Tag Archives: David Foster Wallace

Jan 24 2012

less than a million breaths away

“I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s fear, the same basic fear that you and I have that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it…Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I…

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what – a hundred years? two hundred? – and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished buy my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here…That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.”

That’s from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and it hit me rather hard today whilst I was eating lunch alone upstairs at work. First it was the bit about the gravestones, which we think of as the final reminder of our footprints on our place. Then that bit about the slow fire drove it in. Maybe it was the events of last night – really thinking about the other side of organ donation – I don’t know. But when I read this today everything around ceased to matter, to even exist. And all I can think about now is how precious little time we get here, and how even by that measure I get even less precious little time to spend with Ashley…and that comes at the expense of some other family who ended up with even less precious little time with their child than they could ever have brought themselves to even try to imagine.

And I am sad for them. And yet grateful. And while those two emotions mix readily in a person’s heart, it takes the mind significantly more time to catch up.

Jan 21 2012

anti social-search

David Foster Wallace writes,

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food.

I’ve been a fiction writer since the first short story I wrote in fourth grade, so I know the above to be true. And I also know the following to be equally true:

But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people…The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention.(1)

He goes on, at Wallacian length, to make the argument that television’s benign malice is that it allows for watching without being watched, although of course what’s being watched isn’t an accurate reflection of reality.(2) My point isn’t to argue with or refute this claim. My point is that today we have a much better tool to watch without being watched: social media.

Facebook and Twitter allow me to do exactly what television allows. I get to peek into people’s lives. I get these little snippets that I can piece together. It has an advantage over real life in that if I met a friend for coffee I’d have to pay attention to things like body language and tone to divine how that person feels about anything, and I’d have to do it constantly. Using social media, people just tell me how they feel…and I don’t even have to ask.

Furthermore, social media allows me to choose whose lives I watch from a distance. When I find someone to be untrustworthy I can simply un-friend, un-follow, or un-subscribe from that person’s life. I only have to pay attention to what I want to pay attention to.

And, for the most part, people only watch me when I want them to. Were I the creepy guy on the subway, I’d have to constantly watch everyone else and run decision trees on how they might be perceiving me, all while I’m watching whatever it is that’s caught my interest. It’s a lot. But on Facebook, people only see what I want them to see, whether that be my profile or my status updates.(3)

And so of course I have to be aware that I’m only seeing what others want me to see. In other words, social media is mediated content, just like television. Except that, for the most part, the goal of mediation isn’t simply to make money for some faceless corporation. Some people are obviously out to get as many followers as possible, but having the type of ego – or pathological need – that makes that situation a factor is also part of the reality that I, as a fiction writer, so desperately want to take in. 

Without being, myself, observed. Which isn’t sneaky nor creepy. It doesn’t come from a place of harm or, I hope, damage. Let me put it this way: we, as human beings, tend, I think, to think that most people’s desires aren’t different from our own in any fundamental way. How we go about achieving those desires is, of course, wildly different. But the fundamentals are the same. So if I have a desire to watch everyone around me while I hit the little RECORD button of my memory, I generally assume that others are doing the same thing. Which is what makes me terribly self-conscious even while being simultaneously aware that probably no one is really paying any attention to me anyway. And so it’s only natural that I would embrace anything that removes that problem.

This is why, even though I kind of hate the thing that is social media, I simply cannot let it go. It lets me do the only thing I’ve wanted to do since I wrote my second story: record people without myself being recorded.

Which is why Google is now my enemy.

Image Credit: Biggovernement.com

Google’s new Social Search feature, which allows people who have you in their Google+ circles to see things that you’ve searched for with Google, is more than a violation of privacy. More than a violation of trust. It is a violation of the very lure of social media, which is to watch other people without them seeing more of me than I want.

Suddenly now, self-consciousness has entered into my online life. I have to be worried that people in my circles can see what I’ve searched. Because I’m a writer, because I have a curious mind, and because I have a tendency – for whatever reason – to see and learn about many of the more unsavory aspects of human life,(4) I am genuinely concerned about this.

