Infinte Summer

Most people hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace until his sad sad death last fall. Like the departure of Michael Jackson the attention that went toward him helped garner interest, so perhaps it's because of that that the a group of readers decided to form Infinte Summer. Not only does Infinite Summer (do you italicize the names of websites or put those things in quotes?) offer a sort of memorial for readers who were fans of the man's work, but it also provides incentive, a group therapy reading session, if you will, to get through DFW's masssive tome (yes, that extra 's' is necessary), Infinte Jest.

Like a lot of other people I picked up my first copy of that book a couple years back, I think my sophomore year in college. I found the ten dollar tenth anniversary edition online and asked my friend, Nate, to buy it for me, with the promise to pay him back (I don't think I ever actually gave him that ten bucks, so thanks bud!). For the next few years it sat on my bookshelf, adding to the weight that sagged down the wood panels or whatever they were placed on. Other DFW books started to appear around it, including Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, both of which I read before his death, so I can claim to the uber-pretentious claim of discovering him before he recieved more attention (though let's be honest: anyone who pays attention to anything that's going on in the literary world, even with half a head turned, would know the name David Foster Wallace: Chuck Klosterman is a pale imitation; Mark Z. Danielewski swiped his excessive footnote use and while House of Leaves may seem fun the first time you've read it, after you discover other things you realize how silly it really is, apart from a few geniunely good moments) but I still never managed to get past page 10.

Actually my most gallant effort came over the Christmas holidays where I made it a whopping 130 pages into the tome (including like 5 pages of footnotes) before giving up.

Anyway, the people at Infinte Summer had proposed that we all read along, perhaps even participate in some discussion, the massive novel Infinite Jest, which is 1000 pages long plus 100 pages of endnotes -- which are very important to the story and if you think you can skip, you better think again. They plan to read 75 pages a week and already are in week three, but that's all right if you're just jumping aboard now because lots of people, if you pay attention to their constant lines of updates, are behind in the quota.

Me being me, I finished the book earlier this week and it did take me longer to read than a lot of other things. It's really a piece that demands your patience and attention. It asks you to make as many connections as David Foster Wallace plans to reveal. And it might be one of the saddest things you'll ever encounter, though the relentless depression is offset by the fanatic hysterics, giving you this amazing balance of emotions, which is a part of what fiction should do. The first 200-250 pages are the most difficult to get through, and DFW gets a little excessive in what he's trying to do, as if calling more attention to prose acrobatics and multi-paged paragraphs than giving us progression. Until page 500, things start getting more interesting and you're laughing and wincing and squirming and still finding bits of the excessivness, the overabundance that DFW probably was saying mirrored the events of the book but there's still a point. From 500 to the end, with only a few scenes that could have been reduced a bit, the book is breathtaking and exhilerating. Truly magnificent, I kid you not.

But this isn't a book report, is it? Or even a critical evaluation/review. I just wanted to tell you about this website.

It's a thing well worth your time and if you're the type of person who needs structure and communion to get through something huge, then it might be perfect for you. Or if you're just interested in seeing the different effects literature can have on different people, read a variety of opinions and interpretations and usually fairly well-thoughtout and reasoned explications, then check it out.

CLICK HERE.

In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, the new Dan Brown novel would be sliding under the radar: no one would be able to find it, no one but the most serious consipracy theorists would at all be interested in it, and it would be published by some crummy print-on-demand company that would cheaply bind it and overprice it. The fact that Dan Brown can become so popular is a kind of sad, and the reason I say kind of is because while Dan Brown simply exists in a realm of mediocrity or horridness (choose whichever one you think would be the worst), he is bringing people into bookstores -- despite the fact that the books, like the Twilight series, do nothing to make people think about anything apart from or inside the narrative.

The point is: the new John Crowley was released last Thursday and I have yet to see a single bookstore in Colorado Springs carry a copy. Even the indie bound ones, although being indie bound doesn't necessarily mean that a bookstore is going to stock an item. Let's take into consideration the trouble I had finding John Wray's Lowboy, which is very good and I think that you should read it. I looked everywhere, all the indie outlets first, but they were stocking about the equivalent, in terms of new releases, of what is stocked at Walmart or Kmart or Target (the chain department store I like). Finally I found and bought a copy at Barnes & Noble and did I feel guilty? No. But then again you have to take into consideration that this is Colorado Springs we're talking about, a city that's not exactly the pinnacle of culture or thought. The same thing kind of happened with Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned but I eventually decided not to buy a copy of that book and just check it out from the library (I actually did hold a copy today, not from a downtown bookseller, but again from Barnes & Noble).

