I make things up and write them down. I hope one day someone will read them and believe me, and then print out a copy for someone else to read. Until then, would you believe me if I told you
The writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.
- Gabriel García Márquez
(Source: csmonitor.com)
On the name:
But who is Timothy McSweeney?
The name was widely thought to be a self-indulgent affectation for a magazine title, an inside joke.
But McSweeney was somebody – a real somebody.
Eggers named his journal after McSweeney before he knew anything about the man, and didn’t discover his identity until after McSweeney died in January 2010 at age 67.
McSweeney was an artist who once had taught at Rutgers University but was struck with mental illness and confined to an institution. From there, he mailed odd letters to strangers who shared his last name, believing they were relatives. Among the recipients was Eggers’ mother – whose maiden name was McSweeney – beginning when Eggers was a boy.
“We didn’t know if he was real, but the name ‘Timothy McSweeney’ came to hold an aura of mystery,” Eggers explains at www.mcsweeneys. net.
As the letters continued to arrive, Eggers saved them in a dresser drawer. Years later, he named his journal after the unknown mystery man.
“(The title of the journal) made sense on many levels,” he explains on the site. “I was able to honor my Irish side of the family and also allude to this mysterious man and the sense of possibility and even wonder he’d brought to our suburban home.”
David Foster Wallace’s word lists. Click here to visit Lists of Note to see another.
(Source: therumpus.net)
“The London Review of Books has published a lost short story by Charlotte Brontë that turned up while a contributor was researching the writer at a museum in Charleroi. The story, “L’Ingratitude,” was written in 1842 in French and handed in as a homework assignment for Bronte’s tutor.”
The next day a woodcutter found the corpse, he saw it only as something disgusting – and pushed it with his foot in passing, without thinking that there lay the ungrateful son of a tender father.
(Source: bookforum.com)
Cormac McCarthy Pictionary
(Source: youtube.com)
Would an apple every day keep the viking away?
We knew it all along. DFW loved Viking
David Foster Wallace, “Viking Poem”
The recent acquisition of the late David Foster Wallace’s archives by the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center will no doubt provide both scholars and fans with countless layers of information to process and debate. It has also provided this poem about Vikings, written by a six- or seven-year-old Wallace, which I cannot help but find both charming and tragic. (Not that I am suggesting there is anything romantic about suicide, because we don’t do that here.) There’s just a sweetness to this poem and the obvious enthusiasm with which he wrote it that makes me reflect on the joys of childhood that we tend to forget.
Want.
“Mothers,” Tóibín writes, “get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and by something more interesting and important as the novel itself developed. This was the idea of solitude, the idea that a key scene in a novel occurs when the heroine is alone… Thus her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The novel traces the mind at work, the mind in silence.” Read more of the review.
Need timewarp to engage, now. Heading to Oxford at the end of March for a vaca. Never been. Looking forward to its rich history.
But even more excited for The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.
Dickens may have been the first texter in the world.
In several places in the manuscript we can see instances of early “text speak” - shortening full words to letters and numbers. As one of several examples on this page, when Dickens imitates Pip’s own writing, he uses “2 u” instead of “to you.”
We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
- David Foster Wallace, from “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery.
“Literary adaptations look set to sweep the board in Hollywood this year.”
Six of the nine nominations announced this week for Best Picture are based on books, reflecting a recent pattern in which the Oscar lists have consistently and gratifyingly affirmed cinema’s dependence on literature.
“The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months. It aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism. Hatchet Job of the Year is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style. Most of all, it is a public celebration of that most underpaid and undervalued form of journalism: the book review.”
Click here to see the shortlist.
“The principle is simple. You enter a search term – be it a place, a person, a thing, a song, a band, a movie – and Small Demons very efficiently throws up all the novels it has on its database that mention that thing, with the relevant passages highlighted, and, crucially, hyperlinks within those extracts to other mentions.”
Continues:
Gordon Parks: 100 Years
International Center of Photography (ICP)
1133 Avenue of the Americas, NYC @ 43rd St.
To commemorate...
A depressed copywriter
dogspeed
Château Lafite Rothschild
Oliver works it on Tumblr, Beckett theme by Jonathan Beckett
