Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative
sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about
American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure
to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no
mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish.
The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of
something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of
individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the
connections holding all of us together in this world would light up,
too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of
accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would
have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.
I uploaded a theater script for the Monkey Boners post. A shout-out to Celtx (Wikipedia), a free multi-platform screen-writing application based on Mozilla and XUL that made this way more fun that it should have been.
If you recall from last year, The Dark Balloon published a best-of
list for Overhead in New York from January 2007 to June 2007. In
this episode, we shall cover June 2007 to January 2008 with topics
including
