#she uses words like ''diddle'' all the time

[thorne1435]

My step-mom has begun to respect my gender identity in a really weird way, and I don't know how to react to it, really.

She still refers to me with (he/him) pronouns and deadnames me (by mistake?) quite a lot, but makes an effort to involve me in feminine conversations that I'm around for, whereas before she would've been awkward about me overhearing them. And I don't think she's doing it to make me uncomfortable or w/e, because I'm more capable of making her uncomfortable and she knows that. I used to bring up topics that are considered "women-only" when I was a man and she was always deeply disturbed by it. But she's not reacting like that anymore.

To give you a better idea, she's said "Well, he's a girl, now." and "(While she and my mom were looking at dresses with me) You're gonna make him look like a Mormon's wife!"

This is the person I was the most afraid of coming out to, the one who--after I did come out to her--told me she was fine as long as I didn't "diddle anyone's kids," because she believes all, or at least most, trans women are pedophiles. And yet...she seems to mostly-accept who I am now.

A week or two ago I pried queer history out of my step-mom's iron-grasp and asked what her social life was like when she was in active queer spaces and I think I know why she's treating me this way: that's just how her group treated trans people in general.

She used the wrong pronouns while telling me about an old trans woman friend of hers, and without thinking too much about it, I told her that if they were a trans woman she should probably say "she", since I'm used to having to correct my family on trans issues all the time. She just told me that they all used "he" for them, and it was no big deal.

I don't know what to think of that.

[satorusugurugurl]

You made geto sound so attractive in the leisure streamer fic esp w all the tatts and piercings and rings 😵‍💫😵‍💫 will u ever do a separate Drabble w him in the same universe? Maybe not the same reader bc I like them w gojo but w another reader who maybe works at the cafe?? You don’t have to at all, I was just wondering! 🩷🩷 you just made him soooo sexy I’m obsessed with him 😌 (also sukuna was so funny im the king of the cafe!!! 🤣)

My Boss is a Hottie!

Summary: Geto Suguru is your boss, and you want him to put you in a million different positions; of course, you’d never say that out loud until your best friend Yuki pushes you over the edge.

Pairing: Boss!Geto Suguru x AFAB!Reader

Word Count: 3,372

Warnings Language, smut, pinv, unprotected sex, creampie

A/N: JENXMDJDKDK Thank you for the request! This is set in the same universe as The Leisure Streamer is a Hottie! I love Boss Geto! 🥴 bend me over the glass display case pleas!!

You stare down at the two coffee cups placed in front of you. Your best friend, Yuki Tsukumo, is watching you, smirking as you pick up the 1st cup and take a sip. You let the flavor sit on your tongue

Before swallowing, which you regret almost instantly. The espresso is bitter, and it tastes like rag water. You take a sip of your water before picking up the second cup, taking a sip of the nutty, almost chocolatey espresso, and sliding your mouth, making your eyes roll back.

“That is your stupid instant espresso from the supermarket.” You spit out as you jab a thumb at the first cup you, unfortunately, drank from. “That right there is my sweet Colombian beans roasted to perfection.” To emphasize your point, you pick up the second cup and take another sip of the delicious liquid inside.

“Holy shit! You can tell the difference!” Yuki reaches under the counter, pulling out a large brown sack of Colombian beans she picked up for you and Geto on her latest trip.

“Of course, I can tell the difference; I work with the self-appointed king of coffee, Ryomen Sukuna. I have drunk so much espresso you would think I would be more wired than I already am.”

Yuki shakes her head, patting the bag before stretching her arms above her head. “Sure~ blame your coworker for your sudden encyclopedia knowledge of coffee.” She shoots you a knowing smirk. “It’s totally not because of the boss you want to bang.” Your cheeks flush as you choke on your espresso, winning a cackle from your friend.

“That's fucking weird shut up!”

“Oh, you shut up! I can see the way you both eye fuck each other every time you’re near one another. Do the world the fucking favor and just fuck already.”

“There is no eye-fucking going on!”

Yuki narrows her eyes and looks back at her boyfriend, Choso, who is tinkering with the air filter for Yuki’s bike. “Cho, you’ve seen them, right?” her boyfriend looks up from his project at hand, streaks of grease on his face as he puts down the tool he was working with.

“Seen what?”

“My bestie eye fucking her boss!”

