Reading David Foster Wallace on the Move

 What is your most memorable moment while reading DFW on the move? We'd like you to share, any weird, touching, funny, even tragic, things that you've experienced while actively reading anything by DFW while on the move. Plane, bus, train, taxi, foot, bicycle (skydiving?) etc.

This isn't a parody comp like we've run in the past, we're after a range of personal vignettes that will inspire other readers to share their stories about the experience of reading David Foster Wallace.

Winning Entries - 4-Way Tie:

I listened to the audio book of “Consider the Lobster” driving from a
friend’s house outside Petrolia, on the northern California coast, to
Portland and back. I think the audio book includes five of the essays
(it’s gone; I think I gave it away). This was summer 2007. Since then
I’ve listened to the audio book of “Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men,” which includes a greater proportion of the published text, I
think, although not “Signifying Nothing” or “Octet” or “Datum
Centurio” or “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” of the ones that
come to mind. And in the interview about The Asset Wallace either
screws up or revises on the fly and doesn’t say “Q” before what I
think of as the punch line, “More pussy than a toilet seat, man. I
shit you not.” Also in the first one, “A Radically Condensed History
of Postindustrial Life,” for some reason he stops after the first “now
did one,” leaving off the last two. If he did not know, Wallace would
be curious about and speculate interestingly on, I can imagine, the
provenance of “punch line.” In an interview he said he didn’t think
his writing came across as well read out loud, or maybe he didn’t say
that but instead that he thought his writing worked best on the page,
read by a reader, but I love listening to him read himself. In the
interview about the Great Lover, which happens in Georgia, he attempts
a drawl. For the “Consider the Lobster” recording they figured out a
way to incorporate yet set off the footnotes so he didn’t have to say
sotto voce “footnote” before each one the way he did in the BIWHM
sessions. The audio of him reading the footnotes was processed so it
sounded like David Foster Wallace reading standing in the deep end of
an empty swimming pool. He speaks a funny author’s note explaining the
effect at the start of the audio book.

The four essays in the audio book of “Consider the Lobster” I can name
right now are the title essay, “Big Red Son,” “The View from Mrs.
Thompson’s” and “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Later that summer,
only a couple weeks later, I drove with a girl from Portland to
Seattle, where we went up in the Space Needle, all the way across
northern Montana on Highway 2, through Fargo and Omaha, where we saw
my parents and went horseback riding, to Bowling Green, Ohio, which
sucks, to Pittsburgh and back to New York. We may have re-listened to
part of “Consider the Lobster”: They only gave you five. But we also
had “The Odyssey,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “The Great Gatsby,”
“Dubliners” and I remember when we got to New York we were trying to
listen to Lear which is still on the CD shelf at the house we share
now. It’s a big country. We didn’t get to “The Odyssey” (Fagles
trans.). That fall my brother passed through the city on a tour with a
band and I know I gave him “Dubliners” (I think) and that must have
been where “Consider the Lobster” went to, although he’d already read
it more than once. Actually now I remember I’d offered those audio
books for him to take – they were headed to Athens, Ga. – but he
didn’t take them, I discovered the next day, so I don’t know where
they disappeared to. He, my brother, went through a phase driving long
distances on tour of not listening to anything, he said, no music, no
authors reading, just driving.

It was him raving about “Girl with Curious Hair” that got me into
Wallace. That was around Y2K. “Infinite Jest” came out when I was in
college – or, I was in college when “Infinite Jest” came out – and I
didn’t read it because I thought Wallace looked like a punk in his
author’s photo. He was born in Ithaca, where I spent my college years.
Earlier that summer of the “Consider” trip, my brother and I drove
from southern Tennessee to Madison, where he played a show. At the end
of the first day of driving we found ourselves in Bloomington-Normal,
by mid-2007 a good five years I think, maybe less, since Wallace lived
and taught there. (I never fell in love with L.A. and I’ve never been
to Clermont, although the company I work for now, the one I stole time
from this year to listen to the audio book of BIWHM at my desk, is a
subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, the brother of whose founder (I
think) endowed the professorship Wallace held at Pomona.) In
Bloomington, or was it Normal, we ate at a Lone Star Steakhouse I
remember being air-conditioned in the extreme. Every other restaurant
in town was full, and there was not, we discovered with a bunch of
phone calls, a hotel room in the city to be had. We found out from the
Lone Star waitress it was because a convention of Mormons was in town.
In retrospect it doesn’t make much sense; why hold a convention of
enough Mormons to close the town that way anywhere but Salt Lake? But
that’s what she said. The idea at the time was what kept them out of
the Lone Star was the free-flowing alcohol, although that theory too
has obvious holes. We went up the road quite a ways before we found a
place to sleep.

