[Speech] David Foster Wallace - This is water (2005)

David Foster Wallace was an American author. The postmodern novel "Infinite jest" (that I am calling my own for over three years now and still haven't read) was probably his most famous work. He hung himself in 2008 after 20 years of depression. Below, find a speech by DFW, held at Kenyon College in 2005.





Thanks to Brainpickings for providing this article about DFW and his speech on their Soundcloud page. Thx also to Paula for posting this article and for being one of the few people on Facebook that are not posting mere bullshit.

James Joyce's Dirty Letters

Oh my! 

Shocking! 

"Nora, my faithful darling, my seet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! My little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower."

I found a nasty selection of love letters by the irish novelist and poet James Joyce, addressed to Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom James would go into self-imposed exile and who will give birth to his first child.

James Joyce; Photo by C. Ruf, Zurich, ca. 1918

Full of shame I must admit that I haven't read Joyce yet. But this will change soon as I have laid eyes on Ulysses now, which is probably his most famous work. To get you hooked on Joyce, you might start with those letters I was talking about. To be found here. 

"Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand - a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes, to stick it between the cheeks of your rump and bugger you."

Get illuminated - Robert Anton Wilson Week on BoingBoing

What a nice feature on BoingBoing: It's Robert Anton Wilson Week. For those who don't know: he's the one responsible for the mindfucking Illuminatus! trilogy. That's the real Illuminatus! book, not that crap by ... ! As most of you can probably figure out themselves, people who write such crazy, beautiful books, are very likely to have interesting stories and happen to know interesting people. Read more about him here on his Wiki-Page and find out about his relationship to the LSD-Pope Timothy Leary or his writings for the Playboy mag.