Furthermore, because Google first touted their service as a network that let you control what other people see, I added people to my circles whom I never would have added on Facebook. And so now I have to worry that people at work know that sometimes I really do try pretty hard to find real pictures of people who have three breasts.(5)

And they did all of this without first telling me. The only reason I knew about it was when I searched something a week or so ago and Google showed me similar things that one of my friends had searched. Self-consciousness set in just as much as if I’d gone naked to the prom.

So I quit Google+ right away. And in the past week, I’ve been divesting myself of all the Google services I use. This isn’t easy, since I’ve had a Google account for five years or so. But I am not willing to risk them releasing whatever other information they have of mine or about me to anyone else, whether we’re friends or not. Forget privacy. Forget trust. I spend time on the internet because it helps me accomplish something I simply cannot do in real life. Google has violated my sense of personal security, not my information, not my emails, but aspects of my very self.

At the very least, this makes me horribly uncomfortable. This is the type of thing that in the real world would cause me to get off the subway at the next stop, even if I had no idea where I was. To leave the party. To never talk to a certain person again. To move to a new town. Not because of the violation, but because I have been made too terribly self-conscious to ever face that situation again. So goodbye Google. And congratulations on becoming the town gossip-queen I’ve always worked to avoid.

  1. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.
  2. It’s well documented that pretty much no one would want to watch a show about real life anyway, because real life is allegedly boring. I submit that real life isn’t precisely boring. It’s just that we can’t skip over the long amounts of less interesting points.
  3. I’ll add that the new Facebook Timeline lets you go back and delete pretty much everything you want to delete. It’s a great tool for revisionist history of a very personal sort.
  4. Should be obvious what that means. But it means more than that too. Mine is the kind of mind that finds books about serial killers fascinating. The internet was practically made for people like me.
  5. That fact supports note 4, supra.
Jul 15 2011

pulled from a really good book, vol. 3

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip – and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté…a queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive…what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really come kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be avoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”(1)

  1. From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
May 23 2011

entertainer-in-chief

David Foster Wallace, in his satiric novel Infinite Jest,[1] has, as President of the U.S.A., a former Vegas crooner named Johnny Gentle. A consummate entertainer, Gentle is the “first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech.” He awards even cabinet members the epithet ‘babe.’

One of the points of satire in the novel is American culture’s drive for perfect and/or constant entertainment, and obviously Johnny Gentle is an extension of that. But every satire contains at least some truth.[2]

We’ve been electing entertainers in public office for decades. From Sonny Bono through Jesse Ventura right up to Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Ever four years people start rallying for Jon Stewart to run,[3] and in 2008 Stephen Colbert actually announced he would run. In possibly the state’s most intelligent and/or divisive move since withdrawing from the Union, South Carolina refused Colbert’s application and his bid was over before it really began.

But not before he released this campaign graphic that tells you everything you need to know about Stephen Colbert.

So while having former entertainers in the occasional public office is nothing new for the good ol’ U.S. of A., these days there’s a trend that worries me greatly: that those running for office must be entertaining.

Consider Sarah Palin. She quit being governor seemingly so she could star in a reality TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska.[4] Just as everything else she does, her purpose for starring this show seems to have been showing the American voters what she wants them to know about her when they go to the polls in 2012.[5]

Consider Donald Trump. For years Mr. Trump was mostly known as the richest man in the U.S., many people only vaguely knowing the guy in any other way. Put him on a reality TV show and now everyone knows him.[6] He announced that he was thinking about running and for a while there it seemed he would.[7]

But then another entertainer stepped in the way: President Obama. Mr. Trump was slammed again and again during the Correspondents’ Dinner as Mr. Obama reminded us that part of the reason we elected him is that he can be really, really entertaining when he wants to be.

