Pale King review

The July-August 2011 issue of World Literature Today has my review of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. It’s a short review, but it makes several points I’ve seen nowhere else. (And they’re good ones.) The link is to the journal’s website; the review is in print (pages 70–71), and online via subscribing libraries.

Waiting on a copy of The Pale King and ignoring all discussion of the book until after I’d written a review made for a strange adventure in not-reading. No spoilers!

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

DFW as a character in a novel

Willa Paskin at New York reports on a character in a new Jeffrey Eugenides novel who strongly resembles David Foster Wallace. The character in question, Leonard Baskin, is a double major (biology and philosophy) who chews tobacco and wears a bandanna. There are several more points of resemblance. Paskin notes that

the similarities are so iconically David Foster Wallace (a bandanna and chew are not common accoutrements) that Eugenides, who did not have a well-known or documented friendship with Foster Wallace, must intentionally be calling him to mind.

DFW in someone else’s fiction: I guess it was bound to happen.

Here in east-central Illinois, bandannas and chew are indeed common accouchamacallems, though they might not always be acknowledged as such.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[Like Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, Wallace (not Foster Wallace) dipped (not chewed) Kodiak.]

Overheard

A woman looking at a poster for a baby-product expo:

“I’m in heaven right now looking at this. All right, where’s my cigarettes?”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

Fred Astaire on What’s My Line?

From 1955 and 1959. What grace. What modesty.

A related post
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on The Mike Douglas Show

Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten

[Click for a larger view.]

Here’s a film I immediately know that I want to see, Vadim Jendreyko’s Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten [The woman with the five elephants], a documentary about Svetlana Geier, who spent much of her life translating Dostoyevsky into German. You see the results of her work above.

Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten (Film website, in English, French, and German)
Surviving To Conquer Dostoevsky’s “5 Elephants” (NPR)

[Photograph from the film website.]

LEMONADE FIFTY ¢ ICE COLD

Elaine and I went to the store by bicycle, and we took the mysterious route home, avoiding the major streets, such as they are. And so we saw three children in their front yard, two boys and a girl, sitting at a little table under a patio umbrella. Their combined age might have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight. They were in business, and they had a sign: LEMONADE FIFTY ¢ ICE COLD. We stopped to buy and drink. For a moment, it might have been 1965. And then the younger boy’s phone beeped.

[Yes, fifty cents would have been steep for 1965. Suspend disbelief, at least until the phone beeps.]

There’s something about Rupert

There’s something about Rupert. He reminds me of someone. Who could it be? I just can’t imagine. I’ll just have to knock on Mister Noggin. Could it be . . . could it be . . . Satan?

Elaine noticed it, but she didn’t want Satan Murdoch on her blog, so I’m posting here. The devil made me do it.

6:53 p.m.: Oh gosh, people everywhere have noticed it. There is nothing new under the sun. Or there was something new under the sun, and people everywhere noticed it, and once again there is nothing new under the sun.

A related post
Murdoch’s issues

[With apologies to Dana Carvey, the Church Lady, Geraldine, and Flip Wilson.]

Henry mystery

[Henry, July 19, 2011.]

What Henry is doing is no mystery: he’s painting on a black eye to match the one a bully just gave him. (Ta-da: sunglasses.) But what is he using as a mirror?

My guess is that it’s a gum machine, the kind that once could be found attached to posts in New York City subway stations. Here are three (machines, not stations). I suppose that in the right light the glass could serve as a mirror (especially if it were, say, 1947 or so).

Sometimes I wonder who in their right mind reads Henry.

Related posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry’s repeated gesture

[Here’s a photograph of a gum machine in its native habitat. There’s a better suggestion from Pete in the comments: a comb dispenser.]

“I changed the Will to Shall”

Pete Seeger, on the development of “We Shall Overcome”:

“Long-meter style is the way Zilphia Horton learned it — why didn’t her parents just call her Sylvia, I wonder — and she taught it to me, but I didn’t know how to play it right. I just gave it a banjo accompaniment, and I didn’t even sing it very much. Eventually I changed the Will to Shall. Toshi jokes that it’s my college education, but I’ve always used shall in the first person. Are you going to town tomorrow? Yes, I shall. Anyway, shall opens up the mouth better; the short ‘I’ is not as dramatic a sound as the ‘aah.’ I taught the song to Frank Hamilton, who taught it to a young boy named Guy Carawan, and they put it in this twelve-eight meter, but slow, and that gave it that great, pulsating rhythm. I am not sure where Dr. King heard it, but there was a woman, what was her name, she died only last year, and she remembered driving Dr. King to a speech in Kentucky and him in the backseat saying, ‘“We Shall Overcome,” that song really sticks with you, doesn’t it.’”

Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

[Toshi: Pete’s wife Toshi Seeger.]

Related reading
“We Shall Overcome” (Wikipedia)

Borders to close

From the New York Times:

The Borders Group, the bankrupt 40-year-old bookseller, said on Monday that it will move to liquidate after no last-minute savior emerged for the company. . . . Borders will begin closing its remaining stores as soon as Friday, and the liquidation is expected to run through September.

For months now, the online welcome message from my nearby Borders has seemed tinged with pathos:

Learning your way around our store, or having trouble finding that title? Our knowledgeable booksellers can be found near the Area-E desk, and throughout the store, to answer questions, locate titles, and help you order something if it’s not on the shelf. If you’re in need of a pastry or a pick-me-up, visit our Seattle’s Best Coffee cafe, where our excellent team members will help you find what’s just right for you. We look forward to your visit.

I wish you well, Borders employees. I will miss what was for many years an excellent bookstore.

A related post
Goodbye, Pages for All Ages (The end of an independent bookstore)