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Saturday, May 03, 2003

infinite largesse

"On a warm, windblown evening in late March, David Foster Wallace showed up at an old-style Mexican place in Pomona called El Ranchero. He was wearing shorts and a Pomona College sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, so that he looked like a faintly menacing guy you might see late one night at a 7-Eleven buying Gatorade.

Wallace, the author of, most famously, the 1996 brick of a novel called "Infinite Jest," is finishing his first year as the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona. He's a literary star -- MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant winner, compared before he was 35 to Pynchon, to DeLillo -- newly arrived in Southern California."

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passive tense

"As a rule, passive tense equals at least some level of manipulation. Any decent writer knows to avoid it, precisely because it's confusing -- but editors often rely on passive tense to keep uncomfortable questions about individual and collective responsibility (including their own) at bay"

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Friday, May 02, 2003

do dah day

one year toke free tomorrow so today i celebrated with a membership to crunch. now i need to sweat off those 10-15 pounds i put on as a result. for year three i plan to get some color back in my lily white corpus dilapitus.

[link]