As an avowed New York Times front–page geek, I am very excited about this.

DVDs are not as convenient as external hard drives or online access, but this is still really cool.

Good article on Alaska politics.

I’ve been meaning to say for several weeks that I love the name “Trooper Wooten.” Whenever I hear it, I think it sounds like a character from “Northern Exposure” or “Men in Trees” or “Twin Peaks.”

Trooper Wooten. Trooper Wooten. Trooper Wooten. It’s so much fun to say.

From the Corrections section of today’s NY Times:

A film review on Sept. 5 about “Save Me” confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott — not “Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.”

Fragments from Palin! The Musical.

We need to make the country work
For ordinary folk.
Direct reform must be the norm,
And … Oops, my water broke.

I’ve been reading many of the David Foster Wallace tributes these last few days. I can’t get enough. The Internet is the biggest enabler of all time.

In addition to being an amazing writer, Wallace was apparently an incredibly dedicated teacher and a really sweet guy.

Here are some tributes that have particularly moved me.

A Life Divided:

He was my teacher, at Amherst, in the fall of 1987. …

DFW was about 25. He had long hair and always came to class with a tennis racket and sometimes cookies. He had us take breaks so he could smoke. We loved him. …

I used to confuse “further” and “farther,” and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, “I hate you.” I’ve never confused them since.

Random NY Times commenter:

I taught DFW at Amherst and count him the best student I’ve ever had. …

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst. A creative thesis in English that was his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here’s what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

CC2K:

DFW always seemed several cognitive steps ahead of everyone else working out there—and several steps ahead of me. Much of his stuff just made you shake your head in wonder that anybody’s mental metabolism was speeding fast enough to capture all that he did. …

The really deep and important and amazing thing… DFW did was he helped me come to grips with the noise in my own head, the never-ending eruptions and eruptions out of eruptions of self-consciousness.

I read this book last year:

This book just came out:

Imitation, flattery, etc., but come on.

The New York Times has published its full obituary of David Foster Wallace. They published an interim one yesterday by a different reporter.

David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46. …

This morning I logged into Sitemeter, my referral stats tracking program. It turns out they revamped the site over the weekend.

And now it completely sucks.

(1) The data is now rendered with Flash, so everything loads much more slowly.

(2) What used to be free you now have to pay for. I used Sitemeter because it easily, elegantly showed me where my last couple hundred blog hits had come from — what link they came from, their IP address, how long they stayed on the site. Now I can’t see any of that.

(3) Actually, I can’t see anything at all now. After you log into the new site for the first time, you have to start logging in using your email address and your password. But my password isn’t working, and although I’m supposed to get a reminder email telling me what it is, I haven’t gotten it.

They took something that worked perfectly well and they ruined it.

Everyone else thinks so too.

Can anyone recommend a good referral-tracking website for blogs?

Update: well, that was fast. I guess they got an earful from their customers.

I read Infinite Jest the summer I was 23. It was 1997, I was living at my parents’ house while doing a summer internship, and I had no friends in the area. Instead of a social life I had that book.

I would tote two things together around the house: my paperback copy of Infinite Jest and my hardcover, jacketless copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. I wasn’t reading a novel; I was tackling a summer project. I couldn’t read the book anywhere but at home, because I didn’t dare take it someplace without the dictionary by my side.

I wrote a lot in my journal that summer. David Foster Wallace unleashed me. He was the first writer I read whose voice worked his way into my prose. Infinite Jest has been criticized for its logorrhea, but that’s what cut me loose. I embraced the verbosity, the meandering, breathless sentences that Wallace had imbued with just enough centripetal force not to break apart.

I was drawn to Wallace because he seemed like an overthinker, like me. His thoughts flew too fast to remain neatly organized, and they overflowed in his prose. His mind often seemed to be thinking about itself, picking itself apart, getting in the way of itself, just like mine did. If he was allowed to write like that, then so was I.

I fancied that my writing was as good as Wallace’s, but of course it wasn’t. He was far funnier and far more heartbreaking and culturally incisive. Just because you write long recursive sentences and use lots of footnotes, doesn’t mean you can write like Wallace.

Sometimes I thought about writing him a letter. But I knew that I would be doing so only in part to praise him; I really wanted to show him that I was as talented as he was. If I wrote to him about my own discursive and recursive thoughts, he would see that I was just like him! He would notice me and we would totally bond!

