Day: November 26, 2010

Russell Hoban on What Inspired Riddley Walker

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At The Guardian, Russell Hoban writes about how a viewing of The Legend of St. Eustace at Canterbury Cathedral inspired his post-apocalyptic classic Riddley Walker. The anecdote will be familiar to anyone who’s reread the introduction to Riddley Walker, but Hoban’s essay still interesting. From his essay–

The first time I stood in Canterbury Cathedral and tilted my head back to look up, up, up to that numinous fan-vaulting I felt the uprush past me of all the centuries of prayer, of hope and fear and yearning, yearning for answers and, if possible, salvation.

Breathing in this atmosphere I made my way through the nave to those stone steps trodden by successive waves of pilgrims, some with beads, some with cameras. Up those worn- down steps, past the place where the remembered blood of Thomas Becket seethes on the stones, to the north aisle where on one wall remains the faint earth-green tracery ofThe Legend of St Eustace. Facing it on the opposite wall is Professor Tristram’s reconstruction of the 15th-century painting.

Whatever talent I have for writing lies in being friends with my head: I know its vagaries, its twists and turns, its hobo journeys in fast freights, riding the blinds to unknown destinations. Sometimes I get thrown off the train in the middle of nowhere; sometimes I get to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If you Google for Eustace you’ll find that he has no official standing among the beatified. Perhaps his legend turned up on the back of some Middle-Ages cornflakes box and grew from there. Being thus non-factual, Eustace is quite at home in a work of fiction. According to the legend he was a general in the Roman army to begin with, but one day hunting in the forest, he saw a little crucified Jesus between the antlers of a stag, as vividly shown in the 15th-century painting by Pisanello.

 

“A Gentleman’s C” — Padgett Powell

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“A Gentleman’s C,” a very short story by Padgett Powell—

My father, trying to finally graduate from college at sixty-two, came, by curious circumstance, to be enrolled in an English class I taught, and I was, perhaps, a bit tougher on him than I was on the others. Hadn’t he been tougher on me than on other people’s kids growing up? I gave him a hard, honest, low C. About what I felt he’d always given me.

We had a death in the family, and my mother and I traveled to the funeral. My father stayed put to complete his exams–it was his final term. On the way home we learned that he had received his grades, which were low enough in the aggregate to prevent him from graduating, and reading this news on the dowdy sofa inside the front door, he leaned over as if to rest and had a heart attack and died.

For years I had thought that the old man’s passing away would not affect me, but it did.

(From Micro Fiction, edited by Jerome Stern).

Read the Complete Transcript of a 1998 David Foster Wallace Interview

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Tom Scocca interviewed David Foster Wallace in 1998. A short version of the interview ran in The Boston Phoenix in February of ’98; Slate published a transcript the entire interview this week. It begins with phones and beards–

Q: For basic reader orientation here, are you doing this from Bloomington?

DFW: Speaking to you? Yes, sir.

Q: What sort of phone?

DFW: What sort of phone? What kind of phone is this? This is a Panasonic Easa-Phone. E-A-S-A, hyphen, P-H-O-N-E. And I don’t see a model number on it. It’s got a little answering machine attached, although the answering machine doesn’t work as often as the average consumer probably would like it to.

Q: OK. Let’s see.

DFW: You’re really going to orient that reader, aren’t you?

Q: Yeah. You have to bring the color in somehow.

DFW: Uh-huh.

Q: Any particular configuration of beard or bandana or glasses? It seems to change over time.

DFW: So what, we’re going to pretend, we’re going to pretend that we’re sitting in the same room?

Q: No.

DFW: I’ve never had a beard. I’ve tried periodically to grow a beard, and when it resembles, you know, the armpit of a 15-year-old girl who hasn’t shaved her armpit, I shave it off. I do not have a head hanky on at this point, although I did recently, ’cause I just got back from running my dogs around the countryside.

There Will Be Blood — The Video Game

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