“Oh,” Choso glances between you and his girlfriend, “Yeah, I've seen it.”

You groan into your hands, shaking your head. “Nothing is going on between us! I swear!” Yuki cooed, placing another bag of beans on the table for you.

“But you want there to be!”

It was true you did want to be in a relationship with your boss. But there was one singular problem. He was your fucking boss! Sure, the two of you had known each other since college. Sure, you both got wasted together at bars and had cuddled on his couch countless times. He was the soul fantasy you dreamed about when you were diddling your skittle in the comfort of your bed. But things wouldn’t work out because he was your boss.

Yuki knew you had it down bad for him. And she loved torturing the absolute hell out of you because of that. She insisted that you could make it work, but you saw it as unprofessional. Plus, Suguru was so fucking hot. There was no chance in hell he would even go for a girl like you.

“You cannot look at me and tell me you do not want to see what he’s packing in those baggy pants.”

“No, I don't.”

“You're a terrible liar.”

“And you're being a terrible friend at the moment! I cannot fuck my boss!”

Yuki’s eyes dart behind you before smirking ever so slowly. “Oooh, so you do want to!” You clench your teeth as you down the rest of the espresso. “Oh, come on, just be honest with yourself! The truth will set you free!” slamming the cup down, you glared at your beaming friend.

“Fine! You wanna know, I’ll tell you! But don't bitch to me about said details!”

“Oooh, I wouldn't never!” she holds her hand. “Scouts honor!”

“I would be all over that man all day, every day, in the kitchen, in his car, on the counter. I would be in missionary, doggy, reverse cowgirl, the lotus! I would do the whole fuckin’ Kamasutra for Geto Suguru!” Yuki nodded as you took a deep breath. “I would gladly make that man a father of three! And you know the idea of being pregnant terrifies me!”

“Oh, I know!”

“I would suck that man dry! I would give him the best fuckin’ nut of his life! God, I wanna sink my teeth into him!”

Choso walked over, tapping Yuki on the shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt the horny confessions, but I found the problem; I need to borrow you away from Geto and your bestie.” Huh, you blinked, staring at Choso, who grinned at someone behind you. “Hi, Geto.”

No, there was no way Geto was behind you! “Oh, that's a good one, Choso!” a warm hand clasped your shoulder, making every nerve in your body jolt.

“Hi, Choso.” Your boss, the man you thought of when rubbing yourself under your sheets, squeezed your shoulder—making you want to crawl under the table and scream.

“Well, this has been fun! But I got shit to do! Have a great night!” Yuki was off without another word, tugging Choso towards the back of her mechanic shop.

Geto’s hand remained on your shoulder before his other hand gently massaged you. Heat pooled between your legs as he rubbed your muscles with the right amount of pressure. That soft, constant contact had you moaning, rubbing your thighs together to alleviate the throbbing you were experiencing. Oh god, was this just him being nice? Or was this his way of conveying his feelings?

You glanced up, biting your lip. Geto Suguru was a fucking hottie. The tail of his dragon tattoo ran along his forearm, moving towards his back, where the rest of the dragon was. Suguru’s other arm was an intricate sleeve of ocean waves and cherry blossoms. The black ink matched his painted black nails kneading into your shoulders. The touch of his hand left you hot and bothered, but the chill from the rings on almost every one of his fingers was a sharp contrast. His dark eyes were narrowed his pierced brow cock as he smirked. His long, luscious dark hair was in his signature half-up, half-down style, with bangs on his face.

“I-I got your beans, boss—haaaah—” you moaned, watching his pink tongue dart out over black lip ring. “Fuck.”

“Good job.” His fingers gently inched under the collar of your t-shirt up to the first knuckle. “I appreciate you, princess.”

Your breath catches in your throat as his fingers trace your skin. They feel good, so good you don’t want it to stop. So you gulp before biting your lip. You gently grab one of his wrists and lower his hand underneath your shirt to the second knuckle. Suguru's barrow eyes widened before he chuckled breathlessly, sinking his hand further.

“Fuck—”

You gasp out as Suguru’s fingers gently trace over the top of your breasts. “So, the girls are out. They're going to have a sleepover with Nobara and Maki at their place.” His words are silky smooth, like the espresso you had just downed moments before.

“Oh? So will you and Satoru sit around and play mindless, stupid video games like always?”

