I miss David Foster Wallace

This week's New Yorker had a long piece about David Foster Wallace's career and his final work. It's good, I recommend it. 

This is a photo I took of David Foster Wallace reading this story at my school in 2006. At the time, I was in a fiction workshop in which we read his short stories and complained about how the stories were all about how smart David Wallace was. Max, pictured here in the front row, was an avid champion of everything David Foster Wallace. 

David Foster Wallace rarely read in public, but when he did, he didn't charge. Before the reading, in my workshop, we griped about how that was still David Foster Wallace showing how he was smarter and better than the rest of humanity. But at the reading, I was struck by his humility, and how approachable he seemed - so different from his long, difficult, mostly tedious sentences. I remember him laughing at one of his own jokes. And his hair - his hair was so gorgeous. It was long, and it shone. I admired it. 

And that's when I turned in the road of my feelings about David Foster Wallace.