I have listened to, watched, and read so many interviews and resources that are related to this show since recording this… I almost feel I should totally redo it. After thinking about it, I am leaving it… moving forward… and hoping this inspires you to learn more about the book, the color project, and to do some own thinking and contemplation of the subjects this kind of awesome, cool, inspiring project opens up and brings into daylight.
This show circles around David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and a project Corrie Baldauf did where she “tagged” (or “flagged”) the book with colored tabs every time a color was referenced in the bookâmore than 2,000 instances. I really, really, really want to show a photo of one of her tagged books for this project, so that you can visualize what this show is about. But I hesitate to do that without her permission. So please… go check out all of the beautiful photos from the Infinite Jest project on her site.
Interested in Infinite Jest after seeing Baldauf’s project, I watched several interviews with David Foster Wallace and listened to the graduation address he gave to Kenyon College in 2005.
I now have Infinite Jest from the library. I am more than curious.
Baldauf has moved on now to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. You can follow her color-tracking process on Twitter.
Resources to read/view/check:
- Infinite Jest
- Corrie Baldauf’s Infinite Jest project
- Reading David Foster Wallace for the Colors (Hyperallergic)
- This Is Water (Commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005)
- David Foster Wallace interview with Charlie Rose (03/1997)
- Episode 4 – Discussing David Foster Wallace with Corrie Baldauf (The Great Concavity, podcast)
- Endnotes | David Foster Wallace | BBC Documentary
- Amy Wallace speaks about her brother David Foster Wallace
(In this show, I pronounced Corrie Baldauf’s name incorrectly. My apologies.)
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Really interesting post. My son found the “This Is Water” video in May of 2013 and shared it with me. I drew the fish for my art journal that day and it this drawing is actually my wallpaper on my Flickr site. I think of this video often- it’s one of the important pieces that really changed me when I saw it. I’m really glad you curated these references in this post. Very cool.
Thanks, Elizabeth. That is so cool about the fish drawing–and that the speech had such a memorable impact on you. The Charlie Rose interview was really interesting to me, too.
I wonder how different the reading experience is/would be when reading it with a specific target word (color) in mind as she did? Would things not relevant to color even grab or hold your attention? Would the color aspect (which the author may or may not have written toward, and likely did not have in mind) skew the intended point of the work? or the theme? Interesting. And reading it a second time ‘that way’ would not have the same impact – you would never know if you ‘read it differently’ since the ideas formulated the first time around would still live in your mind.
Aghh!!