The archive of David Foster Wallace is now open at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin. From the press release:

The collection is made up of 34 boxes and is divided into three main sections: works, personal and career-related materials and copies of works by Don DeLillo. The works section covers the period between 1984 and 2006 and includes material related to Wallace’s novels, short stories, essays and magazine articles.

Among the things you can view online, there’s a handwritten page of a draft of Infinite Jest, a sampling of Wallace’s teaching material, and most interesting to me, an inventory of the books from Wallace’s personal library. You can scroll through and get an idea of what he liked to read. There is a lot of Don DeLillo, for example, and a lot of psychology books.

Jacqueline Muñoz, the librarian at the Ransom Center who cataloged the 300-some books says, “Of the more than 300 titles in his collection, there are maybe 10 or 15 that are not annotated—not simply with underlined passages but ample and personally revealing margin notes.”

Looking through the list of books, I wrote down 12 titles I would like to read. Not because I want to be like Wallace, or something, but because they look like rad books. You should check it out. (Via HTMLGiant)

Eve Arnold, ‘Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses’, Long Island, 1954.

“This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.”

Jeanette Winterson from Solitary Pleasures–writers choose their favorite pictures from a new book, Reading Women. (Via Ordinary Finds)

This is awesome. I’m not sure how accurate it all is, but still awesome. From Lapham’s Quarterly. (Via HTMLGIANT)

Sylvia Plath would hate how people see her today. Like other iconic figures–Marilyn Monroe comes to mind–people don’t see the person she was but the things she symbolizes for them. Monroe is the poster for a sexually desirable woman, Plath is the poster for the tortured suicidal artist girl. But Plath wasn’t like that at all. Mental health issues aside, Plath was brilliant, hardworking, and very funny. The tragedy of Sylvia Plath is that she cut off her life right when she was starting to reap the fruit of all the labor she had put in during her teens and 20s by writing poem after short story after poem. She did not have a flash of genius, write her last poems, and then, with nothing else to say, kill herself. Instead, at age 30 Plath was finally coming into her own as an artist, and she didn’t stick around long enough for anyone to see what would come of it. We get a taste of her artistic maturity in poems like “Daddy,” but it’s just a taste–imagine what would have come later if she had lived. In the writing sense of things, Plath’s suicide is like cutting down a rose bush that is loaded with buds just about to open.

And that is sad. But I would like us to move away from seeing Sylvia Plath as some sort of emo goth-girl abandoned-wife victim, and instead try to understand what a brilliant, interesting woman she was. And that brings me to my latest toy: Sylvia Plath (Spoken Word), which has just been released by the British Library. It’s not available in the U.S. until July 15th, but no matter, you can order it from Amazon U.K. just fine. They don’t even charge you exorbitant shipping rates.

Recordings of Plath reading her poems have been around for awhile now–here’s Plath reading “Daddy,” for example–but Sylvia Plath (Spoken Word) is way more awesome than that. It includes an interview of Plath and Ted Hughes on their marriage, readings of lots of poems I hadn’t heard before, a review of a poetry anthology by Plath, and best of all, a short gem of a track where Plath talks about England.

She was part of a program called “What Made You Stay?,” where seven Americans were asked why they chose to live in England. Plath’s answer is delightful and sharp. In 7 minutes, she touches on her literary geekdom, how perplexing she found the British beaches, why she wants to raise her children in England, and how much she loves English butcher shops before launching into a funny story about an eccentric British woman. It shows more about her character and personality than most of the literary information about her that you can find.

And how could I set that up and not give you a sampling? So go ahead and listen to Sylvia Plath talk about why she lived in England here. Click to listen or right click on the link to download.

‘Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.’ — Charles Mingus

History.com has a cool feature called this day in literary history. It mentions a notable literary event for every day of the year.

Today March 5, for instance, Charlotte Bronte wrote to the Reverend Henry Nussey, declining marriage. “The 23-year-old Bronte told him that he would find her “romantic and eccentric” and not practical enough to be a clergyman’s wife. Rather than marry, Bronte struggled as a teacher and governess to help support her brother Branwell’s literary aspirations. In the end, Branwell’s excesses destroyed him; his sisters, though, all became literary figures.”

Novelist Meg Cabot has an interview with Laini Taylor, whose YA novel Lips Touch was recently a National Book Award Finalist.