There were two times I’m thinking of when I felt rather beset and a
new Wallace essay appeared and it was like somebody giving you a big
old high-five. The second time it happened was summer 2006, during the
war in Beirut, where I lived for 19 months. While in Lebanon I kept up
freelance work I’d been doing as a copy writer on the team that
pitches content from the New York Times Magazine to media outlets who
might interview a contributor or otherwise cover the Times coverage
(work which has since disappeared). I would get the text of the
Magazine (or the short-lived Key or, in this case, Play) a
week-and-a-half or so before publication and write what hoped to be
catchy blurbs about the major pieces. They e-mailed the text in big
files slugged by topic; the authors were listed in a separate table of
contents. It must have been around Aug. 10 that I opened my computer
at night at my apartment after the day’s work at the local newspaper
and saw next week’s cover story was on “Federer.” I was sitting on my
bed in a room that got sudden blustery cross-winds from the
Mediterranean, which wasn’t far down the hill below the apartment’s
big balcony. Rent was around $250. I opened the file and started
reading about what the writer called a “Federer Moment.” I read as far
as “I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she
hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on
one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.” And
suddenly something I missed very badly and worried might somehow be
gone wasn’t; I was about to read what looked like at least 10,000 new
words of David Foster Wallace writing about … well, who gave a fuck.
For me it was a Wallace Moment.

(My brother noted that among the events since his death it would have
been very, very nice to have had Wallace check in on, moreso even than
Obama’s rhetoric which he had evidently actually started writing
about, the publication of Andre Agassi’s memoir with its reported
detailing by the star of how much he felt like a slave to the game and
just hated it – an apparent complete upending of the Tracy Austin
model of bland memoirizing Wallace decried – ranks bittersweetly
high.)

(Oh yeah, and being homesick for Wallace after reading “Federer as a
Religious Experience” set off a search of what was available locally,
meaning on the Internet, leading to my re-reading “Tense Present,”
which led to my finally buying Garner’s guide to usage, the
contribution of which to my quality of life and that of everyone to
whom I’ve gifted it since has been truly great. That’s one of like a
dozen (that I can think of, I’m sure way more) major fantastic book
recommendations that live in the Wallace œuvre, notably including if
you missed it in “Everything and More” G.H. Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s
Apology.” Hardy: “Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for
second-rate minds.”)

The first time I got a Wallace high-five was a year and change before
that, in April 2005, when I think I just found the Atlantic piece
looking over some newsstand. This was during that period when our
national politics was really in the crapper. Bush had been re-elected
(sic) a handful of months earlier. (Fuck that guy, still.) “Host” is
full of Wallace Moments: “’Mondo, whose price for letting outside
parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per
evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony
Meso-american features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to
giant mammals everywhere.” Any world where they’re still putting out
sentences like that can’t be all bad, I think I thought. But looking
back over “Host” I think what was really remedial about it at the time
was how Wallace confronted what was happening politically in a
reportorial, microcosmic way that was (of course) painstaking in
avoiding any reactionary-ness of its own (any momentarily rewarding
but ultimately defeating sentiment such as “Fuck That Guy”). It’s a
profile of conservative radio talk-show host Mr. John Ziegler but its
journalistic eye falls on the Nicholas Berg beheading, Joe
Scarborough, “Saddam’s capture, the Abu Ghraib scandal,” imputations
of “socialistic leanings” to the United States, “‘the Arab World,’”
Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the Iraq playing cards,
anti-French, pro-Bush bumper stickers, Fox News, the American media
landscape in general, Sean Hannity, G.G. Liddy, Michael Savage (“Just
on general principles, Michael Savage is not going to be included or
referred to in any way, ever.”), Clear Channel Communications Inc.,
the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and talk radio in general, to make
a provisional list. Wallace took it all on: “Why is conservatism so
hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw?” Then there is his
presentation of the technical arcana of U.S. broadcast radio in
general and KFI AM-640 in particular, which defies summary and really
should not have been possible for anybody but a graduate in all like
five of the pertinent fields.

