Everything is on fire, slow fire, and we are all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.
Wallace annotated many of the books heavily: he underlined passages, made extensive comments in the margins, and utilized the front and back inside covers for notes, vocabulary lists, brainstorms, and more. As a reader of Infinite Jest, one book in particular caught my eye: a battered paperback copy of Pam Cook’s edited volume The Cinema Book (New York: Pantheon, 1985). This reference work is heavily used: it lacks both its front and back cover, its spine is held on with two pieces of tape, and the exposed inside cover is inscribed “D. Wallace ’92,” four years before the publication of Infinite Jest.
Infinite Possibilities: A first glimpse into David Foster Wallace’s library | Cultural Compass
DFW’s full manuscript archive and personal library arrived at the Ransom Center at UT Austin. After spending last summer diving head first into Infinite Jest for the first time, I suddenly have a greater understanding of his singular drive in absorbing and constructing the written word.
Source: utexas.edu
I walked out and I knew I had found it, what I had been looking for all my life, in all the blood and the fucking and the right arm and the fast move, in everything I had done and everybody I had had to deal with. I knew I had found it, but up till now I had never had the full thing… I could have flown with the hawks and the swans if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to stand there.
To The White Sea by James Dickey
I’ve just finished reading this novel and I am in awe…
I never thought I was going to write novels when I began writing. I thought I could just get away with writing a poem now and then. I began writing because it helped me discover what I was feeling or thinking…
Michael Ondaatje interviewed by Robert Birnbaum - The Morning News
I sometimes feel a little guilty for never having read any of Ondaatje’s novels. This conversation makes me think it’s time to seek him out.
Source: themorningnews.org
Waiting for the next balloon…
It has taken me a little over two months to write this sentence. Not because I’m a slow typist, and not because it took that long to get it just right. I just didn’t get around to it.
Other things were happening in my life, new projects and new ideas. But during that whole time there was a part of me that knew this blank space was sitting here, waiting, getting a little dusty. Oh, there has still been writing and creating going on. And there will be more. It’s just a different kind of writing, the kind that keeps me fed and gets me in print. Hopefully. So that means less time for “self-published” writing such as this.
The hardest part of any creative action is the enduring the period of no creative action that precedes it. But that is also the most creative part of the process, and I can’t have a creative act without it. It’s the time when the true creativity takes hold, an idea/concept/image forms a little balloon that grows within me. Once that balloon rises to the surface, the action begins. But I need to give the balloon time and room to grow.
So just because I don’t fill this space doesn’t mean I don’t want to. It just means I’m waiting to see what balloons rise next and where they’re going to take me.