“Satoru is in Sendai with my new designer artist.” Suguru’s slid his finger deeper, fuck he was so close to cupping your breast. “He told me not to wait up.”

Holy fuck, was this happening? This was a moment you had dreamed and fantasized about happening for years. Ever since you started working with Suguru at a local shop before he invested in his own, he easily convinced you to join him, as his coffee shop was a cult. The two of you were always flirting with each other; having been friends for the last two years, you would do that to anybody. But over the last few months, the flirting became less playful and more apparent that you didn’t want to be friends. You wanted to be more.

So, is this your boss's way of initiating an interaction that doesn’t revolve around work? It seemed like it. And you were going to take that hook, line, and sinker.

“Oooh, are you asking me to keep you company tonight?”

“Only if you want.” Your boss's earthy, minty smell crept up your nostrils as he leaned beside your ear. “I think I would be lying to myself if I didn’t tell you; you have me curious.”

His breath tickles your earlobe, making you rub your thighs together harder. “And what exactly is that?” Your grip tightens around his wrist, and you resist the urge to shove his whole hand down your shirt.

“I’m curious to see if you were being truthful about everything you said. If you want to do it with me all day, every day. In my kitchen, my car, on the counter back at the shop.” Wetness coats the inside of your underwear as he whispers those dirty words you had said back to you. For some reason, they sound even hotter and more vulgar coming out of his mouth. “I want to put you in missionary, doggy, reverse cowgirl. Fuck I want to try stuff, I’ve never tried with another person.” His whole hand slides under your shirt, cupping your breast. “I say we buy a copy of the Kamasutra. We try every fucking position in there.”

“F-Fuuck.”

“So what do you say, Princess? Should we take this back to my place?” His teeth take your earlobe between his teeth, making you gasp as you arch your back. “Are you going to give me the best fuckin’ nut of my life?”

“Oh~ you bet your ass I am.”

Your boss chuckles deeply into your ear, releasing the sensitive lobe from his mouth. “Hit me with your best shot, Princess.”

Suguru regrets those words an hour later as you lower yourself slowly, backing up on his cock, as your bent over the empty glass display case in the shop. You had not given him the best nut of his life not once but twice so far. Once with your delightful, talented mouth and the second from you just grinding on him. He felt like a fucking teenager, and goddamnit, he fucking loved it.

There was some enchantment about you. You always drew him like a moth to the flame. Whenever you were, he knew it would be a great day. You were like his personal ray of sunshine, brightening his day wherever he went. Everyone teased him at the shop, asking him if he was going on a date with you, and you both were strictly on business. But lo and behold, he wanted to take you out on a date. He couldn’t bring up the courage to ask you.

It was hard enough for him to ask you to leave your job at the coffee shop you both met at to join him on an adventure of opening his shop. He thought he would say, but you agreed. He felt that there might be something there between you. That was both exciting to explore but also terrifying at the same time.

Now here you both were, your face pressed against the glass display case, with his cock buried deep inside of you, stretching you out with his fat cock. Suguru can’t help but grab your waist, squeezing it gently, savoring the moment. It wasn’t like he would let this be a one-time thing. He had just purchased the Kamasutra, which would be delivered the following day. This was the beginning of a very long and satisfying relationship. One that had started with friendship and was now turning into something more.

“Haaah fuck~ fuuuck baby.” Suguru groans, pressing you further against the glass case, watching as it fogged up with your heavy panting. “You have no idea how many times I’ve jerked off thinking about this.”

“Nnnhh,” you turn your head, looking back at him with a smirk. “Fuck~ I could say the same thing about me. Is that way you would have such long meetings in your office with nobody?”

Suguru pulls out, his eyes glancing down at the cock wet with your spit and arousal. “Yeah, it is.” He shoved all the way back inside of you, making you yelp. “Is that way you’re always late returning from your lunch break? Don’t tell me you’ve been rubbing that pretty little clit in your car.”

Your palms press against the cool chill of the glass underneath you. “Rubbing it~? Oooh no, but I do put my vibrator on it.” Suguru’s grip on your waist tightens as he groans out with a huff from behind you.

“You’re so fucking hot. Is that why you didn’t let me in your glove box that one time? You keep an emergency vibrator in there when you come to work?” His cock begins sliding in and out of your tight walls hugging him snuggly with each jerk of his hips.

