One person’s mind links naturally what another’s finds disparate. The arbitrariness of this behavior is slave to an individual’s vicissitudes and today’s connection is tomorrow’s incongruence. Associations are how we navigate the world and travel to and through influences. Paths spread before us and we choose some to abandon others. These elections contour us while we mold them. The following is nothing more than how one person, on a particular day, went from a single place to end up far away.
Perhaps it is the fact that both became known by their first, middle, and surnames. Neither was particularly handsome, but each was beautiful. Or maybe it’s the worship of genius that structured the fulsome obituaries that grieved their premature deaths. There is no doubt that I admired their work. Whatever the reason, my mind associated David Foster Wallace and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The world is a reduced place without them and the latter’s death, for impetuses beyond my command, renewed interest in reading the former. After his suicide, Harper’s Magazine generously provided links to, I believe, all of the large articles Wallace published with them between 1989 and 2008. This included “Tense Present,” his masterpiece survey of the English language and its use as an instrument of discrimination and class division; an essay that not only exemplifies his inimitable and carefully fashioned use of the language, but that is also recommendable to anyone who opens his or her mouth to speak in the U.S. It is also possible to find “Shipping Out”. This is a holidaymaker’s account of voyaging on an extravagant Caribbean cruise where Wallace’s criticism of the experience suggests a larger condemnation of the corrupting nature of our nation’s pursuit of incessant comfort and the resulting tedium. Buried in this last essay is praise for Frank Conroy’s 1967 book Stop-Time. Wallace writes that it is “arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and is one of the books that first made poor old humble yours truly want to try to be a writer”. Both this text and its author were unknown to me, but I discovered that Conroy had directed the influential Iowa Writers’ Workshop for eighteen years. This fact, combined with Wallace’s recommendation, were enough for me to purchase a copy.
Perhaps by reading Conroy's book you will find your way to somewhere distant and unimagined?
Perhaps it is the fact that both became known by their first, middle, and surnames. Neither was particularly handsome, but each was beautiful. Or maybe it’s the worship of genius that structured the fulsome obituaries that grieved their premature deaths. There is no doubt that I admired their work. Whatever the reason, my mind associated David Foster Wallace and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The world is a reduced place without them and the latter’s death, for impetuses beyond my command, renewed interest in reading the former. After his suicide, Harper’s Magazine generously provided links to, I believe, all of the large articles Wallace published with them between 1989 and 2008. This included “Tense Present,” his masterpiece survey of the English language and its use as an instrument of discrimination and class division; an essay that not only exemplifies his inimitable and carefully fashioned use of the language, but that is also recommendable to anyone who opens his or her mouth to speak in the U.S. It is also possible to find “Shipping Out”. This is a holidaymaker’s account of voyaging on an extravagant Caribbean cruise where Wallace’s criticism of the experience suggests a larger condemnation of the corrupting nature of our nation’s pursuit of incessant comfort and the resulting tedium. Buried in this last essay is praise for Frank Conroy’s 1967 book Stop-Time. Wallace writes that it is “arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and is one of the books that first made poor old humble yours truly want to try to be a writer”. Both this text and its author were unknown to me, but I discovered that Conroy had directed the influential Iowa Writers’ Workshop for eighteen years. This fact, combined with Wallace’s recommendation, were enough for me to purchase a copy.
Perhaps by reading Conroy's book you will find your way to somewhere distant and unimagined?
