More Than Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)
Photo: The Village Voice

"On Feb. 7, 1972, when David Foster Wallace was 9 years old, he began work on a creative-writing assignment—a one-page story narrated by a tea kettle. 'Hi I am a kettle,' his protagonist says, by way of introduction, adding: 'Ouch! Listen I come to you for advice. This flame is real hot but I love my job.' [...] Along with a complete Gutenberg Bible, some letters of James Joyce’s, and collections of Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer, this tale of a tea kettle in extremis now rests in the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, as do more than 20,000 of Wallace’s other papers and books." — Newsweek
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"As an adolescent, Wallace played football and was a regionally ranked tennis player, but his interest in writing and language was influenced by his parents, who read Ulysses out loud to each other. His father read Moby-Dick to Wallace and his sister when they were only eight and six years old, and his mother would playfully pretend to have a coughing fit if one of the children made a usage error during supper conversation." — David Foster Wallace:
An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
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"Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong." — Maria Bustillos, The Awl
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Books by David Foster Wallace here...

Canadian Giants of the Twentieth Century (1) Leonard Cohen

From: The Musical Box

"A Canadian poet, Cohen became one of pop’s most unlikely heroes during the heart of the late ‘60s psychedelic movement. But his music wasn’t at all psychedelic. It was understated, fanciful, modestly stylish and somewhat distant. Cohen was (and still is) a bohemian Bob Dylan - a wordsmith that conveys an epic emotive sweep with his lyrics even though he has been bestowed with a singing voice of seemingly limited technical range. Yet like Dylan’s now-haggard wail, Cohen’s now-raspy baritone only enhances the conversational intimacies and drama of his songs." — Walter Tunis, The Musical Box
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His Novels:

This edition, published by Bantam Books, New York (1967)

Again, this edition published by Bantam Books, New York (1971)











"Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is '...like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.'" — Wikipedia
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Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

From: "Hallelujah" (on Various Positions, Leonard Cohen's seventh studio album, [1984])
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“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before” — Cliff Fadiman

From: Sims Reed - Rare Books

Here's to a blissful summer of reading for all you Jane Austen fans. Her lesser-known works are waiting to be discovered — or rediscovered.
"The heroine of Northanger Abbey is not so popular, maybe because the title is hard to pronounce, maybe because the novel wasn't re-made for television until 2007, but probably because Catherine Morland doesn't have much in the way of an identity. The narrator writes that no one would take her for a heroine — and then throws a hero in her path and makes her one."
—Rachel M. Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?
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"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing? Never." — Edna Ferber

"Solar powered laptops are nice and I'm all for keeping your laptop charged up, but they need to be in contact with sunlight in order to work. What if you could charge your laptop simply by harnessing the power generated from typing on it all day?" — dvice
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And more...

Nouning the Verb

David Tennant (of Dr. Who fame) as Hamlet on a 1st class
stamp issued this year by the Royal Mail to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"We decided to try to see what happens inside us when the brain comes upon sentences like 'The dancers foot it with grace,' or 'We waited for disclose of news,' or 'Strong wines thick my thoughts,' or 'I could out-tongue your griefs' or 'Fall down and knee/The way into his mercy.' For research suggests that there is one specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb?" — Phillip Davis, More Intelligent Life
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Be. Quiet.

From: One Good Eye Antiques

"In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he 'became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.' [...]
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web [...]
And here's the function that the book — the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once — does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: 'Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.'"
— Johann Hari, Huffington Post
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"You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughta be"—Elizabeth Gilbert

From: Escape from Reality

"For writers, the new opportunities are often double-edged, with each new prize multiplying the chances of not winning. 'I understand that some writers may feel that if there’s a winner, there are obviously losers,' says Elana Rabinovitch, administrator of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. 'That’s hard because right now we have a culture of prizes. But it’s the only downside.' "— John Barber, The Globe and Mail

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The top book-prize jackpots open to Canadian writers, in order of value (all amounts in Canadian dollars):

1. Nobel Prize in Literature: $1,555,870

2. International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award: $139,000

3. Man Booker International Prize: $96,487

4. Man Booker Prize: $80,400

5. Warwick Prize for Writing: $80,400

6. Griffin Poetry Prize: $75,000

7. Cundill Prize in History at McGill: $73,345

8. Writers’ Trust Hilary Weston Prize for Non-Fiction: $60,000

9. Scotiabank Giller Prize: $50,000

10. Montreal International Poetry Prize: $50,000

11. British Columbia National Book Award: $40,000

12. The Donner Prize: $35,000

13. Governor General’s Literary Awards: $25,000

14. Rogers Writer’s Trust Award: $25,000

15. Marion Engel Award: $25,000

16. TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award: $25,000

17. Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction: $25,000

18. Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing: $25,000

19. Trillium Book Award: $25,000

20. Matt Cohen Prize: $20,000

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