Human's Animal

Timothy McSweeney is devastated and lost

David Foster Wallace memories above

and below a postscript in the New Yorker.

Some Pomona friends have commented on the McSweeney's site. I don't remember him well. I tried to take a contemporary fiction class with him his first year at Pomona, my last, but it filled up. I went to his office hours to try to get in. He told me I could sit in the interrogation chair or the tippy chair. I sat in one. The class didn't have room. That was fair. I worked in the English department office, library, etc. I ran into Wallace at night in Crookshank Hall. He would be using the office, putting things in mailboxes, taking things from mailboxes. He often wore shorts.

But it's not him I remember (or don't) as well I as I remember the experience of his brain on the page. I remember the companionship, talkiness, the hallways, the drone. I read Infinite Jest throughout a semester abroad in Madrid. I read it after lunches, after napping after lunches in my tiny floral room, after staring at canvases, after staying out 'til morning and waking in the afternoon, after reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

I don't know what to say. I'm trying not to delete my recollections. Read the books? Read DeLillo.

I thought saw a scene from White Noise today on the highway. The kind of rubbernecking where your head bends down.

I'm also thinking of you, English department, and I hope you are alright.