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates is certainly less than entertaining. The newest member of the field, Tim Pawlenty, actually addressed this on Today this morning:

Matt Lauer: “People often look at you and say: ‘Is there enough charisma for Tim Pawlenty to beat Barack Obama?’ What’s your answer to that?”

Tim Pawlenty: “I’m not running for Entertainer-in-Chief. These are serious times and they need serious people with serious solutions. So if you’re looking for the loudest, or a comedian in the race, vote for somebody else. I’ll fix the country.”[8]

And you know what? For the first time ever I’m seriously considering a Republican candidate. Maybe I’m just getting old or something,[9] but just to hear a candidate acknowledge and respond against the notion that the people running our country – the people in charge of its millions of citizens – should be people who themselves are as entertaining as possible has me thinking that maybe this guy is worth considering.

But then again, that’s pretty much the only thing I know about this guy right now. Probably it’s better than I learn what he stands for and what he intends to do than to base my vote on one thing.

[1] Which yes I know I’ve talked about ad nauseum but it’s my favorite book pretty much ever and, well, frankly there are other blogs to read. Or you could read the book and find out why I talk about it all the time. (back)
[2] No evidence yet that the people of Ireland really were eating their young back when Swift wrote his A Modest Proposal, though. (back)
[3] Who told Oprah that he will never run for public office: ‘If my job became solving problems, I would suddenly become a lot less good at what I do, unless the problem being had by the country was a lack of jokes.’ (back)
[4] I’ll admit that I could be wrong about her reasons for quitting, but I haven’t seen her do anything else with her free time that she couldn’t have done whilst sitting in the office for a few more months. (back)
[5] That she hasn’t announced her candidacy yet may be a sign that the show backfired. I’ve read here and there recently that the people of Alaska are somewhat embarrassed by her and there’s almost no way to win the presidency if you can’t even carry your own state. (back)
[6] A show, I’ll point out, that stars more-or-less former entertainers entertaining the American populace in a wholly different way than they used to entertain us. (back)
[7] And he told Fox & Friends just this morning that he might still run. (back)
[8] You can view it here. (back)
[9] Lord knows I’m not suddenly rich, which is about the only other reason to vote Republican. (back)
Apr 1 2011

escaped from his afterlife

People who love to read love to read I think because there’s something in those constructed realities that they feel close to, closer than perhaps anything in this real life. In many cases, I think it’s the characters, these constructions of words that seem more real than the people we interact with on a daily basis. Or, if not more real, more valid.

In other cases, it’s the setting. How many people would choose to live in Narnia or Middle-Earth, or even Castle Rock, Maine?

Still others, I honestly believe, love to read because of the words themselves. Language is our most essential tool, and just like any tool its quotidian uses become mundane over time. Readers of poetry and Shakespeare, especially, enjoy the variations of words and especially syntax that just isn’t found with any kind of regularity. They become personally attached to phrases, lines and stanzas, literally carrying them around inside themselves until circumstance and situation allow them freedom. The utterances in those moments, then, are effectively a marriage of the speaker and writer.

Then there are the true bibliophiles, those who love the fact of a book, the physicality of it, more perhaps than its contents. They stagger and marvel that the possibility of its ideas and truths – maybe even its lies. For them the cover, the jacket, the font and paper and paper’s weight and grain and formatting are fetishized as a real-world signifier of not all things but any things.

For still others, like myself, the affinity for the material turns into an affinity for the novelist. The author. The creator. I recognize in someone a piece of myself or who I wish I could be, and as I read I find more and more pieces of me in these pieces of them.

It becomes like seeing yourself in a mosaic mirror.

The first real instance of this that I recall was for Stephen King, when as a child I promised myself that when I was a grown-up I’d own all of his books and I would keep them on a special bookshelf. Years later, when I read Misery, I had a little laugh at my idea and hoped that I was far different from Annie Wilkes.

Then I met Jack Kerouac and I understood that my Stephen King thing was just puppy-love. Kerouac of course blurred the line between author and character and I think because of that I was able to see the person behind the character, the non-fiction Sal Paradise. And I fell in love.

