Thursday, September 12, 2013

Some Things I Want To Say About David Foster Wallace

   It was a Sunday like any other. After catching up on some morning chores, I started reading the local paper. It was September 14, 2008. Despite the headlines about Sarah Palin and the escalating financial crisis, I remember being in a good mood.
   My girlfriend called. She was out and about, driving around, and we chatted about this and that as I casually flipped through the newspaper, skimming the articles. My girlfriend pulled up to a drive-thru to get something to eat and asked if I wanted anything. I told her I didn’t, and she said she’d call me back in a minute after she was done ordering. I said “Ok” and we hung up, pleasantly enough.
   I turned what little attention I had back to the newspaper. It really was a lazy Sunday, the kind of day when it’s hard to focus on anything.
   I flipped to the obituaries. Gregory Mcdonald, the writer of Fletch, had died a week earlier and for some reason was given prominent space in that day’s paper. His obit took up half the page, above the fold, and there was even a picture of him. Uninterested, I started to turn the page over. Right before the page disappeared from view, three familiar words caught my eye: “David Foster Wallace.” I stopped. I remember being momentarily confused as to why his name was in my local paper, and I think it was a half second later when I realized it was positioned below Mcdonald’s obituary, this realization hitting me while I was reading the complete headline, which stated in bold typeface: “David Foster Wallace, 46, Found Dead.”
   And then my world went black.
 

 
   It is December of 2006. I’ve made the delightful discovery that the 10th Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest is a mere $10, cover price. This leads to a no-brainer decision: I’m going to buy this book for everyone I know for Christmas. And just like that I’m going around to all the bookstores in the area (back then there were multiple options) and cleaning them out of all their IJs. At a single Barnes & Noble, I carry an armload of four up to the register. Lugging them back home, I put them in stacks on my table, and the sight of all these IJs gives me great pleasure. I have serious doubts about whether they’ll actually be read, but it amuses me to think that I’m distributing a dangerous samizdat that will sit on people’s shelves, dormant but dangerous, ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting reader someday.
  I buy a packet of smiley stickers and put one on the cover of each book.


 

   I didn’t pass out or anything like that. The world went black because I had immediately shut my eyes. It was involuntary. I did not consciously make a decision to close my eyes—it just happened. I had never done anything like that before. In the past, I’d averted my eyes out of embarrassment and anger, but never horror. I think it’s something people do, though I’d never experienced it up until then. Days later, thinking about it, I realized why people shut their eyes when they’ve just seen something horrible. I think they’re trying to stop themselves from seeing what they’ve just seen. If they close their eyes fast enough (the thinking goes), the light reflected from whatever horrible thing they’ve just witnessed won’t reach their corneas, and then it’ll be like the thing never happened. I think that’s what I was attempting. I was trying to remain in a world where he was still alive—at least as far as I knew—if only momentarily.
   This attempt to insulate myself from the truth failed utterly. Water built behind my eyelids and I felt a welling-up inside me of something that started in my stomach and then enlarged like an inflating balloon, and I felt it extend upward through my chest and into my throat until finally I felt it at the back of my tongue, but it felt way too large to exit my body and before I knew it I was gasping for air. In-between taking big gulps of air, I was crying. Thinking about it later, I knew that I was sobbing—crying so hard that it was hard to breathe. This was another thing I’d never done before; I’d never been this physically affected by grief. This push-and-pull continued for many minutes, my body wanting to expel so many things at once while I gasped for enough air to keep breathing. It felt like drowning without water.
   Somewhere in this, I became aware that my phone was ringing. It was my girlfriend. I answered it. The first thing she heard was my sobs, and, instantly alarmed, she asked, frantically, what was wrong. I told her that I had just read something…I think I put it as simply as that: “I just read something.” It was obvious that it was bad, whatever it was. She said What? I told her David Foster Wallace was dead. And saying it aloud like that, of course I just broke down all over again.

