Seventy years ago, the U.S. government -- via its Federal Writers' Project -- funded the creation of the American Guide Series, a collection of books and pamphlets about every state in the union at that time. (Hard copies are hard to come by now, but I found the Nevada one on Google Books.)

Inspired by this social project, editors Sean Wilsey (New Yorker, McSweeney's) and Matt Weiland (The Paris Review) compiled State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, a book of new essays by contemporary authors about every state in the union. Here's a sampling of the contents:

* California by William T. Vollmann
* Illinois by Dave Eggers
* Massachusetts by John Hodgman
* Montana by Sarah Vowell
* Nevada by Charles Bock
* New Jersey by Anthony Bourdain
* Ohio by Susan Orlean
* Rhode Island by Jhumpa Lahiri

I read a few chapters on Amazon, and unlike their FDR-era counterparts, many of the essays -- perhaps due to the space constraints -- are rather narrowly focused. Bock's Nevada piece, for instance, is a brief memoir about the pawn shop owned by his parents (now run by his brother) near downtown Las Vegas. Vollmann's piece, on the other hand, somehow manages to capture the grandeur of the entire state of California, from poetic descriptions of its landscapes to an S&M joint in San Francisco. The beginning of his essay touches upon the purpose of the book:

It says something about our changing America that once upon a time, an art-friendly governmental organization commissioned one volume about each of our fifty states; whereas this book, inspired by the WPA's example, has been commercially published and allows each state only a few thousand words. Fortunately, mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say anyhow.

Based on the fact that Vollmann's next book, Imperial, contains 1,300 pages about one county in California, my guess is that his last point is somewhat facetious.

There have been several recent memorials of David Foster Wallace. There was a public memorial in New York City, attended by his sister, Zadie Smith, Don Delillo, Jonathan Franzen, and his longtime editor Michael Pietsch, among others. One account of the memorial talks about an assigned nonfiction Wallace essay we'll never see:

...a piece on Barack Obama and rhetoric, commissioned earlier this year by GQ. [Wallace's agent] Bonnie Nadell... described conversations between the two and Wallace's wife Karen on their enthusiasm and excitement over Obama as presidential candidate. The assignment was to focus less on Obama (there was no way he'd get close to the candidate, Nadell said) and more on his speechwriters, those young turks tasked with putting the words of inspiration in Obama's mouth during stump speeches, town hall meetings and of course, the Democratic National Convention.

And Amherst has a lengthy audio file of the memorial recently held there -- it gets emotional at times, and I was particularly affected by a remembrance from a college friend who talks about Wallace's thoughts about the "spinal" nature of music, mentioning Brian Eno's "The Big Ship" as a favorite of his. (It is a favorite of mine as well.)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a longtime Neal Stephenson fan. I've read nearly every book he's published, (sorry, The Cobweb), and excepting his early books The Big U and Zodiac, I've read them in the order they were published. So I've been attuned to his growth as a writer as he went from Snow Crash to The Diamond Age to Cryptonomicon to The Baroque Cycle. While this last one -- being a three volume, 2,700 page historical fiction epic about scientists in the late 17th century -- let down many of his sci-fi fanboys, it is probably my favorite work of his, combining interesting ideas and historical facts with swashbuckling adventure and his best prose to date. (You can read my review of it in the Harvard Law Record archives.)

Anathem, his latest novel and clocking in at 900 pages, is similar to his pre-Cryptonomicon work -- it has fascinating speculative ideas but there's also a slight but noticeable decline in his writing craft. There's something about his historical writing that improves his prose -- perhaps it's the Charles Dickens influence. And without giving away any spoilers, I'll mention another problem that Anathem struggles with and sometimes conquers that I'll call the "Slow Learner" problem, after Thomas Pynchon's introductory essay to his short story collection of the same name.

In the essay, the overly humble Pynchon criticizes some of his early short stories for a mistaken sense of priorities:

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

He was talking partially about his famous story "Entropy", where the characters at a party act as a representation of the third law of thermodynamics. I actually think that Stephenson was fully aware of this issue while crafting Anathem, and the book steers mostly clear of it by avoiding the metaphorical approach, but I do think that the last third of the book sometimes puts its philosophical ideas above structure and character. (I think this is partially why the New York Times reviewer says he isn't sure Anathem is a proper novel.)

Let me be clear: I hold Neal Stephenson to a high standard, and there are only a handful of writers who I could read a 900-page book by and be constantly entertained and intellectually stimulated. But what it meant for me is that, in the end, I had less fun exploring his wild ideas because they weren't fully earned, whereas here is what I wrote four years ago about the second volume of The Baroque Cycle:

[The Confusion] is Stephenson at his finest, intermixing swashbuckling and piracy with surprisingly engaging digressions on such things as the antiquated timber trade centered in Lyon, France.

The good news is that Stephenson at his finest is to be found in Anathem, but it's mostly in the first third. While the beginning of the book is slow to start due to the heavy load of a made-up vocabulary, much of the fun is learning about the "maths" of the fictional world of Arbre. (If you're interested in details, try the NYT review I linked to above.) The experience of reading this is a lot like a Harry Potter story starring philosophy graduate students. Indeed, in one of his recent interviews, Stephenson explicitly cites Harry Potter as a reason why he thinks readers are comfortable enough with made-up words to take on his latest.

If you're already a fan of Stephenson, then you'll likely enjoy Anathem despite its shortcomings. If not, I highly recommend you start with Cryptonomicon -- if you like what you see there, you'll eventually make it to the philosophically (and sociologically) fascinating ideas of Anathem.

That adaptation of Infinite Jest that I wrote about two years ago? Variety says it's still in early production, despite DFW's agent saying that the option ran out. I've read a draft of Keith Bunin's screenplay and though it was well-written, I didn't particularly like it. (Although if the rumor about a Jon Brion score is true, that would fit nicely.)

It's been awhile since I read the draft, but I wasn't a fan of it because it focused on the global crisis aspect of the novel, and left out what I think is the emotional heart of the book. I vastly preferred the approach of Matt Earp's stage version that he wrote and directed at Wesleyan in March of 2001, which concentrated on the students at the tennis academy, Hal, Madame Psychosis, and Mario. I drove from Boston to see that play and it was worth it. Here's a picture of the Eschaton scene from Matt's play, and here's a summary I wrote about it <gulp> eight years ago.

Hollywood: option Matt's play and build it into a feature, and then have him write a second feature that focuses on Gately. Or better yet, make it a cable TV miniseries.

Based on how many of you have emailed me about David Foster Wallace's recent death by his own hand, I perhaps don't need to remind you all of how important his writing has been in my adult life. (But you can see how much I've written about him on this site.) I may have to sit with this news for a few more days before I can say more intelligently.

Following kottke's lead, I present the list of the 1001 Books That You Must Read Before You Die (from this book) that I have read. I've completed exactly 100 of the books on the list, nearly 10%, 30 of which I read because it was assigned in an academic setting. Those that are among my favorites I have marked with an asterisk -- the full list of the 100 I have read is after the jump.

Update: I should clarify that I don't think the book's full list of 1,001 is either definitive or unflawed, especially for the past 100 years. Still, those that I have read happen to be representative of some of the best books I've encountered.