The Summer Layoff was also included in this recent round-up by big-time YouTubers A Life on Books podcast.
The video is about Andy’s return from brain surgery. I’ve been a big fan of Andy’s for a long time (mainly through his Instagram) and so it was really cool to see that he’d read my book as part of his post-surgery recovery.
In 2018, author Mary Karr tweeted about her abusive relationship with David Foster Wallace. This was at the height of #MeToo and cancel culture, where the phrase ‘problematic fave’ was commonplace. Wallace, dead for ten years but still alive in the public imagination, was suddenly brought into the conversation. Wallace’s fans, too, were implicated in his bad behavior, particularly by their reputation for being ‘lit-bros’. At the time, Grace Chipperfield was writing a doctoral thesis on Wallace, which eventually turned into a collection of essays that reckoned with both Wallace’s complicated legacy and her relationship to him as a fan, a scholar, and a woman. The final essay in the collection was a deep dive into Wallace fandom, and to write this Grace corresponded with members of the Wallace community, including one of its most dedicated and active participants: Matt Bucher. Here, then, is a sample of that correspondence. This essay is a series of letters between Grace and Matt throughout which they consider their moral obligations as fans in the age of the problematic fave.
Grace Chipperfield is a Fulbright Scholar and tutor in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. She recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing, a collection of essays on David Foster Wallace and his fans. She is on the board of the International David Foster Wallace Society and an associate editor for The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Email: grace.chipperfield@flinders.edu.au
The Belan Deck isn’t a straightforward guidebook or manifesto or map, but it nevertheless, in its elliptical, poetic approach, offers a winding, thinking, feeling path of opposition to not only the machines themselves, but also the hollow men who would gladly replace artists and creators and thinkers with those machines. It’s also really fun to read. Great stuff.
The book will seduce you to turn pages whether you chase the clues or you don’t. But if you do there is so much more to think about. I’ll close by pointing out that there is now a rabbit hole connecting David Foster Wallace to Matt Bucher via David Markson and there is a rabbit hole connecting David Foster Wallace to David Markson via Matt Bucher. This is pretty cool.
I was also fortunate to get this blurb from acclaimed Gaddis scholar and literary critic Steven Moore: “Very smart, witty, insightful, very literary, and a lovely homage to Markson.“—Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History
I was intrigued by this book because I had seen Fabre’s name mentioned in a lot of prominent places but had not read his work. In fact, I saw somewhere on Twitter that Valeria Luiselli called Fabre the best contemporary poet in Mexico (or something along those lines).
This week I wrote a piece of MEL magazine about job insecurity.
I was intrigued by this book because I had seen Fabre’s name mentioned in a lot of prominent places but had not read his work. In fact, saw somewhere on Twitter that Valeria Luiselli called Fabre the best contemporary poet in Mexico (or something along those lines).
