Link Banana

I’ve refrained from commenting on the passing on David Foster Wallace because until that news spread, I might have assumed he was a Scottish revolutionary (or somesuch). But Gong Szeto captures how I feel about it all pretty well:

I can conclude with certainty that everyone I have ever encountered who admired his work are smart, passionate, and engaged people. And even though I have not myself engaged in his (intimidating) writing oeuvre, I see the far-reaching effect he had and continues to have on people around me.

Of the limited engagement I’ve had with his work in the last few days, I most liked this 2005 commencement speech. These two quotations are also good.

I was rather taken by Robert Gottlieb’s critique of John Steinbeck’s oeuvre. Though he’s been largely discarded by literary types, he’s probably the twentieth-century author who I’ve read most. (Though that more a sign of how little reading I’ve done than of how much Steinbeck I’ve read.)

Steinbeck’s final work years were spent on journalism, and his subject was almost inevitably America. A collection of think pieces and nostalgia called America and Americans (1966) reveals him at his most characteristic. He’s moralizing, he’s didactic, he’s searching for big answers to big questions. He’s generous and vulnerable and touchy. And he’s more and more dismayed by what he sees around him: “I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism.” You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.