The new volume from University of Mississippi press arrived today, “Conversations with David Foster Wallace.” You can expect a slew of quotations in the next few days.

Here’s one from 1993:

… managing to be a really alive human being, and also do good work and be as obsessed as you have to be, is really tricky.

Simply said and heart-breakingly true.

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It’s been a rough couple of months for readers of poetry, my friends. Today we lost Adrienne Rich, last month, Wislawa Szymborska died at the age of 88.

Here’s one of my favorites from each of these amazing women. Do yourself a favor, take a few moments, get inspired. Maybe read these to someone you love.

by Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems…
XIII
The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years… we’re driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

Possibilities by Wislawa Szymborska
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the river.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

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1. Thanks, Austin

If you’re looking for something to light your fire, here’s a decent place to start.

I used to spend a ton of time making big, long lists of my favorite everything – books, music, movies, etc. – and I took great joy in keeping those lists up-to-date. If you poke around on this site, you can find remnants of all that.

Anyway, in 2011, I was passionate about a few things. Here are some of them.

Mickey Newbury
Newbury’s 1969 album, Looks Like Rain is what I listened to more often than not all year. An American Trilogy is actually a set of 3 albums (with a bonus disk) reissued together. I got them on vinyl and they rarely left my turntable. You won’t find much of this on Spotify, otherwise I’d include a link. Here it is at iTunes, though. Get the first track (“Wrote A Song A Song/Angeline”) and if you like that, keep going.

Miles Davis Quintet – Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1
This was the greatest band of all time. These live tracks are amazing. I don’t know if this is the record that could convert someone to Miles Davis-ism, (Try In a Silent Way or Files de Kilimanjaro for that.) but it’s one more reason my son would be named Miles Matthew.

James Blake
James Blake put out a handful of EPs and his self-titled LP came out right at the beginning of the year. Of everything that seemed really new to me this year, Blake’s music is what stuck. Some call it dubstep, I call it gospel for the internet generation. (Dude puts on a shockingly good live show, too.)

How to Dress Well continued to amaze me, even after I found out he’s a goofy, Robert Crumb-looking mo/fo. Heck, that might make me respect him even more. You’d be hard pressed to find something more arresting than “Suicide Dream 2 (Orchestral Version).”

Cities Aviv is the best hip-hop music I heard this year, by a long shot. Here’s a link.

I wrote about some other music I liked in 2011 for The Agit Reader.

I do a poor job keeping up with it, but I do update my Goodreads profile on occasion.

I read the Steve Jobs biography really quickly and liked it. It’s not brilliant writing, but Isaacson had an amazing subject.

I loveloveloved Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of the longer entries in the 33 1/3 series. I learned a lot from it about how taste and our measures of high, low, good, and bad culture came about. It’s one of those rare books that had me questioning myself a lot as I read. I love those. Here’s a paragraph – about one of the problems with critiquing music – that I highlighted:

In daily life, music is usually part of other activities, from dancing to housework to sex to gossip to dinner. In critical discourse it’s as if the only action going on when music is playing is the activity of evaluation music. The question becomes, “Is this good music to listen to while you’re making aesthetic judgements?” … Part of the reason for the recent backlash against indie rock, I suspect, is a weariness with how much of it seems to be mainly music to judge music by. Celine Dion, on the other hand, is lousy music to make aesthetic judgements to, but might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.

In case you didn’t get it from the title, this book is about Celine Dion. And it’s brilliant.

Steven Pressfield (“The War of Art”) out out another great, little book. It’s called Do the Work and you shouldn’t read it if you’ve been satisfied with sitting on your ass thus far.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, was the most fun I had reading fiction, I think. It’s about baseball and college and stuff.

I think I have to agree with Esquire, though, that The Submission, by Amy Waldman, was the best piece of fiction I read this year. It was satisfying in every way. It had a ton of moments that were inevitable but wholly surprising. That’s about the best thing I can say about a book. (If you’re gonna go look for it on Amazon, I apologize for all the smutty pictures you’re about to see. Kinda funny, though, right?)

Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express cookbook came out this year, too, didn’t it? That’s about the best cookbook ever. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s fun, encourages creativity (and actual cooking) and is full of stuff I love to eat.

