Fri.Sep 20, 2024

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On Not Becoming David Foster Wallace

Mad in America

A dozen years ago I created a website, now extinct, called ‘Five Years’ From the David Bowie song of the same name (“We had five years left to cry in”). The idea was to see how my attitudes evolved over the coming five years: toward optimism, toward pessimism, or same-same. My first column was about David Foster Wallace, whose ‘This is Water’ commencement address at Kenyon College (2005) had become a touchstone ( see transcript here , and audio recording here ).