All right all right, Barnes & Noble isn't exactly the best place in the world either. What happened was this: I preordered the new John Crowley, Four Freedoms, from the store expecting, as with all preorders, that it would arrive on the day it was released. Most times I've preordered, books have come early, which is nice. I figured that with Memorial Day weekend and everything, my book might be a little delayed, but it's almost a week later and there has still been no word on its arrival. I called a store and they said, "Oh yeah, it should be here in 3 to 8 business days." Don't you think that totally defeats the purpose of a preorder? Which is making me frustrated because I've been looking forward to this book for some time already and there's this hindrance.

Also, in a perfect world, no one would stop and record over the first new episode of Pushing Daisies in months for some stupid basketball game. I'm going to find that person and punch them in the eyeball. Several times. Despite the fact that they could probably turn around and beat me up without a problem. Still. It's the principal of the matter. Now I gotta go to the ABC Web site and fight through all the download this download that junk to finish this episode, which was going so good and was a great reminder of what made this TV show such a wonder in the first place (although I hear that it went virutally unwatched: this, however, could be part of ABC's plan to validate their decision to 86 it: I still hope that ABC goes totally under -- once Lost is taken off the air). I missed Ned so badly.

The New Wilco

Follow the link to listen to the brand new Wilco album, which ups the label of eponymous by being titled Wilco (the Album).  I am not making this up.  

I think with this new record, Wilco, as a whole, are doing a lot to show that they don't take themselves as seriously as some might think.  Have you seen the album cover?  It's like Lawrence of Arabia displaced but happy.  Yet, on this first listen, the music is still fantastic.  I love Jeff Tweedy.  As a group, Wilco are probably the best American musical act out there right now.  Not to say that there aren't any other good ones, but man oh man are Wilco awesome.  

Pushing Daisies News

First and foremost, Amazon has listed that the season two DVD of the greatest TV show in recent memory is slated for a July 21st release date. That might seem so far off to find out what happens in the last three episodes of the series, but you know what? We Daisies fans have been waiting so long to see these (apart from those who were actually at the Paley Festival) that another three months -- or less if you count from today -- aren't even that terrible to think about.

Secondly, io9 and Sci Fi Wire -- things I don't normally read and only accessed when I typed Pushing Daisies into Google News Search -- are also reporting that the comic book series, which will serve really as the third season of the show, might be dropping before 2009 is over (take that recession). Fuller, apparently, has pulled in most of his writing staff and hired an artist that I've never even heard of, which honestly isn't a fair assessment because most comic book artists have had to won Pulitzers (Art Spiegelman) or drawn album covers (Craig Thompson) or written other novels (Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore) for them to hit my cultural radar. The online comics ABC had up before ABC went all stupid were entertaining enough and I think with the same devotion that Fuller has always shown, these will be fine. The only thing lacking: the wonderful performances of the cast. Chi McBride, for one, is too good for a great majority of the work that he recieves (Let's Go to Prison? I, Robot?).

Anyway, here are some key quotes:

I am going to pull together the Pushing Daisies writing staff. It will be run
like a writer's room, where I will write the first story, and we will arc out
the other issues, which will comprise what we were going to do in the back nine.
We'll also make it accessible for those who are not familiar with the TV series,
as well as introducing villains we couldn't do on ABC. There is a villain from
the Comic-Con preview comic about a guy who got his head cut off. Ned touched it
to get some answers; the body came alive too and proceeded to grab his head and
get away. We definitely want Head to come back as a big villain.

Is the comic book considered season 2.5, then?
Fuller: In many respects, it's probably season three. We're going to see a lot of exploration with Ned and his father, which we teased but were never able to make good on. We had George Hamilton save Ned and Chuck, and by having Emerson and Dwight Dixon clean up the whole mess we're going to understand who Dwight was to Chuck and Ned's dad. Dwight will be making a return, and we'll be seeing the adult Eugene Mulchandani and Danny that involves helium smuggling. There's a lot of fun stuff woven into the series that we were intending to pay off that we can now do in the comic-book series. The fans of the show will see a lot of stuff come to fruition, but new fans will have a greater appreciation, too. Since it's Marvel, I would also love for the Pie Maker to touch Captain America.

Also, some speculation about the cancellation:

The writers' strike is the big bully to blame for the plummeting ratings. There was a writers' strike in 1988, and television shows lost around 30 percent of their audiences. During this one, shows lost 20 percent of their audiences. It was a combination of the writers' strike and being off the air for 10 months.

The other problem was our timeslot wasn't good, since we didn't have a lead-in. When we aired at 9 p.m., we went up by 3 million viewers, which was really dramatic. ABC refused to move us from the 8:00 timeslot, which had worked previously the season before, but after the writers' strike and the erosion of the audience, it wasn't sustainable, so we asked them to move us repeatedly. We would have even taken Friday night at 9 p.m., because people don't watch TV earlier. All the Nielsen ratings indicate people start watching TV at 8:30. That was a big indication, but I certainly don't think the quality of the show went down. If anything, it got stronger and clearer.

Oh, if you're reading the articles, be wary because there's a lot of stuff being spoiled.

The New John Crowley Book

On May 26th, John Crowley is publishing his 11th book, Four Freedoms, which seems to be more in line with The Translater and The Evening Land: Lord Byron's Novel than it does with Little, Big. Or maybe it is a conflation of everything, that undefinable thing that makes John Crowley John Crowley (check out the Aegypt cycle). Regardless of that, it's another book that I want to read and the second-most that I'm anticipating.

Sorry Professor Crowley, but a new Thomas Pynchon book is a new Thomas Pynchon book....

WHOA....

This is all over the blogosphere, I'm sure, but goddammit, Warner Bros. just put up the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are and it looks...amazing. Click here for the hi-def Apple.com trailer, or just watch the YouTube thing, which who knows how long it'll last?

A Book I Want to Read

I haven't actually read anything by John Wray quite yet -- he only has two books out thus far: The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan's Tongue -- though I have been meaning to and there have been times I've been at the library and had copies of either of those under my arms, which were shoved out of the way for some other thing eventually, but his newest novel sounds incredible. Starred review from Publisher's Weekly, the top of the list of Amazon's best of March '09.... Here are some reviews, reprinted without permission or MLA format:

I'm not the first and certainly won't be the last reader to herald Lowboy
for the subtle homage it pays to one of the best-known
heroes in 20th century fiction, or to envy and delight in its masterful
vision of New York City as seen from its darkest, most primal places. What's
most seductive for me about John Wray's third novel--and arguably the one that
puts him squarely on the map alongside contemporary luminaries like Joseph
O'Neill, Jonathan Lethem, and Junot Diaz--is how skillfully it maps the mind's
mysterious terrain. This isn't exactly uncharted land: John Wray's Will
Heller--a.k.a. Lowboy--is a paranoid schizophrenic who, certain of both his own
dysfunction and of the world's imminent collapse by way of global warming, could
easily remind you of Ken Kesey, but Wray handles that subtext delicately and is
careful to make Will's mission to "cool down" and save the world feel
single-minded without being moralistic. Wray invokes all the classic elements of
a mystery in the telling, and that's what makes this novel such a searing read.
As Will rides the subway in pursuit of a final solution to the crisis at hand,
we meet (among others) Will's mother Violet, an Austrian by birth with an
inscrutable intensity that gives the story a decidedly noir feel; Ali Lateef,
the unflappable detective investigating Will's disappearance whose touch of
brilliance always seems in danger of being snuffed out; and Emily Wallace, the
young woman at the heart of Will's tragic odyssey. The novel moves seamlessly
between Will's fits and starts below ground and Violet and Ali's equally
staccato investigation of each other above. This kind of pacing is the stuff we
crave (and we think you will, too)--the kind that draws you in so unawares that
before you know it, it's past midnight and you're down to the last page.

Atop that, I found, via YouTube, a great reading, very blogotheque or whatever that is, where John Wray reads his book on the actual subway (it was apparently written there, too; a romantic guesture, I presume).









I also like the further premise of this video: