Dreams of DFW (DFW Memorial Part VI)

I dreamed of David Foster Wallace a few nights ago. He looked just like his photos, the ones where he has long hair and no bandana. He was smiling, and I was standing next to my spouse, and David was asking me how I was doing, and what was going on in my life. I started to cry. I was trying to tell him that I knew he had been sad and that I hoped he was OK now. In my dream, he had tried to kill himself but failed ...
He smiled and said, "I'm doing fine. I'm not sad anymore. But tell me about you. ..."
And that was it.
I know why I dreamed the dream. That day, I had finally got a look at the new, posthumous book of his.
It's a copy of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College, an essay I dearly love. It didn't have a title when he gave it. Now it's called, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." Of course, the speech wasn't really long enough for a proper book. So the publisher decided to print one sentence per page, creating a book that comes in at 144 pages.
In theory, this could be a good idea, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the language.
But I thought it made the speech seem disjointed. Kind of like someone reading aloud at too slow a pace.
On a more positive note, I love the cover. It's white with a little tiny goldfish at the bottom.

The goldfish is part of the opening anecdote:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
... If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

The parable of the fish also figured prominently into his novel Infinite Jest, which is a personally totemic novel for me.
I will end up buying the book, even though you can read the essay for yourself on the Internet here. Some people might say it's dumb to buy a book of an essay that you can read on the Internet, but this doesn't account for the phenomenon of text-as-beloved-object. I love the permanence and tangibility and symbolism of words written on bound paper. Not the same as the computer, not to me.

Reader, I married him

Here's a selection from the conclusion of the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect concord is the result.

Read the novel Jane Eyre via Project Gutenberg.
I identify a lot with bookish Jane, but I can also be the madwoman in the attic. Thanks to the spouse for putting up with both. Happy anniversary.

What I'm reading now

My library school class is coming to a fast close. I'm a little sad, because this has been one my favorite classes of library school. It's called "Adult Services," and it focused on what's known as "Reader Advisory," or recommending voluntary reading material to adults. This could be anything a person wants to read: literary fiction, romance novels, science fiction, whatever. I'm working on my final project now, which is an annotated bibliography on the topic of "great books discussion groups." I'm taking a broad view of "great books": My reading tells me a librarian should ask, "Great for who? Great in what way?" And I definitely don't mean that in a relativistic, throw-away-the-standards, "what anybody wants is fine" sort of way. I mean it in a rigorous, standards-based, "you're not going to stick my patrons with a boring book" sort of way. So I'm reading articles on how to select the best sorts of books for discussion groups, with nods toward the Western canon, multiculturalism and diversity, bestsellers vs. award winners, readability, and how books lend themselves (or don't) toward group discussion. Lots of interesting intersections here.
On another front, my book group just finished a very long selection (A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, 500 plus pages), and now we're going to read two much shorter young adult novels (Stuck in Neutral and Cruise Control by Terry Trueman). So this means I have extra time to read my own choices. Nice. Here's what I'm reading right now:

• Nothing Right, by Antonya Nelson. This is literary fiction, short stories about upper-middle-class Americans and their nefarious ways. Affairs, deceptions, break-ups, stabs in the back, etc. I'm not sure why it's so interesting to read about the twisted characters in Nelson's stories, but it sure is. Nelson has this fascination-with-the-grotesque thing going, much like Flannery O'Connor. Except Flannery wrote about people living in the (mostly) rural South of the 1950s; Nelson writes about people who listen to NPR.
• Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the GOP, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The conservative authors argue that the Republican Party needs to develop and promote policies that provide economic stability for the working class. Douthat was recently named a columnist to the New York Times, which will certainly amplify his voice on the national stage. I read Douthat's blog occasionally; I like that he puts his intellectual integrity ahead of his loyalty to party. (Actually, I love writers who put intellectual integrity ahead of loyalty to party -- any party. This is a nonpartisan blog.)
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky. This book looks at the implications of the Internet for group dynamics and organization. Shirky recently wrote a blog post, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," on the decline of newspapers that was pretty brilliant. He concluded we're in the grips of systemic, historical change similar to the advent of the printing press. So I'm just starting on his book and interested to see what the implications are for the future of journalism.
  

And after all this, I really, really want to read and stop putting off reading The Brothers Karamazov. It's time!