Mr. Kitzhaber!!

Please tell me there's a link for this.

Also, this is a fantastic speech.

If it was recorded and uploaded I can't find it. If I ever do find it you better believe it will find its' way here.

Throw in an Orcs tribute I know Gabe and a couple other kids threw up some weird facial variations in the past week or so

Yep. It's great though. It's part essay, part short story.

There's a bunch of essays on depression in Infinite Jest too. This one's actually a jab at another author who didn't want to sleep with him or something. And that's the thing: like I said I was a sad college freshman who basically didn't see the point, terribly depressed, off the Xanax the doctor prescribed because I couldn't study etc. etc. and IJ's depictions of additction, depression and (hilarious) suicides sort of made me step back from the edge, to paraphrase a Soul Asylum song goddamnit. So imagine how pissed I was when I found out he had died, and not in the theatrical way either. It's like, thank you for saving my life, but I didn't contribute anything to the literary world to try to save yours.

I haven't read Infinite Jest or anything by him. On my way to library now. Thanks.50/50 chance I ask for infinite zest.

Cool! I'll read it later, but I kind of agree: as much as Infinite Jest changed my life (I was a freshman in college experiencing a kind of cold (literally and metaphorically) that I hadn't experienced before and read the thing in 3 days without sleep and skipped all my classes) Broom of the System was pretty lazy, like a really bad Pynchon tribute or something, full of short essays lazily stitched into a plot. Infinite Jest does that too to an extent, but it had matured, beyond previous novels that attempted it like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being or Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

I'm sitting inches away from a thousand page David Foster Wallace Reader that my mom gave me for Christmas, and I haven't even opened it yet. I don't know if it's out of sadness, like listening to Jay Reatard or Sparklehorse, or if it's just because whatever's in there won't be as good as Infinite Jest is what's stopping me from picking it up.

To be fair, DFW wasn't especially fond of Broom either. In fact, the main reason I haven't read it is because of the constant disparaging remarks he makes about it in interviews. Same goes for Westward, The Course of Empire Takes it Way. (Well, that, and I'm not a big fan of his short stories.)

Have you seen the trailer for The End of the Tour, zest? Thoughts?

I might be in the minority, but I like Broom of the System. You're right, though, IZ--it very much does feel like a Pynchon tribute. But, that's one of the things I like about it.

I taught Broom this last semester to some really stellar undergrads and I chose it because it let me smuggle "theory" in the backdoor without assigning it. The book, as Wallace once said in an interview, can be read as dialogue between Wittgenstein's and Derrida's ideas about language, with a ton of Hegel mixed in. So, if we read that as "the linguistic turn" and combine it with its Pychonian aspects, it makes for a pretty good teaching text. Lenore's paranoia that she's not a real person and is only a construct of language or a collection of other people's saying, etc. etc. The book let the kids talk about and explore the role of language in a way they really hadn't up to that point in their English classes. Sure, it's not a perfect novel by any means, but it's funny and smart and allowed us to talk about certain theoretical issues that hadn't been addressed yet in the course. If you ever get the time, I'd recommend giving it a read. It's really interesting to see how Wallace's later thematic obsessions are foregrounded in Broom, too.

too soon