Okay, so I'm a book snob

I've been a little mopey lately, since I learned that one of my favorite authors died.: David Foster Wallace. It's been in the news, and I'm sure you've probably heard of it, if you roll in English Department circles. (Do English Department circles roll?) It's been neat listening to stories about him from people who knew him - stories about tape on walls, where he taped the manuscript of Infinite Jest when he was working on it and stories of arguments over dangling modifiers in thesis titles.

Wallace had quite a bit of influence over my life, even though I only met him once and briefly. And yet, despite never really knowing him, I would say that he helped me determine, in a small way, the trajectory of my life. One of the biggest reasons I chose to attend Illinois State was because he was there. And so my conversion into Rhetoric and Composition and the wonderful life experiences and education that I received at ISU are connected in a small way to his life.

I got interested in Wallace's work when I read some of his short stories for a class in college. From there, I delved into Infinite Jest. The first time I read it, I needed a dictionary to make it through. But I remember sitting in a cubicle at my job as a student worker, stifling giggles and laughing myself to tears over that book, especially the eschaton debacle and the HALSADICK math lesson.

The last time I talked with someone about the book, I have to admit that I sounded a little pretentious and maybe talking about IJ at all is a little pretentious, but I said something like, "Yeah, the first two times I read it, Infite Jest was really funny, but the third time I started to see some new an interesting things." Even as it was coming out of my mouth, it sounded to me like I was bragging. Who the hell reads a book that long three times??? I have to admit that I bought it with pretension in mind. It was the "next best thing" at the time. But during that first time through, it quickly stopped being about fitting in with the ironic, hipster Engilsh types in my department. As I read it stopped being about reading something because I was supposed to read it and turned into reading it because I had fun reading it. In fact, the first time through, when I finished the last page, I seriously considered turning back to page one and starting all over again. And now I find that I pull it out in transitional times in my life and consider starting up again, maybe because I enjoy reading it and I enjoy how it makes me look pretentious, a physical sign that I fit in English Departments defined by back-breaking and will-cracking fiction. Who knows.

I guess you could say that I'm a little bummed that there won't be any new DFW novels out there, and while I can still go back to IJ (and probably will some day) there's no more anticipation of the next thing that he might produce, and that's where the mopes sink in.