Good job.

Michael Scherer wrote a nice piece about DFW in the Swampland Blog: http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/in_memorium_david_foster_walla.html#more, with some excerpts and lots of links to some of Wallace's excellent writing. A true loss. Thanks for posting, Jacob.

I'm really enjoying his Consider the Lobster:

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster?printable=true

I was just reading this part out loud to my son and we were laughing 'til we cried.

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).15 A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.

You can only appreciate the humor of this, I think, if you understand this was written as a review of the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet Magazine. Irreverance would be an understatement. Gotta love this guy. One of a kind. He will be missed.