"Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn't have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her."
Orin always struck me as equally sexy and ridiculous, the kind of guy you can't believe you fucked because he's so absurd, and the reason I love this line, why I copied it at length into my journal on a jerky plane--it's a beautiful piece of writing, really hot, as an image, an idea, but also: so ridiculous. Who fucks this way, I wonder, and yes please, that sounds right. Everyone who loves D.F.W is reverent about his genius, it's old news, but the way he just consistently links up such disparate feelings, more like invokes them, anyway, for me...no other writer forces me to get it right, to make sure, yes, I read that, a person actually wrote that, and made my life better for it.
This article, this Mr. Seth Colter Walls who I've never read before, nailed every part of why I am still regularly googling D.F.W., why I can't get over his death, though I always admire him with sadness for having the guts to do it; why I've come home drunk and fruitless, being newly single and felt comforted by reading pleasures such as this, the synchronicity of someone WHO GETS IT.
On Booked Up, with Seth Colter Walls: An Incredibly Un-Fun Misreading of David Foster Wallace that Katie Roiphe Should Never Do Again
"Again they stripped each other to the waist and she, in that same kind of jitterbug jape they didn't have the breath to laugh at, she hopped up at him and forked her legs the same way over his shoulders and arched back until his arm stopped her fall and he supported her like that, the left hand horned with old callus at the small of her satiny back, and bore her."
Orin always struck me as equally sexy and ridiculous, the kind of guy you can't believe you fucked because he's so absurd, and the reason I love this line, why I copied it at length into my journal on a jerky plane--it's a beautiful piece of writing, really hot, as an image, an idea, but also: so ridiculous. Who fucks this way, I wonder, and yes please, that sounds right. Everyone who loves D.F.W is reverent about his genius, it's old news, but the way he just consistently links up such disparate feelings, more like invokes them, anyway, for me...no other writer forces me to get it right, to make sure, yes, I read that, a person actually wrote that, and made my life better for it.
This article, this Mr. Seth Colter Walls who I've never read before, nailed every part of why I am still regularly googling D.F.W., why I can't get over his death, though I always admire him with sadness for having the guts to do it; why I've come home drunk and fruitless, being newly single and felt comforted by reading pleasures such as this, the synchronicity of someone WHO GETS IT.
Thank you.