A friend and I saw it at the E Street Cinema in downtown (by the way, thank you for taking over the briefly defunct West End Cinema; that was a great place and I hope you keep its DIY, underground aesthetic).

Naturally, before the movie, we talked about David Foster Wallace. I’d read Infinite Jest when it first came out, mostly while working the graveyard shift at a gas station. Later, I read the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. A couple of essays published in magazines that I cam across, but that was it for my Wallace reading. And, of course, he had a big influence. But.

I told my friend that I still occasionally picked up A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, but it that exactly true? When was the last time I did that? A year? A decade?

He had such a powerful impact on the psyche, but he wasn’t someone I went back to. Certainly, I’m unlikely to read Infinite Jest again, as much because of the time commitment as anything else. But, then again, I’m re-reading Proust. In terms of word count, that’s a bigger commitment.

I’m not sure that Wallace is a ‘young man’s writer,’ but it seems that’s what he was for me.

On another note, the movie has a nice My Dinner with Andre quality, though not half as awesome as My Dinner with Andre because that movie never gets old (rest in peace, Andre Gregory).