Jack wanted so much for the world to be so beautiful, and he understood that it was beautiful simply because he willed it to be. But his tragic flaw was that he could only see beauty when compared to filth. He couldn’t see a beautiful woman unless she was a prostitute. Like Ginsberg, he couldn’t appreciate a sunflower unless it were growing defiantly near a broken-down train.

In this, I saw myself. And for maybe the first time I can recall, I felt that maybe I was okay as a person. That I wasn’t broken. Or that, even if I was broken, I was valid.

Later on I met Tom Robbins. Then I literally met Tom Robbins where after hearing him speak for an hour or so someone said to me: ‘Yep. You two are like peas in a pod.’ Robbins is similar to Kerouac in his world-view, but he doesn’t need the filth to see beauty. He just does – well, with the aid of various psychotropic substances and what seems like flatly exhausting amounts of sex. In Robbins I see a part of myself that’s maybe a little further from me than I’d want to be…but that doesn’t prevent me from want to be him.

And then I met David Foster Wallace.

 

Photo cred: Suzy Allman / The New York Times

I can’t yet tell you why I feel so much for Mr. Wallace. I can tell you that it’s about feeling, about emotion and not being afraid of it. I can say that few know how I feel in my everyday life better than he does. And it’d be dishonest not to say that my affinity for him also involves the fact of his suicide.

 

This is why today at lunch, when I sat down to read my newly delivered copy of The Pale King, his newest book, I got exactly three paragraphs into before I had to close the book. I felt him too much around me, as though he’d escaped from his afterlife to come hang out for a while.

And then I missed him – even though I never met him. Or more accurately, I missed the world that was a world with David Foster Wallace. Because it was better, somehow. It was filthy and beautiful and neither fact mattered as much as that something was felt about the filth and the beauty.

Later I’ll go back to being excited about this book. But for now I am sad, heartbroken over someone I never met.

“Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trebling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.” – from The Pale King

Mar 31 2011

the pale king

Today Amazon started selling David Foster Wallace’s newest novel, The Pale King. Selling, as in, you could order it. As in, not pre-order it,(1) but order it. Like having it shipped to your home. And since I chose next-day shipping I’ll have the book in my exceedingly anxious hands after work tomorrow.

All weekend plans have been summarily canceled.

  1. I’d already pre-ordered a Kindle edition of the book so that it would be downloaded the morning of its release and I could start on it right away. I’ll keep my Kindle pre-order because I just feel more okay in the world having as many of DFW’s books on me at all times. I already own a Kindle- and a hard-copy version of most of his books and while my mind rails at the illogic and expense of owning two copies of one book, I also feel better about life being able to see his books on my bookshelf when I wake up in the morning. Which may or may not be the impetus behind my having moved the bookshelf into the bedroom. Take that howsoever you will.
Mar 12 2011

pulled from a really good book, vol. 2

Today, O Semi-Constant Reader, I present to you my favorite moments from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

I have a particular longstanding fear of things that spin independently inside a larger spin. (pg. 98)

I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just of east of Cleveland, for women. (pg. 101)

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. (pg. 132)

Authors are monkeys who are mean. (pg. 139)

Quentin Tarantino in interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear. (pg. 166)

Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies – evil wears them. (pg. 166)

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and the foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. (pg. 267)1

  1. Sometimes an author says something that you just never thought of before, such as the Lynch/ear thing. Other times an author puts into words some vague thought you’ve been struggling with for years and have never been able to articulate it, or at least articulate it succinctly.
Feb 22 2011

dfw

Yeah. Me too. If he would just.1

  1. I found this on PostSecret yesterday. It’s funny and perplexing that sometimes just out of nowhere I’ll remember that he’s gone – and it’s not just that he’s gone but that he took his own life – and I become so sad all over again. Analyzing it has gotten me nowhere. I’m left simply to feel, and what I feel is
Jan 28 2011

you and me we were the pretenders

From the long hallway that is the memory of things I’ve read, I seem to recall some story in which one of the characters was constantly receiving articles clipped from newspapers. I think the sender was the character’s mother, but could be wrong about that.1

In the time of the novel this is nothing out of the ordinary.

