Simple test: are you surprised that he’s on this list?

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You may remember that Aristotle attributes to Democritus a story of Daedalus making a wooden statue of Aphrodite move by pouring mercury in it (De anima, 406b). I wondered, however naively, for what purpose until I then remembered the story of Asterion’s birth. I should consult a scholarly edition for more details, I suppose.

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I have a tin ear, and I once, remembering this opinion of Donald Fagen’s, played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” for a date skeptical, let us say, of this: An astounding record. You get to hear on this what a fantastic singer he was. His range, which now, as far as I can tell, [...]

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The second stanza of this poem runs: In the beginning was the Word.Superfetation of τὸ ἒν,And at the mensual turn of timeProduced enervate Origen. An earlier version was: In the beginning was the Word.Superfetation of τὸ ἒν,And at the menstrual turn of timeProduced the castrate Origen. The changes were Pound’s suggestions, apparently. Generally speaking, Pound’s [...]

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I seem to remember from the pellucid legal reasoning of one of the Yoo memos that the government has the ability to withdraw from any treaty at any time. That apparently does not extend, according to Larry Summers and Edward W. Liddy, to the abrogation of domestic contracts. I would have expected this willful stand [...]

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I learned from the wallace-l list, which I recently rejoined, that the D. T. Max article I mentioned earlier misquoted Larry McCaffrey’s interview with Wallace from the Review of Contemporary Fiction. The transcribed web version has Wallace reporting that “most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive” instead of “mediated.” The print version is available as a [...]

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Is here. I created this quickly, without checking to see if some other enthusiast had done this before and with more detail. A couple of things I noted: 1) I cannot find a place called “Drury” in Utah. I’ve pinned it in Salt Lake City. I don’t know if this is deliberate, the name of [...]

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I’ve written about the apparently inexplicable use of homophonic spellings with this construction in dialogue in M. John Harrison and Cormac McCarthy before. Here’s another example from Wallace’s Brief Interviews: “The bastard even must of faked that call” (26). I’m surprised that Wallace, of all the writers I’ve seen this in, didn’t think about this. [...]

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I’ve done some preliminary rummaging around on the internet for commentary on this short piece from Brief Interviews and have found little. The title appealed to people writing about Wallace after his death, I suppose, but I didn’t see much commentary on the story itself. (The archives of the wallace discussion list seemed to be [...]

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This is from the NYT interview with Cormac McCarthy: Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: “McCarthy is the one writer younger than [...]

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Can anyone think of a book which uses them almost exclusively? Real life has provided some very good models, as you know if you follow the news. I could imagine someone publishing the Yoo memos, as is, in chronological order, in 1997, and winning all relevant prizes. I feel like there’s an obvious example, but [...]

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Timothy Burke will write over a thousand words of deliberative and measured fury in response to this Anthony Lane review of Watchmen.

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In this revealing and sad New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace and his unfinished novel, D. T. Max writes the following: Doug Hesse, a colleague, made the mistake of praising an essay of Wallace’s. “He did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing to his mouth with the other,” Hesse [...]

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