The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King is going to be released in 2010. Little, Brown - his publisher - said it runs 'several hundred thousand words.' (Regular-size novels usually weigh in at about 75,000 words or so, I think.) The finished edition of Infinite Jest had 479,198 words, and is apparently the tenth-longest novel ever written.

It seems sometimes like Eleanora Fagan Gough suffered just so Billie Holiday could sing. After a functionally parent-less childhood that was punctuated two incidents of rape, and after working briefly at a brothel, she began performing for tips - and taking on the persona of Holiday - in New York nightclubs when she was in her late teens. The Suffering Artist is by no means a new concept, but many of our poets and singers endure a more existential, less tangible sort of pain.

There was no joy in Mudville. Of course, they had that year where their baseball team showed promise, but then in the final game of that season, the one that could have made them town heroes, Casey struck out in the bottom of the ninth. Moundville, though, was worse.

Dwight Wilmerding, the protagonist of Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel Indecision, is acutely aware that other people have trod in his existential shoes. An ambivalent part-time tech support worker, he feels "like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it."

"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything," says Homer Simpson. "14% of people know that."

Aside from my usual motivations – narcissism, loneliness, and a desire to be (dorkily) en vogue – I’m not sure why I tweet.

I had trouble getting into John Updike's writing. As an undergrad, I did the thing where I tried to search out my identity through literature, and this led me (scarily) first to Bukowski, then (understandably) to Jonathan Safran Foer, then (scarily, again, in terms of personality, even though he's indisputably a fantastic writer) to Philip Roth. Right now, for the record, I'm hovering around Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kafka.

Yesterday I was with a local writer/musician (interview forthcoming next week) whose first book just hit the shelves. It’s self-published, and when the author sat down at the table in our organic, cage-free coffee shop, the first thing the she mentioned was how she was still trying to figure out how to market it.

It was more amusing than disheartening, I think, but nevertheless it happened: Obama's first words as President were lost in a linguistic burp. Deemed 'The Flub Heard Round The World' by the Associated Press, Chief Justice "Roberts got the words of the [swearing-in] oath a little off, which prompted Obama to do so, too."

Age 3: Freud sees his mother naked (1859).
Age 98: Rin Tin Tin dies in his Los Angeles home - age in human years: 14 (1932).
Age 30: Hitler grows a mustache (1919).
Age 53: Local writer and illustrator Eric Hanson publishes a compendium of mini-narratives detailing the origins, endings, and turning points in the lives of several historical figures, ages zero-100 (2008).