theparisreview:

Our editor Lorin Stein writes a letter to the New York Times editor regarding Paul Elie’s essay “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?.”

coalblack:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass 

- Ezra Pound

Illustration by Jacob van Loon 

heheheheheheheeheheheehehe:

chart re The Contemporary Short Story, a craft class by Tao Lin in Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program in fall 2012

relevant links: 2048px chart, class description, syllabus

theglancereveals:

Last night Harvard hosted a stimulating conversation between the literary critic James Wood and David Foster Wallace’s biographer D.T. Max. Despite my own dyspeptic ambivalence about Infinite Jest, I seem to have an endless appetite for smart people saying smart things about Wallace’s life and art, and there were a great many smart things said last night.

While Wallace’s upbringing, his intermittent struggle with depression, and his literary influences were all discussed in depth, I was surprised to learn that neither Wood nor Max could place the Kafka line that Wallace had posted to his bedroom wall in high school: “The disease was life itself.” It’s a haunting sentence, both in connection to the undeniably grim elements in Wallace’s own work, and the even grimmer conclusion to his life. It’s no surprise that this detail of adolescent wall decor made it into David Lipsky’s 2009 Rolling Stone account of Wallace’s last years, and thence into Max’s biography, tracing a wide circle across the DFW-based interweb in the meantime.

But perhaps the reason that neither Wood nor Max could recall the original Kafka sentence is because Kafka never wrote it. (A search through one database of Kafka’s works turns up no results for the phrase or its variants.) The line, according to Wallace’s sister Amy, was clipped from a magazine article on Kafka — and sure enough, in 1983 Time magazine published a review of a Kafka story collection under the headline, “The Malady Was Life Itself.” The clipped line, however, was not Kafka’s own but the invention of Time critic Stefan Kanfer:

‘Not all the sickness was psychosomatic. Kafka succumbed to tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. But he regarded even real disease with paranoid suspicion: “My brain and my lungs must have conspired in secret.” He believed in “only one illness, and medicine hunts it blindly like a beast through unending forests.” The malady was life itself.’

Does it matter that it was Kanfer, not Kafka, who Wallace clipped, or that the key word was “malady,” not “disease”? Probably not. (In fact neither Lipsky or Max positively affirm that it was Kafka who wrote the sentence, although that seems to be the prevailing assumption, both at last night’s talk and around the internet.) At some level this is an even more trivial piece of literary minutiae than an account of how Raymond Chandler got his first bicycle.

Does it matter that because the article didn’t appear until July 1983, Wallace couldn’t have tacked it to his wall in high school, but sometime after his sophomore year at Amherst College? Probably not, either, although it might prompt a few tiny revisions in the chronology of Wallace’s adolescent and post-adolescent depression, and the way that depression swirled around DFW’s turn towards literature in his early twenties. After all, Max’s closing argument in last night’s talk was that Wallace, never much of a writer in high school or early college, embraced literary art (rather than philosophy, mathematics, etc) as the only possible intellectual remedy for existential despair. The malady, as Kafka never said, might be life itself, but the medicine was reading Kafka — and writing like him.

mianoti:

“Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don’t know where I want to go, I get dressed, blearily, stumbling, hopping about to pull on my trousers, I go and shave with my electric razor - for years now, whenever I shave, I’ve avoided looking at myself in the mirror, I shave in the dark or round the corner, sitting on a chair in the passage, with the socket in the bathroom, I don’t like looking at myself any more, I’m scared by my own face in the bathroom, I’m hurt even by my own appearance, I see yesterday’s drunkenness in my eyes, I don’t even have breakfast any more, or if I do, only coffee and a cigarette, I sit at the table, sometimes my hands give way under me and several times I repeat to myself, Hrabal, Hrabal, Bohumil Hrabal, you’ve victoried yourself away, you’ve reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I’ve reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts, even the walk to the bus-stop hurts, and the whole bus hurts as well, I lower my guilty-looking eyes, I’m afraid of looking people in the eye, sometimes I cross my palms and extend my wrists, I hold out my hands so that people can arrest me and hand me over to the cops, because I feel guilty even about this once too loud a solitude which isn’t loud any longer, because I’m hurt not only by the escalator which takes me down to the infernal regions below, I’m hurt even by the looks of the people traveling up, each of them has somewhere to go, while I’ve reached the peak of emptiness and don’t know where I want to go.”

― Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears : Letters to Dubenka

Portrait: Hrabal * in 1985, by Michal Tůma *