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

Like all of Samuel Beckett's plays, Endgame, now being produced by the Ten Thousand Things company, is an odd piece. The author tended to write claustrophobic plays in which a few people bother each other over and over again; the most famous of these is, of course, Waiting for Godot, in which two bored men spend the entire play waiting for the titular character, who (spoiler alert!) never arrives.

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.