What is waiting for me on my doorstep when I get home from the bar?
Past the flannel planes and blacktop skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbriar, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in the morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Yes! From the New Oxford American Dictionary: “invaginate: be turned inside out or folded back on itself to form a cavity or pouch.” My weekend is full, folks. And then this is how they’ve presented the author bookflaply:
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion, and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the usage panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the Engligh Language. He died in 2008, leaving behind unpublished work of which The Pale King is a part.
Damn it! Damn it!