And then I decided that no, he would see right through me, that hundreds or perhaps thousands of other people had probably already written him letters in faux-Wallacian style, letters filled with rambling sentences and quirky use of conjunctions and footnotes inside footnotes, attempting to attract Wallace with his own pheromone, just like I wanted to do. I also felt like Wallace existed on a higher plane. Almost literally. That if I wrote him a letter from within the twisted labyrinth of my thoughts, he would be there overhead, piloting some biplane or hot air balloon, and he could actually see the labyrinth from above, and describe my own thoughts far better than I could, and he would see that instead of hedges the labyrinth was all just made out of plywood. That I could see two dimensions but he could see three. Or four or five. That as witty as I might feel, he would always outwit me. That I could try to engage him on his own level, but I’d never be able to.

Someone in this Metafilter thread joked that Wallace must have left a hell of a suicide note. I wonder if his entire body of work was that note. But that sounds trite.

I want to say to him, fuck you for hanging yourself and depriving us of everything else you had left to write. And then I want to apologize to him for that.

I always hoped that someday he’d write another enormous novel, something just as groundbreaking. I hope that there’s something he’d been working on and that someday we’ll be able to see it.

Holy fucking shit. David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. He was 46 years old.

I can’t believe this.

I adored his writing. Infinite Jest is one of the most amazing novels I’ve ever read.

More links about his death here. Here’s his Wikipedia page.

Metafilter thread.

I’ve written about him several times.

Here’s a handy schedule of fall 2008 TV premieres.

The day slips itself into our calendar again. In the limbo of early September — no longer summer, not yet autumn — it shows up. Sometimes I think it’s going to be an ordinary day, and then I read something about it in the damn New York Times and it comes back: the way the day felt, smelled, sounded, tasted.

But most years, my need to react against others’ feelings warps my own. If I try to ignore the media force field, I realize I’m aggressively doing so, which is the opposite of ignoring. If I write about it on the blog, I’m following the Approved Party Line, because We All Must Remember, and I hate doing that. But if I don’t write about it, then that, too, is giving in.

I resent people who weren’t here that day, people who merely watched it on TV in the middle of America and have tried to take ownership of it away from me for the last seven years.

And then I realize I’m being a 9/11 snob.

I shouldn’t discount the feelings of a Kansas grandma who watched it on TV. She has as much right to her feelings as I do.

And there are people who experienced it much more firsthand than I: those who lost a close relative, those who had to escape from the buildings, those who were in the financial district. Compared to them, I’m the Kansas grandma.

We are all allowed to feel what we feel.

So I try to resent the 9/11 sentimentalism only when it comes from people who love America but hate New Yorkers. Or when it’s exploitative. Things like this, or, you know, this.

Doug would probably be married today and he’d probably have a couple of kids. But those kids will never exist. I wonder if unconceived children have souls.

Matt and I are trying to plan a short vacation to New England this fall. The idea of going out into the country in the fall just fills me with wonderful shivers. We’d like to take off a Monday/Tuesday or a Thursday/Friday and make a long weekend of it. But where to go, exactly?

One idea is Boston. Matt’s never been. But I’ve been there several times. Even though the most recent visit was eight years ago, I wonder if I’d be bored. Maybe, maybe not.

The other idea is to do something rural — a country inn or something. I have this fantasy of staying in a B&B that has a library with comfy chairs, where I could pick random books off the shelves and curl up with one of them in front of a fireplace, and we eat dinner in nice cozy restaurants.

The thing is, I haven’t driven a car in four years and I’d be a little nervous about it. I used to drive all the time. I used to love to take road trips. When I was in school, I’d drive between Virginia and New Jersey a few times a year. In the early part of this decade I drove to and from work. Does driving a car come back to you pretty quickly? It seems like it would.

If we were to do Boston, we could just take Amtrak. But for the New England countryside idea, I’d probably visit my parents in NJ a couple of times in the next few weeks and take the car out for a spin, just to get my road legs back, and then we could rent a Zipcar and drive up to Massachusetts or Vermont or wherever.

Any ideas for where to go or what to do?

Someone hates drawing attention to himself, even (well, especially) when it’s someone’s birthday. But I don’t care.

So, happy birthday, Matt!

Slate polled its readers to find the most common Netflix rentals to go unwatched. Slate‘s solution, by the way, is that if you don’t watch a movie within a week, send it back:

Mailing back a DVD unwatched doesn’t mean you’ll never get another shot at it. And Netflix is the one paying the postage. Why not give yourself a week to see Hotel Rwanda. If you don’t get to it, maybe it’s because you’re a bad person who turns a blind eye to unspeakable tragedy. But maybe it’s just because you’re not quite in the mood for it right now. Perhaps in a few months the disc will again reach the top of your queue and you’ll tear it out of the envelope and throw it into the Toshiba the day it arrives in the mail. In the meantime, you can get started on a good Paleolithic kick.

This weekend I finally watched The Insider after 2 ½ months.