D.T. Max on the title of his David Foster Wallace biography “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” and tracing the origins of a phrase: http://nyr.kr/VyJPnS

D.T. Max on “Wickedness,” an unfinished story about the Internet from around 2000, now part of the newly opened Pale King boxes in the David Foster Wallace papers at the Ransom Center: http://nyr.kr/STG2FW

(Source: newyorker.com)

This week, D. T. Max has been writing on Page-Turner about documents and artifacts he drew on for “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” his recently published biography of David Foster Wallace. Here Max talks with Sasha Weiss about the challenges of writing about Wallace, and how Wallace, who once described himself as “an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding” might feel about his biography. Listen now: http://nyr.kr/Ph747o

D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace’s childhood poetry and other writings: http://nyr.kr/Odupbb

David Foster Wallace’s Tax Classes

The author hardly pulled these abstruse accounting complexities from thin air. Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, I looked at Wallace’s own accounting-class notes with this new excerpt in mind. (Wallace attended tax courses as research for “The Pale King”; those notes make up a part of his archive, which is housed at the university’s Harry Ransom Center.) These papers, which are mostly related to in-class lectures and problem-set solutions, occasionally became a place for Wallace to observe his classmates, who were taking the classes for credit toward a degree. “ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS,” reads one jotting that found its way into “The Pale King.”

That same page of Wallace’s notebook also contains what looks like a plea regarding the author’s own boredom: “God please help me—Pain, captain.” The mood suggested here is evoked by another unnamed examiner in the Hovatter scene, who at one point “made as if to cover her ears and asked whether please might they be spared listening to this all again.” Submitting to the grind of tax scholarship wasn’t merely a method by which Wallace tried to empathize with the more distractible I.R.S. agents, though. He was also working to understand tax dodges. “An avoidance scheme, perhaps?” Syvlanshine asks the lunch crowd in the new paperback scene, regarding Hovatter’s proposed year-long TV-watching project. “Passive losses?” he then adds, as a reference to a type of deduction that can be used to offset passive gains—but which results in a penalty if abused. During a class that Wallace described in his notes as a “Scam-Fest,” he scribbled the phrase: “PASSIVE a big word for IRS.”

This week in the magazine, Jonathan Franzen writes about his trip to Alejandro Selkirk, a Chilean island in the South Pacific, named for the Scottish sailor who was likely the model for Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” but also known as Masafuera: Farther Away. (Visit Facebook to read the full article). Franzen hopes to see a rare bird while there, but his principle reason for making the trip to the island is to mourn his late friend David Foster Wallace and to scatter some of his ashes.

Franzen has shared some of his photographs from the trip, presented here with excerpts from the piece.