi of the instrument.  This Tiny Desk Concert shows Wu Man playing three songs, solo.

The songs are, if not traditional Chinese songs, then at least traditional in style.  Needless to say they are not for everyone (and really, they’re not even my cup of tea–I’m not downloading it, just watching it), but watching her fingers move on this instrument and really paying attention to the kind of things she’s doing with four strings, it’s quite an impressive feat.

She doesn’t sing, and the songs do not follow western musical structure at all.  But it’s an interesting look into Chinese musical culture.

Even if you only watch the first song, it’s worth the time.

[READ: April 29, 2011] The Pale King

[Note: this review is pretty much free from spoilers–some details are given but I don;t think they ruin anything–but it is full of speculation and imaginings of what could have been]

I finished The Pale King today.  It took about a month, but that was because I only read it at lunch hour.  And I was surprised to find that, unlike with other books, I didn’t always feel up to pushing my lunch hour a few extra minutes to get some extra pages in.  Not because I didn’t like the book, but I think it was just really dense and often quite intense.

I’ll also state that I hadn’t been making any kind of notations when I started.  Then, a bit of the way through, when I realized there were a lot of characters, I started jotting down some names and characteristics.  But then I stopped again, because it was interfering with my absorption of the story as a story (such as it is).  So, this review is based on an initial read (yes, I’ll be reading it again in the not too distant future, that’s for sure), without any real note taking.

Is note taking necessary?  Well, yes, at least to keep the characters straight.  There are many many characters and most of them do not interact (or at least not explicitly) so it’s not always easy to know who is who or which person’s weird characteristics are showing up in any given chapter.  Plus, there are dozens of chapters in which unnamed people are described.  It’s hard to know how deliberate that was or how much of it is just the fact that book was unfinished.

The other thing is the ending, of course.  DFW fiction is notorious for its “lack” of endings.  Broom of the System ends mid-sentence, Infinite Jest ends in the middle of a scene, so who can imagine what The Pale King would have ended.  As such, we have only to go by editor Michael Pietsch’s placement of chapters.

So, in many respects, this book is very much Pietsch’s project.  Sure, DFW wrote all the words, but it was Pietsch’s job to piece them together.  Who is to say that DFW would have wanted §50 to end the book?  Pietsch also includes about ten pages of notes at the end of the book all showing ideas that DFW had asked himself about the nature of the finished product.  Some of these questions are minor, but others are quite significant, and would effect not only connections in the novel, but also the overall shape of the book.  It also implies that there could have been as much as another 500 pages coming.

The book feels like a kind of culmination of all of the things that he has been putting into his work for the past few collections.  There are character sketches based on interviews (Brief Interviews), there are lengthy sections of bureaucratic minutiae, lovingly rendered (“Mr Squishy”), there are scenes of conformist office work (“The Soul is Not a Smithy”) and there is redemption in the everyday (“This is Water”).  The mind reels at what this could have been had it been finished.

So this book is obviously, radically unfinished (and yet it’s still over 500 pages long).  So, why bother reading it?

(Here’s where the review really starts).

Because what is here is amazing. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Farther Away” (New Yorker, April 18, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Birds, Books about writers, Daniel Defoe, David Foster Wallace, Death, Essays, Fears, Guitar Player, Harper's, Jonathan Franzen, KEXP 90.3 FM--Seattle, WA, Memoirs, Nature, New Yorker, Orson Scott Card, Sarah Vowell, Smarty Pants, Sonic Youth, Suicide, Thurston Moore, Travel on April 18, 2011| 4 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: THURSTON MOORE-in studio at KEXP, March 11, 2008 (2008).

This interview was headlined ‘Thurston Moore: Not a “Real Guitar Player”?’ which is pretty funny.  The Sonic Youth guys have been defying conventional guitar playing for years.  And then in 2008 Thurston put out a solo album called Trees Outside the Academy, a beautiful delicate album of acoustic guitar songs.

The interview covers this very subject and concludes that maybe back when they started he wasn’t a guitar player, but now, 25 years later, he certainly is.  Moore is charming and funny and relates a very amusing story about being on the cover of Guitar Player and then embarrassing himself in front of one of his idols.

