November 11, 2004
david foster wallace
I went out with Grace and David to see David Foster Wallace do a reading at the Hamer Museum. Apparently the museum is the new home of the UCLA English department's Favorite Author Series. They made a big deal of letting us know that it was their favorite author series, which I had already assumed was inferred at the start of the event, but I guess that's beside the point.
I personally had never even heard of Wallace before the event. I just don't tend to read contemporary writers, although I really am trying to break myself out of the shell little by little. My creative writing class was helpful with that. Dr. B is good at inspiring his students to branch out a bit. Back to the story - Wallace was introduced by a bumbling English UCLA department chair who used a lot of "Aaaaawh" kind of breaks between each and every sentence. As the chair of the department, I was surprised when he said he had "a anouncement" to make. Yeah.
Wallace took the stage eventually and read a brand new excerpt (although anything would have been new to me - hey it's just like NBC reruns.. if you haven't read it, it's new to you!) about a tax audit guy whose boss has a baby that can only rightly be described as "FIERCE." Hahaha. Makes me smile just thinking about it. The next story was already published, and was a short story about an accident that happens to the baby of a family. Very intense.
After the readings came a Q&A, which only made the professors look pretentious and hippy-ish (thank God I never had to sit through a class with them!) and made most questioners from the audience look a bit presumptuous. I was expecting sly remarks that would condescend to the audience from Wallace, and that's what I got - yet I was surprised when he would catch himself in the middle of it and then try to provide an honest answer. I admired that in him.
Wallace is probably someone I wouldn't buy on my own, but I did enjoy the reading and wouldn't mind trying out one of his books some day. He does have a distinct, descriptive style. Hearing his tone of voice reading the stories really was cool.
But the coolest thing of the whole night was the look that was on David's face from the moment we left the parking structure to the end of the reading:
It was worth going just for that.