http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=1

I was looking for this quote all day before I realized that it was actually part of the commencement speech Franklyn posted earlier…very poignant, but very, very sad indeed:

“As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

Mike, as a fan of both DFW and tennis it was a thrill to read his “Federer as Religious Experience” piece for the NY Times a few years back. At the time I hadn’t realize that he was quite an accomplished tennis player when he was younger.

Here are some links to some of his stuff online:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/web-publications.html

As for me, I actually read Infinite Jest first, but the first essay of his I turned to was A Supposedly Fun Thing, the cruise ship piece, having gone on a cruise not long before that.

Joe, I know gods don’t answer letters, but if you were to write at greater length about Wallace, it’d blow my mind.

Sloth, MSS, and Mike – while MSS might be right about “Consider the Lobster” containing a greater variety of essays suitable for an introduction to Wallace, I’d specifically recommend the state-fair and cruise-ship travelogues from “A Supposedly Fun Thing”, both being chock full of both humor and insight while being utterly accessible.

Franklyn – thanks for the link; I’d never read that commencement address before, and it seems a perfect window into what Wallace and his writings were all about.

I’m going to genially disagree with Mike, here, and recommend you start first with his other essay collection, “Consider the Lobster.” While the collection Mike recommended is very good, it has more of an abstracted, navel-gazing philosophical attitude toward much of it, whereas the essays in “Lobster” are grounded more firmly in reportage. I think it’s a better starting point because it opens the door for you to Wallace’s prose style and the scope of his intellectual curiosity while still grounding you in a familiar journalistic mode. The reason I recommend this is because, in *my* experience (and I realize mine is statistically meaningless), people who start out with the headier Wallace stuff stand a better chance of not connecting with it. The prolixity and involution are more off-putting; the labor seems more intense. Conversely, people I’ve met who’ve started out with his more conventional journalism and then delved deeper into his more complex fiction have had a higher incidence of really enjoying the latter — I think because there’s less chance for frustration or bewilderment if you’re already fond of the style.

I also just want to thank Joe again for having this site. Without the opportunity to work out what I was thinking on the comments section, here, I think I would have been sort of hazy about this for a couple days. Thanks for the therapy.