D avid Foster Wallace died 10 years ago yesterday. His friend David Streitfeld tries to put his finger on Wallace’s conflicted inner life: “How much of myself am I willing to give away to get what I want? He hated it when he walked through the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, as I once did with him, and people tried to stop him and tell him they admired his work. He had trouble acknowledging them, which made him seem rude, but he was just awkward and conflicted. He felt bad about it, and felt bad about feeling bad about it. Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you, Infinite Jest advises, but it was a hard lesson.”
Where Hollywood stars go to live (and act) out their final years: “Located on MPTF’s 23-acre Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills, the community currently accommodates around 230 residents ages 70 and up, and it has a unit for individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia and a 40-bed long-term care facility. The campus is both bucolic and state of the art, featuring rows of cottages shaded from San Fernando Valley sun by tall trees, a network of walking paths connecting the living quarters to a health-and-wellness center, a greenhouse, and, of course, a movie theater—a 200-seat venue that plays first-run films, often introduced by their principal actors. If the facilities (excepting that movie theater) might seem typical of a high-end retirement community—though you’d be hard-pressed to find many as well outfitted as this one—the names of the buildings are not: the Jodie Foster Aquatic Pavilion, the Louis B. Mayer Theater, the John Ford Chapel. It is, unmistakably, a place with a legacy, an environment dedicated to the art form that its residents once practiced. Another feature that differentiates the Motion Picture Country Home, as residents call it, from your run-of-the-mill retirement community: it has a TV channel. Founded about a dozen years ago, Channel 22 is a closed-circuit station run by and for MPTF residents, with assistance from a dedicated staff and hundreds of volunteers, including film-school students and current members of the industry. Its programming, which runs 24-7, is composed of older movies and TV shows and 12 hours of original content a day...”
A memoir by John Steinbeck’s second wife was published for the first time earlier this week. “ My Life With John Steinbeck recalls a troubled marriage that spanned 1943 to 1948, a period in which he would write classics including Cannery Row and The Pearl. During their marriage, Conger Steinbeck described a husband who was emotionally distant and demanding. ‘Like so many writers, he had several lives, and in each he was spoilt, and in each he felt he was king,’ she wrote. ‘From the time John awoke to the time he went to bed, I had to be his slave.’”
The genius of Alberto Giacometti: “His sensibility was too visionary and inward to be comfortable with the analytical, formalistic aesthetics of Cubism, which may be why his most successful effort in this vein is at once his most and least cubist work. Entitled Cube and dating from nearly a decade later (1934), it is a broadly faceted vertical monolith that exudes a powerful, quasi-figural presence. It would seem to be an evocation of his childhood experience of a large stone encountered in the countryside and anthropomorphized into ‘a living being, hostile, threatening.’ From his very beginnings as an artist, there had been a tension in Giacometti’s mind between creating and making, the former equated with discovery, the latter simply executing a preconceived idea.”
A history of “cool”: “For a millennium or so, cool has meant low in temperature, and temperature itself has long been a metaphor for psychological and emotional states (a cool reception, hotheaded). Chaucer, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, used cool to describe someone’s wit, Shakespeare to say, ‘More than cool reason ever comprehends.’ But starting around the 1930s, cool began appearing in American English as an extremely casual expression to mean something like ‘intensely good.’ This usage also distinguished the speaker, italicizing their apartness from mainstream culture.”
A Reader Recommends: Linda Lee recommends The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington: “This book does for cockroaches what Watership Down did for rabbits and is also very funny until the end, which lapses into incoherence. Either the author couldn’t decide how to end it, was drunk, or got drunk because he couldn’t figure out how to end it. It’s still worth reading and is frequently offered free if you have Amazon Prime.”
Essay of the Day:
In Quillette, Noam Shpancer offers a moderate defense of stereotypes:
“The impulse to dismiss stereotype accuracy (and by proxy group differences as a whole) as wrongheaded fiction is mostly well-intentioned, and has no doubt produced much useful knowledge about individual variation within groups as well as the myriad commonalities that exist across groups and cultures. Yet, the fact that stereotypes are often harmful does not mean that they are merely process failures, bugs in our software. The fact that stereotypes are often harmful also does not mean that they are often inaccurate. In fact, quite shockingly to many, that prevailing twofold sentiment, which sees stereotypical thinking as faulty cognition and stereotypes themselves as patently inaccurate, is itself wrong on both counts.”
Photo: Florence
Poem: Joseph Mirra, “Oh Where Was God?”
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