But yesterday it most certainly was out of the ordinary.

I don’t get much mail at the library and most of it is flyers for various university goings-on. So a fully eight-and-a-half-by-eleven inch envelope with my name handwritten in ink across the front was about as strange as seeing Lady Gaga in sweatpants.2

The handwriting looked familiar but I didn’t think much of it. Opening the envelope,3 I found a note and a half-page of newspaper. The note was from the professor of the class I took last semester.

Hi Bo. I saw this article on Sunday and thought you might like to read it, if you haven’t already.

Back up. Did you see that?

On Sunday.

Yep. She was sitting at home on a non-work day, relaxing and reading the Sunday Times, maybe with coffee or tea. She came across this article4 and thought enough of it to clip it from the paper with the intent of sending it my way. At some point she brought it to work. She wrote a note. She put it all in an envelope. She wrote my name on the front and sealed. She dropped it in campus mail.

Think about that for a minute. Think about everything that went into it. The human interactions: between her and the paper, between me and the paper, and between her and me.

This is far more touching than cut-and-paste.

Far more touching than email.

Far more touching than a computer screen.

Because she could have done it. I’m sure the article is available online5 and she could have very easily just looked it up and done the copy-and-paste-and-email thing. Probably would have taken her far less time.

…time.

That’s the problem. Right there. The sacrifice of real, analog human interaction for the illusion of free time. After all, if I only spend 30 seconds on you, that’s more time for me, right? Maybe it’s not free time. Maybe it’s the origin of that horrible phrase: Me time.

I get that today’s world has us constantly crunched for time. But the only reason the world is pressing us for time is because it’s giving us so much shit to pay attention to.6

I’m not proselytizing here; I’m every bit as guilty about this as everyone else. Probably more so than some. Some of the shit out there is enormously entertaining. Some of it’s even interesting. Even enlightening.

But I fear we sacrifice human touch way too much.

Send someone an article. Print out a picture of your kid and mail it to his or her grandparents. Write someone a letter. Have a conversation with your brother. Your sister. Call everyone you would normally text. Go somewhere with a friend and leave your phones off.

Technology isn’t a bad thing. But be human while you still are.

  1. I also think the character lived in an apartment in or near Chicago. This fact leads me to believe it’s the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle or one of the characters in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. But it really could be anything.
  2. or hearing Taylor Swift sing a song about how she thinks the guy should totally keep dating the girl he’s with and how she completely supports that decision.
  3. Maybe the 6th time I’ve used the letter opener that came with the desk. If only the phone could fall into such disuse…
  4. W/r/t David Foster Wallace.
  5. Yep. Right here.
  6. And we all know damn well that 90% of it is shit.
Jan 15 2011

saturday things #2

After a month or so of serious consideration and not-quite-internal debate, I decided upon buying an Amazon Kindle. It took me roughly five minutes to fall completely in love with it and to subsequently name it.1

But I’ll get to that in a minute.

First I want to share the reasons I decided a) to buy an e-reader, and 2) to buy this e-reader. Like most things on which I end up spending large amounts of money2 this came down to matters of practicality.

Primarily, I can buy classic books for free or for $.99, thusly enabling me to move some of my books to the storage unit3 and free up precious space in our apartment. If/when I ever move to a larger place, I’ll bring all those books back out and keep them around. But for now keeping them in digital format is extremely helpful.

Also, having those classic books with me at all times means I’m way more likely to actually read them. Mark Twain said that classics are books that everyone wants to have read but no one wants actually to read.4 I’ve worked pretty hard at reading many of the classics, but I could work harder at it. This will help me.

