Weekend Content

• Wyatt Mason has some suggested weekend content for those of your mourning David Foster Wallace’s passing, or for those of you who are new to him and want to know more (not that the two categories are necessarily mutually exclusive).

  One of his items is the interview Wallace gave for the Review of Contemporary Fiction. This is a great interview, and I’ll take the opportunity to say right here that it is one of two items I’ve been recommending to people this week who have been asking me where to start with Wallace’s work.

  The other item I’ve been recommending is the essay "E Unibus Pluram," which also appeared in the RCF (later collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing . . .) and which the above interview was meant to function as an adjunct to. Taken together, these two items provide a great grounding for a reading of Infinite Jest, a book that, despite its imposing status, I think Wallace neophytes can jump right into. If you do want to try IJ, I suggest at least glancing at these two items, as they will help reveal some of the ideas Wallace is exploring and free up more cognitive space to embrace the characters and simply enjoy the prose.

• Keeper of the Jewels
  By Robert Gottlieb
  "Ballets don’t have frozen texts, the way string quartets or novels do;
  they change—and all too frequently erode—as they pass from company to
  company and from generation to generation. Most actually disappear, and
  in Balanchine’s case not only his early work in Russia and early
  triumphs in Europe like La Chatte (1927) and Cotillon (1932), but important pieces he made in America, like Le Baiser de la Fée, Balustrade, The Figure in the Carpet, Opus 34, the Paul Taylor solo from Episodes. Others are sliding toward oblivion: How often do we see Harlequinade, Ivesiana, Gounod Symphony ? Even Orpheus,
  with its beautiful Stravinsky score and striking Noguchi decor, a
  crucial ballet in the Balanchine canon, is more dead than alive when
  New York City Ballet trots it out every once in a while: the steps are
  there, but the ballet is gone. On what basis, given these
  circumstances, can critics today approach the immense Balanchine oeuvre?"
• Abstracts of the papers presented at the recent Sebald conference

El-P:

Thredony for the Victims of Hiroshima (first 36 seconds)

Joyce Reading "Anna Livia Plurabelle" from Finnegans Wake

I’m not big on The Digested Read, but I will make an exception for Pynchon. Plus, it’s in audio.