 
   It is early 2005. I want to get into reading books. I’m not even sure why; I get in these moods sometimes. Anyways, I like art. I’ve been watching a lot of movies and listening to a lot of music, and now it just seems natural to get into reading books, specifically novels. It’s not that I never read. I read occasionally, a novel here and there (mostly ones that have been made into movies), but now I just really want to give them a shot on their own terms or something. I want to be aware of what is going on in the literary landscape, just like I am for movies and music.
  The problem is I know nothing about contemporary literature. So, as I often do, I turn to my friend, who is inordinately more well-versed than me in all the art forms, but especially literature. The guy devours books. He has books literally spilling out of his room.
   So I ask him, what contemporary authors are doing great stuff these days? I put it to him this way: “What author would you run out and get their book if it came out today?”
   He considers it for a moment, then tells me three names: Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never heard of any of them.
   After doing a little Googling, Wallace captures my attention the most. Powers and Vollmann are exceedingly prolific and it’s hard to tell where to start with them. Wallace, on the other hand, has only written two novels. And one of them, Infinite Jest, is clearly the one. It’s over a thousand pages. Even knowing nothing else about it, it looms over everything else. It is an undeniable monster, beckoning to me during a time when I found undeniability to be one of the most attractive qualities of good art.
   I circle around it a little, unsure whether to take the plunge. I do a little more research. I become fascinated by the fact that Wallace was only 34 when it was published. (He looks even younger in the author photo.) I play coy with my intentions, asking my friend about it the way you ask other people about your crush. I ask my friend one day, “What are the chances you think I could finish Infinite Jest?” (“Does she say anything about me?”) He takes a second, then says the odds are pretty good, once I get into it. (I know now he was lying; the odds of completing IJ are pretty bad for a person like I was at the time, viz. someone who didn’t read much. But the alternative is telling someone to not even bother, and I know I would never say that to anyone.)
   I wait a couple more days, then decide on the spur of the moment that I’m actually going to do it. I’m going to attempt to read Infinite Jest. I’m so caught up in the spirit of embarking on a new adventure that I don’t even want to wait the couple days it would take Amazon to send it to me. Instead, I go right to the nearest bookstore and buy an undiscounted, full-price copy.
   I start reading it that day. Over the course of the next two months, the book never leaves my nightstand and I slowly but surely make my way through it. It’s hard going at least initially, but I reach some sort of hump and get over it and I find myself on the descending side of this mountain of a book.
   My friend asks me periodically how it’s going. When I’m about 600 pages in, I tell him, You know, it doesn’t even matter how Wallace ends it. He’s built such an impressive object up to this point that the last 400 pages can be gobbledygook and it’d still be the most impressive book I’ve ever read. It’s so full and rich. Sure it might be over-stuffed but it’s one of those things that is amazing because of its excesses. You know, like Apocalypse Now. (All my references were movie-related at the time.)
   Of course, the last 400 pages were just as brilliant as the first 600, and many months later, after finding myself constantly thinking about it, I had to admit to myself that IJ was definitely my favorite novel of all time.
 

I wish there were more audio clips of him reading from Infinite Jest.

 
 

   She let me cry for a minute before gently saying, “For a second I thought something had happened to your parents.”
   Her comment pierced the grief-infused haze that I’d been mired in and I immediately saw the situation through her eyes. All she knew about David Foster Wallace was what I had told her about him. She knew he was my favorite author, but that was basically it. She’d never read any of his writing, and even if she had she wasn’t the type of person who put artists on some kind of pedestal, and she certainly wouldn’t be moved to such a display of grief as I was now evincing. She came from a tight-knit family and keening was reserved for those with whom one shared blood. (Or at least for very close friends.)
   Although I could not stop my flow of tears, I saw that her (unspoken, merely implied…or rather, inferred (by me)) position was basically correct; it was a little ridiculous that I was carrying on in such histrionic fashion about the passing of someone with whom I had never exchanged even a single word. Only someone with a somewhat charmed life—someone who’d never come within arm’s-length of true disaster, someone with no direct knowledge of tragedy—could be so moved by the death of a stranger.
   But I was that person, one of the lucky few who had never known true loss. I’d never had death enter my life; everyone I loved and cared about was alive and well. My family and friends—all alive and hale and doing well, which is how it’d always been for as long as I could remember. I’d never been shattered by the dreadful news of the passing of a loved one, and my reaction to Wallace’s obituary bespoke not only how important Wallace had been to me, but my emotional innocence as well.
   At my girlfriend’s words, I was confronted with this other subjectivity here in the midst of my anguish, and I became extremely self-conscious—something readers of Wallace know a thing or two about. I saw the blubbering mess she was picturing and I immediately began apologizing to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I know this is ridiculous.” I’m still crying, I can’t help it. But I’m saying “sorry” whenever I can summon up enough breath to do so.
   She assured me that it was ok, that she knew how important he was to me, but I heard the skepticism in her voice. How do I begin to tell her that he was more than just some author I liked? How to describe for her that intensely intimate voice of his that made you feel like you were close friends? His stuff was completely devoid of the pretension and bullshit flattery and condescension that infect almost everyone else’s writing, even award-winning, universally respected writing. Reading his books made you feel like an equal companion of his (though you were still in complete awe of his intimidating mind).
   Added to this, I had listened to enough interviews to know that the mesmerizing voice he used in his books was really just his default setting. He talked exactly like he wrote. Nobody else did that. Even writers of the most gorgeous prose were usually reduced to hollow shells of their writing when they were interviewed. They would pause awkwardly and use stilted language and you would usually see them struggling to find the right word before falling back on safe platitudes and general bromides about writing or whatever they were talking about. Wallace might pause when faced with a particularly tough question (they were all tough for him), but when he opened his mouth out came fully formed and oftentimes revelatory ideas, precisely articulated in an extraordinary string of sentences. You felt like you were getting direct access to his brain when he talked, which was the same feeling you got with his writing. Incredibly, he was able to recreate the intimate voice of his writing in extemporaneous conversation. It just came naturally to him. (I’m positive his first drafts were marvels, better than everyone else’s fifteenth drafts.) So, to me, it was a simple formulation: To love the writing was to love the author, to love his words was to love the man, or so it seemed in Wallace’s case.
   This was why I was so affected by his passing, but I couldn’t find a way to express this to my girlfriend, so I just said “I’m sorry,” over and over again.   