“Oh~ I’m cumming alright.”

Suguru’s hips buckled, eyes going wide before he growled, shoving himself deeper inside of you, forcing your hips back. Being filled to the brim made your eyes widen as you hissed out a whine through your teeth. His thick pulled out before slamming back into you with such force your fingers grabbed the edge of the cool counter.

“God, you're such a dirty girl. I fucking love it!” He growled, snapping his lips forward, pushing you harder into the glass. “Next time you get all hot and bothered, come see me~ I’ll fuck you so good.” He leaned his head down, humping slowly against your ass with slow thrusts that hit every sweet spot inside of you. “You could even bring your vibrator~” his teeth snapped gently, tugging at your ear.

“Holy—” your eyes rolled back as Suguru’s hips had your clit rubbing against the smooth glass. “I-I’m dirty~ listen to—hnnngh!” His teeth tugged at your earlobe, silencing your retort. “Oh my god~! Ooooh, my fucking god Sugu!” You rocked yourself back against him, his kisses and nips at your sensitive ear and neck driving you mad.

A shaky chuckle sounded from your boss, “You’re sensitive, aren’t you, princess~?” You answered with an eager whimper and nod before looking back at him.

His tongue ran over his lip piercing as his ring-covered fingers slipped down, groping the fat of your ass. The cool metal, the way his slick cock slid in and out of you faster and harder, had your eyes rolling back as your walls tightened around his cock. Suguru growled; one of his eyes twitched slightly as your walls tightened around him, squeezing his cock with almost pained pleasure. He was drowning in you and your tight cunt.

Suguru pressed his whole body against your back, bucking into you; his thrusts were hard and fast, pushing you closer to your release. Suguru’s hands slammed on either side of your head, keeping himself up not wholly to crush you under his weight. His right hand slid up, covering yours with his own, his fingers intertwined with yours, holding your hand as he fucked his cock deeper into you.

“S-Sugu~!” You cried out, turning your head to meet his. “Suguru~!”

His lips caught yours, kissing you as he squeezed your hand tight, his hips buckling as he felt you getting closer and closer. Your walls hugged him, making you squeak as he shoved his tongue into your mouth. The chill of his piercing against your lips and his tongue wrestling yours for control had your eyes shut tight as you squeezed his hand back.

“Oh~ fuck- mmmm—“ Suguru’s orgasm was fast approaching, his once well-patterned thrusts becoming messy and frantic. “Fuck—cum with me, please, Princess.”

You kissed him harder, gasping against his lips, breathing hard. “Gonna cum~ Suguru harder~ harder!” Your grip on his hand is almost crushing as he does exactly as you ask. His hips bucking yours as hard as he can the display case, shaking under each frantic thrust. Your eyes shut tight as Suguru rests his mouth against your cheek, moaning as loudly as you were. His breath is hot, and his dress is messy, and you can’t stop it from happening. “C-Cumming!” You scream as your walls convulse around his cock, squeezing the loving life out of him.

“Fuck!” Suguru hisses out. “Haaah~ ooooh! Fuck that’s right cum on my cock. He whispered against your cheek as pleasured cries filled the room. “Yeah~ yeah fuck~ gonna cum~ you want it?” All you can do is scream out, nodding, legs shaking as your orgasm keeps rocking through you. That is what has your boss’ balls slapping against your clit as he fucks himself into his orgasm. “N-Nnngh!” Suguru's face presses harder against yours as his cock throbs with every spurt of cum he thrusts into you.

You blinked slowly, humming happily as Suguru stayed buried inside of you, his lips finding yours in a gentle kiss. This was everything you wanted, and more, like your dream, finally came true. Suguru sighed, nuzzling his face in your neck as his heart rate slowed.

“Remind me to thank Yuki for pushing your buttons the next time I see her.”

“Heh~ you and me both.” You wince as Suguru slowly pulls out of you, his hand sliding your hips to help steady you as you stand up. “Fuuuck, that was amazing.”

“Mhmm, you’re amazing.” Suguru wraps his arms around your waist. “Would you be opposed to round three in the shower? That way, I can thoroughly clean you up~”

Your arms snake around his neck as you bite down on your bottom lip. “I would not be opposed to that at all.” Suguru leans down, his lips inches from your own, as a chime sounds above you. Both your eyes go wide as you listen to stomping through the kitchen. Nanami storms through the back, his eyes dark with anger. The anger is displayed as Suguru struggles to pull his pants up while you shakily hide behind him as Nanami looks towards you both.

