And there you have it: even then Didion was a writer who could produce something in 48 hours that your sophomore-year roommate wouldn’t quit quoting for years.
In Bloomington, Wallace struggled with the size of his book. He hit upon the idea of endnotes to shorten it. In April, 1994, he presented the idea to Pietsch, adding, “I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it.” He explained that endnotes “allow … me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns … 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.” Pietsch countered with an offer of footnotes, which readers would find less cumbersome, but eventually agreed.
A Dozen Writers Put Down Their Pens to Prove the Might of a March
“We see by the number of people that literature still has authority in our society because no one called these people — they came themselves,” said Lev Rubinstein, 65, a poet and one of the organizers. “We thought this would be a modest stroll of several literary colleagues, and this is what happened. You can see it yourself.”
When Art Spiegelman visited Maurice Sendak
“Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!”
Occupy Wall Street's Debt to Melville
On May 1, students and activists are planning to revive the Occupy Wall Street movement with a general strike. One poster making the rounds on Facebook and other social media features a hamster nervously eyeing a treadmill, and above it the famous words, “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO.” The hamster’s wheel of course represents the drudgery of our modern routines; the phrase, many will recall, comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Subtitled “A Tale of Wall Street,” this cryptic narrative traces the sad fate of a passive-aggressive writer who refuses to vacate the offices of a corporate lawyer. Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street.
I humiliated him as he should be humiliated,” Hemingway says of the “rich Cadillac psycho,” choosing to “omit details.” “Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for 11 years,” he adds. “Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.
Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that you disagree with without throwing a fucking temper tantrum.
If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar. He needed no further consolation.
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick — the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
