Yes indeed, nothing better than looking over old emails at work to delete ones I don't need and realizing that I am occasionally a damn fine writer. Every so often I look up from my stupor of days and investigate my life, and I realize that I've lost the impulse to write. It never seemed like a big deal when I had it. I'd write long blog posts and emails and journal entries, and I was always pulling out my pocket notebook to write something down, but I very rarely wrote stories. Since that was my benchmark of being a writer, I didn't think I was doing anything worthwhile. Now I look back at how frequently I wrote in my late teens and early twenties and I wonder what the hell happened.

When I started this blog, I saw it as my responsibility to publish things in it, almost like I had been hired to write a daily column for a newspaper. My deadline was midnight every night. I could take vacations without getting prior approval, but it was on the understanding that I might lose my two or three readers.

I later learned that (a few) other people read my blog at various points but never left comments, so I didn't know it at the time. If anybody I don't know personally has read my blog, I still don't know it. Over time, though, I must have lost all of my readers, mostly to my own neglect.

I meet very few new people these days, and I've fallen out of touch with most of the old ones. I became friends with library students the first two years I was a supervisor, but in the third year, I really haven't. I don't feel a desire to hang out with people in my German class, and even if I did, they live in Albuquerque. And I get tired and misanthropic in most social settings involving more than one other person.

Writing is a famously solitary action, but that clearly isn't the whole story. Without a sense of audience, I often have no urge to write. The more time I spend alone, the less time I spend thinking and, of course, the less I have to describe anyway.

Also, I guess, as I get older I'm continuously losing my engagement with the world. My curiosity is mostly intact, but I primarily focus it on things that other people have written. I get little sense of wonder from encountering new things in the world, and indeed very little seems genuinely new. I often seemed to have an unlimited desire (but very limited ability) to observe and probe people, the way they think and speak and dress and move, the bizarre shapes their relationships with each other take, the mystery of personality. I thought about it often, but to little effect. I've been thinking about it less and less, and I don't know why it is that I no longer become fascinated with people any more.

I can still get plenty annoyed with people, though. As I type this, someone in the preceptorial that meets in the study room attached to the library is polluting my ears with his overwrought, high-pitched, percussive laughter. The sound is like an evil clown in a Saturday morning cartoon, only it has a genuine lunatic quality that cartoons can't match. I wonder if it isn't the student Anne dubbed "hyena boy".

So there, I've met my digital quota for the month. Here's hoping I keep it up tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt that M. Night Shyamalan had died in a plane crash, or perhaps it was from a horrible disease. What a tragedy it would be if we lost the worst Hollywood filmmaker of the present era (if not ever), and thus all the terrible movies he'll produce in the future. It is a great relief to check google news and find that the top Shyamalan hits are still about this historically important director being invited to the White House as a guest at the state dinner for Manmohan Singh.

fumbling toward ecstacy

Epicenters of hamhock faces:

Sports Center
Boston, MA
ex-members of Saturday Night Live
high school sports coaches
reporters for Men's Fitness
County Kerry
John Kerry
Kerry O'Malley's brother Mike O'Malley
Martine Kerry O'Michael O'Malley
McDonalds in Ohio
Ted Mc'O'Hamhock Shyamalan Kennedy
within twenty minutes of any cornfield
and, I'm sure, also in Heaven

Anybody still reading? Read these two paragraphs from the Daily Howler about how poorly people understand the way the media and the government work in the U.S.:

Like Henneberger, Simon described a strange dual system. One side gets to yell objections—the more absurd the better. The other side is somehow required to make an impossibly complex presentation. One side is required to yell two words. The other side has to tick off long list of complex points.

To our ear, Simon and Henneberger were each describing a political system they can’t quite explain. One side gets to yell crazy things—and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka—a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

From: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082609.shtml

The following sentence appeared in an email from Conference Services about carpet being installed in the library:

Please do not “get in the way” of the crew when you stop by as we need them to get done with this project.

