Everything and More: A Tribute to David Foster Wallace
When: | Wednesday 16 March 2011 |
Where: |
Lensic Performing Arts Center
|
What: | Readings & Conversations event |
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.
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: 2:15:34Video from this Event
Reading 1: Rick Moody
Reading 2: David Lipsky
Reading 3: Joanna Scott and Michael Silverblatt
Conversation with all readers, moderated by Michael Silverblatt

David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was one of the most acclaimed and influential American writers of his generation. A gifted novelist, essayist and humorist, he is best known for his 1996 opus, the...

David Lipsky
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine...

Rick Moody
Rick Moody is one of the most acclaimed American novelists of his generation. His first novel, Garden State (1992), won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Choice Award. Two years later, he published...

Joanna Scott
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Follow Me, Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance. She also has two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and...

Michael Silverblatt
Michael Silverblatt, described as “the guy authors go to when they want a serious literary conversation about their work,” is the host of KCRW’s Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program...