I have a little book coming out soon. It is called The Belan Deck. It’s set mostly during a layover at SFO and it centers around a person who maybe doesn’t really fit in at their AI tech job but still needs to produce one final PowerPoint deck.
I am standing at the corner of Folsom and Embarcadero waiting for an Uber.
I can see the cars on the Bay Bridge frozen, stationary.
No MUNI trains are barreling down the Embarcadero at this time of day.
Beyond a few palm trees outlined in the aquamarine sky, just below the descending clouds, I can see the top of the arrow of Claes Oldenburg’s Cupid’s Span.
There is the breeze and the smell that seemingly never leaves San Francisco.
Fifty eight degrees.
I have the Uber app open, SFO as destination but have not yet hit Confirm.
I glance at the Teslas and SUVs in the intersection, glance back at my phone again.
There are several cars stopped on the Embarcadero, almost all Uber and Lyft drivers I’m certain.
Once I tap Confirm I know my ride will be accepted in seconds and I will get into one of these cars.
Just then I had an incoming call: Jimmy Chen.
I hate incoming calls and the immediate panic they induce.
Breathe in. Accept.
Hey Jimmy, I’m on my way to the airport right now. Gotta get back to Austin tonight. Can we talk later?
No, no, it’s fine. Totally understand. Just thought I’d give you a heads up that the meeting I mentioned, the one with the Board, that’s actually happening on Monday now and I just wanted, I mean, wanted to call you.
I can barely focus on what he’s saying. The traffic is muffling all other sounds and I need to get into this Uber right now.
I squint at a black sedan. The driver saw me looking at my phone.
Jimmy, is this regarding the issue of my ongoing employment?
That’s on the agenda. I mean, yeah, but I mean, I just wanted to give you a heads up. So I’ll need that deck on Sunday. The one for Belan.
A tech bro wearing a hoodie and a gray backpack shoots past me on a skateboard. A mother with a stroller maneuvers around me.
Can we talk about this later, please? I’m obstructing pedestrians and I’m on my way to the airport.
Yeah, yeah of course. Just wanted to give you a heads up. But I need that deck sooner rather than later, OK? Sunday morning if you don’t mind.
Got it.
End.
Tap Uber. Confirm.
Your driver is now arriving. Black Mercedes S580. License plate PEV4391.
The Embarcadero morphs into the 101 and soon we are stuck in the usual parking lot traffic. I don’t mind. I have an hour or three to spare.
I like to get to the airport early.
I don’t like to entertain the idea of being late.
Maybe that’s an understatement.
And, despite some awful experiences in the past, I don’t mind SFO.
It feels familiar. An old friend.
And I don’t think of myself as a typical business traveler. Whatever that means.
Weathered men, pale in drab suits, or, more likely now, in Salesforce-logoed Patagonia vests and quarter-zips, always on their laptops, racking up millions of miles, discussing sports or crypto.
That ain’t me.
Most of the time, at the airport, I can’t bring myself to do that sort of work anyway.
Physically, mentally, I don’t find the space conducive to office work.
I am a traveler. Even while commuting.
My preference is for a paper book, a pencil or pen, a paper notebook to write in, a restaurant or bar where I can watch the never-ending flow of humanity, then to go browse the shops, read some more.
Do nothing, in a way. For once.
I always have several paper journals on me at all times, especially when I travel.
Claes Oldenburg died of complications from a fall.
Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults age 65 and older.
Belan is the Chairman and CEO. When I first met him, after I’d been hired and flown to San Francisco, I was shocked when I saw his name.
My great-grandfather had been named Belan when he was born, but had been adopted later at the age of 21 and he changed his name.
We call him Leo Steven. But I never met him.
When I met this Belan, the CEO, this was the first thing I told him.
Belan was a family name. On my dad’s side.
Just as I started to launch into the story, he cut me off: Interesting. Huh. Well, about this strategy deck you’re working on…
I’d never met another person named Belan in my life, and I doubt he had either but that apparently didn’t matter to him at all. He was all business, all the time. I could feel the stress emanating off him like steam.