I read a lot of Manga in the middle of the year. My favorites were Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga (a woman, FYI) and Bakuman, from the people who brought you the world-wide smash Death Note.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Stephen Sondheim’s collections of lyrics (as well as “comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes.) This may be the closest we get to a memoir from The Man, and if you’re involved in any sort of writing I bet you’d really enjoy these. And if you’re involved in any sort of theatre-making, you’d best not to admit to me that you’re not going to read these books. They are AMAZING.

Movies? I didn’t really go to the movies this year. I did get the Criterion Collection release of In the Night of the Hunter, and that’s really worthwhile tribute to a great true classic.

Other that, let me just mention a few other random things: Tomas Transtromer, CM Punk, Shadow of the Colossus, Vanilla Cedarwood, Rajon Rondo, and A Few Acres of Snow.

Related posts:

1. 8 Songs to Delight You
2. 2011-09-04 Tweets last week.

So here we are, Mr. Kindle. I pre-ordered you the moment you were announced. You’re waiting at home for me, still not removed from your box. I currently own 26 books in the Kindle format, many of which I’ve greatly enjoyed reading on the iPhone. (Though I did regret a couple of those purchases, but probably not as much as if they were $26 hardbacks.) I’m very much looking forward to booting you up and retreating to some brightly sun-lit park to continue reading The Ultimate History of Video Games or Nicholas Weber’s massive biography of Le Corbusier. Or perhaps to turn to a random page and enjoy some of the brilliance of David Foster Wallace.

But what’s going to happen on Tuesday?

As you probably know dear reader, (and you, dear Kindle) this Tuesday, August 31 is the release date for Jonathan Franzen’s brand-new, 576 page, 9 years in the making, supposed Great American Novel, Freedom. The first printing of 300,000 has already sold-out. It will be read by everyone everywhere who likes books, perhaps even by Leigh, who didn’t like his last book.

You see, Mr. Kindle, I am a Franzen fan, not a fair-weather friend. I agreed with his opinions on Oprah. I bought his little-appreciated collection The Discomfort Zone, I’ve read Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City (and enjoyed one of them) and I even wrote a plays based largely on the material in How to be Alone. He’s on my Goodreads list called “I Keep These Close” and I keep The Corrections and How to Be Alone on that special shelf in the front room.

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. That sounded like bragging.

So, long story short, Mr. Kindle – am I gonna buy the book? Or am I gonna buy the electronically rendered collection of words that represents the book?

I want to skip for a moment the question of whether “the book” is the physical thing, or the collection of words. (After all, the book will be published with many shapes and forms in its life, so who’s to say what is or isn’t “the book.”) Rather, I want to know why this is even an issue for me.

August 28, 2010. Re-state my assumptions.
- We don’t need more stuff cluttering our home.
- I’ve vowed to reduce my consumption.
- I’ve rid our home of almost all CDs and I’m living happily with mostly digitized music.
- I’ve rid our home of about 200 DVDs and I don’t miss them a bit.
- I’ve been regularly buying physical books, enjoying them, and selling most of them when I’ve finished, and I don’t mind it.
- I don’t mind reading on the iPhone, but for a book that I anticipate will be “special” to me, I still prefer the comfort of a the physical act of reading a larger edition. (I bought Vendela Vida’s The Lovers just a week ago.) But a Kindle should fill that need.
- Therefore, given the introduction of the Kindle into our life, I should have no reason to purchase any physical edition of a book that can be read on the Kindle.
- In fact, carrying the Kindle in bag will be much less inconvenient than carrying the 576 page tome being released on Tuesday. (And, I can avoid the embarrassment of being seen reading the same G.A.N. as 300,000 other Americans, including, most likely, 3 or 4 in the same coffee shop.)

And yet, I want that book.

WHY?

Well, there’s some kind of collecting impulse. I have all his other books. Also, if I really love Freedom, I anticipate it’ll win a prized place on that special front-room shelf, and won’t that be a wonderful thing? And I do know the attachment that comes of certain “things,” even though books have a rather prosaic use (no pun intended) compared with things like fancy laptop computers, or even well-made kitchen gadgets. They simply contain words in a certain order, and the experience they represent is just lots of time spent on the couch, in bed late at night, on an airplane, on the subway, in coffee shops, in the park, or waiting in the lobby at the dentist.

