Even Less?

Your Bloguero notes that Andrew Sullivan has decided to quit blogging. He has two reasons:

The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

Sounds familiar. Your Bloguero has ruminated frequently on blog death. In fact, the demise of this blog. Would he just let the blog entries become further and further apart until one day there were no more? A fade out. Or would he write a farewell, a Good Bye Cruel World entry explaining himself and the end in detail? If only your Bloguero took himself and his output so seriously. Or his imagined significance to his readers.

And so this Blog limps along. Breathes shallowly. Seems to be sleeping. Or in a far deeper state of repose. Is it alive? Is it expiring? Will it stand up suddenly, Frankenstein like and bellow? That seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, your Bloguero has been listening to and thinking about winter night sounds. The sirens and the flashing blue and red lights. The car horns. The wind in the trees. And about radio signals, that invisible cloud in the sky. There is probably no more room for a novel or short story about that. David Foster Wallace, Daniel Alarcon having weighed in, there's not much left. Your Bloguero remembers how Jean Shepherd sounded half a century ago, but when he sits upright, awake in the dark, searching for the idea, your Bloguero cannot find it. Perhaps it will come.

Your Bloguero is working on a third novella. He can no more rush it than a cook can hurry a souffle.

David Foster Wallace

We're reminded by Garrison Keillor that today is David Foster Wallace's birthday. DFW said:

"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

David Foster Wallace, RIP

The Times reports that David Foster Wallace has died.

Of his most recent work of fiction, the story collection Oblivion (2004), Wyatt Mason, writing in the London Review of Books, wrote:

The typical mode of narration is digressive; the digressions, in keeping with Wallace's reputation as a humorist of the first rank, are not infrequently very funny. The stories also tend to feature an abundance of neologisms, arcane vocabulary and foreign terms. The settings for the stories include, as well as intimate domesticity, the more public spheres of advertising and publishing, with their own argots, often whipping up blizzards of acronyms. Perhaps more than anything, the defining quality of these fictions is the degree to which they leave the reader unsure about very basic narrative issues: who is telling this story? Where are we? What exactly is happening? In this regard, the title novella of the collection is both representative of what Wallace has been up to, and a test case for the extent to which he has succeeded, according to the demanding terms he has set for himself and for his readers.

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