newyorker:

David Foster Wallace’s Tax Classes

The author hardly pulled these abstruse accounting complexities from thin air. Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, I looked at Wallace’s own accounting-class notes with this new excerpt in mind. (Wallace attended tax courses as research for “The Pale King”; those notes make up a part of his archive, which is housed at the university’s Harry Ransom Center.) These papers, which are mostly related to in-class lectures and problem-set solutions, occasionally became a place for Wallace to observe his classmates, who were taking the classes for credit toward a degree. “ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS,” reads one jotting that found its way into “The Pale King.”

That same page of Wallace’s notebook also contains what looks like a plea regarding the author’s own boredom: “God please help me—Pain, captain.” The mood suggested here is evoked by another unnamed examiner in the Hovatter scene, who at one point “made as if to cover her ears and asked whether please might they be spared listening to this all again.” Submitting to the grind of tax scholarship wasn’t merely a method by which Wallace tried to empathize with the more distractible I.R.S. agents, though. He was also working to understand tax dodges. “An avoidance scheme, perhaps?” Syvlanshine asks the lunch crowd in the new paperback scene, regarding Hovatter’s proposed year-long TV-watching project. “Passive losses?” he then adds, as a reference to a type of deduction that can be used to offset passive gains—but which results in a penalty if abused. During a class that Wallace described in his notes as a “Scam-Fest,” he scribbled the phrase: “PASSIVE a big word for IRS.”

- Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, Seth Colter Walls looked at Wallace’s accounting-class notes. Four “previously unpublished scenes” accompany the paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” which arrives in bookstores this week.

For more of Wallace’s notes, and Walls’s thoughts on them:http://nyr.kr/ISFV2C

“Here’s people learning how to speak the language in this country. The folkways, mores and every other kinda way—and ‘ism’—and it’s all the way to the end of the Civil War before instruments even appear in the hands of black people. By that time, it was an even shorter length of time [before] we had the appearance of Scott Joplin. And James Scott and other people. And this has been going on in my lifetime. … My grandmother and grandfather had a house that they couldn’t even own the mortgage to. They didn’t even give mortgages to black people. This is in 1958. That’s Chicago! Yeah, that’s a town. Big country town! As far down south as you can get up north.

“So what I’m trying to say about people describing [jazz]: It’s like saying, suppose we stopped short and we never got around to seeing Jackie Robinson or Obama or Jesse or anybody. This is all about becoming—people are still becoming. Black people are still becoming. People act like everything’s been attained. Nothing’s been attained yet. You come out of [hundreds of] years of pure slavery and then you enter a period of Jim Crow where people still can’t become anything. There’s no such thing as really integrating into America—it’s still a struggle, so people are still finding out who they are, how they exist in this country. So the art they produce—the art is parallel. That’s being put together as the people are being put together.

“So it’s an insult as far as I’m concerned—to say ‘oh this is jazz’ like there’s one black group, one concept, or conception of black people. No other group has this other kind of small definition! So as I said these ideas about ‘jazz,’ the word, is confusing, is misleading, and is really not informing. It had, in the past, a more informative [role]. Because we were looking at basically one river, but now we’ve split into so many tributaries. That’s because of black people being able to advance in this environment.”

— American genius Henry Threadgill, in discussion with me, ahead of his dates at NYC’s Jazz Gallery this weekend

“I THINK MOST OF MY WORK SHOULD NEVER BE REVIVED. ‘EINSTEIN’ IS A BIT DIFFERENT.” - Robert Wilson

Some people who know my taste(s) really well (like, maybe Steve himself?) would perhaps guess that I headed straight for the date with Bailey and Lewis. And they would be correct.

sonofnightafternight:

Thirteen new Anthony Braxton “bootleg” concert recordings are now available on the Tri-Centric Foundation website, all spruced up and ready to download free of charge. Here’s a list of the new offerings:

[EDIT / SCW]

BL019 Trio (Pisa) 1982
July 23, 1982
Braxton, George Lewis, Derek Bailey

Philip Glass is 75 today. Respect. Not even going to front like I wasn’t thrilled to get a chance to speak with him, for this piece. (Incidentally: I have now interviewed Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams for my own sorta Journalism Trilogy of Minimalism.)

