I don’t know a whole lot about non-fiction journalism, but the way i think about [it] in terms of what I can do is: I think of it as a service industry. Essays like this are occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lifes…—David Foster Wallace

If you haven’t read David Foster Wallace’s CONSIDER THE LOBSTER, you might want to take a look. Meg and I read it a few months ago and liked it a lot. (I’ve yet to read his fiction, myself.) I took this quote from his great interview with Michael Silverblatt (I know MS’s voice is hard to take, but he’s a smart reader and he talks to some great folks.)

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The interviewer asked, “How does your wife take the way she’s depicted in your comics?” and James Kochalka replied, “She used to hate that I would draw about her at all, especially if I drew something that was dirty. But, she’s getting more used to it.”

I haven’t written a story about Meg yet, (I’ve drawn her a bunch) but it’s bound to come up.

Legend has it that Etgar Keret’s girlfriend was always bugging him to write a story about her, so he wrote the excellent story “Fatso.”

That’s what you get for asking, I guess.

(based on a real photo by Doug Mills that Meg clipped for me…)

• Lester Bangs on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
• Junebug would be a great movie if you walked in late and had to leave early. Real people who talk like real people living in a real place. Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?
• Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconcious. Done up as a sweet book by Ralph Steadman.
• DFW’s review of an old Updike novel contains a final sentence that I think could serve as a summary for about 50% of fictional characters nowadays (not to mention a few folks we all know): “…it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.”

“For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called “compression” — for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.”

- David Foster Wallace, “Laughing With Kafka,” HARPER’S July 1998