New Stuff: David Foster Wallace

First Lines: David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid jutting of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics.

First Lines: David Foster Wallace - The Pale King

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek.

New Stuff: David Foster Wallace

Posthumously published unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace.

First Lines: David Foster Wallace -The Broom of the System

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

First Lines: David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

Bits from Infinite Jest #3

He had to put an audio message on his answering device saying that starting that afternoon he was going to be unreachable for several days. He had to clean his bedroom, because once he had dope he would not leave his bedroom except to go to the refrigerator and the bathroom, and even then the trips would be very quick. He had to throw out all his beer and liquor, because if he drank alcohol and smoked dope at the same time he would get dizzy and ill, and if he had alcohol in the house he could not be releid on not to drink it once he started smoking dope.

David Foster Wallace

Bits from Infinite Jest #2

The insect on the shelf was back. It didn't semm to do anything. It just came out of the hole in the girder onto the edge of the steel shelf and sat there. After a while it would disappear back into the hole in the girder, and he was pretty sure it didn't do anything in there either. He felt similar to the insect inside the girder his shelf was connected to, but was not sure how he was similar.

David Foster Wallace

Bits from Infinite Jest #1

You have to love old-fashioned men's rooms: the circus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose mosaic pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.

David Foster Wallace

New stuff

Miniatures #12

A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life
by David Foster Wallace

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one.

New Stuff