DFW book from Madras Press

Straight out of Newton, Massachusetts: Sumanth Prabhaker’s Madras Press has published a section of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a five-inches-square book: The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax. It’s a conversion narrative, the long first-person story of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a drug-taking “wastoid” who walks into the wrong college classroom and finds his life changed by a lecture on the heroism of accountancy. The Fogle story may be the best thing in the The Pale King.

Madras Press books are available from select bookstores and by mail from the publisher. All proceeds go to charitable organizations. The beneficiary for this book is Granada House, where, in 1989, Wallace began living in sobriety. Take a look at the Granada House website: the first account on this page is by Wallace.

My visit to Granada House in 2010 (as a DFW reader wanting to make a donation) helped me understand one of the “exotic new facts” in the Infinite Jest catalogue of things one can learn in a halfway house: “That God — unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.”

Thanks, Ben, for getting me a copy of this book.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[My link to “An Ex-Resident’s Story” is no revelation: Jason Kottke made the Wallace connection in 2008. I have borrowed most of the sentence describing Chris Fogle’s story from a review of The Pale King that I wrote for World Literature Today.]

W3 online

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is now online. The price — $29.95 a year — seems a bargain. (A year’s subscription to the OED runs $295.)

Do I need the online W3? At home I work about eight paces from a 1986 copy of the real thing, always open on a dictionary stand. A first-edition compact OED is about four paces away. These dictionaries are not exactly of the moment. But there are several more recent dictionaries in the house, a dictionary app on my Mac, and (through my university’s library) the online OED. I think that I want is going to yield to common sense. Besides, the library might be getting W3 online.

A related post
Review: The Story of Ain’t (on W3)

Mimeograph duplicator

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:


[Life, July 22, 1940. Click for a larger view.]

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

See how clean and sharp those copies look? You can barely distinguish them from the original sentence. That’s because I made them with my A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator.

The business model put forth in this advertisement would be welcome today: “Honest salesmen, selling honest quality in honest products, made in honest factories, marked at honest prices.” No junk: “One chair that lasts is worth a whole suite that peels and cracks and falls apart.” Yes. “The real economy of the superior,” not “the extravagance of the inferior.” I think about these matters every time I have to buy a tool or household item. It’s cheaper in the long run to buy what will last.

What better way to sell a duplicating machine than with a crisp line drawing of a duplicating machine? Look: the machine and the picture are being wheeled into your workplace as I type:


[You’re almost there, fellows. Push! Push hard!]

If, like me, you fondly recall the fragrant purple ink of schooldays, you’re thinking of the products of the spirit duplicator, not the mimeograph. The two-ply page used with a spirit duplicator was called a “spirit master.” What a strange and wonderful name.

[That dress- or keyhole-like shape in the bottom left corner? I have no idea.]

“Creatures of hope”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).

Other NYRB finds of my acquaintance: William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere. I’m not sure it’s possible to go wrong looking for NYRB spines in a bookstore.

Mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs

From The New York Times, a report on the mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs. Elaine and I saw bit of their show not long ago in the very strange Route 66 episode “The Cruelest Sea of All” (aired April 5, 1963). Very little seems to have changed in fifty years.

“Poindexter barbat”

[Zippy, July 6, 2013.]

“Poindexter barbat”? The linguist Arnold Zwicky has a plausible explanation.

Related reading
All Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Does anyone else remember this guy?]

An otter failure

[Mark Trail, July 6, 2013.]

“Them”: a couple of otters. Rusty spoke to “them” just yesterday. I quote:

“You two can play in the yard while I go inside and have lunch. But don't wander off — I’ll be back in a few minutes!”

And yet, as Rusty is about to discover, they have wandered — “into the wilderness,” “back to their river home.”

I am troubled to think that the adopted son of the great outdoorsman Mark Trail thinks that otters will follow directions given in English. Everybody knows or else should know that one must speak to otters in Otterman.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Movie recommendation: Stories We Tell

                            What happened?

                            Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of
                            Starlight

In my family, we’ve been fans of Sarah Polley since Ramona, the ten-episode CBC series that aired on PBS when our children were tykes. In the documentary Stories We Tell (2013), Polley seeks out a crucial truth of her family’s history, interviewing her father, her siblings, and family friends and relations, all of whom tell their stories — what they know, and what they don’t know. As you might suspect from the list of interviewees, the crucial truth concerns Polley’s mother Diane, an actress and casting director who died in 1990, when Polley was eleven.

Stories We Tell has been described as a matter of mystery and contradiction, but there’s really very little of Rashomon here: what happened becomes clear early on. The real strength of the film is its presentation of love and marriage and family life as the work of fallible people who make difficult choices and must learn to live with the consequences. Or to rewrite Tolstoy: All families are imperfect, but each is imperfect in its own way. A second strength is the film’s foregrounding of the work of storytelling. In one of my favorite scenes, Polley’s actor father reads in a recording studio his own written account of his marriage as Polley directs, asking him to reread here, slow down there. What becomes clearer as the film goes on is that Polley is telling a story, one that not only explores but also imagines and recreates the past.

Stories We Tell has some flaws. The film runs a little long, seeming to wrap up at about the ninety-minute mark before continuing for another eighteen minutes. Greater variety in the circumstances of interviewing would lend the film greater visual interest. (I’m thinking, of all things, of the variety of interview settings in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah: a barber shop, a café, an open field.) But these are minor complaints. Stories We Tell is unusual, inventive, and filled with humanity. Perhaps it will arrive at a theater near you.

You can read more about Stories We Tell at the film’s website. Careful: the trailer gives away more than you might want to know.

Thanks to Mike Brown for putting this film into my front brain.

[In Sorrentino’s novel, the repeated question What happened? is Marie Recco’s way of asking what went wrong in her marriage.]

The Fourth of July

[“Fourth Of July Celebrations Wantagh, Li”. Photograph by Leonard McCombe. Wantagh, New York. No date. From the Life Photo Archive.]

If I were the photographer, the description would read: “Youngsters engage in frenzied bidding war for meat, meat by-products.”

Happy Fourth of July.

Related reading
Another Leonard McCombe photograph

[“Li” = Long Island.]

Joad’s Corollary

A corollary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return:

Time is infinite. Imagination is not. Thus there are remakes.

See also Stubbs’s Corollary.

[Inspired by the news that Steven Spielberg is planning to remake The Grapes of Wrath. Yes, there are good reasons to retell stories. But here I say hands off.]