"The parallels between Bartleby’s peculiar form of rebellion and the protestors of Occupy Wall Street should be obvious. The point of Occupy Wall Street — and the Occupy movements around the country — is to put a face to America’s dwindling middle class. There is no need to be any more specific than that. In fact, it seems that the less specific, less reasonable, and less demanding the protesters are, the more likely they are to unnerve those who actually have the power to make a change. Bartleby is disturbing not because of what he says or doesn’t say, but because he seems to have lost some aspect of his humanity ..."

"... reading and thinking about the generations of women who had to suffer this kind of knee-jerk condescension from men, you begin to wonder how it was that any woman managed not to put her head in an oven before approximately 1968. Plath’s classmate in Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar, Anne Sexton, did eventually kill herself, too, but Plath’s sometime rival Adrienne Rich did not. Many millions did not. Why not? The situation was intolerable. How could anyone tolerate it?"

"This incredibly rare television documentary includes interviews with a number of Beckett's friends, colleagues and followers. Among those interviewed are: Raymond Federman, Hugh Kenner, Steve Martin, Edward Albee, Stanley Gontarski, John Calder, Barney Rosset and, in a round-a-bout way, Samuel Beckett himself."

"That’s what I wanted to do -- write a book about horse racing at its low end, in an era considerably before the present moment, and see if there wasn’t an open niche for that. By god, it seems to have happened."

"It is what the internet lures out of us -- hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions -- that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV's power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, while the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude."

"Extraordinary young talents are all the more dependent on the most ordinary sustenance. But instead of a home and a college education, what Barbara Follett got was author copies and yellowing newspaper clippings. This girl—who should have been America’s next great literary woman—was abandoned by the two men she trusted, and her fame forgotten by a public that she never trusted in the first place. Her writings, out of print for many decades, only exist today in six archival boxes at Columbia University’s library. Taken together, they are the saddest reading in all of American literature." The story of Barbara Newhall Follett.

"Ha, it's always awful. There is a restaurant in Petersburg called 1913. I ask, why 1913? 'The only good year in Russian history.' (Both laugh)"

@o_crunk: "Writer Races to Victory From Way Off the Pace (I think Jaimy Gorden is a bit weird in a refreshing way)."

Haruki Murakami: "To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not 'chaos'? What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?"

"Though Gordon didn’t expand on 'hope' (indeed, 'expansiveness' was not a word to be applied to any of the writers given medals for new work), the sentiment was clear: Gordon’s was a classic underdog tale, about a little-known writer with a little-seen book who overcame long odds to capture the prize and, at least for one night, revel in the glory (or swoon out of disbelief)."

"Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction tonight. It’s the second time this year that a high-profile fiction award has gone to a previously very-low-profile novel."

"As I read 'Lord of Misrule,' I was mesmerized by prose like this and intrigued by the accuracy with which the author captured the idiom of the racetrack, the dynamics of backstretch society and the nature of the animals - both their physiology and their personality. How did a university professor know so much about this obscure subculture?"

Anis Shivani compares creative writing programs to the medieval guild system. "The system is profoundly undemocratic when it comes to the quality of the product it engenders, and its relentless crushing of any incipient freelance competition. There is an undeclared boycott in place with the famous residencies, conferences, and awards, and non-guild members need not apply ..."

"For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete."

"What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values."

"Feelings of wounded self-regard (on both sides) soon knew no bounds, and daily life at Yasnaya Polyana was approached with a mixture of attraction and repulsion that often excited thoughts of murder or suicide. Both Sonya and Tolstoy became obsessed to the point of dementia with the conviction that, at the hands of the other, each had been cheated of a destiny that would signify. Neither could have understood in advance of the marriage the depth of emotional ambition that motivated them, much less that it was precisely because that ambition was destined to be thwarted that each would be bound permanently, one to the other. It was the stuff upon which Sigmund Freud was to build an intellectual empire."

”Monotonous. Tedious. Repetitious. One note, all the way through. Theme inordinately stale + old hat. Alas, Willie.”

"There is, I think, and we might call it not the problem with no name but the problem we can't define: the problem of unconscious gender bias and how it affects the ways we think about accomplishment and authority."

"I don't know what 'chick lit' is anymore, except books that are understood to be aimed at women, written by women, and not important. And I can't get behind that."

"A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist."

"I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online."

"When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it's easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there's no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples."

".. all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality."

"Pancake’s writing is devastating in its beauty. He evokes the landscape of West Virginia and the inhabitants of those small town mountain hollows with a sinewy and precise prose that comes as close to Hemingway as anything I’ve ever read. And the force of his prose is just the beginning." Still grateful to SF for introducing me to Pancake.

As it relates to Trilling.

Marking the first anniversary of David Foster Wallace's death. "You don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to recognize the power of Wallace’s work. You just need a set of healthy nerve endings."

'Do you know what her children call her?" a mutual friend asked me when I said I was going to see AS Byatt. "You'll never guess. Not in a million years." "Antonia? Mum?" "No," he said, laughing. "They call her 'AS Byatt'."

See Johnson WSJ article. Related.

"Among the jobs that Beckett contemplated were: office work (in his father's quantity surveying firm); language instruction (in a Berlitz school in Switzerland); school teaching (in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia); advertising copywriting (in London); piloting commercial aircraft (in the skies); interpreting (between French and English); and managing a country estate." Fortunately, he took up writing.

"There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?" I both fear Johnson's conclusions and suspect he is right.

"In the Paris Review interview, Porter explained that her illness had changed her forever: 'It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.'" Notes Als, Porter biographies depict her life after 1919 as "pretty much a continuation" of what it had been. [Another example of untranslated interiority.]

Endnotes (and some additions and/or digressions) w/r/t "The Unfinished" by D. T. Max (The New Yorker, Mar. 9, 2009), a.k.a here are a lot of links to David Foster Wallace that help us feel even more connected to the man and the work he left behind.

Max answers readers' questions on David Foster Wallace and the lengthy article he wrote about the late author.

On friendship and writing. That this thoughtful essay happens to feature turf writer William Nack seems cosmically right.

Quibbling with Max's sensitive, exhaustive New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace's work and life.

D.T. Max's exhaustive early review of DFW's life and work.

"In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues." Zadie Smith on plural selves, plural voices.

A collection of articles.

Dave Eggers talks to Dave Wallace about infinity, politics

"Whatever links that are provided are to the same old mainstream media stories to which so many other blogs are also linking and which, of course, ultimately only reinforces the supposed first-order authority of the kinds of print publication hosting the blogs in question."

The death of postmodernism and beyond.

“To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed,” Morse wrote in 1972, “good writing is inherently subversive.”

Lost works restored to print

Invented, borrowed, and stolen ideas (new lit journal)

Sam Lipsyte travels with Michel Houellebecq