“Nanami! Turn around!”

“Oh, god, sorry!” Nanami flushed, turning away, giving you and Suguru a chance to readjust your clothing. “I-I didn't see anything! Sorry, I was looking for my idiot client!”

“He hasn’t come home yet,” Suguru says, clearing his throat and brushing his hair out of his face. “He was staying the night in Sendai.”

You peek at your blonde friend, blinking as he clenches his fists with a growl. “And he’s not answering my texts or calls!” What could be so crucial that Nanami needed to talk to Gojo at midnight?

“Did something happen?” You ask, wobbling on your jello legs as Suguru sprays disinfectant on the counter you just fucked on. “Did he say something stupid again, and you need to do crowd control?”

Nanami turns to gawk at you as Suguru wipes the display case clean. “You haven’t seen it?”

“Seen what?”

Nanami sighs, pulling up his phone and showing you both the screen. The number one trending headline on Twitter is Gojo Satoru, the headline: Popular Leisure Streamer Checks into a Love Hotel with His Girlfriend!” Underneath the article was a photo of a beautiful girl and Satoru at a receptionist's desk.

“Oooh shit.” You whisper, covering your mouth with your hand as you giggle. “Where’s his mask?!”

“My thoughts exactly!” Nanami snapped, dialing what you assumed was Gojo’s number again. “Geto, I hope you’re not too attached to him because I will obliterate him.”

Suguru sent a quick text before wrapping an arm around you. “I’ll miss him, but as long as my princess is by my side, I’ll live.” You beamed up at your boss, who was now much more to you. Fuck thanking Yuki; you needed to get her a gift basket.

Forever Tag List:

@darkstarlight82 @pandoness @nealeart @simp-plague @sugurubabe @chilichopsticks

[tinyfishtits]

Join Me?

Micah Bell / Gender Neutral Reader

Summary: Reader stumbles upon Micah skinny dipping. Word Count: 2,973 Rating: Teen and Up ~ for foul language and suggestive themes Author's Note: More fluff! This is Ch. 2 of 'Need a Haircut, Doll?' ★ Chapter 1 ☆ Read on AO3 ★ Masterlist

Life in camp finally seemed to settle and find its rhythm over the next few weeks in Clemons Point. The men were out most days diddling around Rhodes playing cops and robbers and stirring up trouble… I tried to keep out of it for the most part. In fact, I was so on edge being in Lemoyne Raider territory I hadn’t left camp at all since the move, I was starting to go stir crazy. 

Since joining the gang back in Colter, I'd established myself as a pretty proficient hunter. I was good with a bow and even better with my knives. I gave Charles and Arthur a run for their money when it came to clean kills and high quality pelts. I wasn’t used to being so cooped up and Grimshaw was really taking advantage of all my time loitering in camp. She knew I was an easy target for the chores everyone else seemed to avoid, and now I understood why. After weeks of scraping up horse crap, Karen's vomit, and cleaning dog piss out of bedrolls and blankets that the new camp mutt seemed intent on marking as his territory, I both smelt and felt like shit. 

All this was just compounded by the fact that I couldn’t seem to get a good night's sleep. And so I found myself, for the fifth night in a row, tossing and turning restlessly for hours until I finally gave up the fight and decided to go on a walk. Bundling up in my wool blanket, I made my way down to the lake. It was still dark out, probably just nearing four in the morning. The sun wouldn’t paint the sky for at least another hour. I walked barefoot across the rocky shore, treading slowly over the uneven terrain until the pebbles tapered off to finer grains of sand and I finally felt the warm relief of water at my feet. 

Listening to the soft, rhythmic lapping of the waves, I let my mind wander as I walked. I thought of what I would do when I left camp next. Perhaps I would convince Charles to go hunting with me, or maybe Keiren would finally take me up on my offer to teach him how to throw a knife if he’d show me how to fish. Being surrounded by so many beautiful and bountiful lakes, rivers and swamps in Scarlett Meadows alone, it seemed a shame that was one of the few skills I never even attempted, having written it off early in life as a needlessly boring activity. After all the chaos of the last year, though… I’d grown to cherish those simpler, quiet moments. What was once dull, was now peaceful. 

