Glenn Kenny

The David Lynch piece that David Foster Wallace wrote for Premiere, about life on the set of Lost Highway, was commissioned well before the world met Infinite Jest. This was in late 1995, and it was Susan Lyne, Premiere's founding editor, who made the prescient assignment. Not long after Wallace turned in his first draft, however, Ms. Lyne left the magazine for a job at Disney, and the piece fell to her successor, Chris Connelly, who gave it to an editor named Kristin von Ogtrop. Ms. von Ogtrop -- now the editor-in-chief of homemaking magazine Real Simple -- went to town on the thing, cutting huge chunks out of it for space and thus inspiring Wallace to nickname her "The Blunt Machette" in the acknowledgments page at the end of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, in which the piece was anthologized.  read more »

Engaged: June 14, 2004  read more »