What the soothing people at Alcoholics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink. We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case.

- C. Hitchens 

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2003/03/hitchens-200303

Eschaton-inspired music video: The Decemberists - Calamity Song

Police Lock

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/thecity/27lock.html?_r=0

Wallace essay: "The Nature of the Fun"

http://www.penusa.org/blogs/mark-program/bookmark-david-foster-wallaces-nature-fun

"The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's "Mao II," where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebo-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention."

One artist's cartoon rendering of Mario Incandenza

Rimbaud, Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Michaux all on one page

IJ 232:

'A du nous avons foi au poison.' (We have faith in poison) from Rimbaud's Drunken Morning )

and,

"Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar"

Drunken Morning - Rimbaud

(Illuminations XI: Matinée d’Ivresse)

O my Good! O my Beauty! Atrocious fanfare in which I never falter! Enchanted easel! Hurrah for the unknown work and for the marvellous body, for the first time! It began in the laughter of children, it will finish so. This poison will linger in all our veins even when, the fanfare returning, we are delivered again to the old disharmony. Oh, we now so worthy of such tortures, let us fervently grasp this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! They’ve promised the tree of good and evil will be buried in darkness, the tyrannical virtues will be deported, so we can bring here our love so pure. It began with certain disgusts and it ends – we being unable to seize this eternity all at once – it ends with a riot of perfumes.

      Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of the faces and objects here, hallowed be you by the memory of this vigil. It began with all boorishness, behold, it ends with angels of fire and ice.

      Little drunken holy vigil! If only on account of the mask you’ve granted us. We endorse you, method! We’ve not forgotten that yesterday you glorified every century of ours. We have faith in poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.

      This is the age of ASSASSINS.

1) Director and film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, looks like David Lynch's Eraserhead

2) Drunken Angel is one of Kurosawa's early major works.

3) Michaux wrote a book about his experience with the hallucinogen mescaline:

Once the agony of the first hour is over (effect of the encounter with the poison), an agony so great that you wonder if you are not going to faint (as some people do, though rarely) you can let yourself be carried along by a certain current which may seem like happiness. Is that what I thought? I am not sure of the contrary. Yet, in my journal, during all those incredible hours, I find these words written more than fifty times, clumsily, and with difficultly : Intolerable, Unbearable.

Such is the price of this paradise (!)

Brighton Marine


View Larger Map

I didn't see this one on the audio archives page, but it's the one where the first audience question following the reading is about church attendance and the role religion plays in DFW's life and work - a question he mostly dodges.

http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/25789

Also see DFW's short essay, Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky:

"What exactly does "faith" mean? As in "religious faith," "faith in God," etc. Isn't it basically crazy to believe in something that there's no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe's sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it'll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he's presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are we talking about?"

Behold!

Lo, The David Foster Wallace Audio Project.

Tributes to DFW

McSweeney's published a number of tributes to David Foster Wallace, some of which are worth reading. Incidentally, while skimming along I noticed one of my Latin professors from undergrad (Alex Tetlak) contributed.

Movie within a movie

Ethan Hawke's Hamlet is a film student in the 2000 film adaptation

Sprezzatura

IJ: 158 - "The way he'd oh so clearly practiced a chair's back-leg tilt over and over."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura
Sprezzatura [sprettsaˈtura] is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".^[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".^[2] Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".^[3]

The word has entered the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "studied carelessness".^[4]

Frank Gehry's Strata Center at MIT

IJ 186: "The Union itself... is a great hollow brain frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be..."

(In real life) In 2007, MIT sued architect Frank Gehry over flaws in this building, which opened in 2004 to much critical acclaim. 

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/06/mit_sues_gehry_citing_leaks_in_300m_complex/?page=full

8.5 Trailer

Wallace refers to Fellini's film 8 1/2 twice - pp. 175, 185.

Difference between an alcoholic and an addict

IJ pp. 179: McDade offers to help look for pudding that he stole.

David Sheff: “An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”

Craig Ferguson:

Potential
IJ 168 -  "Potential may be worse than none, Jim."
    173 - "Talent is sort of a dark gift, talent is its own expectation."

Dylan Moran on potential:

Heroism/Success/Boredom
 IJ 141- "He is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating cluttered fields."

IJ 172-176 - TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY

DFW's Pale King - “True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” 

David Brooks NY Times Op-Ed, In Praise of Dullness (5/09):
 "The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=07