Plans

Do you want to come over? It’s tacos and Greek yogurt night.

DFW

David Foster Wallace, my favorite author,¹ is dead. Hanged himself on Friday night.

Three Things: 1. No other author has floored me so often and absolutely as he. His journalism and fiction made me appreciate syntax and structure and pacing and, plainly, writing and its style. 2. This happens all the time: I love the realization, wading halfway through a throwaway thought, that he has made a 90 degree turn and beelined into paragraph-long stream of consciousness sentence that is building upon itself and propelling forward, achieving warp speed. I’m sitting there, reading silently to myself, breathless – literally gasping for air – until I reach the period and can regroup and take inventory. 3. No one else has ever made me pump my fist in the air, celebrating – honestly, seriously, not kidding, this has happened: celebrating! – writing.

I was lucky enough to see him at a speaking engagement in Buffalo when I was a freshman at UB that was broadcast on the local public radio station. Grab a recording of that program, which aired live almost exactly eight years to the day of his passing, here.

FOOTNOTES:
1 Guaranteed, the least impressive title anyone could ever receive