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“... But it also points to a lack on the other side. America has had Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster and Craig Owens setting up positions, rationalising developments; in Britain there’s very little general pro-contemporary art theory. But then in New York the battle-lines and the historical stopping-off points were always far clearer. The cause ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental. Jim was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; Sally taught English at a community college, and at home with her children was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’, constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... it. In fact, magic and power were sharply distinguished in Welles’s mind, the deeds of Charles Foster Kane a different affair from his own performance in the Mercury Wonder Show, when, on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1943, he sawed Marlene Dietrich in half to divert the soldiers on their way to the war. Between Falstaff the benign half-magician and ...”