Can anyone tell me what she thought she was doing with the quotation marks? I really want to know. I'm strongly tempted to reply to the email and ask.

The world contracted again.

In the library, I came across a book from 1956 that was put together as an attempt to re-establish English political philosophy (since it was an English editor, who characteristically refers to none but the most significant philosophers outside England but will discusses minor British names at equal length). It's fascinating in a small way, since it contains thoughts on political philosophy which are recent enough to be recognizable, but far enough in the past that it examines subjects which are now taken for granted. The preface, for example, deplores the fact that English philosophy (from Russell through Ryle) killed the three-hundred-year-long tradition of political philosophers writing in English, who "concern[ed] themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality." This tradition is dead, and it outright says that the Logical Positivists killed it. And also the Marxists and the social scientists, the first because they were incorrigable relativists who looked at political theories as necessarily contingent, the second because they thought politics were too important to leave to the philosophers.

Topics in the book include an examination of the possibility of multiple moralities as opposed to a single, rationally decidable answer to every moral question; the grounds for the theory of natural rights; whether or not such a thing as the general will exists; and the philosophical justification of punishment. These topics are all discussed in contemporary writing, but I never see the premises so clearly laid out as they are in older texts, where they were still fresh. There's also an earnestness and sophistication of literary style in the old writing that is generally lacking today, alongside of a naiveté--charitably, a willingness to be naive when necessary.

It's not a book I want to read straight through, but I guess I'm glad it's in the library.

I'm currently looking through Insound, trying to find things to buy and shifting between two poles. The first pole is thinking that I have the money and I would like to support Insound, the bands I like, and the physical music industry in general. The second pole is thinking, what am I, a capitalist cheerleader?

I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.

But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.

I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.

In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.

It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.

For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.

Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.

And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."

Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.

And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)

There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.

But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.

*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.

I just received a book of German philosophy through interlibrary loan; I knew at the time I was filling out the request form that I couldn't possibly want it once it arrived. The book is by an 18th century thinker named Salomon Maimon. Last names were rare for Eastern European Jews of that time, but he picked one to fit in better among German philosophical circles; he chose this name because of his respect for Maimonides. The book, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, is Maimon's comments on Kant's first Critique, which I'm still interested in even though six years ago I would have scorned someone who continued focusing on program authors in a non-academic setting. I requested Maimon because I read in a book on the history of philosophy that Kant said in a letter, “none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does.”

When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.

Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.

I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.

And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?

I went almost two months without any translation jobs, and now suddenly, all at once, I get two big jobs that are due very soon. I knew that one of them was on its way, since a company I worked for in the past told me there were getting a 500 page document and were looking to break it up among their freelance translators. They asked how many pages I thought I could do between 2/27 and 3/12, and I said I could do about 30 pages. Then they sent it on Friday, all 30 pages, and said that actually it was due on 3/4--so I have eight fewer days to translate it.

Also, I got a call on Friday around 7 a.m. from a German who, thank God, was speaking English. I had sent an application to his agency at the beginning of February, and he asked, "Have you done any contract work?"

"I've only been a freelancer."

"No no, have you done any contract work for an agency?"

I thought he was asking if I had ever worked for an agency, so I said yes.

Then a little while later he sent the document and it turns out he meant had I ever translated a contract. Which, no, I hadn't, although I would have answered the same way. It was a five-page document which I would have asked around 80 € for, but I asked him how much he would like to pay and he said 150 €. So that was lucky. It was kind of fun to translate, too, because I was able to find what all the terms meant, and then I had to contract it up in my translation, make it contracty. There's also a translation forum I go to for help, and a few people gave really useful explanations of legal terms.

So I turned the contract in last night, and now I'm on to the catalog. For the first ten pages it was pretty easy, just product specs for which I was mostly able to figure out how to phrase it in English. Then I came to the middle of the document, where it switched suddenly from parts for heating systems, to parts for energy production plants. If anyone knows why these would be in the same catalog, I'd love for you to tell me. Anyway, now I have to figure out how things like building management systems, control protocols, cable ties, automation systems, setpoint values, and other things I'd never heard of all work together. I need a Rosetta stone-like document that is talking about the same sort of thing, in English, as my document is in German. If it's a dual language document, well that would be peachy.

