see, when i read your post i think that you *must* read DFW — to see what you are missing and how your comment might be missing out and that “That line between emotion and critical self-consciousness” is the razor-thin space from which DFW most often writes, and it’s not even a line because he does such a fantastic job of creating a more expansive space for the work that goes on there. i find DFW masterful at *both* offering a critique (of, say, the Maine Lobster Festival or Cruises — oh, and that story is, i’m pretty sure, also the collection’s title, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) *and* intense, personal reflection, earnest reflection that conceds and wanders and postures and then implodes so that is maybe says “i don’t know,” but here’s what it seemed/ felt like to expeirence it (said feeling and seeming fully detailed so that readers might begin to consider the matter instead of simply accepting his take). the reflection comes at the cost of authorial confidence, but isn’t authorial confidence so often repugnant? i teach, instead, as we all likely do, a rhetoric of inquiry that works to craft writing that performs the deep moments of insecurity about a subject, moments that enable *actual* critical reflection instead of merely posturing or ranting or narrow, cliched padding.

i hope you read Consider the Lobster, or SFTNDA or *anything* from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (we have that on tape, DFW reading; i haven’t listened since the news of his suicide, which is still wrecking me).

but so.

I read “Shipping Out” (is that the title of the cruise article?) and thought, my students (I was teaching creative writing at the time) need to see this. This is word choice as ethics. They complained that it was too long, and they didn’t see the point, and I felt helpless and frustrated.

I lent my copy of _A Supposedly Fun Thing_ to someone years ago, and I don’t remember whom, and I want it back.

My first cat, Niamh, was a rescue from the woods near Ann Arbor. When I first got her, she wouldn’t let me near her. She lived in the bathroom (I had an efficiency), and I used to sit in there and read to her while she huddled behind the toilet. Later, when she became my constant companion, I got two more kittens and she taught them both to hunt. She would catch a mole and then let it shamble around the driveway while the kittens, Alice and Flyer, clumsily tried to pin it and kill it. Every time the mole began to escape, Niamh would grab it and bring it back for another round. It was bloody, but I didn’t stop them.

:: hugs :: to you.

I don’t know. I also have to admit to never having read Wallace, so I am going to end here.