You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height.

david foster wallace is dead. he was an extraordinarily talented writer and apparently a gifted teacher. his books are challenging yet delightful. i'm sure that as this news creeps across the literary world he will be lauded much more appropriately than i can do here, but i liked these two quotes. the first hints at what makes his work so special, and the second just struck me as funny.

dfw on Infinite Jest, from his 1996 Salon interview:

I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like that and they piss me off.

a comment on the LA Times obit:

A suicide note, running some 300-odd pages and heavily footnoted, was found.
Submitted by: Zarp
11:39 PM PDT, Sep 13, 2008