Our wall broke. Our poorly constructed house has a cheap layer of drywall covering the adobe, and the wall by the shower eroded to the point where the tiles have nothing to hang on to anymore. So now I have to clean up the house and the yard as quickly as I can before calling the landlord, and God forbid, maybe they'll pin the eroded wall on us. Any thoughts, non-existent readers?

It's been too long . . .

I may have forgotten how to blog. I might be testing that theory in the next few days. Someone whose name begins with an X was reading through here and leaving comments tonight, and it seemed a shame to me that I haven't updated since November. I'm once again amazed, looking my old posts, how different I seem to myself when I read what I've written. I have a personality that doesn't come out in daily life very much, particularly now that I no longer live near any close friends from school. I go months without having an intellectual conversation with an interested partner.

I recently finished Steven B. Smith's Reading Leo Strauss, one of no fewer than six "apology of Leo Strauss" books in the St. John's library. After reading Reading, I could see myself going through Strauss's major works at some point, even though I'm still unclear why he's so thoroughly opposed to historicism, and I don't know what evidence there is for his esoteric readings of Plato. I read the book because the lecturer last week spoke on Alfarabi, and this week it's on the statesmanship of Lincoln--two obviously Strass-influenced lectures in a row--and so I thought I'd finally try to figure out what the origin of this stuff was.

I still have an enormous preference for the philosophy of Richard Rorty, an avowed historicist whom the Straussians would, furthermore, likely consider "unserious" or something like that because he doesn't have a central enough focus on politics. Oh well. It takes all kinds to make an ivory tower.

I am proud to report that both John McCain and Barack Obama have conceded the election to me. We fought a hard campaign, but I obviously fought a lot harder and received much more love an many more votes. As I see you all before me tonight, all of you who wrote my name in on your ballots and sent me lots of campaign money that I spent on cream puff pastries from the Zia Diner, pumpkins from McCall's patch, owl pendants, Dale Cooper trading cards, Grant Morrison comic books and Bob Dylan CDs, I feel a great sense of honor and joy. For the next four years, I will be proud to sleep all day while my excellent vice presidential choice, David Duchovny, makes all the decisions. Truly, the owls are not what they seem. My fellow Owls and I will lead this country out of its lack of cultural prominence, and we will once more fight off the ghosts and make the night safe for donuts. The Owl Party, though, is not just about partying. We are also about Batman, those delicious peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's, reviving David Foster Wallace, and producing more and better cats. Tonight, we are all Democrats, we are all Republicans, and we all voted for me for president. I'm pretty sleepy now, so I'll let Mr. Duchovny take over from here.

Back in September, either Scott or Anne heard about a Mountain Goats concert scheduled for Halloween night. John Darnielle and co. were coming through the southwest like a wagon train on amphetamines, parking in Arizona on October 29th and then careening right over New Mexico to Lubbock, Texas for Halloween. Scott wrote a polite message to the mild-mannered, wild-eyed singer, asking him to consider stopping here in order to relieve our high desert misery. He got no reply, which meant we were going to Lubbock.

Life moves slowly here. The last thing I remember is walking down to St. Michael's High School on a warm, drizzly night to see a fireworks display with horrid, beer-sipping, pickup truck-kicking musical accompaniment. Then I think I went to sleep for four months and woke up last Friday to find that someone had placed me in the driver's seat of Hoffman and I was speeding down Highway 40, headed east, a Monster energy drink in my cup holder, shuffling keyboard rock on the stereo. Morrissey was in the passenger seat, and Delirium of the Endless was doing something with scissors in the back. I looked a little closer and saw that it was Scott with a pompadour haircut and an oversized button-down shirt, and Anne with a purple-dyed wig on one side of her head. Then I set my mind to remembering, which is something it does very poorly and only once a season, and realized that I hadn't been asleep, and then I remembered the contents of the first paragraph of this blog.

