Everything and More: A Tribute to David Foster Wallace

About this Event

An evening in celebration of the life and work of DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
1962-2008

Writers David Lipsky, Rick Moody, and Joanna Scott will read some of their favorite selections from Wallace’s writings followed by an in depth discussion moderated by Michael Silverblatt, host of the radio interview program, Bookworm.

Abstraction has all kinds of problems and headaches built in, we all know. Part of the hazard is how we use nouns. We think of nouns’ meanings in terms of denotations. Nouns stand for things-man, desk, pen, David, head, aspirin. A special kind of comedy results when there’s confusion about what’s a real noun, as in ‘Who’s on first?’ or those Alice in Wonderland routines-‘What can you see on the road?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What great eyesight! What does nothing look like?’ The comedy tends to vanish, though, when the nouns denote abstractions, meaning general concepts divorced from particular instances. Many of these abstraction-nouns come from root verbs. ‘Motion’ is a noun, and ‘existence’; we use words like this all the time. The confusion comes when we try to consider what exactly they mean.
— From Everything and More

Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

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Audio from this Event

Writers David Lipsky, Rick Moody, and Joanna Scott will read some of their favorite selections from Wallace's writings followed by an in depth discussion moderated by Michael Silverblatt. | Duration: 2:15:34

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Video from this Event

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