But this download is all about the songs.  Thurston (and violinist Samara Lubelski–who plays great accompaniment, but doesn’t really get any on air time to speak) play four songs from Trees: “Sliver>Blue,” “The Shape is in a Trance,” “Frozen Gtr” and “Fri/End.”  He sounds great in this setting, especially under close scrutiny.  I’d always assumed that there was a lot of improv in the SY guitar world, so to hear him play these (admittedly not difficult) songs flawlessly is pretty cool.  I actually wondered if he’d be hesitant (he admits the acoustic guitar is a fairly new thing for him), but not at all (although he says he screwed up on a chorus, but I never heard it.

It’s a great set and its fun to hear Thurston so casual.

[READ: April 14, 2011] “Farther Away”

The subtitle of this essay is “‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.”  As with Franzen’s other recent essays, this one is also about birding.

Franzen explains that he is hot off the work of a book tour (for Freedom) and is looking for some solitude.  He decides to travel by himself to the island of Alejandro Selkirk, a volcanic mass off the coast of Chile.  The island is named after Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish explorer who is considered the basis for Robinson Crusoe.  As such, Franzen decides to travel to the remote island, decompress and read Robinson Crusoe while he’s at it.  The locals call the island Masafuera.

I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe as an adult, so I don’t know the ins and outs of the story.  Franzen has a personal resonance with the story because it was the only novel that meant anything to his father (which must say something about Franzen’s father, no?).  The upshot of what it meant to Franzen’s father was that his father took him and his brother camping a lot as a way to get away from everything.

However, for Franzen, on his first experience of being away from home for a few days (at 16 with a camping group), he had terrible homesickness.  He was only able to deal with the homesickness by writing letters.

When he arrives on Masafuera, Franzen’s writing really takes off.  He has some wonderful prose about this treacherous space.  Although he comes off as something of a yutz for relying on a Google map to learn about the terrain and for bringing an old GPS which has more or less run out of battery. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace–The Pale King’s release date is here

Posted in David Foster Wallace on April 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I wrote this post several weeks ago.  In fact, I had scheduled several posts as a lead up to the fateful day when this book would get released.  I had even considered finding 4 things to quickly write about so that I could have an entire week of posts about DFW for the lead in to the release of his final, posthumous novel.

And then the book was released on March 30 anyway.  As I write this update, I’m about half way done.  I’m not saying anything about it until I’m done, though.  So, in the meantime, you can read my original post:

Today (tax day–although this year Tax Day is extended until the 18th) is the scheduled release date for The Pale King. Obviously I haven’t read the book yet.  As I write this I, haven’t even received my copy yet.

I was planning on writing a special post for today, but after the last few weeks of build up, I think I’ll just let the book’s release speak for itself. (more…)

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David Foster Wallace ( Prabhakar Ragde and Jordan Ellenberg)–Mathematical Errata for “Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞” first edition

Posted in David Foster Wallace, Erase Errata, Errata, Infinity, Math on April 13, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: ERASE ERRATA-“Tax Dollars” (2006).

I admit to looking up a song by this band specifically for this post.  I’ve known of them for a long time, but never really heard them.  So I tracked down this song/video.  I have no idea if it represents the band or not.

This is an angular punk song that starts out with lots of sharp chords but is quickly taken over by a funky bass line and all kinds of percussion.  The bridge is a single guitar section (quite catchy) played over and over.  The fourth section (!) of the song is a kind of sinister spy movie soundtrack sounding riff with all kinds of horns (just how many people are in this band?)

The song is about: murder, slaughter, funded by my tax dollar. It’s sung/shouted by a woman who comes from the Poly Styrene camp of singers, and it’s all quite good.  Initially impression was of a song full of  chaos, but after repeated listens, there’s some really interesting interplay of sounds here.

I’ll have to investigate them more.  Check out the video here.

[READ: March 23, 2011] Mathematical Errata

I had toyed with the idea of making all four posts this week be DFW-related.  Then I realized that I didn’t really have anything else to write about (since I’d been doing about one a week for several weeks now).  So, I found this little, tiny, barely much of anything piece online at the howling fantods and figured I’d mention it as well.

This three page PDF is, as the heading suggests, all of the mathematical errata for the hardcover edition of Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. Now, I read the paperback edition, so technically I didn’t need this errata.  Of course, I read it almost a year ago and I can’t say that I retained an awful lot of it when I did read it.  So, really these errata aren’t terribly useful to me.  They probably aren’t very useful to anyone unless you are really intense about math.

(more…)

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