DFW, still,

I never knew who David Foster Wallace was before September 2008. I had an ongoing assignment to keep up with reading the news for my "Reporting and Writing I" class, part of which involved reading the Sunday Times in its entirety.*

So one Sunday I read a post-obit that called him "the best mind of his generation," and was like: Who? How don't I know about this guy?

Since then, in the course of class reading assignments and mentions of his work from magazine editors, I came across Wallace's pro-lobster essay for Gourmet magazine, his despair-on-a-cruise-ship bit for Harper's***, and his introduction to an anthology that chose to poke fun at the genre of the introduction rather than to truly introduce the anthology of the Best American Writing. The guy is... was cheeky. I'll give him that.

But I'm more and more intrigued by shortcuts he might provide to me -- with 16 years less experience than he had -- at avoiding certain self-destructive behaviors and habits, namely those of the mind.

Today an article appeared reviewing a commencement address he gave that, having been popularized on the Internet, has now been made into a one-line-per-page keepsake in the form of a printed book.****

So I started reading it and got stuck pretty early on with this quotation:

...the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.*****

I think that -- the job of reeling in a beast; of taming a dragon with bit and bridle, that -- is the hardest task, ever. And I don't know that anyone is ever able to do it; not even the monks who set themselves a 1,000 year multi-life deadline.

It can be destructive on one hand, but then again, if you never let your mind wander off into all sorts of places, be they nice and clean or creepy and dank, you'll never know where it can go and what it can find. (Which makes me think: I'd really like to attach a live-feed camera and transmitter to my cat's collar to see just where the hell he goes all day.)

I'm done. I have to put my mind to graduating now... fewer than 30 days remain. And then... the beginning. Again.

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* I shelled out the $5 or so non-tax-deductible dollars before I realized the New York Times did in fact publish an index of all the stories of the day in the online format. Just be sure to get to it before 5 or 6 or 9 p.m. or so when it switches over to the next day. I have no problem paying for news I want to read, in theory. It's just that I object to paying for news that someone else tells me I have to read for a class quiz and, unlike textbooks -- which is acts in place of -- I can't count it against my income at the end of the year.**

** Whoever said that David Foster Wallace ruined footnotes for the rest of us was full of it. If I had known I could have used footnotes, I would have. Now I know it can be done, I intend to carry it forward.

*** Harper's put all of Wallace's work in its pages in PDF form, available free via this page.

**** This has been happening so much lately -- Stuff White People Like becoming a book; Randy Pausch's Last Lecture; now even xkcd. If I have a novel I want to sell, should I just serialize it on a blog rather than bother with the world of snarky literary agents?

***** Speaking of choices, I'm now listening to spark plugs and chainsaws "sing" American Woman, first by the Guess Who, which CBC Radio 2 is playing because they like playing cover songs of Canadian content. I choose to listen to CBC Radio 2 specifically for odd little surprises such as this.