A few yards out in the water I heard a faint splashing, like a large fish breaking the surface. Straining my eyes in the darkness, I could see something shiny and dark floating on the water. The longer I looked, the bigger it got, slowly emerging from the depths and coming toward where I stood on the shore. The moment the moonlight caught his skin I gasped and turned away, almost falling on my face as my foot caught the edge of my blanket. 

“Jesus! Christ, I- I didn’t-” I stuttered, frozen in embarrassment as I realized what exactly I’d stumbled on to. Micah Bell was half submerged in the lake, a few yards behind me, completely naked. “I didn’t… see… anything.” I said sheepishly. It was mostly truthful. I didn’t see anything, below his waist at least… But I had seen more of him than I ever had before. My cheeks burned hot at the image cemented in my head. Micah, glistening wet in the moonlight, toned arms reaching up to wipe the long hair from his face, freshly trimmed mustache dripping water onto his chest and falling down his soft stomach, the golden hair that trailed down it to what lay just below the water's surface.

The silence following my accidental peeping was painful and I found myself desperately wanting to escape, wishing I had just sat by the fire like every other cold, restless night. Was this what he did? Where he disappeared to after everyone else was asleep?  I had been surprised before when I never ran across him on my midnight walks around camp. Part of me always hoped I would…

“I- I’m sorry. I’ll go.” I said, starting back off in the direction of camp. I’d only made it a few clumsy steps before I heard my name, soft and velvety on the wind at my back. I stopped dead in my tracks, still too red in the face to dare turning to look at him just yet. 

“Wait.” Was all he said, the silence that followed filled only by the subtle splashing of water as he moved through it. “Join me?” His voice rang out from the darkness. The water at my feet, once warm against my skin, now felt ice cold in comparison to the fire raging through me. I’d never heard him so… serious . He always had such a cocky air about him, laced every word in sleazy armor as to not give too much of himself away. The rawness of this one small request, just two simple words… it hung between us like a lightning bolt on the edge of a knife. 

The pure shock of it had me turning to face him, embarrassment over my red face overpowered by curiosity. “What?” I gawked back at him. Even if he couldn’t see my flushed cheeks, it was obvious by the way my voice rose two octaves how flustered I was. Only his head bobbed above the water now and he met my wide eyes with a sly smirk. The moonlight shimmered off the water and reflected in his light blue eyes, igniting them like the fluorescent irises of a predator stalking its prey. It sent a shiver down my spine. 

“I-” I started, feeling the need to speak when he let the silence drag on, but had no clue what to say or do. The thought of going for a much needed soak in the pleasantly warm water was all too enticing… Would he think me a prude if I waded into the water in my clothes? Or even more so if I walked away? If it were anyone else, Charles, Arthur, Bill… I wouldn’t have cared what they would think. But something in me desperately wanted to be vulnerable in this moment, not to turn away or hide myself in fear this chance would not come around again. 

“Turn around.” I said, my voice much steadier than I felt. His eyebrows shot up at first, then his lips twitched with a smile and he turned away to face the horizon. I shuffled out of my clothes, setting them beside where his were, to my surprise, neatly folded on the pebbly ground. Another facet of his personality suddenly fell into place. The gruff, grimey outlaw valued order and care when it came to his possessions. It was clear in the way he tended to his weapons, his horse, his facial hair, and now, his clothes. 

The water felt incredible. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone swimming, or even had a proper soak in a tub. It’d been long enough I forgot how light it made your body, how, when the water was the perfect temperature as it was tonight, it felt close to flying. If it weren’t for the light of the moon flickering off the water's surface it’d be hard to think otherwise, the darkness of night and water were practically one in the same. Once the water met my chin and the lakebed disappeared beneath my feet, I couldn't help the laugh that escaped me. 

Micah turned to face me then, “What’s so funny?” He asked, a gleaming smile painting his face as he examined my own elated expression. 

“It just-” I giggled, feeling the water flow through my toes and fingers so softly it was almost ticklish. “I really needed this.” I admitted. 

His smile softened and he hummed in acknowledgement. “Yer workin’ too hard. I don’t know why you let that old bat order you around so much.” 

I wasn’t overly fond of Grimshaw, but I understood at the very least where she was coming from. The camp would fall to pieces overnight if it weren't for her. “She only has me do what needs to be done, I don’t see you pitchin’ in on chores.” 

