Yacht jacket and wrestling shoes

Well, this could probably be appended as a comment to the earlier post about David Foster Wallace, but I have doubts that it would get read. Also, I'm tired and I've been drinking vodka and cayenne pepper all night, because a story in Thieves Jargon told me it was a dandy cold remedy. I don't have a cold tonight, but what the hell?

A reader named Gina passed this link along to me:
http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/david-foster-wallace/index.html

This is a David Foster Wallace story from a 1989 issue of Playboy. They say it's his first story published in a major magazine. It came out a year after his first novel was published. I'm curious if anybody has a thought.

There aren't any nudie pictures involved, so you could probably get away with reading this at work. Unless you work at the same place I do, which bans Zygote in My Coffee because of "nudity."

Dead Author's Club

In my Book Marketing class last year, I made a statement saying that a really good way to increase your new book's sales would be to have your author get arrested right before the book came out. Nothing felony, just a barfight or drug possession or some drunken disorderly. The teacher returned the paper without a grade and called it a "joke of a homework assignment." To her credit, I gave her a list of three authors in the New York Times top-10 (Tucker Max, Slash, and some jerkoff from Motley Crue or Poison or whatever) whose book sales would receive a publicity bump if their authors got into some trouble, and I ended up with an A in the class.

Which has little to do with David Foster Wallace, who, if you haven't heard, hung himself late last week. What I'm getting at here is this: Wallace's opus "Infinite Jest" is sitting at #10 on Amazon.com's sales list right now. Not bad for a book that's more than ten years old. I'm sure the publisher will take this sudden windfall and establish a scholarship in the author's name, or donate the money to charity, and I doubt there are any John McCain supporters on the board over at Back Bay Books rubbing their hands together in a shady manner.

I haven't read a lot of Wallace. I tried out Infinite Jest in my early twenties, but I was reading it on the bus to and from work, and I couldn't get it done. My roommate has read it twice, and I've been meaning to give it another shot, but I make it a rule to avoid 1000-page books without covers. I have a collection of his short stories in my on-deck circle. I've read a few of his essays. I felt a lot safer knowing there was a writer out there who could write intelligently about infinity, sports, pornography, and seafood. In a stupid, stupid country, we'll be worse off without him.