Many students at Pomona College had Dave Wallace as a professor. (He insisted we call him "Dave"; we always called him "DFW" when he wasn't around.) And many students also considered him a friend—even if being a friend meant dealing with his byzantine yet internally consistent and fair network of rules for social contact with the world. I came to think that this interface was necessary for him as a teacher, that it acted as a sort of membrane to let students in and keep critics and literary paparazzi out. In any case, I'm thankful he made this effort with my classmates and me. What follows here is exactly the sort of thing he hated. He couldn't stand being the center of attention. He'd found that even praise could be harmful, and so he'd brush it off as if it was beside the point, or as if he wasn't worth it. Of course he was worth it. But if a workshop got particularly warm and congratulatory, Dave would say, "Let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs." Read More

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of "dignity." She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn't think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels. We were endlessly self-reflexive individuals who had been marked by dabbling in drugs and semiotics; the media world we inhabited made life feel squalid, disposable, and fearful; we could hear, when we opened our mouths, the culture industry's language and not always our own. We were trapped inside ourselves—and in there wasn't even a "self." More like an empty lot crisscrossed by gusts of addictive compulsion, and littered with cultural debris. The situation made you feel ashamed. It bankrupted concepts like "dignity." Read More