Micah scoffed. “I bring in cash, sweetheart, I already got a job.” He was just a few feet away from me now, effortlessly paddling his arms and legs. I wasn’t as skilled of a swimmer and could already feel my limbs growing tired at the energy I was exerting just to keep my head above water. Micah noticed my struggle and positioned himself behind me. “Lean back” His gravely whisper brushed against my ear. I did as he ordered and found myself supported by two strong hands on my back as I let my body relax against his hold. 

I let out a content sigh and heard his chuckle ring out above me. “Thank you” I whispered back, my eyes closed as I enjoyed the bliss of feeling as though I truly was floating, suspended in air. 

“Least I could do, darlin’.” He replied, his voice soft and soothing. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to give in completely to his hold on me. As I began to drift off, I could have sworn I heard Micah hum to me, gentle, sweet tunes. One I even recognized as a lullaby from my childhood. I wondered briefly if his mother sang to him as a boy, if he’d ever had a moment as peaceful as the one he was gifting me tonight. He held me like that for so long that by the time I opened my eyes, the sun was rising at my feet, the sky a beautiful deep tangerine.

He slowly released me from his hold once I began to stir awake in his arms. “Mornin’” He whispered, so close I could have sworn I felt his mustache scratch my ear. I turned to face him and he made no effort to move away, our bodies just a foot away from each other. As the sun lit the sky and the water, I became acutely aware of how naked we were. My cheeks reddened in an instant, it took more willpower than I was willing to admit, not to look down. As if he could read my thoughts, though I’m sure they were clearly written on my face, Micah waved a hand toward the shore, splashing the water with his gesture. “Go get dressed doll, I ain’t lookin’.” 

I waded to the shore, my legs a bit wobbly as I readjusted to the weight of my body. The bite of the morning chill prickled at the soft hairs on my body and I shivered against it. Quickly pulling on my clothes, I watched as Micah dove under water. I was surprised how long he could hold his breath, staying submerged for over a minute before his golden head broke the surface again. Fully dressed and bundled once more in my blanket, I yelled for him. “You comin’ cowboy?” 

Diving once more, Micah resurfaced just a few feet away from the shore, shaking his head and flinging the water from his hair like a dog. I yelped as droplets showered my bare legs and jumped back, much to his amusement. Chuckling, he rose from the water, giving me no warning as his bare body came into view. His tanned, toned, glistening body… My mouth went dry and I stumbled once more to turn around in time, giving him the same privacy he allotted me.

I walked over to one of the many large boulders scattered across the shore and took a seat, staring at my hands as he dressed. The faint rustling of fabric and Micah’s soft grunts as he pulled his clothes over damp skin filled the silence between us. The strike of a match and the subtle crackling burn that followed caught my attention and I looked up to find Micah watching me, a cigarette lazily perched between his lips, dressed except for his shirt which he left completely unbuttoned, his chest on full display. 

I opened my blanket and patted the space beside me, a silent invitation. He sauntered over and joined me without a word. His body was so warm , like he had his own fire burning under skin. Micah stiffened as I cuddled up to his side, my arms automatically wrapping around his bicep, pulling him closer. Another shiver wracked my body at our temperature difference and he relaxed, snaking his arm out of my grip to wrap around my waist and bring me deeper into his embrace, pulling the blanket around us both. 

We sat in companionable silence and watched the sun rise, basking in each other's warmth. That faint lakey musk clung to us both, but Micah scent was… deeper, more complex. The ashy burn of salt tingled at my nose, melded delectably with the tobacco smoke and a greener, fresher aroma, like prairie grass. I didn’t realize I was nuzzling his neck until he let out the faintest moan, just barely more than a sigh. But the vibration of it through his throat tickled at my nose and I shot up, suddenly aware how tangled up I was with him. He peeked sidelong at me, taking the cigarette from his lips and blowing a puff of smoke from the side of his mouth, away from me. “Why’d ya stop?” He asked, his voice so low it was barely more than a whisper. 

Instead of searching for an answer I reached for the cigarette in his hand and brought it to my lips, drawing a deep puff before returning it to his still outstretched fingers. I could feel his eyes on me as I gazed out at the brightening horizon. “You been havin’ bad dreams?” He asked suddenly. I turned to look at him, surprise and confusion painting my expression. “I- um.” He stuttered, clearing his throat before continuing, “You haven't been sleeping…” 

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and sighed as I sunk back against his warmth. “I’ve just been going a little stir crazy is all.” And when he didn’t reply added, “And it’s cold as hell here at night. I don't know how anyone gets any sleep.”