The essay came at a very bad moment for American journalism, for
American politics, for American Americans. The partisan undertow was
so strong and the swirl of disinformation emanating from the top so
overwhelming that at its worst it seemed the written word was on its
way down. Wallace stepped up with his sanity of tone and authority of
detail, his pacific sensibility and his genius humor, his ability to
observe and recall and his mastery of language. Some of us were just
sitting around feeling bad about how things were. And there he was
hammering like John Henry. We needed it. That was another thing about
Wallace, I always felt like he was on our side, on the good guys’
side, doing the good thing, for all of us.

Wallace’s killing himself sent me to everything I hadn’t read,
including “Infinite Jest.” As a fan and in light of his death it felt
like there was some masochism in it: This has been lost. This has been
lost. Although not all lost, because I’d never met Pemulis or
Incandenza or the hero, Don Gately, and then there I was, copiously
knowing them, in early July of last year in the park on a blanket
under a sky like on the cover of the book reading the Gately overdose
scene and then suddenly he’s on the beach also lying on his back. One
way I understand what Wallace told Michael Silverblatt about the novel
being structured like a Sierpinski Gasket (stop me if this is obvious)
is there are multiple occurrences of the reluctant avenger story (or
“revenge/recidivism action genre,” as Wallace has it) for example
J.O.I.’s feature-length “Blood Sister : One Tough Nun” that are small
triangles inside the big triangle of the novel itself which climaxes
with (spoiler alert) Gately being forced to call on the brute skills
he has forsworn to awesomely smack down the muscle-y Canadians in
Hawaiian shirts. The fact that Wallace saw how such a vicious infinite
regress of plot could work and then that he pulled it off on the scale
of “Infinite Jest” … well, I think what the “L.A. Weekly” reviewer had
to say according to the top blurb on the latest edition about BIWHM
being “a supersonic delight” is ridiculous, but I sure am inclined to
agree with what he wrote next (as cheesy as the author may have found
it): “David Foster Wallace is one badass fiction writer.” (Plus how
witty is it to lampoon the “revenge/recidivism action genre” for how
hopelessly simple and self-serving it is, and by extension to make fun
of us humans for being so emotionally simple to manipulate and please
when it comes to being told a story, for just eating that kind of
thing up going back to Odysseus laying waste to the suitors and
probably further – how witty to make fun of it and us but then to play
with a perfect poker face as the climax of your novel a scene in which
the reluctant hero has just been pushed too far and is forced to break
out a can of dazzling whoop-ass, and to make that scene as unabashedly
gratifying and irony-free as anything in Eastwood? So witty.)

Two months after Wallace killed himself my brother came through town
again on tour. He and his band stayed at our apartment (the one I now
share with Space Needle girl) in Brooklyn. This was not long after our
move-in. That time there were five guys in the band. One of them
decided to sleep in the van even though all the gear was safely in the
house and around 3 a.m. the cops, responding to a call a neighbor’d
placed, woke him up and brought him to the apartment and rang the
doorbell to prove he belonged there, and that gave us some idea of the
neighborhood we’d moved into. The night the band played the next
morning there was a non-resident girl in the apartment too. (I’m
thinking of Michael Casper’s revelation in his cool “n+1” piece that
the names for Pemulis and characters in “Girl with Curious Hair” came
from a story a classmate at the U. of Arizona told Wallace about the
music scene his brother was in. But where did the title of the Wallace
story come from? He was about done with Amherst I think when the
absolutely sexy music video featuring recently (as of spring 2010)
elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown’s future wife in a bikini
masturbating a bottle of suntan lotion (1984, it was tanning lotion
not sunscreen yet) came out. As wonks of a certain stripe will know,
the band was Digney Fignus, and the song was “The Girl with the
Curious Hand.” Just a thought.) That first night in November 2008 my
brother and his band were in town we, me and my brother who shares my
love of the writing of David Foster Wallace and anyway who I don’t get
to see much, because he lives in Omaha and I live here, went out to
the bar and spent a while there and eventually listened to each other
try to talk about it.