I wish I wrote to him because it’s clear now that there was a pretty good chance I would’ve gotten some sort of response.
 

 

   It’s summer of 2007. With IJ still inhabiting my mind, I decide to tackle the rest of Wallace’s oeuvre. I’m going to read everything. The short story collections, the essays, even his textbook-like thing on the subject of infinity. All the in-print stuff is a given, but I also get Signifying Rappers for $6 on the Amazon marketplace. I also want to read peripheral stuff like interviews and profiles, so I buy the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction that features his long interview with Larry McCaffery. I get curious about how IJ was presented to the world when it first came out in 1996, so I buy a hardcover. (It has a tiny bit of iridescent foil on the cover like a special edition comic book.) I see a pristine first edition hardcover of The Broom of the System for sale, but decide $300 is too much to spend (Me in 2013: Argh).
   As I plow through the books all summer long, I find myself becoming more and more enthralled. I start tracking down audio interviews, video clips of him on Charlie Rose (I actually buy the DVD ($25)). I listen to the Bookworm interviews over and over again, absolute treasures. I listen to muddy recordings of readings and Q&As he did (one of which is so staticky that he can barely be heard, but I still get through it once).
   This is not enough, so I turn to the internet and find uncollected short stories, book reviews, essays. Also print interviews, profiles, analyses of his writing. I don’t want to read all this stuff on my computer monitor so I use my roommate’s printer to create hard copies. It takes multiple days and many hours to print out everything using the good ole inkjet. My roommate shakes his head. “So you’ve decided to print out the internet?” he asks.
   I end up with hundreds of printed pages. I put it all into the biggest binder I can find and separate them by subject with multi-colored tabs: Short Stories, Interviews, Nonfiction, etc. (A year later I will add another tab: Tributes.)
   I had a blast reading that summer. The best summer of reading I’ve ever had, and probably ever will.

 
I wish he did a Bookworm interview for Oblivion (instead of doing that shallower Connection interview).
 

 

