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David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words)

Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint it here, and for sharing an update on Nat’s life (see the postscript below).

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‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s

Edwin Lefèvre | Reminiscences of a Stock Operator | 1923

 

Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro:

Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the crash of 1929. His life and times were immortalized in 1923 by author Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. The novel became a bible for those looking to get rich quick (though rarely succeeding), and Livermore’s advice became legendary. “There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”

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Chapter I

I went to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stockbrokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big board in the customers’ room. One of the customers usually sat by the ticker and called out the prices. They couldn’t come too fast for me. I have always remembered figures. No trouble at all. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About

For four years now, the Longreads community has celebrated the best storytelling on the web. Thanks for all of your contributions, and special thanks to Longreads Members for supporting this service. We couldn’t keep going without your funding, so join us today.

Earlier this week we posted every No. 1 story from our weekly email this year, in addition to all of the outstanding picks from our Best of 2013 series. Here are 10 stories that we couldn’t stop thinking about.

See you in 2014. Read more…

‘The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.’

Longreads Pick

Jessica Hopper interviews former Chicago Sun-Times music journalist Jim DeRogatis, who first broke the story of dozens of alleged rapes committed by R. Kelly, on why more people have not paid attention to what really happened:

I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment – something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled – even feuded on air – over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly’s victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl’s wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.

DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story – as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man’s personal crusade.

I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.

Source: Village Voice
Published: Dec 17, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)

Boy Next Door

Longreads Pick

The writer on growing up with news reports of a serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for years before finally getting arrested, and how it impacted her own experience with sexual assault:

According to media reports, after Bernardo’s arrest a police officer assigned to prepare the official transcript of the footage of French’s and Mahaffy’s torture collapsed, weeping, and couldn’t continue. I had a similar reaction while reading it. The smallest details haunted me: during one prolonged assault, Bernardo took a break to rent a movie and grab a pizza, and another time Homolka cooked a chicken dinner for the couple and their victim.

The real terror was that it felt so ordinary and suburban, that the vilest acts occurred in the spaces we thought were safe. I was struck by the same sense of banality, looking at the home where Bernardo grew up.

Evil was not foreign to our idyllic community. It had been with us all along.

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Nov 18, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,047 words)

“As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes. So as a crew, how do you stay focused, and how do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it?

“And the way we do it is to break down what are the risks. And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is, ‘What’s the next thing that’s going to kill me.’ And it might be five seconds away, it might be an inadvertent engine shutdown, or it might be staging of the solid rockets coming off, or it might be, you know, some transition or some key next thing.

“It’s not like astronauts are braver than other people. We’re just, you know, meticulously prepared. We dissect what it is that is going to scare us and what it is that is a threat to us, and then we practice over and over again so that the natural, irrational fear is neutralized.”

Commander Chris Hadfield, to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, on how astronauts handle risk. Read more on NASA in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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“I’ve said this before, and it was said to me, but life is choice, and choice is loss. And it’s very easy I think when you’re a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what’s special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process. I will say, Arrested, I had to remind myself that it was a great joy, that even when we did it, we were both making fans and upsetting fans. It did sort of die, and like anything that dies young, nobody goes back and says, ‘You know who wasn’t a very good actor? James Dean.’ ”

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz (via Vulture). Here are more TV stories from the Longreads Archive.

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Playlist: 5 Podcasts on the Business of Film and TV

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Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life. She’s a frequent longreader and also a big podcast fan, so we asked her for some recommendations.

For a while now we’ve been hearing about the rise of television, how shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones have surpassed the film industry when people think of quality viewing experiences. Gone are the days where writers and actors dreamed of making it big in pictures, now talent is flocking to small screen.

Here are some recent interviews that will be of interest to those who like to dig deeper:

WBUR On Point: Is The U.S. Movie Industry Broken? (45 min.)

This is a panel discussion featuring Lynda Obst, a film and television producer whose credits include “Sleepless in Seattle” and whose recent book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, chronicles the recent changes in the movie industry—with big blockbusters more common and smaller films barely getting made. Alongside Obst, sometimes arguing, sometimes agreeing, was Sharon Waxman, CEO and EIC of TheWrap.com.

KCRW The Treatment: Sofia Coppola (29 min.)

Despite the industry’s changes, Coppola is still making “small films,” including her latest, The Bling Ring, a film based on the real-life events (chronicled by Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales) of a group of California teenagers obsessed with celebrities; so much so that they break into stars’ homes. 

NPR Fresh Air: Elisabeth Moss (41 min.)

Mad Men just wrapped up its sixth season and has one more to go before it’s off the air for good. Terry Gross spoke with Elisabeth Moss (aka Peggy Olson) about the evolution of her character and how much she knows about the show’s direction before shooting an episode. (Read the transcript here.)

The Nerdist: Charlie Hunnam (1 hr., 17 min.)

Here’s Hunnam, who plays Sons of Anarchy‘s “Jax” Teller, with Chris Hardwick on being approached by real bikers and his life growing up in a working-class town in North East England.

The Nerdist Writer’s Panel: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (1 hr.)

Nerdist Writer’s Panel host Ben Blacker sits down with the people behind The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a web series that’s a modernized adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with the story told primarily through the lead character Lizzie Bennet‘s video diary entries. The episode includes co-creator Bernie Su, writers Margaret Dunlap, Rachel Kiley, and Kate Rorick, and writer/transmedia guy Jay Bushman.

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Photo: Michael Yarish/AMC

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Behind the Longreads: Dan Zak on the Nun and the Nukes

We asked Washington Post reporter Dan Zak how he stumbled upon “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” Here’s his account:

“This story happened because a generous colleague, Dana Priest, pitched it downstairs to my area of the newsroom. She had finished a series on the country’s aging nuclear arsenal and a shorter news story on security lapses at the site in question, and she thought this nun might make a good feature story. So I started to report it out, because how could I not? A nun? Nukes? Sign me up.

“In October I had lunch with Sister Megan in Rosemont, Pa., where she was convalescing after wrist surgery, and I was kind of spun around by the precise way she lives: With utter intent and compassion. What had been billed as a kind of Keystone Cops episode (old folks bumbling into a nuclear facility) took on this new, almost primal logic in my mind after talking with her. After reading the transcript of a confounding congressional hearing on the break-in and having long phone chats with the activists’ lawyer about the legal knots of the case, I started envisioning a broader, longer piece that would attempt to wrap its arms around the past, present and future of the country’s nuclear identity—and all the legal, bureaucratic and theological complications therein.

“By the end of January, when I called the security guard who was first to respond to their intrusion, I knew that the story was riddled with paradox but felt like a classic, simple parable. The trick was to narrate the parable without sacrificing the nuance or paradox that governs the real world. I’m not sure I was successful, but I thought it was worth a shot.”

Read the story here.

(Photo by Jonathan Newton/Washington Post)