What is a Lubbock, you might ask? I knew the answer after a few more hours of driving. It turns out that it's a flat bit of earth on the western edge of Texas, where somebody decided to plant a bunch of store fronts from the 1950s, turn on some neon lights, name the streets with letters of the alphabet, and sprout a few Texas hipsters who aspire to someday be from Austin. On Avenue H, which had been subtitled Buddy Holly Avenue, there's an art gallery with a performance space attached, and at 11:30 p.m. on Halloween, John Darnielle jumped out from the garage door that opened onto the stage, glanced at the crowd, saw Scott-as-Morrissey in the front row, and walked over pointing at him and grinning madly. Then he grabbed the microphone, glanced at his bassist, Peter, and started to mouth along to The Four Seasons' "Oh What A Night".

I've only seen the band once before, as described in the first post on this blog, in fact. There was no drummer last time, and Peter only joined him for a few songs. This time nearly everything was with accompaniment, and in the middle they were joined by Kaki King, the opening act. Kaki is an angry-looking, very young guitar virtuoso, able to play different melodies with each hand, one tapping notes on the neck and the other finger-picking, while also thumping a beat with her palm. When she was on with her own band, she seemed to take delight in telling the audience that she'd been up all night drinking, that we weren't fucking rowdy enough, that the people to the right who were briefly moshing were showing us up on the left, that she was contractually obligated to play this next song every night for the rest of her life, "so you can all touch yourselves now, or someone else." The song she then played is apparently her most famous, just her on guitar making a danceable, complex, memorable little rhythm, fingers moving at a hundred miles per hour. It was pleasantly rousing, and the crowd got into it, and she appeared to resent the fact that she'd written something people liked.

So I didn't like her, but John sure seemed to. When she joined him in the middle of his set, he described his embarrassment when she sent him a demo, because he was her fan and he didn't think he was good enough to play with her. "So I wrote lyrics from the perspective of a stalker," he said, and then broke into the song they'd been strumming as he spoke; his lyrics and singing once again showed that he's a master songwriter, while she's (at least at this point) a snivelling poser.

The next song John introduced by saying, "This wasn't on the set list tonight, but someone in the audience told us it should have been." Familiar chords crashed around the room, and then, "Why do you come here? And why-huh-hiii-huh-hiiii-huh-hiiiiii . . . why do you hang around?" While he sang, he made a few airy gestures with his hands, and then he bent toward the audience to grasp people while he sang. Scott had come equipped with a bush-like bunch of flowers to wave, and halfway through the song he threw them on stage. John picked them up and did the Morrissey dance right, then walked over to Scott and took him by the hand, and for half a minute they sang to each other, "You had to sneak into my room, 'just' to read my diary. 'It was just to see, just to see' (All the things you knew I'd written about you...) Oh, so many illustrations, oh, but I'm so very sickened, oh, I am so sickened now." Then John took off his glasses and handed them to Scott, trading him for the pair of black-rimmed Morrissey glasses Scott had on.

Oh, what a night indeed, dear dwindling number of readers. It ended at the Lubbock Denny's where a Johnny sophomore who had told Anne that we could crash on his floor (and then revoked the offer the night before) held court before a group of local admirers. He waxed on lovingly to his high school friends, embellishing the difficulty of the St. John's program, oh, how very hard and impossible it is! Anne even remembers him calling Johnnies the Navy SEALS of the intellectual realm. There were about twenty people at the table, one of them a Freshman who had come along for the show but had been snubbed by a guy she was hoping to hang out with, and now she wanted to go home. Luckily, so did we, so we offered her the extra seat in our car, then turned around and left the arid plains of Lubbock for the juniper spotted wonderland of New Mexico at night.