I made it through the precheck line, no bags to check, and headed toward gate B39.
My phone vibrated. It was Amanda. She wasn’t my assistant, exactly. But she “supported” everyone on the team by doing things like booking travel and ordering office supplies and scheduling meetings.
Flight delayed 2 hours. Go to gate C42.
Thanks, I text back. Then I text my wife: Flight delayed, don’t wait up.
Belan had a few weird rules, like insisting no one use the word “I” in any memos or decks. Meetings must start at 10 minutes past the hour. No ties. Jimmy told me: crack a golf joke to get on his good side, loosen him up. He loves the Kentucky Derby.
Incredibly, SFO has a bargain book store. Or at least I have never seen another airport bookstore with a large bargain section. And one stocked with many small-press books. I headed there before leaving B terminal.
One thing I spent too much time worrying about was the title of the PowerPoint deck.
I’ve decided that my Monthly Audio Newsletter, Mostly About Nothing will, for now, not feature my voice but only feature dead writers. Only dead writers will be featured.
After a brief illness, Bob Giroux (of Farrar, Straus Giroux) passes away at a home in New Jersey on September 5, 2008. Throughout his career, the writers Giroux was closest to–John Berryman, Robert Lowell (who died 9/12/77), Jean Stafford–all broke down.
After losing the second set, Roger Federer defeats Andy Murray to win his fifth consecutive US Open title on September 8.
After weeks of speculation, rumors swirl that the fourth largest investment bank in the US, Lehman Brothers, won’t be able to raise the required capital for a bailout. The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops another 2.5% on September 9 as the financial crisis widens.
“I am not very curious about the lives or personalities of other writers.”–David Foster Wallace to Jacob Didier, 2005.
After the Democratic convention in Denver, David Remnick’s analysis of Obama’s rhetorical powers appears in the Talk of the Town, September 8 issue of The New Yorker. David Foster Wallace had agreed to write an analysis of Obama and rhetoric for GQ magazine but deferred in August, citing a stomach ailment. Joel Lovell at G had offered Wallace a deadline of September 12.
After weeks of border skirmishes, Navy SEALs raid the Pakistani town of Angur Ada. Seven years after 9/11, the trail to find Osama Bin Laden had gone cold. Vice-Admiral William McRaven (who would be installed as Chancellor of the University of Texas system just six years later) wanted to jump start the mission with a ground raid in Pakistan itself.
After a decade of construction and billions of dollars invested, the first beam was circulated through the Large Hadron Collider on the morning of September 10, 2008.
The code among gutter punks is not to inquire about or investigate someone’s past.
After all of Galveston Island is ordered to evacuate, three million Texans lose power on the night of September 12, 2008. Hurricane Ike makes landfall the next morning, causing upwards of $35B in damage and killing at least 50.
“Trying to calculate the odds against two poets as talented as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton taking part in the same university writing workshop at the same time–and with an instructor of the stature of Robert Lowell.”–David Markson, The Last Novel
After John McCain showcases his running mate Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention, the duo briefly overtake Obama-Biden in the Quinnipiac polls for the week ending September 12, 2008.
“In the Nazi camps, it was forbidden to rescue a man who wanted to hang himself.”–Evan S. Connell, Points for a Compass Rose
After opening on Friday, September 12, 2008, the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading wins the weekend box office, knocking Heath Ledger’s The Dark Knight down to 9th place.
Federer fathers four children in nine years and is, by all accounts, a devoted and loving father.
After dinner, I am running bath water for my toddler’s nightly routine. Somewhere out in that dark night, Ed Champion’s finger hovers above the tweet button, eager to break the news of an author’s death.
I only have a few minutes to write this but I want to try to put down something in writing on this day, November 9, 2016. I woke up this morning hungover, very tired, and had to tell my two boys (a 4th grader and a kindergartner) that the bad man had won. I woke up in a similar state on September 12, 2001, in Brooklyn, with the exception that I had no children to explain this to. I am still grappling with the implications of this election, and what that will mean to our country. I can’t imagine all the progress that will be undone. My great hope is that there is no major calamity that befalls us, that nothing catastrophic can stop us from resisting the changes to our social, political, and environmental progress. I still believe in the idea of this country and don’t want to flee it. I want to stay and fight. I wish I had done more to oppose this villain.