Also, look at the storefront of iTunes this morning (via Alex Ross’s post this morning):

!!!!!

Never mind spying Carrie B. and Janet W., individually, at two different social junctures, in the course of the same week. Or the cheap (by NYC standards), locally grown foodie plates. Or the proliferation of great coffee. Amid the relaxed milieu of new-friends-making (oftentimes with animals) I tell you PORTLANDIA IS OH SO REAL.

orbooks:

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Miles Klee’s debut novel, IVYLAND. Klee, known best for his benevolent satire on The Awl and McSweeney’s, brings his mastery of a unique blend of dark humor, critical insights, and literary precision to his fiction debut about a near-future, post-urban, crumbling New Jersey. (March 2012)

Pre-ordered.

(via ferrrn)

ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC THINGS OF 2011

I guarantee you have 17 minutes in your culture calendar for this. Get a bagel/croissant + coffee, sit somewhere comfortable-ish, crank your volume, and then click the embedded audio player below to hear Mos Def (soon-to-be named Yasiin) performing Frederic Rzewski’s 1972 minimalist work “Coming Together” with the newly reconsecrated Brooklyn Philharmonic last Thursday:

(The free stream of the full concert, hosted by WQXR, will become inactive on Thursday, Oct. 20th. Does every music lover on the Internet have a stream-capture program by now? Yes? Because I’m probably going to put this performance on my year-end list of favorite music, and I don’t want to hear any talk like “I didn’t know about this / don’t live in NYC / couldn’t hear it / didn’t know how to make a copy of the audio.” OK, let’s continue.)

The NY Philharmonic, over in Lincoln Center, is sometimes given loads of credit just for SHOWING UP to do a 20th Century piece. (I have given them some of that credit.) But playing “Coming Together” is what I’d call city-specific programming with a purpose beyond aesthetics, or mere “good taste.” When the Brooklyn Philharmonic played the piece — the text of which is drawn from an Attica inmate’s letters — in Bed-Stuy last week, it was covered by HipHopDX, for example (see image-grab above).

While there, Mos dedicated the piece, sensibly, to Troy Davis. These are things I think Rzewski — who scored the piece, in open-ended/radical fashion, for “speaker, bass instrument and ensemble” — would be all the way into. (You can read more about how “Coming Together” works as a piece, over here.)

“Does New York really need another philharmonic?” is a question you’ll hear from certain people at certain times. The answer turns out to be: Yes, unambiguously. America-at-Large could use more philharmonics like this, as well, though that’s a bigger conversation to have probably after we figure out some other stuff.

“Talk to guards and inmates,” aight, everyone in the 99%?

Hi Tumblr, I know it’s been a long time, but I wanted to tell you about Robert Wilson’s production of The Threepenny Opera, at BAM:

“The play has a double nature,” Brecht said during a Stockholm lecture in 1939, adding: “Instruction and entertainment conflict openly.”

The glacial pacing and ritualized, slo-mo gesturing that are by now familiar tics of Wilson’s stagecraft have rarely seemed as justified or as purposeful as they do here, where they stretch Brecht’s conflict over a span of time that runs twice as long as any Threepenny recording on C.D.

When Macheath heads for the gallows, it takes forever—as does the satiric reprieve Brecht provides for Mac at the hands of the Mounted Messenger. But precisely because it all takes place in Wilson time, the audience is given enough space to recall the recent, Twitter-chronicled delay during which Troy Davis’ life seemed potentially rescuable. The effect of a life in the balance, so cheaply observed (and then shruggingly accepted), feels radical once again—and fully stripped of several decades’ worth of Roaring Twenties/Weimar nostalgia. Per Brecht’s theory of alienation, we don’t feel empathy for the characters in the drama, but rather for the inconsistent presence of justice in our own world—and a fate we still hope to improve through our collective begging.