A Few Recent Updates

1. I did win the recent Wells Branch Library Board election. I’ll be sworn in for my next two-year term in January 2024.
2. I was recently on the Eminent Americans podcast discussing DFW with my friend Daniel Oppenheimer. Be sure to follow his podcast and Substack!
3. Hannah Smart reviewed The Belan Deck over at the Sunlight Press.
4. Rick Harsch also had this very entertaining video review of The Belan Deck on his YouTube channel.

How to be a Fan in the Age of Problematic Faves

This academic article is really a series of letters between Dr. Grace Chipperfield and me. It was published in January 2021 in the journal “Life Writing” and the subsequent book titled Essays in Life Writing. The question that Grace and I were grappling with is still one that stalks DFW Studies (and plenty of other fandoms): is there an ethical way to be a fan of a problematic artist?

I’ll paste the official abstract below.

ABSTRACT

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

New Reviews of The Belan Deck

I’ve received several great reviews of The Belan Deck over at Goodreads, but I wanted to call out two other lengthy reviews.

Biblioklept reviewed the book here and had this to say:

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.

Jay Innis Murray reviewed the book at The Visionary Company and I also did a short interview with him there. Here’s an excerpt of his review:

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

A Couple of Things

Over at Publishers Weekly I interviewed Jane Alison about her latest novel, Nine Island.

I wrote a short essay on Impostor Syndrome for Poor Yorick’s Summer (an Infinite Jest reading group).

Two New Reviews

I reviewed Thomas Rayfiel’s excellent new novel Genius for the Chicago Review of Books.

Thomas Rayfiel’s <em>Genius</em> Tackles Sexuality, Philosophy, and Cancer

And at Mexico City Lit I wrote a review / appreciation of Carlos Velazquez’s first book in English, The Cowboy Bible.

http://mexicocitylit.com/matt-bucher-reviews-the-cowboy-bible-collage-by-alberto-pazzi/

Publishers Weekly

This week I wrote a piece of MEL magazine about job insecurity.

https://features.wearemel.com/company-loyalty-is-a-myth

Also, I had a brief quote in this New Yorker piece about Infinite Jest.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/beyond-infinite-jest

 
Over at Publishers Weekly, I interviewed author Laura Tillman about her new book The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/69409-scene-of-the-crime-pw-talks-with-laura-tillman.html

Recent updates

For issue 3 of molossus, I reviewed Luis Felipe Fabre’s poems about Sor Juana.

http://www.molossus.co/the-long-story-of-bad-translations-on-luis-felipe-fabres-monsters/

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.

https://features.wearemel.com/company-loyalty-is-a-myth

I had a brief quote in this New Yorker piece about Infinite Jest.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/beyond-infinite-jest

Fabre in Molossus

For issue 3 of molossus, I reviewed Luis Felipe Fabre’s poems about Sor Juana.

http://www.molossus.co/the-long-story-of-bad-translations-on-luis-felipe-fabres-monsters/

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).

Two Recent Pieces

I recently posted this article about Wes Anderson and Bye Bye Braverman over on simpleranger.net

One thing I didn’t mention there is that Braverman includes a scene filmed at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. For a while, I lived a block north of there on Bedford. That intersection has changed a lot over the years so it was very cool to see it back in 1968.

You can see the old Town Hill Restaurant in the background.

That Texaco station is long gone.

I also wrote about David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and the character of Toni Ware over on Medium. The Pale King’s Trailer Park Queen.

The Scofield & David Markson

A new literary magazine launches today and I’m happy to have contributed a small piece to it. The magazine is called The Scofield and my essay is on David Markson and Twitter. It’s a truly stellar magazine that has assembled a who’s who of writers working on and around David Markson. Keep an eye on The Scofield.

In other news, to support the film The End of the Tour, I wrote this article on “Why David Foster Wallace Matters” for a collection on Medium called “Just Words.”

Also, last month I published this essay on Roberto Bolaño and A Little Lumpen Novelita in the Dublin Review of Books.