Our words, our selves

Barbara Wallraff:

With our words — particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them — we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best. Our words, outside ourselves, can be objects for us to reflect on, objects to perfect, evidence for us to study if we want to know whether we’re as kind or as clever as we like to think we are — and then they can be tools to help us be that kind or clever if we can just use them skillfully and patiently.

Word Court (New York: Harcourt, 2000).

[From 1983 to 2009, Wallraff was an editor and columnist for The Atlantic.]

Solidarité

[Solidarité. Illustration by Ana Juan. From The New Yorker website. Click for a larger view.]

DFW, non-Philo-ite

The cover story for the January 16 issue of Newsweek: The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace. It’s the work of Alexander Nazaryan, a self-proclaimed “fanboy,“ and it reads that way. There’s nothing to see here, really, for someone who knows Wallace’s work.

Nazaryan makes the common mistake of believing that Wallace grew up in Philo, Illinois. Depsite what Wallace wrote in the essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” he did not grow up in Philo. Nazaryan quotes the essay’s description of the town:

a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana’s university.

Wallace grew up in Urbana, Illinois. His father James Wallace made the correction in 2010:

None of us, including David, ever set foot in Philo. I don’t know why David put all that feigned autobiography in the essay, but he did. Lots of people think we are from Philo. Only we and the residents of Philo know the truth.

Philo also turns up in the unfinished novel The Pale King, as the home of IRS employee David Foster Wallace.

In 2011 Elaine and I drove around Philo looking for “the blacktop courts of a small public park” that Wallace describes in his essay. There were none. There might have been, at some point. But Wallace wouldn’t have been playing there. What “Derivative Sport” doesn’t reveal is that his childhood home (in Urbana) was half a mile from Blair Park, a park with tennis courts. D. T. Max’s biography notes that Wallace took tennis lessons “at the local park.”

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

[This post is a brief step away from current events.]

A film trailer in a dream

I dreamed it last night: a trailer for a film about the poet Frank O’Hara. The title: A Controversial Thing in the Past. The trailer showed nothing but yellow taxis, shot from below. “Please not with James Franco,” I thought.

The obvious influences: the “the hum-colored / cabs” of O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” the circumstances of his death, the 2010 movie Howl.

I wondered about a source for the title, but Google returns nothing for “a controversial thing in the past .”

There is a short film of Frank O’Hara independent of this dream.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[This post is a brief step away from current events.]

Art by Lucille Clerc

Lucille Clerc is the creator of the three-pencil tribute to Charlie Hebdo. The story is here. Clerc posted this image (no filter) to Instagram with the caption, “Break one, thousand will rise.”

Paparazzi!, an OS X app

Paparazzi!: “a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.” It’s free. Thank you, Nate Weaver.

Note: pages. Paparazzi! takes a shot of the page, not the screen. It saves one (or me) the tedious labor of stitching screenshots into a larger whole. Unlike Div Shekar’s BrowseShot (also free), Paparazzi! works with Google Books. That’s what makes the app especially useful to me.

Thanks to Zoe Rooney, who recommended Paparazzi! in a blog post.

Yesterday / today / tomorrow

Posted four hours ago to the (fake) Instagram account banksy. The caption: “RIP.”

Whoever made it, it’s a fitting tribute.

*

January 8: The image is by a French illustrator living in London, Lucille Clerc. Story here.

Battle for Brooklyn

A documentary worth watching: Battle for Brooklyn (dir. Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, 2011), which chronicles the eight-year fight against the Atlantic Yards project, which displaced residents and businesses to bring the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn. Can the doctrine of eminent domain be made to serve private enterprise? If you’re name is Bruce Ratner, the answer is yes. As Elaine quickly realized, the story is rather Wire-like. The fix, as they say, was in.

Battle for Brooklyn is both dispiriting and inspiring. Those who resist lose. Yet again and again, they refuse to give up. Their effort makes me remember this observation from Philip K. Dick: “Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”

Related reading
Battle for Brooklyn (The film’s website)
Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn

An observation about writing, from Richard Marius

A good reason to read Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day: each post closes with a little bonus, a quoted passage about language or writing. Here’s one sentence from yesterday’s passage:

When you write every day about yourself and your immediate world, you will develop habits that will help you observe the greater world beyond yourself.

Richard Marius, A Writer’s Companion (New York: Knopf, 1985).

Richard Marius’s book, now out of print, is a good one. It’s the kind of book that seems to be of little interest in the world of “comp” — the work of a writer (not a “specialist”) sharing what he knows.

Go fish!

In downstate Illinois, a would-be restaurant robber runs into “a knife-wielding sushi chef.”

[This story has already enjoyed significant circulation. I’m posting it because it’s news to me and it’s local. I’ve eaten at that restaurant.]