Babe Alert: David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace, author of many outstanding story and essay collections, fan of all things David Lynch, "genius grant" winner -- and I hear he also wrote a couple of novels -- this guy is 100% babealicious. I mean it.

Dashing hotness aside, Wallace wrote one of my favorite stories ever. Included in his collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it's entitled "Forever Overhead." The story takes place on the main character's thirteenth birthday, much of it narrated while, for the very first time in his life, the boy stands shivering in his bathing suit, his toes gripping the nose of the high-dive board. At the bottom of the access ladder, a long line of other divers wait impatiently for their turn. The boy's position becomes a metaphor for the anxiety and pure elation of crossing that threshold we call male pubescence. The membrane that separates boy from man, air from water, is pierced in one short, brimming moment.

Here's a ratemyprofessors review written by one of Wallace's lucky Pomona College students:

He really cares about helping his students to improve, and I learned a lot from him. Because he's pretty eccentric, his reactions to emotional elements of stories and essays can be kind of mind-boggling. Exhaustingly brilliant, very demanding, definitely worth it if you're serious about writing.

And oh my, is he ever serious about writing. Wallace is a supreme grammarian and stylist who not only uses extensive footnotes, but he even footnotes his footnotes, which leads me to believe we are a match made in heaven (or we will be, once I master Chicago style documentation).

Not only does Wallace have a great pair of legs, but he's ubercompassionate, always considering the reader. The purpose of fiction, he says, "is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves." Which, if you think about his use of the second-person narrator in "Forever Overhead," the reader gets full imaginative access to the House of David, including the fridge, the pantry, and the well-stocked freezer. Yowsa, wouldn't you say?

I haven't ever been within shouting distance of this elusive and handsome writer, but the imaginative access he mentions above could well be as sensual an experience as, say, waiting an exquisite forty minutes in line to have him sign your copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Rest assured, dear readers, his fingers would be strong, his nails meticulously trimmed. Perhaps, too, they smell of lemon and tennis courts and unboiled lobster.Until the day we meet and, inevitably, fall in love, I'll leave a candle in my heart's window. A superfantastic magic candle that doesn't burn down, I mean.