To my boys: I will tell you what I have always said – we will treat other people with respect and dignity. And we will stand up for those who can’t stand on their own, we will fight for what we believe in, and we will be okay. This will all be OK in the end.
Today marks twenty years since the first email was sent to wallace-l@waste.org. Since that day, another 77,000 emails have found their way through the waste.org servers and in to the inboxes of thousands of subscribers. Twenty years of email! The very phrase inspires dread in some. Yet, these emails have brought me so many delightful surprises, so many new ideas to consider, and a real sense of community.
In 2009, I wrote a history of how wallace-l came to be, so I won’t rehash that particular story here. I expected traffic to decline after Wallace’s death in 2008 and it has somewhat, but each month sees a handful of new, substantive posts. After his death, we began to see the emergence of a real “Wallace Studies” in academia as well as other discussion-worthy topics like David Lipsky’s book-length interview, D.T. Max’s biography, the publication of The Pale King, the opening of his archive at the Ransom Center, and dozens of other scholarly works. What has had a greater impact on the email list is the rise of Twitter and Facebook. I now retweet links about Wallace or any mentions of his work rather than composing a new email. But there are still things that cannot be said in 140 characters. I created a list of wallace-l members on Twitter and find myself reading the sorts of short messages there that might have passed as just-chiming-in emails in the past. But, the advantage of email remains, its primitiveness, its text-only nature, and its anonymity. Facebook forces us to focus on the visual elements, the lazy scroll that does not push us to read its contents so much as to “react” to them.
But, despite a decrease in traffic, I suspect there will be many more anniversaries to celebrate. So, it might seem like 20 years is a long time for an email listserv (and it is), but The Howling Fantods is almost 20, and we are getting to the point where digital communities have established and entrenched histories and archives.
I’ve asked Rob Short, who has done some scholarly work on the Wallace fan community, to compile some statistics for this anniversary. So, any stats mentioned here are courtesy of him.
The top five posters (who, coincidentally, represent the “over 2,000 posts” club) have collectively contributed over 14,000 posts.
Those folks are:
George Carr (3,707)
Hillary Brown (3,295)
Prabhakar Ragde (2,540)
Maria Bustillos (2,410), and
Matt Bucher (2,094).
Most of those posts (thousands!) were from a period of years before 2008. So, looking at those names for me in 2016 calls to mind an earlier time when Wallace was still writing and publishing, and finding others to talk about his work was vital, an epiphany. And yet, for all those names that popped up in the “from” field of emails, there are hundreds of other subscribers who simply lurk and have never posted.
Earlier this month, I asked our 1400+ subscribers to send me any sort of fond memories or kind words about the listserv and I will share a couple of those stories below. If you have not read Maria Bustillos’s appreciation of the list, do check it out. A few people emailed me and thanked me for keeping the list going, but the dirty secret of that is that it doesn’t require much work from me at all. In fact, I want to thank all of you who have contributed to such enlightening conversations and who have provided for me the best possible home on the web I could imagine, a real Shangri-La.
The true heroes behind the scenes are the mysterious folks who own and operate waste.org. I know almost nothing about them. They have never asked us for anything. In return for hosting the listserv (and Pynchon-l and a lot of other stuff) for 20+ years, they have literally never contacted me or anyone I know. The waste.org FAQ states:
Who pays for it?
Back when internet was expensive and we had a bunch of phone lines (and we were young and poor), WASTE was supported primarily by user donations. Today, you should probably give your money to the EFF instead.
So that’s exactly what I’m going to ask you to do. If you are inclined to thank waste.org for hosting wallace-l all these years, please make a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation https://supporters.eff.org/donate/
Now I am going to leave you with two stories from longtime members of the list. Here’s to another 20 years.
