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First Annual DFW Conference Report

Great report from Thomas Cook about the ISU's First Annual DFW conference over at The Hairsplitter, Normalizing David Foster Wallace:

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Over Memorial Day weekend of this year, the Department of English at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, where Wallace taught for most of the 1990s, hosted their First Annual David Foster Wallace Conference at the Marriott in uptown Bloomington. Yes, Bloomington has an “uptown” neighborhood, I was surprised to learn, where The Coffee Hound responsibly sources Costa Rican beans from Oscan and Olga Mendez and offers a range of paleo-friendly and gluten-free menu items. My wife and I were in attendance at the conference, having made the trip from Massachusetts to the oasis of corn and soy in central Illinois, a landscape we’d inhabited in college and readers of Wallace would, if they were to make the sojourn, recognize from Wallace’s early essays (“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”) as well as his last novel, The Pale King, which is grounded in Peoria, Illinois. Even though we were familiar with the landscape, the flatness overwhelmed; we hadn’t been back in half a decade.
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