It is the time of year when coats accompany everyone like second skins, making friends and acquaintances immediately identifiable even from a distance when outside, remaining behind as a reminder of their presence when they get up to go to the bathroom or find a book. They add so much to people's personalities that they are like character in physical form. I can almost imagine that if I wore another person's coat for a while, I would eventually become that person. Forget shoes, walk a mile in someone else's coat. Put on James Dean's jacket and lean against a brick wall with a cigarette and soon enough you'll be slightly mournful and act recklessly. Take Lincoln's jacket and stand at a lectern and surely great eloquence will flow from your lips.

I'm surprised there isn't some ritual involving the resurrection of the dead by means of their coat. Well, there's that scene in Beetlejuice I guess. I can't help but think there's more of a person in his or her coat than in any other object they keep with them. The question then arises, does the personality come from the coat or does the coat pick it up over time, like a cat rolling around on concrete? Does the coat call out to its future wearer from the clothing rack? Does a tailor possess the creative power of a deity?

A coat resting on the back of a chair, when its wearer is somewhere else, transforms a whole room into a warehouse for souls. It sits inert, waiting for the mind that it completes to return. I almost expect that its wearer will sprout from beneath it, arms filling out sleeves, and walk away. At any moment, the coat itself might just rise into mid-air and start cooking dinner or watching television.

My last day at work, and one of the treasurers I work with just left me a message and said "so if you can holler back at me, I'll be here this morning."

A student just came up to the circulation desk holding an open book. "Excuse me," he said, "I have a question. Why does it have errors?"

I took the book from him and glanced down at the page. "What do you mean?"

"Like the year, punctuation . . . is it just typos?"

"Yeah," I said, and handed the book back to him.

"Okay, thank you," he said, and placed the book in the return cart.

October

Fall: the plants bulge with ripeness, sagging under their own weight, ready to die. The sunlight is diffuse and cold but also comforting, like the light from a fish tank when you're the only one left awake in the house; it has all the clemency that is missing from the merciless sunlight in mid spring. The ground sags and crumbles under each step, the moist remains of decaying leaves, spilled apple cider, acorns that didn't take root. The air is the breath of ghosts, the air drifts out of brick fireplaces and crawls out from underneath porches, unfurls out of old oak chests and billows out of the creases of long-unused wool blankets. The air is what the world will feel like when it finally stops running, chill and calm.

It rained yesterday, water showering down from the grey sky that was not mournful but mischievous. It splashed against the window and trickled down in little rivers, and pattered across the roof like all the steps ever taken there by cats that once were, like fingertips fluttering across a piano's keys at midnight. Such a relief after the onslaught of summer, which made a very great campaign this year indeed. Summer conquered all that came before its wrathful eyes, and hoarded its spoils in a cave by the seaside. It settled there to drink and eat continuously, never sated, and thus engorged its body with the stolen goods. Now it lies prone and rotting, overthrown by its own greed. The rain crept over to laugh at it softly.

Now night comes on like a festival, decking the sky with its banners of stars, making streamers out of the rustling leaves and tent flaps out of the shimmering horizon. Crickets spring about as jesters with fiddles, and every uncertain step in darkness is a roaring carnival ride. The moon is the bard of the world and it knows every song that ever was, because they were all written for the moon. Cats creep through the darkness, preying on unsuspecting revellers who don't keep a close enough eye on their wallets. The cotton candy air is sweet and pulls off in soft chunks, then melts on your tongue. Sometimes if you stand outside long enough until the wee hours of the morning, you can almost see the workmen come along and take it all down.

"The flowers cool from the on-going fires, the beginning-death of nature, into another warmth of the confession of the sin of picking, a warmth that is insularand yet is a secret bondage with the human hand, the ally of the blooming--the fulfillment--the entelechia of the flower. The counter of the plucking is the arranging, the arranging that takes place (wonderful phrase, takes place!) between streaming fingers. Rather than arranging, could we say weaving? The flowers, now having found each other again in the vase, can we see the basket?"

