Concavity Show

In this episode we are joined by Wallace scholar Lucas Thompson. 

Lucas Thompson is the author of the new book Global Wallace (Bloomsbury) which is the first volume in a new series called "David Foster Wallace Studies" edited by Stephen Burn. Global Wallace centers around the often overlooked sources of influence on Wallace's work. Thompson explores Wallace's connection and borrowing from Manuel Puig, Dostoevsky, hip hop culture, and many others.

Thompson is a Research Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published articles in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Journal of American Studies, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Forthcoming book chapters appear in The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace, MLA Approaches to Teaching: David Foster Wallace, and MLA Approaches to Teaching: Jewish American Fiction. His reviews have appeared in US Studies Online, The European Legacy, and Philament, and he has also written for The LA Review of Books.

This time we talk to our friend Jill Braithwaite, a Wallace scholar who wrote her Masters thesis on Infinite Jest and its connections to the ideas of theologian Paul Tillich and Unitarian Universalism. She is on Twitter here. 

Jill mentions a sermon she gave (in which Wallace's Kenyon speech makes a sigificant appearance), which can be found here. 

In this episode, we talk with Jeff Severs, author of the excellent new book David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value, published by Columbia University Press. Severs is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Convexity.

Severs is also a noted Pynchon scholar, author of a number of scholarly articles and co-editor of a book about Against the Day.

Show Notes

1:00 - Introductions

2:40 - Austinites

3:34 - James Manguson

5:00 - MFA programs

6:10 - Mary Carter - the name Matt was trying to think of

7:50 - Overview of the book

9:05 - Balance in general

10:05 - Axiology - study of valuation

13:06 - Heidegger defines axios

17:18 - A Tripartite writer

26:26 - A biographical approach

34:15 - Juxtaposing hard labor with a dissolute consumerist society

40:31 - GQ, Obama, rhetoric, 2008

46:53 - The civic vision of the Pale King

1:35:40 - Jeff correctly picks Moonlight as the Best Picture winner!

This time, we talk to our friend Lee Konstantinou, a contemporary US literature scholar who has published significantly on Wallace. His new book Cool Characters is available now from Harvard University Press.

As is the tradition, Dave and Matt take a minor detour (at times) from the usual topic of David Foster Wallace to discuss their personal highlights and favorite literary and pop cultural items of 2016.

Show notes:

00:27 - The Nightmare: 2016

02:08 - Matt knows books, Dave knows everything else

03:29 - Phone addiction

04:02 - Personal years in review

09:52 - Go to the 2017 David Foster Wallace Conference

11:15 - Sports, or lack thereof

14:59 - The International DFW Literary Society (dfwsociety.org)

21:20 - Matt’s favorite books of 2016

30:54 -Dave’s favorite books of 2016

38:04 - Netrunner Worlds and Dave’s appearance on Boards Alive - (starts 1:24:39)

38:59 - More of Matt’s favorite books (and a footnote about Bill Gates)

41:54 - The proliferation of monographs on DFW

42:40 - Dave’s favorite music of 2016 with Great Concavity bonus playlist

53:44 - Our favorite films of 2016

59:02 - More of Matt’s favorite books of the year (mostly biographies)

1:09:03 - 2016, the 20th Anniversary of Infinite Jest

1:12:50 - Television in 2016

1:22:53 - Board games in 2016

1:27:48 - Passing over video games

1:28:03 - Wrap up

Matt Bucher contact

Twitter & Instagram: @mattbucher

Website: mattbucher.com

Dave Laird contact

Twitter: @dave__laird

Instagram: @davelaird

Email us: [email protected]

In this episode we speak with the multi-talented writer and musician Andrew Savage of the band Parquet Courts. Their song “Instant Disassembly” opens and closes each episode of our podcast, but more importantly, Andrew is a super-literate dude who is capable of expounding on almost any topic.

Here is the video that Dave mentions of George Saunders’ appearance on The Charlie Rose show: https://charlierose.com/videos/23703 (DFW discussion starts at 40:54).

Check out Parquet Courts on Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube or just shout their name out the nearest window.

Their official website is https://parquetcourts.wordpress.com/

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Show notes

01:54 - Why Dave chose “Instant Disassembly” as our intro song

01:55 - Thematic relation between DFW’s writing and “Instant Disassembly”

01:56 - There’s ennui but it’s also a really bitchin’ song

02:45 - Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”

03:46 - Bookworm’s theme song

08:35 - Growing up in Denton, Texas

09:53 - Austin Brown

13:30 - The Marked Men

14:40 - The Parking Lot set in Charlottesville

16:53 - Where did we play in Vancouver

18:49 - Parquet courts in The Garden and basketball

20:08 - Influenced by fiction

22:14 - Coming to Wallace, an intro thereto

23:52 - IJ/DFW influences everything

25:31 - The anxiety of influence, nah

29:56 - What to hold back

32:12 - Trump is a germaphobe

33:23 - The labor issues of being a musician

36:08 - New Sincerity discussion

39:13 - Parquet Courts and the Irony of Blah Blah Blah

43:45 - What makes a good performance

44:41 - Smaller venues

46:13 - Dealing with cynicism

48:12 - Favorite Wallace stuff

51:30 - The Depressed Person: parody or not?

55:30 - The existential angst of the modern condition

57:03 - We’ve all got holes to fill

58:40 - In search of lost time

1:02:00 - Listening to music the way we read

1:03:49 - The Big Ship on repeat

1:05:00 - Cate Le Bon

1:06:01 - Opposite Sex from New Zealand & Hamlet

1:07:40 - Glasgow has a grid system

1:08:56 - Favorite books & movies - Knausgaard

1:10:43 - Eva Hesse’s diaries

1:13:01 - A movie discussion ensues

1:14:19 - The song North Dakota

1:17:23 - How to finish things

1:28:30 - Easter egg

In this episode with talk with Academy-Award winning screenwriter and DFW fan Nicolás Giacobone. Nico is best known as the co-writer of Iñarritu's Birdman and Biutiful, but he's also a writer of fiction and a serious reader.

