Conversational Reading: Weekend Content

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Talib Kweli

Pomona College has put together a page of reminiscences about David Foster Wallace.

1) He chewed tobacco. Everybody hated it and he tried to quit a few times, but he usually spent at least an hour of each class chewing and spitting into a 32 oz. Slurpee cup.

2) He loved pop culture.

3) He had terrible fashion sense.

4) He was cool.

5) He was obsessed with grammar. He wrote about it some, especially in one published essay, but it’s hard to understand the depth of his obsession without having written and turned in papers to him. Responding to the first essay I ever turned into him, Dave started with the line, “There are a lot of interesting themes you’ve touched on ... but to discuss those themes would be like conversing about the weather over a bloody, mutilated corpse.” Over a few years, Dave learned not only some tact but also that not every person in the world was raised to diagram sentences as a child.

6) He talked as he wrote, sometimes literally. He used bullet points in his arguments. He footnoted certain comments with follow-up comments. There was nothing affected or exaggerated about his style.

7) He never talked about his work. Not once in the three workshops I took with him. I’ve had numerous professors force their students to read their own work in courses, but he would have been mortified by the idea. There wasn’t a bone in his body that wasn’t humble.

8) He was funny. God, was he funny.

9) He was fascinated by emoticons. After a student explained them in class one day, he began making his own and using them as his signature when he marked up a draft of our work.

10) He would have found at least six grammatical mistakes in this list.

Stephen Greenblatt on the candidates and Shakespeare

Novels in which Photographers Appear as Important Characters

Matthew Cheney interviews Brian Francis Slattery, author of Spaceman Blues:

Let's talk music, since you're also a musician. Do you listen to music while writing?

No. I do listen to music a lot when I'm editing my own stuff, though. This is about to go off on a tangent that you probably weren't expecting, but here goes. About a year and a half ago, I was the beneficiary of a vast collection of recordings of 78s (I have them as MP3s), and I tend to listen to them when I'm sitting in front of my computer. I really love all of it, and I'm so grateful to be able to listen to it, this music that was recorded more than eighty years ago and survived at least five changes in the format of recorded music to become digital. I love the idea that, having made it this far, it just might stand a good chance of surviving the next eighty, too. Which always gets me to thinking about what recordings from our time are going to be listened to a hundred years from now. I like to think that it'll be totally random, the product not of popular consensus, but of the work of a few enthusiasts who just refuse to let the thing they love go. Which suggests to me that the popular and the unknown will be put together side by side without judgment, just like Carlos Gardel and Carlisle and Ball sit next to each other on my hard drive now.

What's a good soundtrack for the collapse of the United States of America?

Anything you can play without electricity.

Alex Ross discusses Stockhausen:

The concert took place in Hangar 2 at Tempelhof Airport, the historic site of Hitlerite fantasies and of the Berlin airlift. Tempelhof is scheduled to close at the end of October, and parts of it are being converted to other uses. Hangar 2, a forty-five-thousand-square-foot space that resembles the Park Avenue Armory, is big enough to accommodate Stockhausen’s conception; the three orchestras were arrayed in a horseshoe around the audience. With Simon Rattle, the Philharmonic’s music director, sharing conducting duties with Daniel Harding and Michael Boder, the orchestra played “Gruppen” twice through on two consecutive nights. Listeners were instructed to change seats between performances so that they could obtain a different acoustic perspective. Beforehand, brass, wind, and percussion players assembled to unleash Messiaen’s “Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum,” another room-shaking investigation of sonic properties. Altogether, these events were among the most gripping orchestral concerts I’ve attended in recent seasons.

Kirkus offers a Fall/Winter books preview

Devin the Dude