-From a 1980 Friday night lecture by Thomas Harris entitled "Work"

Thomas Harris sure was most exceptionally crazy. This is the second essay of his I've looked at here at the library, and neither one at any point even began to make sense. Going to his lectures must have been like having someone read Finnegan's Wake without even knowing English.

I was sitting on my back porch with Anne late on Saturday night after watching a movie with some friends when I heard a strange shout, and then Scott opened the door and told us that David Foster Wallace had hanged himself. The next several minutes were taken up by silence. The night felt split open, an unmistakable mark had just been made. I knew I would remember this moment, possibly for the rest of my life. This was the first time I had heard of the death of a famous person that hit me on a personal level, made me feel like something irrevocable had been lost.

At first I thought it was just the unexpectedness, the fact that Wallace wasn't on my list of people whose death I had to watch out for, because he was so young. I actually have a short list of people I check periodically just to make sure they're alive, people whose absence would make the world a different place: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Philip Roth. They're all around the age of my grandparents, and their loss would have similar significance for me as those first and primal family members. They are forces in my life, nearly aspects of my personality. They're the people who I most often look to and think of as paradigms of writerly greatness, personalities I might aspire to develop, models for myself if I took writing more seriously. I don't think I realized it before Saturday, but it turns out that Wallace was one of those too.

I first encountered Wallace in 2003, when Anne recommended him to me as one of the few writers she would call good. I read Infinite Jest first, over the course of a few weeks, and I think some part of me is still reading that book, still taking it in. Here was a modern writer who, in contradistinction to nearly everybody else, seemed to understand what it meant to write a masterpiece, and maybe had done so. A writer who took the vocation of novel writing seriously enough that he made something that was wholly his own, and yet spoke to people of my generation saying things we all knew but hadn't yet realized.

Later, I read Girl With Curious Hair and Supposedly Fun Things, and I saw that his range was even greater than I thought. He was a literary experimenter, an insightful cultural critic, a memoirist, a scholar. Moreover, his life was not so dissimilar from mine. I could identify with him in ways that I couldn't with other great writers like Dostoevsky or Faulkner, because the steps he took in learning to write were steps taken in a culture I recognized. In his youth he was smitten with the works of postmodern writers of the sixties and seventies, and then when he did an MFA program he realized that the goal wasn't imitation but rather development of the same ideas for one's self.

For years, then, I've thought of Wallace every so often when scanning the recent past for new, living writers who I wholly respect. They're not very easy to find. His work was leagues above, say, Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, because he just had a bigger view of the world, more insight into the culture, a better ability to express himself. This didn't result in my reading everything he wrote (although I've read a lot of it), but that was mainly because I thought there was time. I thought he'd be around for a long while yet, and that he'd produce a lot more work. When I learned that he taught a writing course, even though it was in Phoenix I thought that if I decided to do an MFA myself, I'd want to do it with him. I didn't know if that was possible, because I don't have the freedom to do an MFA right now, but it was in the back of my mind as a possibility. Even if I couldn't take a writing program with him, I would have liked to meet him, see him speak, get something signed.

Now that all that potential is gone, now that he is gone, I realize that for me, he represented something no other writer has: he was the best I've seen at expressing the hidden parts of our personality, the things that we feel as separations from other people and from popular culture, the thoughts that we can't share, the aspects of ourselves that seem inexpressible in words. These are the things he most often wrote about, things that seemingly preoccupied him. He described a feeling that I think is widespread in my generation that the world we're inheriting was not made for us, is not how we'd want it, but that perhaps we're powerless to change it. He was a champion of the hidden personality that can only be shared with close friends, and of the even more hidden depths that we can't share with anyone, the fear that deep down we ourselves don't know who we are and aren't sure we want to be anyone.

So today I'm feeling grief, having lost one of my champions, a man who made the world more understandable, a place that felt more desirable to live in. Mixed with that is a gratefulness that he wrote what he did. And mingled with that is a kind of despair, because if in the end Wallace couldn't find a way to live with the world as it was, to live with himself as he was, then what chance do I have?