   “How did he die?” she asked. I looked down at the crumpled newspaper in front of me—another involuntary action, crumpling the newspaper into a ball (Get rid of the evidence, it never happened)—flattened it out and read the rest of the obituary, even though it was unnecessary because I was pretty sure I knew how it happened. “Found Dead” is ambiguous and could mean many things: maybe something health-related (not likely for a still youngish former athlete) or maybe something more lurid like a homicide. But those possibilities are so out-there I didn’t even entertain them. “Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself,” I read to my girlfriend, confirming what I already knew.
   In the following days, much was made of the occurrence of suicide in Wallace’s books, and it’s a point with which it’s hard to argue. There is a lot of suicide in his books. And Wallace was never particularly subtle about its inclusion. (He once wrote a story called “Suicide as a Sort of Present.”) The morbid subject matter is always front and center, never in the background, and it is sometimes a key plot element in his fiction. And so of course that’s all everyone fixated on for a while.
   I, on the other hand, in the first moments after learning of his death, thought immediately of a story he did called “Octet.”
  In this story, Wallace sets up a series of short scenarios he calls “Pop Quizzes” designed to “interrogate” the reader’s reactions to various heartbreaking set-ups, usually involving a double-bind of some sort. In one of the stories, a mother gives up custody of her child to her vindictive but wealthy former husband so that the child will grow up provided for and taken care of, and the text literally asks, right there on the page, whether the reader thinks she’s a good mother or not. Another (longer) scenario involves a man who’s on the outs with his dying father-in-law, but who decides to bury any animosity he feels and give at least the appearance of being present and supportive of his wife and her whole side of the family during this ordeal, and this support extends to his father-in-law who—make no mistake about it—detests his son-in-law just as fiercely if not even more than his son-in-law does him, and by doing the “right thing” the man is placed in an extremely uncomfortable and dishonest position by the end of the story when the old father-in-law has passed and the man, who alone knows his true feelings, is now expected to issue words of praise in the father-in-law’s name during some intimate post-funeral service with the father-in-law’s entire family looking at him expectantly. And the questions at the end of this “Pop Quiz” make clear the alienation and helplessness and loneliness the man feels at being put in this situation.
   About halfway through the story, Wallace breaks some kind of fourth wall and starts talking to the reader. It’s set up as another “Pop Quiz” (“You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces…”), but it’s clear that he’s talking about himself and “interrogating” you, the reader, directly. He explains that he’s in a swivet because this piece of fiction he’s working on—the thing you are reading now—just isn’t working. In fact it’s crumbling before his very eyes. He had intended to write eight short pieces that “demonstrate some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever want truly ‘to be with’ another person instead of just using that person somehow” but that “five of the eight pieces don’t work at all—meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three” and he had to throw them out. (The skeletal outlines of a couple of these “failures” are described in a long footnote.) And now he’s faced with the last resort of just coming right out and asking the reader if she feels anything like what he feels, a feeling that he considers “urgent, truly urgent, something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs about.” (In a footnote he acknowledges that this sounds pious and melodramatic.) And he’s also worried that coming right out and addressing the reader like this is going to look “pathetic and desperate” in the eyes of the reader and that he’ll look like “just another manipulative pseudopomo bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a meta-dimension and commenting on the fiasco itself.” It’s framed as a hypothetical course of action, but in actuality it’s one of those hypotheticals that are actually real propositions (“Suppose I were to ask you out…”), and it’s clear that Wallace is trying to see “whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way [he does].”
   Or rather, it’s clear that that’s what he was trying to get at now. Back then, in 1999 when the story came out, all evidence points to people taking that story as an amusing little bit of “S.O.P. metatext,” even though he expressly tells you in the story that that is not what he is trying to do. But, y’know, nobody took him seriously because…well, irony, man.
   In fact, there always seemed to be some unbridgeable gap between what Wallace intended to convey with his fiction and what a lot of readers took away from it. For example, he said over and over that he considered IJ to be a sad book, and yet wave after wave of admirers extolled the book’s humor. Discussing his book of stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in which “Octet” appears), he went so far to say that “everybody thought [Infinite Jest] was very funny, which was of course nice, but it was also kind of frustrating, and I designed this one so that nobody is going to escape the fact that this is sad.” Taking that into account, there is a certain sadness in reading the blurbs for BIWHM that call the book “bitingly funny” and “often funny,” with other critics proclaiming “it is fun, and often very funny” and “outrageously funny” and that it’s “damn funny stuff,” etc. There always seemed to be some misunderstanding or misinterpretation of his work, even by those who praised them.
   This is what I thought of moments after learning he had died. He was a writer who always took sadness as his subject. Always, even when people thought he was trying to be funny. But as sad and horrifying as this is to admit, it was like you couldn’t really see what he was saying until he killed himself. It was only then that you knew for sure that he really wasn’t kidding around with what he was writing about. He wasn’t doing that thing that so many other inferior writers do, trading on some general sense of “sadness” that often gets turned into cloying sentimentality in an attempt to extract a few tears from the reader, but only in the service of a crowd-pleasing redemptive ending. Sadness is also commonly deployed to elevate one’s opinion of the author: “Oh look how clever he is, pointing out all the ways the world is shit.” Both methods flatter the reader’s idea of “oh, there’s something wrong with the world, how sad,” and both end with the author and reader going their separate ways, basically happy and content, leaving the book behind, forgotten, as they go merrily on being consumers or well-adjusted citizens or whatever. Basically, it’s really easy to pay lip service to an idea of intrinsic human sadness and that’s why it’s really hard to take seriously sometimes. But Wallace was utterly serious about it. When he was making every attempt to get at an almost indefinable sadness in “Octet” and desperately querying the reader about her take on it, he wasn’t playing games. He was truly trying to describe a sadness he honestly felt. This wasn’t just some literary construction for him. And it’s impolitic to say this, and the implications are truly horrific, but we know he genuinely felt this sadness because he killed himself. We later found out about his clinical depression, the previous suicide attempts, the decades-long battle with his own biochemistry, but I know at the moment I found out about his death, it appeared that he had finally succumbed to the ineluctable sadness he had been trying to describe with nearly every word he wrote. It pained me to think of how acutely he must have felt this sadness, and it also shattered me to think of how his attempts to convey this sadness he knew so intimately had often been misconstrued, even by his most careful readers. As I sat there sobbing at news of his death, I felt all his themes of sadness and loneliness crystallize and take the form of a sharp point that proceeded to stab me in the heart.
   How could his fans not know he was suicidal? an outside observer might ask today. Considering all those stories about suicide? How could you not realize he was dangerously depressed? After all, he wrote a story called “The Depressed Person” that casually name-dropped dozens of antidepressants. How could you not see it?
   We didn’t see it. We had no idea. I don’t know why. It’s not that we didn’t believe him when he wrote about the sadness…that was something he enabled us to recognize all too clearly. Perhaps conditioned by the way other writers operate, we just didn’t think it was so firmly entrenched inside of him. Maybe we figured his books were having the same palliative effect on him that they were having on us. For those who loved his books, his prose perfectly limned the despairing sadness that was an intrinsic part of life while at the same time acting as a shield against it; by being so erudite, so insightful, so good, his books made us feel less alone and better equipped to navigate our own “skull-sized kingdoms.” But apparently, it was not enough for him.
    If we knew the ordeal he was going through, I guarantee we would’ve done something. I can picture a large contingent of his fans descending on his house in Claremont, putting themselves at his service, trying to give him some measure of comfort, holding candlelight vigils outside his home. I’m being 100% serious. Wallace fans are some of the most com-/passionate people in the world. You think we would’ve just sat back and done nothing if we knew he was in such constant pain? There’s no chance. We would’ve gone to California based on nothing more than the slim hope that we could do something for him, repay him in some small way for all he had given us. And there’s no doubt he would’ve hated it, he would’ve fucking hated it, all of us showing up unannounced like that. All that attention on him when he so eloquently made the case against solipsism and the cult of “me-me-me.” God, he would’ve hated a crowd of adoring and concerned fans outside his house. (Probably anyone would, actually.) But we wouldn’t have been able to help ourselves. Of that I am sure.

