Category: David Foster Wallace
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I Write (/Think) Like…
I recently plugged a couple graphs of my review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (excluding quotations, of course) into the Web site I Write Like. The humorous and perhaps unsurprising result was that I apparently write like David Foster Wallace: http://iwl.me/s/d7939cdb Granted, I’ve always written in a childishly DFW-esque way; that’s part of why…
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Brief Review of Brief Interviews
I’ve written a fair bit on this blog about one of my top two or three favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. I’m hoping to use this summer’s respite from required reading to finally finish slogging through his rather daunting catalogue. Of the three books that remained for me, I decided to start with Brief Interviews…
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DFW
Clark Terry apparently once said “Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.” I’ve felt the same way, since being introduced to the latter by a teacher and friend of mine a few years go, about Douglas Adams and David Foster Wallace. In Wallace I found another author unafraid of the bold, if…
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Sunday Judgment III
Today’s subject: nauseated vs. nauseous. As I folded laundry this morning, trying to decide on a “Sunday Judgment” topic, I listened to some especially good moments in today’s special encore addition of Prairie Home Companion. In the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment, Garrison pulled a typically self-conscious SNOOT move: he used nauseated where most of…
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Go With The (Nework) Flow, Part I
Some preliminaries: (1) I couldn’t resist posting a link to this New York Times piece about eHarmony, et al. The “Algorithms of Love” in the headline alone made it worth it. (By the way, I love it when copy editors choose to force “EHarmony” and the like when these ridiculously capitalized words come up at…
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Wouldn’t That Be Nice
About a year-and-a-half ago, I started to get into tennis. My friend Emily taught me how to play, but I also learn a lot from David Foster Wallace. His essay “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (from A Supposedly Fun…
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Miscellany
Apologies for the week-long absence. I’m sure it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future of this blog, but I’m honestly just trying to enjoy my last couple weeks of relative sanity before the new semester starts. And again, that means we’re pushing back the anticipated release of the CSC Sunday column. (Conveniently, that…