Friday, May 29, 2015

The End of the Tour: Looking Back on David Foster Wallace

Back in 2010, I loved brilliant David Lipsky’s heartbreaking and intimate book based on the time he spent with David Foster Wallace near the end of the tour for Infinite Jest, the book that would make the young writer’s career.

It was 1996. Lipsky was on assignment for Rolling Stone. Wallace was in the process of becoming the next-big-thing. As Lipsky wrote:
I’m thirty years old, he’s thirty-four. We both have long hair .... this book runs from the minute I turn on the recorder, through five days of diners, arguments, on-ramps, friends, a reading, a faraway mall, his dogs, up to the last word David said to me.
Except, of course, it’s more than that. The portrait Lipsky shared is a barometer of his own fierce skill and powers of observation. It’s a powerful recollection of a fierce talent too quickly lost.

It’s a wonderful book.

With all of that in mind, I’m really looking forward to what I think might be an equally wonderful adaptation of that book. The End of the Tour would seem to have all the right stuff, with Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky and Jason Segal as the troubled author. Directed by James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), the film opened at Sundance to stellar reviews. It will open to wider release July 31st, and I’ll in in that line. Meanwhile, the trailer is below.

 

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2 Comments:

Blogger seymourblogger said...

I always felt that DFW could not snap out of his depression after he quit his meds then tried to get back on to no avail. I blamed it on Aspartame but had no proof until I read Lipsky's book. The massive amounts of Aspartame DFW took is documented in there. At the end when he tells us the crates of diet soda pop in his kitchen as he drank so much of it he didn't want to keep going out to get it. Here is a blog writer in Scotland who reviews books telling about his bout with Aspartame.And isn't brain fog what he complained about, that he felt he wasn't all there in his thinking. Was that the way he said it? Here's James in his blog on it. "I had work planned and had made a start when, a couple of days in, the brain fog returned with a vengeance" http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/search?q=depression+%2B+aspartame I am convinced now that we lost a great person and writer from a stupid chemical sweetener named Aspartame. I want a class action suit to cost them so much money they will go out of business forever and all their children and grandchildren.

Saturday, June 13, 2015 at 12:26:00 PM PDT  
Blogger seymourblogger said...

Oh shit I'm crying just watching the trailer. I love him so much.

Saturday, June 13, 2015 at 12:30:00 PM PDT  

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