But we know that’s not true either, don’t we?

It’s hard to imagine feeling attached to the digital file that represents Mr. Franzen’s novel. And then, I’ll finish the book and have nothing to show for it.

Oh man, that’s terrible, but it’s true. Isn’t it? I want to put the book on display on that special shelf. It’s right there in the front room, screaming “This is me! This is my identity! Look at me! You are like me! And if you’re not, it’s because I read better books than you! Have you read Rising Up, Rising Down? Of course not, the fucking abridged edition is 752 pages! But, look, I read it and I loved it and it changed me! Have you even heard of Vollman? I didn’t think so!”

That’s just one part of the joy of having stuff. It’s part of the reason there’s a shelf in the house, in a more subtle spot, that features a bunch of very nicely packaged Criterion Collection DVDs, with a strong leant towards French New Wave. (That Breathless Blu Ray is totally on my birthday list, even though I already have two editions of the DVD.) (Look, I just did it again.) (Can you even name another Godard film?)

But there’s a more personal joy to having these things too. I do, sometimes, look at that shelf and remember. I remember sitting in the sun in Oxford, Ohio, outside my apartment during a terribly lonely summer, reading A Heartbreaking Word of Staggering Genius and being throttled from tears of joy to tears of despair within a few pages. I remember the sun on my face and on the pages. I can picture every detail of that moment when I was just sitting there and getting lost in the pages. I remember a similarly lonely time when I ate peanut butter sandwiches and read The Honeymooners, one of the most depressing books around. If I’d known it was going to be like that, I’m not sure I’d have started. And I can certainly remember every detail of the bedroom in my parents’ house in which I first waded through Infinite Jest, a book that not only changed my life, but probably saved it as well. I have three copies of the novel now, but that first one, beat-up as it is, is among my most valued possessions. My wife knows that the books in our house are to be treated with the utmost of care, because who can tell which one will have some potent meaning, some secreted significance, some reason my heart would be broken if the pages were torn or the corners bruised.

But that’s just a ridiculous attachment to material things isn’t it? It’s the experiences that have value, right? Certainly not the objects themselves. And if I read Franzen’s new book and dig deep into it, and love it with all my heart, I’ll still remember it, even if I don’t have the object itself to serve as a totem of the late-summer of 2010, when the landlord remodeled the bathroom and I taught my wife how to mow the lawn and we bought a Kindle. Right?

And now I see a distinct difference in the syntax alone. It’s not whether I buy the book that matters. (As so often I am mistaken … just look at the giant stacks of mostly un-read books on the piano.) It’s whether I read the book.

Am I right? Are you with me?

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So, I’m sitting here staring at my brand-new copy of Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. In case you couldn’t guess, he’s not in favor of it.

There’s a long quotation on the inside flap from author J.M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals that ends like this:

… anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume the [factory farming] industry’s products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.

So, if you read this book and you’re a good person, you will become of vegetarian. (Or, one of those people who only eats meat the source of which they can identify as a-okay. Do we have a name for that yet?) There’s certainly ample evidence that the book is having a profound affect on many people.

I want to be a good person. If there’s a more righteous, nobler way to do something, I want to do it, even if it’s hard. So, if being a vegetarian is the better way to be, I want to be that. But I am having a hard time going whole hog, so to speak. Does that make me weak, or evil, or something bad? I dunno. I’m sure most folk would say not.

Despite the fact that I love J.S. Foer’s two previous books, and despite the fact that this is clearly right on topic for something that’s a big issue in my life right now, I’ve been putting this thing back on the shelf in bookstores all over America. I even read the big excerpt in the NY Times magazine, and then very purposefully did not order the book.

Well, now it’s in my home and my hands. It’s sitting on the table at the coffee shop right next to me, staring at me. And I KNOW it’s gonna be really good, and imagine several tear-stained nights ahead as I plow through it, and I feel consternation at my reluctance. I guess I figure by reading the book I’ll have decided to be a vegetarian, whether I like it or not. And I’ll have committed myself to a difficult path.

Oh well, at least I’ll still be able to eat Yorqshire pudding. I’ll just have to do it without the prime rib.

