Maud Newton, literary femme fatale and all-around delight, blogs (and twitters! how progressive) from the 80th anniversary of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Biggest development?  The third edition of the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary will also be its last!  After publication of “the first comprehensive and up-to-date edition of the OED in one alphabetical sequence since the original edition of 1928″, the OED will (figuratively) close all 20 of its covers and move on to a bigger and brighter future as an internet-only text.

My prediction: the next groundbreaking dictionary to box up its dusty, leather cover in favor of a more hip internet form will be the Urban Dictionary.  Oh, wait…

Is the OED’s move to an exclusively electronic form good or bad?  Will this spell the end of civilization’s erudite ability to trace the exact diachronous history of a word?  Or simply the proletarianization of mankind’s intelligence?  You decide.

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature–Mr. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.  Yet, who is this mysterious (at least, in the annals of the collective American consciousness) J.M.G. Le Clézio?

According to the NY Times:

Mr. Le Clézio’s work defies easy characterization, but in more than 40 essays, novels and children’s books, he has written of exile and self-discovery, of cultural dislocation and globalization, of the clash between modern civilization and traditional cultures. Having lived and taught in many parts of the world, he writes as fluently about North African immigrants in France, native Indians in Mexico and islanders in the Indian Ocean as he does about his own past.

Mr. Le Clézio is not well known in the United States, where few of his books are available in translation, but he is considered a major figure in European literature and has long been mentioned as a possible laureate.

Sounds fancy and French.

Yet, as the article mentions, Mr. Le Clézio isn’t well known in the United States because we’re still in the 1700s and news and ideas just haven’t made it across the Atlantic Ocean.  Or, at least that’s what the Nobel Prize committee seems to think.

There were rumors floating around the internet that J.D. Salinger would be the next Nobel Prize laureate–the first American laureate since Toni Morrison’s win in 1993.  Yet, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, says that the US “is too isolated, too insular” and doesn’t really “participate in the big dialogue of literature.”  Maybe the Europeans are just to exclusive for us “Joe Six Pack” Americans.  What are your thoughts?

Thursday, October 9 was the English Undergraduate Association’s first event of the semester (well, second if you count the Indoor Picnic).  As Kenton mentioned in the last post, it was led by Linda Macri and Gerald Maa (Vivianne Salgado was, unfortunately, unable to make it) and revolved around the (related, unrelated, hyperbolic, polemic…) topics of War and Literature.

It was an absolute delight, and Linda Macri and Gerald Maa were two incredibly articulate and well-versed people.  It’s difficult to encapsulate the entire conversation, because so much was discussed and it was all so interesting.  I was particularly intrigued by the small tangent on Ursula K. LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.  It’s interesting to think of the art of storytelling as a gendered idea.  LeGuin is a big shot in the world of science fiction, so she is no doubt aware of the gender bias against female science fiction writers (not to mention the bias against science fiction as “literature” in general).  From what little I’ve read of the idea, it seems that LeGuin takes a bit of a swipe against male narratives, saying they’re less interested in human narratives and more interested in events and “action.”

Some very interesting topics of thought that came up from the discussion:

• Can you think of a “comedic” war story that is not anti-war?
• How often do women write epic battle stories?  Is there something to be said about the gendering of narrative that women reflect more on internal rather than external struggles?
• Why are people interested in war and it’s relationship to literature, anyways?

Following in the footsteps of most Interweb and print media outlets, I’ve decided that it’s only appropriate for us at On Purpose to post a quick in memoriam to the late David Foster Wallace.  I personally cannot speak too much for his writing, having only ever read one of his short stories, the beautifully entertaining “Little Expressionless Animals.”  It’s a behemoth of a “short” story.  It centers on a young, lesbian woman who is in the middle of a breakaway streak on Jeopardy (à la Ken Jennings).  David’s treatment of her sexuality, his sensitivity toward long-spun childhood traumas, and his on-point Alex Trebek cameo was just brilliant.  I can’t think of too many writers who could accomplish the same thing with such bravado and originality.

And what writer hasn’t spent his/her fair share of time staring at Infinite Jest as it mocks from the rosy-wooded shelves of Barnes & Noble.  That quaint puffy-clouded background.  The looming title.  Then one opens it up to find all 1104 pages of David staring back.  It’s easy to understand why he has garnered so much posthumous “genius” recognition.

But what is the relationship between this enigmatic persona, this “David Foster Wallace,” this man who in the last years of his life was racked by depression, and his writing?  Is it possible for a man with short stories such as “Death is Not the End” and “The Depressed Person” and “Suicide as a Sort of Present” to not be ill, in some way?  How much of David’s personal life was infused within his writing? (As a writer myself, I imagine a lot.)  Is his depression and subsequent suicide a by-product of his writing and the overwhelming expectations of his post-Infinite Jest fame?  (Perhaps.)  Is his writing something that stemmed from his depression, an outlet or a crutch? (Perhaps again.)

It’s impossible to ever know the workings of writers, let alone writers who are affected so strongly by depression.  There’s a natural inclination to point to his short story titles, to point to his interviews, to point to anything we can find and say, “See?  See? Look at how depressed he was.  How could we not see it coming?”

Unfortunately, the humanities are not quite so transparent.  It’s not a matter of connecting the dots from biography to text.  Sometimes all that we have is simply text.  From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace:

It’s funny what you don’t recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember–my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home’s backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden’s area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the Moms’s path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was really unpleasant-looking in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn’t make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold–Orin posits from some dark corner of the Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. `I ate this,’ was what I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work, and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering; and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out–as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine.

`I ate this,’ I said.

`Pardon me?’