 
I wish he had felt well enough to write that piece on Obama and rhetoric.

 
   It is 2010. I am in a bus terminal, waiting for a friend due to arrive any minute. I’m passing the time by reading Understanding David Foster Wallace, recently rereleased by South Carolina Press in a new, updated edition.
   I’m sitting on one of those long benches. On the other end of the bench is a guy around my age. He’s also reading a book. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the blue cover first. I look up and see the unmistakable cinder block heft, and I recognize those all-too-familiar one thousand, seventy-nine pages.
   I must admit, I’m more than a little excited. It’s the first time I’ve seen an IJ “out in the wild.” (I live in a rural area and I hear they’re usually indigenous to NYC subways.) I don’t even consider not talking to the guy.
   I make that half-reaching gesture people use to get someone’s attention and softly say, “Hey.” The guy looks up. I nod at the book in his hands and grin. “Infinite Jest.” I hold up my own book, cementing our solidarity.
   For his part, he doesn’t look too taken aback. He asks to see my book and flips through it, gauging his own interest. I look at his copy and notice the first bookmark (there are two, of course) is about 150 pages in. I ask him if this is his first time reading it and he says it is. I tell him it’s my favorite novel by far, gushing a little. He nods soberly and hands back my book. I ask him how he’s enjoying it and he says he likes it so far. He’s obviously not yet at the evangelical stage I am about Wallace and IJ. He has not really smiled during this interaction and I get the impression he’s one of those people who takes himself way too seriously, but I don’t care because I’m just happy to finally meet a random stranger who is reading the book.
   My friend’s bus arrives and I see him disembark. I gather my things and stand up. Before I leave, I say goodbye to the guy and tell him that I hope he enjoys the rest of the book. The last image I have is of him reading IJ on that bench. I wonder whether he finished it, and, if so, what his thoughts were.

