Graduation season is upon us again, and with it comes the vacant, cliché-ridden literary animal that is the graduation speech. Over at Lit Hub, Emily Harnett revisits David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” and marvels at the insidiousness of the speech’s logic and message: Tell your audiences that they’re too smart […]
...moreOn the eve of a new biopic and on the long tail of posthumous publishing and popularization—Christian Lorentzen takes a long, compassionate, critical look at David Foster Wallace and on the ways in which a prolific writer gets written into the public memory—as intellectual behemoth, creative luminary, contemptuous snob, major depressive, motivational speaker: A writer who courted […]
...more(n.) breaking out afresh or into renewed activity; from the Latin recrudescere (“to become raw again”) The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about … this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the […]
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