david foster wallace

David Foster Wallace

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On the 15th April 2011, tax day in the United States, over 200 people gathered in the gallery at Foyle's on Charing Cross road to celebrate the life and work of the late David Foster Wallace as well as to launch his posthumous novel, The Pale King.

Paul Murray kicked things off by reading the opening of the book, Catherine O'Flynn then read from Infinite Jest and finally Michael Pietsch, David's editor, and Bonnie Nadell, his lifelong agent, spoke in conversation with Jonathan Derbyshire, the culture editor at the New Statesman, about David's work, publishing The Pale King and the tragic loss of a great friend and tremendous talent.

Due to some technical difficulties on the night, the recording is not as pristine as we would have hoped. However, it was such an interesting and incredibly moving occasion, that we wanted to share it in its entirety.

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The Penguin Podcast: A Celebration of David Foster Wallace

Thoughts on why the human male is so violent regarding sex

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Most everyone is consumed with "facts" yet never ever know WHY those facts came into being leaving them helpless to change these facts that they so delight in reciting as if that alone could change something, much less, help. 

Just the facts, man

LeMarc talks about Sam Harris

David Foster Wallace 2005 Commencement Address

David Foster Wallace BBC 3

David Foster Wallace's iconic 2005 Kenyon College graduation address. Context and transcript here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/

Part 2 here: http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-2

David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 1)

David Foster Wallace's iconic 2005 Kenyon College graduation address. Context and transcript here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/12/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace/

Part 1 here: http://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water-1

David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 2)

The opening section from David Foster Wallace's essay on the social impact of television and the use of irony in American culture. First Published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993. Full text available here jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

David Foster Wallace E Unibus Pluram recording

An excerpt from the audiobook edition of BOTH FLESH AND NOT read by Robert Petkoff and Katherine Kellgren

Beloved for his epic agony, brilliantly discerning eye, and hilarious and constantly self-questioning tone, David Foster Wallace was heralded by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. BOTH FLESH AND NOT gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not," considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2," which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers.

A sweeping, exhilarating collection of the author's most emotionally immediate work, BOTH FLESH AND NOT spans almost 20 years of Wallace's career and reminds us why A.O. Scott called him "The Best Mind of His Generation" (New York Times).

Available in Print and as an eBook from Little, Brown and Company, or as an Audiobook available for Digital Download online or on CD in your favorite bookstore!

A few places you can find it online:
An eMusic pick! http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/book/david-foster-wallace/both-flesh-and-not/10129286/: 

http://www.downpour.com/catalog/product/view/id/111252/s/both-flesh-and-not/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/both-flesh-not-essays-unabridged/id568530952
http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B009K8SPQO&qid=1357922745&sr=1-1

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/both-flesh-and-not-david-foster-wallace/1111303725


Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace, read by Robert Petkoff - Audiobook excerpt

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Don't Play Around featuring Aloe Blacc and Charles Bradley

– David Foster Wallace, quoted in "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" by David Lipsky (At Amazon.com: http://bit.ly/AOCYEUBY)

“There’s so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us. Like, living in Bloomington: One of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to a lot of shitty country music. ‘Cause that’s like pretty much all there is on the radio when you’re tired of like, listening to Green Day on the one college radio station.  And these country musics are just so — you know, 'Baby since you’ve left I can’t live, I’m drinking all the time' and stuff. And I remember just being real impatient with it. Until I’d been living here about a year.  All of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor? And what they're really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? 'Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning.' That in a weird way, I mean they're incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something. And it’s so weird. It’s like you live immersed in this stuff, it’s very Flannery O’Connor-ish. And then every once in a while you realize that it’s all the same, and it’s all about the really profound shit. And that it’s adjusted in various ways to talk to various demographic groups for commercial reasons. But that if you cock your ear and listen real close, it’s — that it’s deep, you know?”

(I believe I originally found this and other clips from AOCYEUBY here: http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/jul/01/start-conversation-david-lipsky-david-foster-wallace/)

David Foster Wallace — Beauty & profundity in pop culture

 
http://www.democracynow.org - The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges join us to discuss what could mark the most significant government intrusion on freedom of the press in decades. The Justice Department has acknowledged seizing the work, home and cellphone records used by almost 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press. The phones targeted included the general AP office numbers in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, and the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. The action likely came as part of a probe into the leaks behind an AP story on the U.S. intelligence operation that stopped a Yemen-based al-Qaeda bombing plot on a U.S.-bound airplane. Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and former New York Times reporter, calls the monitoring "one more assault in a long series of assaults against freedom of information and freedom of the press." Highlighting the Obama administration's targeting of government whistleblowers, Hedges adds: "Talk to any investigative journalist who must investigate the government and they will tell you that there is a deep freeze. People are terrified of speaking, because they are terrified of going to jail."

Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,100+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday.

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Chris Hedges: Monitoring of AP Phones a "Terrifying" Step in State Assault on Press Freedom

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Award-winning journalist and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman records a podcast in conjunction with her weekly column, which you can read here: http://bit.ly/16qBDl5
 
May 30, 2013
 
By Amy Goodman
 
One cyberactivist’s federal case wrapped up this week, and another’s is set to begin. While these two young men, Jeremy Hammond and Bradley Manning, are the two who were charged, it is the growing menace of government and corporate secrecy that should be on trial.
Hammond was facing more than 30 years in prison, charged with hacking into the computers of a private security and intelligence firm called Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, when he agreed to a plea agreement of one count of computer hacking. Stratfor traffics in “geopolitical intelligence, economic, political and military forecasting,” according to its website. Yet, after Hammond and others released 5 million emails from Stratfor’s servers to WikiLeaks, it became clear that the firm engages in widespread spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Coca-Cola hired Stratfor to spy on the group PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Dow Chemical hired Stratfor to spy on the activists who were exposing Dow’s role in the cyanide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984 that killed an estimated 8,000 and injured thousands more.

Hammond is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 6. His lawyers have asked for time served—15 months, some of which was in solitary confinement. He faces 10 years.

Bradley Manning, meanwhile, will finally have his day in military court at Fort Meade, Md. He faces a slew of charges related to the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Manning pled guilty to mishandling the information, and acknowledged uploading hundreds of thousands of documents to the WikiLeaks website. But he denies the most serious charge, still pending, of “aiding the enemy.” Prosecutors are seeking life in prison; however, if Manning is found guilty, the judge could still impose the death penalty.

Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond are among the highest profile in a series of cases that the Obama administration has been pursuing against whistle-blowers and journalists. Attorney Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and an attorney for WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, said in front of the courthouse after Hammond’s court appearance, “This is part of the sledgehammer of what the government is doing to people who expose corporate secrets, government secrets, and really the secrets of an empire.”

Manning explained his actions and his motivation in a detailed statement in his pretrial proceedings. He said, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information ... it could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” The first public release by WikiLeaks of the material provided by Manning was the video (titled by WikiLeaks) “Collateral Murder.” The grainy video, taken from an attack helicopter, shows the cold killing of a dozen men on the ground in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. Two of those killed by the U.S. Apache helicopter gunship were employees of the Reuters news agency, cameraman Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, a father of four.

After their violent, senseless deaths, Reuters sought answers and filed Freedom of Information requests for material relating to the attack, which were denied. Manning saw the video when stationed in Iraq, and researched the background of the attack. He saved the video file. He explained in court, “I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.”

Hammond and Manning, facing years in prison, have in common their connection to WikiLeaks and its founder, Assange. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden about allegations of sexual misconduct—he has not been charged. After losing a fight against extradition in Britain, he was granted political asylum by the government of Ecuador, and has remained in Ecuador’s embassy in London since last June. It was a leaked Stratfor email that referenced a U.S. indictment against Assange, reading: “Not for Pub—We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

This all happens amidst recent revelations about the Obama administration’s extraordinary invasion of journalists’ privacy and the right to protect sources. The Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of its reporters and editors in an effort to discover the source of a leak about a foiled bomb plot. Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, may actually be charged in a criminal conspiracy for allegedly receiving classified information from a source about North Korea. 

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have used the Espionage Act six times to prosecute whistle-blowers—more than all previous presidents combined. Obama’s assault on journalism and his relentless war on whistle-blowers are serious threats to fundamental democratic principles on which this nation was founded.

The job of journalists is to hold those in power accountable. Our job is to be the fourth estate, not “for the state.” Let us be.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
 
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,100 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
 
© 2013 Amy Goodman
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ABOUT AMY GOODMAN:   
Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, syndicated columnist, author and the host of Democracy Now! Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for "developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media." The Independent of London named Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! "an inspiration"; pulsemedia.org placed Goodman at the top of their 20 Top Global Media Figures. Goodman is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her latest book is called, "The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope." Read all of her recent columns: www.democracynow.org/blog/category/weekly_column
 
ABOUT DEMOCRACY NOW!:  
An independent, global weekday news hour, Democracy Now! is anchored by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Democracy Now! is broadcast in English and in Spanish on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations around the world.

"Hammond, Manning, Assange and Obama’s Sledgehammer Against Dissent." By Amy Goodman

In our week off, Andy sticks it to the Vikings.


David Foster Wallace E Unibus Pluram recording

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