If you have not seen the movie Birdman, it is strongly advised that you do so.

In this episode we discuss his grandfather's filmography, literary influences, Manu Ginobli, and many other things.  

Books and writers mentioned include Alberto Laiseca, John Updike, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, and Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter among others. 

Contact us: [email protected]

Show notes: 

00:042 - background and introductions

02:16 - writing for television is painful

03:41 - Like Ed Wood, he was his own extra

09:08 - Homer and Dostoevsky and Cervantes

22:22 - movie writing is collaborative by nature

28:19 - San Antonio Spurs and ego

32:20 - In Latin America, everything is sold with a handshake

33:40 - Treating writing like work

35:08 - Ruth Reichl and DFW

43:40 - Never wrote another novel

49:00 - Six minute takes

53:01 - Tortured artist whose biggest obstacle is himself

54:00 - Free time and they write bullshit

57:07 - Aaron Swartz's theory of IJ

1:04:26 - We can't do math

1:08:11 - Plenty of good books are forgotten

1:12:01 - The 160-page version of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

1:15:19 - Sergio de la Pava

1:22:06 - The Internet as a tool

1:28:00 - Mario Bellatin

1:32:32 - Moving past Bolaño's influence

1:36:46 - Make fun of Shakespeare

1:37:59 - Comparing Birdman and Infinite Jest

1:39:56 - IJ is impossible to film

1:45:55 - Easter egg: technical difficulties

In this episode we talk with Wallace scholar Clare Hayes-Brady about her new book The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-unspeakable-failures-of-david-foster-wallace-9781501313530/

She is Lecturer in American Literature at University College, Dublin.

We discuss a variety of issues in this episode including bad endings, DFW Studies, Ricoeur, love, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and assorted other things.

You can find her on Twitter https://twitter.com/ClareHayesBrady

Show notes

00:30 - Byzantine Erotica right off the bat

01:30 - Spelling of Quebecois

02:30 - UCD vs TCD

04:01 - The Unspeakable Failures

05:01 - Noncompletion, the lack of closure

05:45 - A Failed Entertainment

08:30 - Short Story Theory, resistance to closure

10:39 - We don’t have neat narratives

13:00 - How can you be done with something?

14:26 - Starting IJ again

15:20 - The peripheral stuff

16:27 - Was IJ/DFW narcissistic?

19:10 - The empathetic connection with readers

20:38 - Incoherent need to communicate

22:21 - The problem with romantic relationships--and Anne Geddes

25:21 - Misogyny from a place of fear

26:36 - The Granola Cruncher

30:53 - The silencing of female characters

31:02 - The Lionel Shriver issue

35:18 - A poorly disguised avatar

35:45 - Hungerford piece

37:02 - The Joycean Boys Club

39:59 - The C-word

44:42 - Inhabiting other minds

45:29 - Hurston not explaining things

47:26 - White male protagonists. . . groan

48:46 - VIDA count and the equivalent awareness

50:01 - Separating the artist from the art

51:29 - Ferrante & Knausgaard

55:36 - Writing beyond his own perspective

56:20 - Hardcore Theory Weenies

58:41 - Conflating a couple of paradoxes

59:59 - A fascinating disaster of a book

1:01:54 - The conclusions of the failures

1:04:40 - First attempt in Learning

1:05:08 - Post on Poor Yorick’s Summer

1:05:30 - Honest Ulsterman and motherhood

1:08:40 - Easter Egg

In this episode we talk with John Mango. John is a teacher and a scholar but in this episode we talk a lot about recovery, AA membership, depression, and alcoholism--perennial DFW subjects all around.

01:07 - Twenty episodes in a year

02:02 - Introducing John Mango

04:01 - John Grisham paperbacks

05:05 - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy

06:30 - A comforting loss and depression

08:30 - Terry Eagleton & the role of literature

11:22 - Discovering Wallace after death

13:15 - We feel like we know him

14:14 - Can you even talk about AA?

15:25 - Hiding stuff all the time

16:29 - Humility

17:30 - Separating the biography from the writing?

18:20 - Alcohol & Poetry, John Berryman

19:48 - Sharing and honesty and irony

21:11 - The Big Book is IJ

22:14 - William James, Religious Experience

25:39 - AA and agnosticism

26:02 - G.O.D. = Group of Drunks

26:25 - It all comes down to pragmatism

27:15 - Gately saving Randy Lenz, a program of action

29:04 - The gift of desperation

31:30 - St. Anselm

33:00 - Gately enjoys riding with the crocodiles

37:31 - Big Craig

38:10 - Interview with Deb Larson-Venable, the real Pat Montesian

39:43 - How John came in

41:09 - Gratitude? Seriously?

44:58 - A giant love letter to AA

48:44 - It sounds like a cliche

51:20 - A favorite part of Infinite Jest

54:05 - Fleeting mention of Trump, sorry

54:44 - Fake cliche motto

57:40 - Burlington, Vermont & Hebron, Connecticut

59:01 - Norwalk virus

1:00:11 - The Joke in Infinite Jest

1:02:13 - Vocabulary of emotional literacy

1:03:56 - The problem of solipsism

1:07:07 - @callmejohnmango, Facebook, The Blog - https://hazardsofthecourse.wordpress.com/

1:10:23 - Destigmatizing the disease

1:11:13 - Android Netrunner