It wasn’t Wallace’s plug for it in the “Oxford American Writer’s
Thesaurus” that made me go out and buy an Oxford English Dictionary
but I’ll admit one of the moments I felt really happy to own one was
when I read what Wallace had to say about it (at the end of his Word
Note for “hairy”): “If you’re thinking of using any of the more
esoteric adjectives here, you’d be well advised to keep an OED close
at hand. This is not simply a gratuitous plug of another Oxford
University Press product. … Actually, why not screw appearances and
state the obvious: No really serious writer should be without an OED,
whether 20 volumes, a CD-ROM, or online. Nothing else comes close.” So
now I can look. Punch line. “Words or a sentence expressing the point
of a joke, play, song, etc.” Fair enough. But whence and when? Twain
is full of them but did he call them that? Does “punch line” appear in
Shakespeare? Even earlier?

Turns out “Variety” first had it in 1921, 25 November 8/1 : “All of
their sure-fire punch-lines went over.”


-Tom McCarthy

After high school and a few years before getting to college, kicked
out of my mother’s house and living with my father about an hour or so
from my hometown, riding shotgun with him every day to the city I’d
been exiled from so he could work and I could play, I spent each drive
there and back for a month reading Infinite Jest.  I didn’t know
anything about DFW then and had selected the book on a complete whim.

“It’s a book about a movie that kills people because it’s so
entertaining,” I remember saying, early on. (It is about so much more
than that, of course, but I wouldn’t understand that for a while).
Dad, behind the wheel, shakes his head.

One late afternoon on the way home, there’s a sudden vibration beneath
the vehicle, then a jump and plummet and the ungodly sound of steel
against pavement at high speed.  We’re leaning left into oncoming
traffic when a fully intact wheel goes sailing past us.  The car
actually broke apart.  An entire wheel had just snapped off.  But
somehow Dad manages to steer the uncontrollable beast to the shoulder,
to a stop, and we’re stranded in the plains.  Neither of us have cell
phones, so Dad sets off for the nearest farm (which ends up being
about three miles away).  I find my copy of the book in the scattered
mess the jolt has created.  While Dad’s away I get to the section
detailing Eschaton.  The light starts diminishing.  I lean closer to
the window but the light keeps going.  None of the electronics in the
car work, everything is shot.  I dig through the glove box.  I end up
finding an old emergency kit way at the back of the trunk with a
flashlight that has deteriorating battery power but produces just
enough yellow light to read by.  I’m nearly finished with that section
of the novel when Dad gets back, out of breath.  We have a while to
wait for the tow truck.

The Six Runner Up Entries: 

I'm in a hospital conference room, attending my first 12 Step meeting
and wondering if I'll ever ID with these guys or not.  Part of me
tries to be open to what the 12 Steps offer; another part looks for
Crocodiles, uses "ID" rather than "identify" and compares this to the
Gately, et al. stories.

October 2008.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic: My father's dying
from a brain tumor.  He has two months left and I'm driving every
other week between my home in Texas and his in New Mexico.  While in
Texas, I'm also shuttling from motel to various friends' houses
because I've been kicked out of my own.  I'd bottomed out in my own
addiction and my girlfriend wanted me out.

I'll log 7300 miles in eight weeks.  Amidst all this moving and loss,
I carry Infinite Jest everywhere.  David had recently taken his own
life; reading IJ is an attempt to hold to some part of him as well as
an attempt to understand the whole addiction thing.  I read it on
stops along the 12-hour drives to and from NM, I read it in dad's
hospital room and before my 12 Step meetings and during sleepless
nights in unfamiliar beds.  It's the one healthy thing that takes my
mind off everything else and actually helps me not slide back into
addiction.  It sustains me when I start looking at places along the
road steep enough to drive off of and not have to feel anything again.
 It's like David's spirit saying, "Hey, you don't have to do that."

The substantiality of the book, too, is a comfort; the only solid
thing in a world that's dissolved.  I re-read the characters'
testimonials and Gately's struggle in the hospital.  It's epiphanic.
Like being 14 again and reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time,
multiplied by ten.  It's hard to remember I haven't actually met these
characters in person.

Today, I'm 15 months sober.  My father is gone, but my girlfriend and
I are enjoying a renaissance that I'm gratefully present for.  David,
too, is gone, but I'll be always thankful for the gifts he left us.
They've meant more than I can express; his books feel like gifts
handed directly to me.  I hope I return even a fraction of this
extraordinary generosity to the world.

-Josh W.