Six for David Foster Wallace

by Audrey Kuo

And what were his final thoughts, as he felt his legs swinging beneath him, those lengthy anchors of pendulums: would this become a footnote - and if so, judged how, as romantic or foolish or tragic or wasteful or something else entirely - tacked on to the canon of his stories, then? Because the "human" side of literature is always there, the autobiographical factoids and real-life similarities that maybe could have been inspiration or clues or the simple objects and events later "metaphorized" and offered as fiction, whatever that means, as if any of it is really real anyway, with and alongside and within the text being offered to the reader. He, of all people, knew that the author is inseparable from the text, embedded in it, as suffused with and by the meaning as cream once absorbed into the whole of a steaming mug of coffee. Fuck. What a shitty metaphor. I could never do him justice.

6S

Audrey Kuo just graduated and this is not making the world seem any more sensible. She also misses Vonnegut.