In it, Laini talks about her background in both writing and art–she majored in English but also went to art school:

Laini: Writing was my first love. When I look back now, I can see that my whole art journey was really an elaborate procrastination from writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and in college I majored in English and took writing workshops, planning (in the vaguest possible way) to take the publishing world by storm after graduation.

Laini: Well. There was one small problem. I didn’t actually write very much. Minor detail! I thought about writing a lot, but actual words on the page? Not so much. Writing was really hard, so, out of avoidance, I began to do art instead. It started as a hobby, but I got obsessed, and within a couple of years I was applying to art schools. It was years before I got back to writing seriously, and I can’t help but imagine all the books I might have written in that time. Still, I’m glad my life took that path. Art has been a great second career AND I met my husband in art school!

She also talks about her heroes, including Lady Oscar from a Japanese cartoon she watched as a kid (“She was Marie Antoinette’s kick-ass female bodyguard and she dressed and fought like a man but she was beautiful and had a great love story.”), and how she deal with rejection as a writer.

But. I have another way of dealing with rejection that’s much more fun: make enemies. Really. I have a secret nemesis, a writer who snubbed me at a convention once (no, I won’t say who!). Since then, I’ve only ever said his/her name in the way Seinfeld says “Newman!”

A great interview. Read it here.

I’m not sure which is a bigger expression of ego: to believe that your creative work is an expression of genius or to believe that creativity is a receptor of something special God sends just to you, and therefore by extension your work is an expression of God. (That is the logical end to her thinking here, right?) Nevertheless, Elizabeth Gilbert has some interesting thoughts about creativity and how to keep from being emotionally squashed by your own work. Plus she’s just so darn likable.

Hmm if this were true, I think all writers would be in trouble.

French novelist Camille Laurens is claiming that “fellow author Marie Darrieussecq committed “psychological plagiarism” with her 2007 book Tom is Dead. She says that Darrieussecq’s book is the retelling of the death of her newborn child, which she wrote about in her own 1995 book Philippe.

“Reading Tom Is Dead,” Laurens said, “I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she (Darrieussecq) had sat on my chair, lain in my bed.”

Darrieussecq responded that retelling a story is not plagiarism. And she’s right. Plagiarism is to “present as new and original a product derived from an existing source,” (Merriam-Webster) i.e. stealing their words and passing them off as your own. What Darrieussecq has allegedly done is steal ideas. Ideas, the real commodity of writing, are not protected in the same way, nor should they be.

I have some advice for everyone: Never tell a writer a story if you aren’t comfortable with her writing about it. It’s a well-known fact that writers mine from life. They are always on the lookout for new stories and emotional material. If they are interested in your story, there’s a good chance some part of their mind is considering writing about it. And they just might do it.

Which doesn’t mean that Darrieussecq’s behavior is okay here. The person I know who has the best stories (Marcia) also happens to be another writer, and because of this I would not write about anything she tells me. That’s her material. Likewise I would not write about my close friends and family because that is disloyal. I want the people I love to trust me.

But that’s morality, that’s not legality. The fact is, there are many writers who have made a career out of stealing the ideas that they turn into part of their work. Some of it is okay, even wonderful. Some of it is morally icky. Either way, it’s a fact of the writing life. That’s why Lauren looks like a bit of a baby for complaining about it, especially since her own book was published 15 years ago. While it’s never fun to have another writer steal your ideas, it’s also a sign of a lesser creative mind. People steal what they do not have.

Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, wrote a long, honest article called Why I Write, which I enjoyed very much. It talks about how he got into writing, why writing is important to him, how little money it makes, how he deals with that, and how he writes. There’s some interesting stuff about the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which Elliott attended, and details on his publishing life. For one thing, Elliott published 5 of his 7 novels without an agent. For another, he purposely avoids teaching or pitching magazines. He makes $30,000 a year writing, which is nothing in San Francisco, but he writes what he wants. It’s a trade-off, as he says. Some interesting points:

But how do writers get by? That’s more complicated than it sounds. What do we mean by “getting by”? Do we need as much as we think we do? How important is it to make more each year than the year before? While working on a first book, almost everyone has a job that has nothing to do with writing. When people tell me they would write if they had more time I’m always skeptical. The hardest-working fellows at Stanford rarely wrote more than four hours a day.

…

It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

More here.