 
Some things I’ve hated about the last five years: I hate how DFW has been used as a punchline for stupid jokes or as a sort of shorthand for describing a certain kind of highly self-aware writing but in a really reductive and usually sneery way. I hate how people who haven’t read IJ think it’s just some repetitive, too-clever-by-half, overly cerebral commentary on addiction and entertainment and whatever. I’m mildly annoyed at how people have glommed onto This Is Water and seem to know little else of Wallace’s work. I’m even more annoyed that people stay away from Infinite Jest and that other fans recommend reading “around it” or “building up to it.” (Would you have someone listen to Dirty Work, Steel Wheels, and A Bigger Bang before finally giving them Exile on Main St.? Just give them the best stuff immediately, I say.) I hate the jokes (“How do you know someone’s read Infinite Jest? Don’t worry, he’ll tell you”). I hate that he’s gone.

 
Some things I’ve loved about the last five years: I love seeing all the stuff we might never have been able to see: letters, manuscript pages, syllabi. I loved getting The Pale King, even if it wasn’t quite in the form we would’ve liked. All the audio interviews that were released because of the more widespread interest. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Infinite Summer. But mainly all the posthumous writing. Though I will state what to me is the obvious: I would trade every bit of Wallace’s writing we got post-’08 for him just to still be alive and healthy again. And not necessarily because I want new work. Even if he didn’t write another word, even if no more books were published, I think I’d still derive some measure of comfort knowing that he was out in the world, just living his life.


   It’s hard to know how to end something like this. I have a strong suspicion these last few paragraphs will just trail off at some point. I’d feel uncomfortable making some grand final statement like “David Foster Wallace meant ______ to me, and always will” or something like that. It’s hard to even encapsulate how important he and his works are to me in under 6,000 words. A simple way of putting it is that he’s changed my life for the better. That’s a zero-BS declaration. Just reading Infinite Jest is like getting a solid liberal arts education. If you look up every word you don’t know and wikipedia every reference or concept you don’t understand, then Eggers is right: You will come out of it a better person. I’m not particularly intelligent, but if I hadn’t read IJ, I would be a lot dumber than I am now, that’s for sure.
   While it’s true that he’s fundamentally changed the way I look at the world, some of the ways he’s affected my life aren’t what you would call Profound or Earth-shattering. I don’t eat lobster anymore. And I’ve turned into somewhat of an amateur SNOOT. Inspired by Wallace’s passion for language, I’ve hit the books and now know much more about grammar than I used to. I mean, take a gander at that paragraph supra where I’m writing about preparing to tackle IJ. You can see how my writing was infected with solecisms and general carelessness before I read that book. There are dangling participles (“After doing a little Googling, Wallace captures my attention”), super casualisms (“Anyways”), careless placement of modifiers (“Wallace, on the other hand, has only written two novels”), noun-pronoun agreement problems (“What author would you run out and get their book if it came out today?”), s-v a.p. (“but it’s one of those things that is amazing because of its excesses”), wrongness coupled with awkwardness (“who is inordinately more well-versed than me in all the art forms”), etc. While this new-found awareness can sometimes result in a kind of writerly paralysis, I like to think that ultimately I’m better for it.
   There were some things I wanted to talk about earlier but wasn’t able to blend them into the piece in a natural way. I wanted to say how grateful I was that I read the bulk of his work—especially IJ—before 2008. Everyone reading his stuff now for the first time probably can’t stop the alarm bells going off every time suicide is mentioned, and I really don’t think that’s the ideal way to read the books. I also wanted to talk a little about the weirdness of learning about his death from a newspaper of all things, a local paper no less. This was 2008, not 1908. The internet was up and running. I guess everyone found out Saturday night…it must have been reported by various outlets. How did I miss it?
   I really don’t know how to end this. I will say I’m constantly reminded of him. I’ll see an unusual word and remember that I first encountered it in one of his books. Pynchon’s book comes out next week and I only got into Pynchon because of him. Hardly a week goes by when he isn’t mentioned in some book review or another. Nadal just won the U.S. Open, which set off an explosion of associations.
   I think I’m done for now.