David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, Vol. 2

Here is what I sent to McSweeney's, in memoriam:

In short and from my fixed perspective, Dave Wallace accomplished in his forty-six years that which no one else has yet to repeat: he, surely without knowing, embodied the bookish cool.

I met Dave for the first and last time when I was seventeen and a high school junior. I lived in Bloomington, IL, where famous authors don't live. But Dave was teaching at Illinois State, and my kick-ass English teacher, a friend of his, arranged for us to have coffee at a diner less than a mile from my house. The Garden of Paradise, where famous authors don't dine. She wanted us to meet and talk and "hash out ideas" about the essay (my first rather elementary stab at cultural criticism) that I had proposed to write on the so-called weird Americana phenomenon for her class.

Now I wasn't even sure what weird Americana meant or even how to explain what I thought maybe it kinda was, but Wallace had said it was David Lynch and my teacher had said that maybe DFW's stories and experimental prose was it too, so I threw it all together and tried for the first time to wrestle with Artistic Theories that made me feel very small.

You'll believe that I am not being rhetorically grandiose when I tell you that Dave's words changed my life. When first handed A.S.F.T.I.N.D.A. by the same kick-ass English teacher, I read it twice in two weeks, nearly pissed my pants laughing, rethought the purpose of the footnote and the dash and the comma and - hell - all of literature for that matter, fell into an obsessive love with the OED, realized that it wasn't only OK to swear in professionally-sound writing but that it was a fucking postmodern (?) necessity, and became lose-sleep-at-night afraid that I would never be able to write as well as this man despite my inescapable longing to do so and do so now (then).

Maybe Dave's stories and essays are not weird Americana after all, but to that seventeen year-old they were mesmerizingly weird and representative of my little corner of America, with its cornfields and state fairs and tornadoes and state colleges. Here was a (local!) author who thought what I thought - only more perceptively / who wrote how I wanted to write - with seemingly complete command / and who took as his subjects all that in which I too shared (or quickly discovered) interest.

So there I was in 1998, wrapped in the requisite flannel, Converses, and blue jeans with the frayed bottoms that come from cutting off the cuffs - the very picture of Clinton-era teen-spirit conformity while desperately trying to fit in - and I'm sitting alone in this diner booth, waiting for Dave to show up. I'm nervous as hell, and will remain so. He shows up fifteen minutes late, tells me not to get up, apologizes for tardiness, and sits down. And then he just starts talking.

He talks and I listen. Like we are old friends.

I think I said something stupid about Lynch or tried hard to accurately identify something as w.A. He smiled and graciously agreed, expounding further on why I was "right," and then kept on talking. I just watched him - watched him extrapolating theory onto the everyday; watched him spitting his dipped tobacco into a coffee mug followed by a nervous glance to make sure he didn't confuse the the spit mug with the coffee mug when he reached for a sip seconds later; watched him work himself up physically with excitement when explaining how unexpectedly great this adolescent novel called Endzone was and how he was going to go back into the local downtown used bookstore to try to find the next book in the series; watched him adjusting his glasses and running his hand through his hair in a way that no so much suggested but defined the grunge-scholar or the PoMo Bohemian-intellectual. Every detail emitted a reality of anti-falseness.

In that short half-hour, he confirmed for me what I had always wanted to believe: that bibliophilia + central Illinois + analytical thinking + passion + words, words, words could = so cool.

He didn't stay for long. My mind wasn't an impressive match, I am sure. But he was kind and encouraging and, as he climbed into his beat-up blue Chevy, told me to keep asking questions. I sent him my paper and he read it, graciously marked it up, proffered some suggestions, and wished me good luck in my senior year.

In the years since, whenever I would write him, he assured me he remembered this first meeting of ours because I think he knew what it meant to me. That seems trivial now, and quite narcissistic on my part, but perhaps it speaks to the power of his persona and the endurance of his artistic genius. Our meeting and his words marked a moment in my life when I foresaw my future and pronounced my passions: I would and will read and write and teach and learn, in part because Dave Wallace did the same, and did it so coolly.

May you rest in peace, Dave. For those of us who loved you, your memory and your words will remain ad infinitum.