David Foster Wallace on Writing, Death, and Redemption by Maria Popova “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.” On May 21, 2005 David Foster Wallace took the podium at Kenyon College and delivered the now-legendary This Is Water, one of history’s greatest commencement addresses — his timeless meditation on the meaning of life and the grueling work required in order to stay awake to the world rather than enslaved by one’s own self-consuming intellect. It included this admonition: Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. Three years later, on September 12, 2008, Wallace murdered his own terrible master — not by firearms, but by hanging himself. Donating = Loving
The Paris Review's Lorin Stein on the Power of Ambiguity in Fiction By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. In the past five years, Lorin Stein has watched something happen at The Paris Review, the literary magazine he edits. A new generation of writers under 40 has emerged, he says; their essays, poems, and short stories don’t sound alike, but they’ve been shaped by the same forces and they share a set of concerns. The goal of The Unprofessionals—an anthology of new work harvested from the Review’s pages, edited by Stein—is to put these voices in one place and let them be taken in together. In our conversation for this series, Stein discussed Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” a short story that puts The Unprofessionals into context. Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it’s published young unknowns including Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, and David Foster Wallace. He doesn’t care.
THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AUDIO PROJECT | Audio archive of interviews with, profiles of, readings by, and eulogies to David Foster Wallace. Sara Toole Miller - Fiction & Non-Fiction Writer supposedly fun | david foster wallace Towards the beginning of E Unibus Pluram, Wallace makes the distinction between the observance of the fabricated and the observance of the authentic. On one end of the spectrum, Wallace derides television for its articificiality, its psuedovoyeurism that allows the masses to peer into a world behind the screen, unnoticed and uninterrupted. Wallace describes this one-way mirror, saying “television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself” (Wallace, p. 22). Among many others, one of Wallace’s main qualms with television is the sense of false intimacy it creates with the watcher. While the viewer feels as if they are witnessing the technicolor, private lives of the characters behind the glass, they are in fact viewing the creative whimsy of tv writers, the end product of mass-market demands. Enter Wallace in “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”.
Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers Image by the USO, via Flickr Commons In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. We’ve talked so much about the reader, but you can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too. This is excellent advice. Revision in the second draft, “one of them, anyway,” may “necessitate some big changes” says King in his 2000 memoir slash writing guide On Writing. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. See a fuller exposition of King’s writing wisdom at Barnes & Noble’s blog. Related Content: Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read Stephen King Writes A Letter to His 16-Year-Old Self: “Stay Away from Recreational Drugs”
Harry Potter vs. Huckleberry Finn: Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories Than Americans If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children’s literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children’s literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways. The small island of Great Britain is an undisputed powerhouse of children’s bestsellers: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It all goes back to each country’s distinct cultural heritage. Today there may be more reason than ever to find solace in fantasy.
The world's greatest literature reveals multifractals and cascades of consciousness James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world's greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even more intriguing. As far as many bookworms are concerned, advanced equations and graphs are the last things which would hold their interest, but there's no escape from the math. Fractals are self-similar mathematical objects: when we begin to expand one fragment or another, what eventually emerges is a structure that resembles the original object. Multifractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. "Analyses on multiple scales, carried out using fractals, allow us to neatly grasp information on correlations among data at various levels of complexity of tested systems. Prof.
What Famous Novels Look Like Stripped of Everything But Punctuation Jacques Mattheij made a small, but awesome, mistake. He went on eBay one evening and bid on a bunch of bulk LEGO brick auctions, then went to sleep. Upon waking, he discovered that he was the high bidder on many, and was now the proud owner of two tons of LEGO bricks. (This is about 4400 pounds.) Mattheij had noticed that bulk, unsorted bricks sell for something like €10/kilogram, whereas sets are roughly €40/kg and rare parts go for up to €100/kg. There are 38000+ shapes and there are 100+ possible shades of color (you can roughly tell how old someone is by asking them what lego colors they remember from their youth). In the following months, Mattheij built a proof-of-concept sorting system using, of course, LEGO. Here's a video showing the current system running at low speed: The key part of the system was running the bricks past a camera paired with a computer running a neural net-based image classifier. Check out Mattheij's writeup in two parts for more information.
Il "doppiese", la lingua irreale delle traduzioni Entrate in libreria, aprite un romanzo italiano a caso, prendete una pagina a caso, e leggete le prime battute di dialogo su cui vi cadono gli occhi. Se trovate la battuta «ma che stai dicendo?», potete proseguire la lettura o potete chiudere il libro. Scegliete voi. Io chiudo il libro e me ne vado. DoppieseLa battuta «ma che stai dicendo?» Le ragioni del doppiese, al cinema e in TV, dipendono dalla tempistica di produzione degli adattamenti. (Il livello più basso, in termini di qualità materiale dell’adattamento, è il doppiese hardcore, quando il budget per il doppiaggio viene ridotto al minimo e si registra tutto in un paio di pomeriggi: risultato, niente rumori di fondo, poche voci e tutte frontali; non importa in quale punto dello schermo stiano i parlanti reali, suoneranno sempre come se stessero seduti davanti a voi.) Ora, il doppiese è una non-lingua. La cosa che lascia secchi è il ritrovare il doppiese nei libri. L’ultimo esempio non è casuale. Mi spiego meglio.
Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have by Maria Popova “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.” “Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself,” Umberto Eco observed in his magnificent atlas of imaginary places. Indeed, our capacity for self-delusion is one of the most inescapable fundamentals of the human condition, and nowhere do we engage it more willingly and more voraciously than in the art and artifice of storytelling. In the same 1948 lecture that gave us Vladimir Nabokov’s 10 criteria for a good reader, found in his altogether fantastic Lectures on Literature (UK; public library), the celebrated author and sage of literature examines the heart of storytelling: Vladimir Nabokov by William Claxton, 1963 Literature is invention. The best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.