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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[box_red]“They want me to give up this poetry life, but I don’t know another way to pray.”[/box_red]

I saw Barb’s performance at TEDxColumbus this year. There are two pieces and the second, starting at 2:30, shook me to my soul. I remember throwing my hat on the ground and shouting “DAMN” when she was done. People around me must have thought I was crazy.”

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One of the better things I’ve ever written is this review of Van Halen’s new album for The Agit Reader.

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1. 2 Things
2. Two Things I Like Today
3. So Here We Are, Mr. Kindle (or, The Mean Joys of Having Things)

Kevin Huizenga is one of my 3 favorite makers of comics these days. His methods mix accessible pictures, science, philosophy, history, and autobiography all together in a form much like David (Reality Hunger) Shields describes here:

The lyric essay asks what happens when an essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or leaving the blanks blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation? There are now questions being asked of facts that were never asked before. What, we ask, is a fact these days? What’s a lie, for that matter? What constitutes an “essay,” a “story,” a “poem”? What, even, is “experience”? For years writers have been responding to this slippage of facts in a variety of ways–from the fragmentary forms of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry that try to mimic this loss to the narrative-driven attempts by novelists and memoirists to smooth over the gaps. The lyric essay, on the other hand, inherits from the principal strands of nonfiction the makings of its own hybrid version of the form. It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay and conflates them into a literary form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception.

Huizenga augments his story-telling by using an alter ego, Glenn Ganges, as a stand-in for himself. Glenn’s life has been unfolding over the course of Huizenga’s stories the past few years, but rather than getting a grand narrative, we’re seeing a disparate set of moments in his mind. Whether Glenn “is” Huizenga matters not very much at all, he’s just there to give us a way in. And yet, because we have such a need for closure (to see parts of things as a whole) we form a real attachment to Huizenga’s characters, whether or not we think they represent the real person or and despite our doubts about it. (In fact, they might not even all be the same Glenn Ganges, but that’s another story.)

So … maybe you find this interesting and maybe you should sample Mr. Huizenga’s work. There’s a great example online at What Things Do. Check it out.

Related posts:

1. Essential Reading: Kevin Huizenga
2. Jeffrey Brown in The Comics Journal
3. GOOD Magazine on Graphic Novels

From the website:

Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The “post-black” artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture — and about the meaning of art itself.

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Not all the time, and not for everything. But for one particular reason, I really do like writing on the computer.

I can easily back it up. Sometimes I wish I had everything backed-up.

In 2005, I had a show about halfway written and figured out in my notebooks (I frequently carry several of different sizes. Ready for anything.) During BlueForms’ triumphant, 100-degrees on-stage, festival closing performance of A/ThePostModernLoveStory (yes, one word) in Cincinnati, our car was broken into and my bag was stolen.

It was a beautiful Ogio bag, blue and black, and I’ve never found one I like even half as much. Anyway …

The contents of the bag included a silver iPod-mini packed with nothing but hip-hop, several books by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Fernando Pessoa, and 3 notebooks containing many months worth of writing.

I was upset about the broken window, and the iPod, and the bag, of course. But I was really upset about the writing. I’ll never know what was in there, what was good or bad, what new ideas I had that I’ll never recapture. It’s not exactly that I miss the lost sentences and all that scratching, but I do wonder.

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Resistance loves a day like this. It’s unexpectedly cold, rainy, grey, dull. I didn’t sleep well and my brain feels like mush. It’s 10am, but it feels like 8am, or maybe 8pm. There’s no appointment forcing me to get-up. I really need to do laundry. I hate searching for matching socks. My most weather-appropriate clothes are dirty. What’s worst, I don’t have a clear picture of what I need to accomplish today.

Oh, and my loving puppy, who usually forces me to start my day, crawled back in bed, under the covers, wanting to cuddle away the miserable morning.

So, what now?

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I should’ve put this up before, huh? Anyway, here it is, my TedXColumbus performance.

And here are a couple of my favorites from the event:
John Mueller: Obsessed, and Why? (Seriously, this one’ll change your world-view. Pick up his book, Atomic Obsession)

Ann Pendleton-Jullian: Design Through Gaming
Chrystie Hill: Community: it’s the new content

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Are you an artist, entrepreneur, start-up dude, or anyone just trying to start something? You need to watch this Ralph Bakshi video. Be forewarned, he might destroy you.

You sit there crying about it all falling apart. It’s not crumbling! You’re crumbling! You got these computers that can do the stuff for nothing and what do you do with it? You try to get a job with some asshole!”

h/t PAUL HORNSCHEMEIER

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guy gets deja vu fairly regularly, and in very intense, specific way. Suddenly, he realizes that he’s in a sequence of actions and impressions, images, and viewpoints that he’s experienced before. Sometimes there are even associated memories of bits of knowledge. He’ll set a book down and feel it. Deja vu.

At first it frightens him, but as his life goes on and he reaches his 30s, he starts to find comfort, to believe that the deja vu is actually a sign that things are going to right way for him. Especially when it happens in circumstances he couldn’t have predicted much in advance, he takes great joy when it occurs.

Eventually, though, he realizes that its actually a little sinister. He gets sick, and has deja vu, something bad happens to a friend, and he gets deja vu. Maybe these visions have all been leading towards some really bad stuff, and it was his subconscious trying to warn him,, trying to get him to put the pieces together. Eventually, he does, but of course it’s too late by that point.

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