David Foster Wallace Discusses the Loo

I have only fairly recently come to know (and now love) the writing of David Foster Wallace. Though aware of his work for awhile, it took several casual conversations with this blog’s other writer as he read Infinite Jest before I finally took that first step into Wallace’s unique world. Since then I have rather voraciously been eating up this man’s work, fiction and non-fiction alike. As I finish my second of his books, I rejoice that I received a third just this weekend for my birthday.

A Supposedly Fun Book I’ll Probably Have to Read Again

I first encountered the writings of David Foster Wallace through tennis, an interest that has grown over the last two years. Wallace was a ranked junior tennis player in the Midwest, and an overall jock in his younger days. He wrote an excellent piece, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience“, for the New York Times Magazine in August 2006, a season during which Federer compiled a 90-5 match record and won twelve titles. I enjoyed his conversational style of writing, and I found some of his observations, like the description of the kinetic beauty in sport as originating with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body”, to be particularly insightful.