3 posts tagged “literature”
David Foster Wallace, a dazzlingly talented author once considered the heir apparent to post-modern greats like Thomas Pynchon and Donald Bathelme, was found dead in his home September 12. He hanged himself and his wife found him in their home in California. He was 46 years old and taught at Pomona College.
Via gawker via reluctant habits.
I remember reading his first novel, "The Broom of the System", years ago, and recall thinking that every sentence was like its own novel. He drew comparisons to James Joyce for his pure verbal talents, and his novel "Infinite Jest" garnered a cult like following which it retains to this day and catapulted him into the literary stratosphere, when it was hailed as a Ulysses-esque masterwork. I must endeavor to read it now, in earnest.
Condolences to his wife, family, and friends. Thinking that this happened on September 12, and typing this on a gloomy, rainy Sunday is, to say the least, eerie.
EDIT: Apparently this Detroit article was from 2006, so ix-nay on the Kwame Kilpatrick relevance, hahaha!
The Onion's streak of untarnished hilarity continues, uninterrupted from the publication's inception until now - and that is a fluid now - these folks just never miss!
This one held particular resonance as it came just two days before Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sent to jail. Mr. Mayor has since been released.
All jokes and philandering politicos aside, I went to Detroit once for DEMF, and having become fascinated by the city as the most prominent example of American urban poverty resulting from loss of manufacturing jobs and wondering how, if at all, this played into Detroit birthing techno, I read Dan Sicko's excellent "Techno Rebels" at the suggestion of good buddy and techno-mentor Peter Anthony. Required reading for any fans of the bommpty-boomp; as Peter once put it, "to know the future, one must know the past." I guess that reads oversimply out of context, but it is fun and useful knowledge to learn a bit about how the city shaped the rise of techno.
And now that that little techno tangent has come to a close, back to Detroit as a symbol of urban decay. It was once the 7th city in the US in population, and, as we know, home to the automobile industry, but as cheaper and more reliable Japanese imports cut into the market for cars, the city suffered and ultimately kind of collapsed, culminating with race riots in 1968 which emptied the city of its white residents, who headed for the burbs and didn't come back. Visiting Detroit is indeed a real trip - totally crazy place. There's office furniture there in dilapidated buildings from the 1950s that's simply never been taken away.
Take a little spin through the excellent site The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit for an animated tour.
Legendary Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. . Reading the NY Times article about his life and accomplishments, one cannot help but be filled with a feeling of smallness. He was one of those people that stood up for what he believed in, defying the communists in spite of imprisonment and exile. Apparently, he was strange character, and considered a reactionary by many later in his life, but the weight of his contributions to the literary canon and his defiant acts to the cause of intellectual dissidents in Russia and elsewhere certainly shine more brightly.
I'm embarrassed that I've never read any of his books, and am adding "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago" - his defining depiction of the Soviet Gulag prison camps where he spent 8 years - to my list of items to read.