George Carr’s story
I’ve been on the list since about 2002, no later than 2003; as I wrote in the blurb that’s still up on the Howling Fantods describing the Brief Interviews Project, I joined after re-reading Brief Interviews and looking for online reviews & commentary. I can’t say exactly when I joined, as my Gmail account only goes back to 2004; I remember getting my Gmail Beta invitation from a fellow lister!
The story that dominates the early years of my time on wallace-l was gathering all the unpublished pieces for what would become the original samizdat DFW Reader; that was a major group effort, as I got scans and Inter-Library Loans from all over the country, and even talked to staffers in the archives of the newspapers that DFW reviewed books for, to make a little extra scratch. The resulting book is a project I’m still proud of, even though more than half of it has since been officially published; I loved how listers were so willing to pen their own essays about wallace-l, and how easy it was to get people excited about the prospect of reading more of DFW’s work.
Oddly, I was kind of distanced from wallace-l by the time Wallace died; we hadn’t done a Group Read in some time, since finishing the big Oblivion analysis project (“OO” in each email header, please!) and I was just treading water until the next book came out. His death actually happened on my wedding anniversary, so every year I commemorate both events, each year more one than the other.
I remember the list being VERY cathartic around the time of Wallace’s death; whatever part of my feelings I wanted to indulge, I could find companionship on wallace-l: cold-eyed cynicism, frustration at the treatment/pharmaceutical scenario that led to his death, awed contemplation of the much deeper and different grief experienced by his family and close friends; it was all thrown out there, as we all helped each other figure out the best way to come out the other end of that tunnel of emotion. In a strange way, that experience and the wallace-l help with processing it helped me greatly when my mother died almost a decade later; by then, I knew pretty well how to feel grief while understanding it at the same time, and what kind of emotional place I wanted to aim for, after the immediate sadness was over. Having felt such frustration and anger over Wallace’s untimely demise, the fact that she lived a long and full life — raising children, traveling the world, reading great literature in depth — made it ultimately easier to deal with her death, emotionally.
Even after the publication of TPK and the realization that there just won’t ever be any more DFW, and even after the amateur analysis we’ve done has been mostly surpassed by the work of hardcore academics, I’ve never felt it would be right to leave wallace-l. It played such a huge part in what I now consider my maturing years, helping create my adult-ish attitudes about everything from what makes great fiction to online etiquette, I don’t ever want it to come to an end. But if it does, I’ll know how to deal with it.
These days, I mostly enjoy the discussion of everyone’s reading lists, and new discoveries that kindle some of the same fire that burns hot in DFW’s writings. I continue to meet up face-to-face with listers whenever possible, and love keeping an ear on the chatter; some of my favorite books of the past decade have found me through wallace-l recommendations.
Ryan Blanck’s story
I know it sounds cheesy and cliché, but finding wallace-l was, in many ways, a life-changing event for me. Maybe not on par with a religious conversion, but it was a profoundly important thing for me.
The stars aligned in the spring of 2009 as I was introduced to DFW, then started my Letters to DFW blog, then I found “my people” in wallace-l. I was a novice writer wanting to take my craft to a new level. I found my muse. And I found a community to help foster my growth.
Because of wallace-l, I was able to hone my art and craft as a writer. I was able to move from periodic blog posts to writing and publishing my book, Supposedly Fun Things. I was afforded the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Antwerp to present my first academic paper at the Work in Process conference. I was named a Featured Panelist at the first annual DFW conference, which led to the publication of my Infinite LEGO book. And most recently, I was asked to be a guide in the Infinite Winter group read.
But more than these opportunities and experiences has been the friendships I’ve forged through Wallace-l. Even though I’ve only met a handful of listers in person, I feel an incredible bond to this worldwide group of fans and scholars. And for that I am grateful.
From DFW to wallace-l
As I mentioned in my 2009 article about wallace-l, there was one instance where David Foster Wallace was asked directly about this email list that followed his every word. At a March 2003 Bookworm event at Barnes & Noble in LA, list-member Christina Wilson asked him to write a brief message to the list. That note was, at one time, posted on a wallace-l resources page created by Marcel Molina called andbutso.com. That page is long gone so I want to repost the message here, for a little more posterity:
