Have just this morning had the opportunity to begin reading some of the side links from the Ransom Center on the DFW archives and how they came to receive them. Following, is nearly 100% of what DFW’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, had to say about what she discovered as she and Foster Wallace’s wife began organizing his books and notes into a coherent archive:

Organizing David Wallace’s papers for an archive was not a task I would wish on many people. Some writers leave their papers organized, boxed, and with careful markers, David left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever. His wife and I took plastic bins and cardboard boxes and desk drawers and created an order out of chaos, putting manuscripts for each book together and writing labels in magic markers.

But what scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a “look ma no hands” kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are. How a character’s name was gone over and over until it became the right one. How David looked through his dictionaries making notes, writing phrases of dialogue in his notebooks, and his excitement in discovering a wild new word to use.

All the side links are a necessary read.

Need to find a way to get to Austin.

This, from a link inside the Bobulate piece. Images of DFW’s margin annotations inside books he owned.

The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace’s college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.

Touch and hold any word to look it up in the built-in dictionary or Wikipedia, or to search for it throughout the book and on the web.

Apple – iPad – Buy and read books like never before | via Apple.com

I also wonder if this is going to make it easier for my wife to sleep while I read in bed.

Mine’s on order, by the way…

The more I find out about this guy the more I love him and the sadder I get that he’s no longer alive. So completely unpretentious, honest, and exposed.

We all worship and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose, to an extent, what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves over to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different. For instance, pleasure, or drugs, or the idea of having a lot of money.

I don’t know that anyone would put Foster Wallace on a list of spiritual or religious writers, but I have a continuous sense while reading his writing that he has a very spiritual/transcendent point of view. Not preachy, just a sense that he’s seeing outside the box of what’s “normal.”

YouTube-David Foster Wallace interview 2003 part 1 of 10

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

Special issue of Hamish Hamilton’s excellent literary magazine, “A celebration of the life of David Foster Wallace with contributions by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and others.” Designed by our old friend Dean Allen. So good — do yourself a favor and print it out.

Five Dials # 10 | via Daring Fireball

In short, a great, loving, thoughtful tribute to David Foster Wallace.

Even shorter, I’d know nothing about DFW if not for John Gruber’s site. So, thanks John.

All That | via DaringFireball and The New Yorker

Agassi admits using crystal meth | via Washington Times

I too started, but did not even begin to finish reading Infinite Jest this summer. (Actually, the truer statement is that I barely started reading Infinite Jest, but it sounds better if I say that I started.) Too many things conspired against me, chief of which was our x-country trip. (Why did I think I could read a 981 page tome while driving more than 8500 miles around the U.S.?) But I have, over the last year, after learning of David Foster Wallace’s death, read almost every other piece of his work that I could get my hands on. Although that’s probably an overstatement too. I’ve read quite a lot, it’s true, but I’ve purchased more than I’ve read, and there’s still a pretty thick pile of work for me to get to. I will though. And I’ll get to Infinite Jest too, just not in the Infinite Summer time frame.

Since I started reading David Foster Wallace there’s been a pretty common theme for me. First, I now read with a dictionary beside my bed. (Nice new Merriam Webster model that has an inline thesaurus. My tenth edition is on the desk, the new one is by my bed.) Second, I constantly find myself turning to my wife and uttering something along the lines of the following:

Being a writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.

Of course, nothing I’ve ever said sounded quite as good as that. It was more of something along the lines of, “Wow, this guy is really amazing,” or, “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as honest, sincere, or funny as this.” Then, even though my wife is not a real lover of being read to, although she is my lover and is therefore willing to listen to me, I read her some miles long passage that is both funny and poignant, witty and elegant, simple and extraordinarily complex. And then I smile at her and she smiles at me and we wonder at the beauty of what I’ve just read.

I’m sad that David Foster Wallace is dead. Sadder still that he was so sad himself. And I’m disappointed in myself that I’d never read his writing, or even knew who he was, before he died. But I’m so happy to have found him and, while this is a rather small consolation for what was lost, I don’t know that I would have, had his passing never come.

My  very bad behindness briefly aside, I was pleased to discover that a Howling Fantods reference comes early in the book. (page 45 to be exact) I’d always wondered which of DFW’s books the term came from but didn’t realize that “fantods” wasn’t a DFW creation. Guess I should have picked up a dictionary before I made that assumption.

So, will I survive this bad beginning? Truth is, I don’t care. I’ve begun the journey and I’ll push through to the end. But for now I’m not so far behind that I won’t catch up before week two is over and out…