“Wallace had decided that writing was not worth the risk to his mental health. He applied and was accepted as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard. Philosophy was the only thing that had meant as much to him as writing. It, too, could trigger epiphanies. Harvard had offered him a scholarship, and academia would give him a more stable life, with health insurance.”
More of the same. Oh, DFW…DFW…
“In his senior year of high school, he began carrying a towel around with him to wipe away the perspiration from anxiety attacks, and a tennis racquet, so that no one commented on the towel.”
– D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker (via Evan)
“Long after Burnham’s death, Frank Lloyd Wright told a lecture audience, “Thanks to Dan Burnham, Chicago seems to be the only great city in our States to have discovered its own waterfront.” Chicago, Wright said, was the most beautiful city in the country, and he gave the credit for this to Burnham, whose architecture he could never abide.”
– Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker on the centennial of the Burnham Plan of Chicago
The artists’ statements are done and the grant is almost finished.
We are lost in the arcane governmental sub-procedures of grant submission, which require registration with three different middleman websites in order to submit one grant. But we’re close.
I am at that point in editing where every sentence is only looked at for a way to make it shorter – I knew I’d gone too far when I was changing sentences like “The organizations involved are A, B, and C” to “Organizations involved are A, B, and C.”
I am editing the narratives of two artists into those “artist’s statement” items for a grant. I got to talk on the phone to each of them, which was nice. One, rehearsing in Minneapolis, had just returned from getting lost on a morning jog in ten-degree weather.
It would be inaccurate to say that snow is “falling” today, because from my second-story window, it looks more like it’s rising. Or, knocking at the door.
“…just as often the entries record a kind of spiritual desolation and profound isolation. The actress Hope Lange, with whom Cheever had an on-and-off affair, once said that he was the horniest man she had ever known, and sexual avidity is certainly omnipresent in the journals. They include graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, real and imagined, with members of both sexes, as well as anguished attempts to hide or rationalize or excuse his attraction to men. But what comes through most strongly is not so much lust as all-purpose yearning: for a gentle touch, a moment of closeness — for love. The journals are often so thrillingly well written that you can’t put them down, and yet there are pages where you feel you ought to look away. Reading them is like peering over someone’s shoulder into an abyss of loneliness.”
– Charles McGrath on John Cheever in the NYT Sunday magazine
Dara Weinberg 