Excerpts from 52% of a letter sent by Gordon Lish to students of his writing class, which Harper's published and was sued for (Lish won the suit)

It is absolutely unacceptable to me that this term not prove to be our most heroic yet. Everything points to the gathering of amazements...It happens that a number of old-timers are (if only quondam) teachers of fiction writing now--by my quick count, Yannick Murphy, Peter Christopher, Mark Richard (newly confirmed pal of, ye gods, Jackie O.), Jennifer Allen, Ted Pejovich, Amy Hempel, and Diane Williams. Anyway, all the more reason why the source of their "anxiety of influence" must again redouble his efforts if he is to keep surpassing himself, a requirement, you have my word, he pledges himself to meet. Newcomers could not possibly know how arduous, how taxing an experience awaits them. Much is going to be asked of you--and altogether aptly, necessarily--for the profit that can come to you from these classes is great beyond measure....Because you are on the point of taking your place in an undertaking not anything like what you have ever before essayed--this you can depend on! It is, in the opinion of some, a kind of magnificence, this class--and it confers, many claim, a kind of magnificence upon those who have managed to make their way from start to finish. Swell....On this point, by the bye: no questions, not during the course of the class...Ditto, please understand, the making of observations. Please believe that your question will very likely be superannuated by statements I will, when the occasion properly calls for it, make. I have been teaching fiction writing for thirty years. I know how to do my job. I need no one's help doing it. Not to fret: You will have the chance to show off every inch of your knowing by virtue of the literary artifacts you will be creating from it. Learning, acquiring a new set of behaviors, is a monstrously challenging task: Everything must be made to abet its happening. Therefore: no questions, no interruptions. Sit. Listen. Do this as best you are able (you will, mark me, get better and better at it) and you will surely observe my doubling back and doubling back and, each time that I do so, my bringing greater and greater exposition and exactitude to everything that has already been said--so that I might heighten the force of your revelations and elevate them to more sophisticated (read "ironic") terms....as old-timers will tell you, the first hour or two often find me at the zenith of my inspiration and usefulness--as does the last hour....No snippets, no jibbie-jibbies left behind you, yes? Yes, yes, you may, of course, use the potty--but watch Gordon and ask yourself, does he?...And since, reduced to its simplest formulation, the goal of your labors should be to overtake Lish...Well the inference is yours to draw, yes?...Look, do as you must--but be willing to wonder, perhaps for the first time, what you really must....Okay, that's it and that's it--save for me to say please be thrilled for what you are about to do. It is a brave prospect, incommensurate with the ordinary acts of your life and potentially susceptible of raising up from you nothing less than the occult, the strange, the unprecedented, the unexampled, the fabulous--namely, a work of art, an artifact worthy of history's notice. Old-timers know that I will stop at nothing to manage this immense ambition. To be sure, I feel more robust than ever, having at last shipped off the novel I had been failing to wrestle into the harness these last cruel years. I am stronger for that accomplishment, all the stronger to lift you up and carry you over the top--if you will only let yourself be lifted and carried. Listen to me--whatever your life is, there can be an excellence in it, a garden of achievement that no jealous god can drive you out of and whose walkways, however narrow, can keep you safe and steady on your course for all the rest of your given days. Soon, then, and be well.
--GORDON

(from Harper's December 1990 issue)

the first page or so from a frequently touted yet somehow still underappreciated work

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

The book comes out April 13, 2010. I wonder how long until a major biography hits shelves. It only took 20 years after Donald Barthelme's death, but he didn't die young or move as many units.

From Amazon:

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious."
-- David Foster Wallace

An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour."

In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s Magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”

Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour—for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amidst these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things - everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and counfounds him - in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is an indelible portrait of one of America’s greatest writers. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer, of being young generally, trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what is was like to become David Foster Wallace.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

handing out a confection of venom

good stuff

FictionDaily.org has excerpted and linked to a fiction piece of mine called "Guerilla Warfare" originally appearing in Barrelhouse. Nice. From the site: "FictionDaily’s goal is to help aggregate and organize this sea of new literature." In other niceness, What to Wear During an Orange Alert placed my story "Camera Obscura" (in Word Riot) on their Watch List back in December.

"Anyway, as he flees this latest disaster, Mark valiantly stops to save a girl who's tripped and fallen under the stampeding feet. The girl's name is Sylvia, and she's played by Reese Witherspoon with equal portions of gamine bluster, little-girl vulnerability, bewitching carnality, and a sort of arid, postwar Gallic Maoist, protofeminist, chignon-wearing hauteur that easily falls away to reveal a kind of Squeaky Fromm-like, giggly, non-compos-mentis 'hey, whatever' insouciance in a performance that marks a stunning comeback from Ms. Witherspoon's disastrous turn as 'Tante Helke' in controversial Austrian director John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt's unwatchable S&M epic My Name Is Your Name Too."

Donald Barthelme's Reading List

This is probably old news to a lot of people, but The Believer has an article (from 2003) called DONALD BARTHELME’S SYLLABUS: A NON-READER PURSUES A LITERARY EDUCATION ARMED WITH NOTHING BUT THE DON’S TOP EIGHTY-ONE. It's quite diverting: the list itself, as well as Kevin Moffett's account of his experience tackling it. I get the feeling that Barthelme deliberately included quite a few obscure titles, ones that are no doubt useful to read, however. I guess I'm referring to Gogol's Wife by Tommaso Landolfi, Tragic Magic (which is awesome) by Wesley Brown, The Palm-Wine Drunkard by Amos Tutola, and The Oranging of America by Max Apple. DFW mentions Max Apple in his essay on TV and US fiction, I believe. Barthelme also tried to represent a range of styles on his list. Writers (at first glance) far removed from him in terms of aesthetic make the cut: Saul Bellow, Anne Beattie, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, John Cheever, Ray Carver. Postmodern cohorts of his who are represented include: John Barth, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, and John Hawkes. William Gaddis and Robert Coover don't make the list, oddly enough.

Last summer I tracked down the ten shortest books on the list and tried to read one per day. I made it five days before burning myself out. I've been proceeding more slowly since then. I plan to finish the list, because it consists of the recommendations of one of my favorite authors, but there are so many other books I need to read.

From an article by John Barth in the NYT: "He [Donald Barthelme] then produced for the seminar his 'short list': five books he recommended to the attention of aspiring American fiction writers. No doubt the list changed from time to time; just then it consisted of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds - a fair sample of the kind of nonlinear narration, sportive form and cohabitation of radical fantasy with quotidian detail that mark his own fiction. He readily admired other, more 'traditional' writers, but it is from the likes of these that he felt his genealogical descent."