Thirdly, I think I mentioned last week that I always take at least three books with me whenever I go on a trip, even just a weekend trip to visit Ashley’s sister in Chicago. When we went to Disney World last year and I was struggling to pack books in my bag5 Ashley said, ‘Why are you bringing so many books? We’re going to effing Disney World.’ Yes, I said, but years of habit are hard to break. An e-reader makes this way easier: I just toss the device into my bag and I’ve got everything I might want to read right there, plus the ability to get more books.

The next reason is the least immediate to me but is still a valid concern. E-readers are relatively new technology and are already insanely popular.6 This trend will only intensify in my opinion. Given that I will be a life-long reader, I feel it’s time I begin adapting how I read.

The last bit of practical logic is what came to me out of Dave’s comment on last week’s iPad post: ease-of-use can make a device worthwhile even if it merely duplicates functions that other things I own already to. In this case, books allow me to spend my time reading. An e-reader easily lets me spend more time reading a wider variety of material. That makes it worthwhile.

Thanks Dave!

Soooo…

why did I settle upon a Kindle?

It’s actually rather simple. Despite all of my concerns, it came down to one fundamental decision: I want my e-reading experience to be as similar as possible to my non-e-reading experience:

  • Books don’t hurt my eyes because the pages are too bright.
  • Books can’t be read in the dark.
  • Books never tell me that I have an email.
  • Books have pictures, but those pictures never move.7
  • Books don’t need to be charged.

All of these are true of the Kindle except for the last statement. But as Wired put it, “Battery life is long enough for space shuttle missions.” I read for maybe four hours straight last night, after also reading the New York Times at various points throughout the day. The battery is still practically fully charged.

My friend Mike commented last week that on day two of owning a Kindle the device “the device slipped away and it was just me and the words.” This happened to me last night, and I was grateful. So far my Kindle experience has met and in some cases exceeded my expectations.

So now, finally, I give you the promised moment-of-love-and-subsequent-naming.

After I opened the box and enjoyed the new-device rush that’s become such a part of contemporary life, I synced the device to my Amazon account. Once I returned to the home screen I saw that I had an archived item that I could download to the device. Last semester, whilst knee-deep in researching my paper on Infinite Jest, I realized that life would be easier if I could search the text. So I bought the e-book on Amazon and used the Kindle for PC app for this purpose.8

As the book was downloading to the Kindle the other night, I realized this meant that I would have my favorite book of all time with me at all times.

Damn. Totally worth it.

And that’s when I fell in love with it. Which required that I name it. That part was easy.

Adored Readership, give a hearty hello to Foster.9

:-)

  1. I name all of my favorite devices and things, especially the ones that I know will positively affect my life. My iPod is The Black Bard. My Droid is Artoo (as in Dee-too). My laptop is Hermes. There’s a bit of dispute w/r/t naming the car: I want to call it The Falcon, Ashley wants a non-Star-Wars name. We’ve settled on Vue Askew, it being a Saturn Vue and all. My bass guitar has whatever name I choose to give it at that moment, but it always starts with Doctor. My acoustic guitar actually doesn’t have a name, which stuck me as curious when I realized this. But I’ve come to understand that I view that guitar as more of an extension of me and my personality than its own separate entity. In this way, the lack of a name is possibly the highest of compliments in Bo-world.
  2. For my purposes, this is decided by the following: price-of-device>$50, (cash-on-hand + (future cash/t)) – (upcoming bills/t), where t is a specified amount of time.
  3. Climate controlled. Frankly, my storage unit is probably better for my books than the apartment.
  4. Paraphrased. Probably.
  5. Along with deciding which books to pack.
  6. Said quantities of insanity are relative to the book-reading population.
  7. Statement describes reading experience typical of most readers. Individual results may vary.
  8. This is where the lack of page numbers is so damn frustrating. Citing things would be way easier if Amazon could figure this out.
  9. I like how ‘Kindle’ taps into both a noun and verb. Foster accomplishes the same thing while at the same time pays tribute to Mr. Wallace.