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1. Sane Eating in Columbus: Part 1
2. I read a book
3. Sane Eating in IndieColumbus

Just some really big paintings of books. From an article in/on print.

h/t – A Parker

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1. I read a book

The Henry Ransom at U of Texas just got a million more subscribers to their blog.

The Center just became the home of the tragically late David Foster Wallace’s archives, and they’ve unpacked his books, and started making a list of all the words he circled in his dictionary.

That’s a scan of the first handwritten page of Infinite Jest.

Yeah, I can’t read it either.

And here’s the front spread from his copy of Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

Does that really say, “Sad smelling” … ?

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The New Yorker is more than flush with great critical writing. Well, this is a list of lists (some are decade-spanning, too) from those wonderful writers.

I’m trying to tell you it’s a dream come true. Get over there. Click around. Get lost for a few hours.

In fact, to encourage you, here’s my list of the ten best lists from the New Yorkers Best Of lists:

1. The Best Films of the Decade, by Richard Brody
2. Goings On About Town’s Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009, by Shauna Lyon
3. The Best Recordings of 2009, plus annotations by Sasha Frere-Jones
4. The Top Thirteen People of 2009, by Zachary Kanin
5. The Five Best Ten-Best Lists, by Ben Greenman
6. The Best Non-Museum Art Goings-On of 2009, by Andrea K. Scott
7. Ten Great Photographs, 2009, by Vince Aletti
8. Memorable Fashion Statements of the Obama Era, by Judith Thurman
9. Ten Exceptional Recordings by Alex Ross
10. Books of the Year, by James Wood

And that’s not even the half of it.

Best-Of Lists: The New Yorker

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1. Jan 13, 2009
2. Mar 14, 2009
3. Lists Returning

The Rest Is Noise is Alex Ross‘s big, fat book about 20th century music. Classical music, to be precise.

It’s a huge book, in it’s scope as well as it’s impact. Politics, revolutions, the connections of wars and operas and prejudices and composers. It’s like opening my eyes to a world of relations of which I had no previous conception. It’s a once in a lifetime book, probably one of the ten best I’ve ever read.

It’s certainly been praised enough that you don’t need me to recommend it, but I even met a young cellist who’d not heard of it, so, just in case …

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So, this quest for a better way of eating got kicked into high gear when I picked-up Mark Bittman‘s newest book, Food Matters. Bittman will be familiar to some as the author of How to Cook Everything, AKA in our house as the big, yellow cookbook with no pictures.

Food Matters is exactly the book I needed. If you’ve read Michael Pollan‘s food-related work, there’s probably not going to be any new information for you here. (In fact, in the first 120 pages, Bittman references Pollan about a dozen times.) Lucky for me, I haven’t read Pollan’s books (though The Omnivore’s Dilemma has been sitting on the piano since it came out it paperback). So, I was greatly impacted by Bittman’s arguments about the relationship between the way we eat and our impact on the world around us. Did you know that “global livestock is responsible for more than one-fifth of all greenhouse gases – more than transportation”? Okay, smart guy, well I didn’t, and I’m man enough to admit it.

In his introduction, Bittman continues, “by simply changing what we eat we can have an immediate impact on our own health and a very real effect on global warming – and the environment, and animal cruelty, and food prices. (Yeah, I’m pretty sure he means cruelty to animals, not by animals.) It sounds too good to be true, right? But I’m just idealistic enough to give it a try.

It comes down to eating less of some things and more of others. Basically, less meat and more plants. The amount of energy a food necessary to produce meat is outrageous, and in excess it’s effects on our health are pretty shocking too. So, eating less meat is good for everybody.

None of this is revolutionary, of course, but Bittman’s book was just practical enough, and exactly jarring enough at just the right moment get me our of my food-funk and inspire me to make some real choices and change in my day-to-day.

I started by immediately eating all the plants in our kitchen, leaving me with a freezer-full of junk. I grabbed my wife when she got home and apprised her of my plans. She get, rightfully, a little nervous and asked, “What’s for dinner?” “Chipotle, my love!” (What can I say, we have a show running and I was short on time.) We each ate a very full full veggie bowl, I stuffed an apple in my bag and we ran off to change the world.

Be here next time when Acacia and I visit Whole Foods, learn to love soy nuggets, and discover the ugly truth behind our favorite foods. AND, I’ll answer the most important question of all, “Where does Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream fit into all of this?”

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