“Well go into town today, let Grimshaw do her own damn chores for once.” He said, as if it were that simple, and for him I’m sure it was. I didn’t want to admit the real reason I’d confined myself to camp the past few weeks… couldn’t bring myself to say the word, scared. I was scared. I’d made it my mission the last year to improve my knife and bow skills so I’d never feel helpless again, and I’d done a damn good job of it. But the memory of the raiders, the trauma I'd endured at their hands… It wasn’t easily forgotten. And although I could effortlessly take down an Elk, a dozen men with nothing but malice coursing through their veins was a different story entirely. 

When my silence dragged on Micah added, “I can come with ya, if you want.” I perked up, my heart fluttering at the idea of spending a day with him. 

“Would- Would you go hunting with me?” I asked, suddenly excited for what the day ahead of me held. Finally, I thought, something other than chores! Micah let out a breathy laugh and flicked the butt of his cigarette to the ground. 

“Animals?” He said with a theatrical sigh, “It’s not really my… area of expertise.” But after a moment relented, “Alright..." He drawled, "What are we huntin’?” A wide smile spread across my face as I looked up at him, “Yotes!” I said, the excitement clear in my voice. I’d been dying to get some pelts to make myself a propper, warm bed. 

Micah laughed, a genuine, deep laugh that shook me. “Coyote's it is then.” And pulled me in closer to his chest with a sigh. “Maybe I-” He started, a hand idly playing with a strand of my hair as he searched for what to say. “Could I teach you how to shoot?” He whispered into my brow. 

“I know how to shoot.” I said and he quickly retorted, “A gun darlin’.”

I hummed, feigning that I had to think it over. I’d wanted to ask him to teach me to shoot the first time I saw him twirl his revolvers around his fingers. “Sure.” I said finally, “But I don’t have a gun.” 

“I can fix that.” He said, getting up and stretching a hand out to me. The smile he gave me was soft and sweet, his silver-blue eyes alight. He looked like he’d emerged from a painting. The sun behind him gave the appearance that he glowed with golden light, beckoning me toward him like some rugged, gunslinging siren. I took his hand and let him pull me up, our hands lingering in each others for a moment longer than need be. 

He leaned down then, picking up his hat and dusting the sand from it before placing it on my head. “Looks better on you.” He said quickly, his voice a bit rough, and turned back toward camp. Blush burned at my cheeks as I watched him walk off, my eyes lingering on his broad back, his hips… “Comin’?” He yelled back at me, and I jolted, hurrying to catch up with him.

[nerdieforpedro]

Weekend Update 03/10/2024

Made it another week Nerdie.

That I did. I believe today is Sunday. Too much time in this chair. I think I slept in it before. Too many times.

Nerdie, don't you have a bed?

I do, I don't always make it there. I've usually zoned out and nodded off, the wake up when my neck hurts. 👀 I'm not always writing either, just thinking sometimes.

Couldn't you think in bed Nerdie?

I could, but I don't. That sounds like a good idea. My ideas aren't always great. But I did have a few this week.

My March Spring Prompts continue. I was able to do ten of them without repeating a character! 🤗 This upcoming week we'll see some Pedro peeps come back. Key words: gas station sushi, angst, oil and bath. Remember this is Nerdie 😎, it could be any and everything, but my prompts are mature and not explicit. I do write about some heavy subjects, fluff, a few giggles, and have some innuendos, but my main masterlist is 78% smut so just go there.

The WIP I’d been mentioning for the last few weeks or months (could be either) is finished and posted : Diddle your Dieter to Disco. My first Dieter smut actually which is hilarious at least to me. 🤣 The rest of his Masterlist is fairly fluffy. I would check the warnings on it, I put a lot in it. 👀

Part Two of my series The Lake Between Us is up. Make sure to read the warnings. Ezra introduction has a lot going on. It's an AU so he has both arms but that doesn't mean I didn't torture him other ways. 👀 I do love that ya'll love the taglist name "Taste-testers of Ezra's gumbo." 😆

I finally wrote the follow up to He told me his name called She made me feel. I think I enjoy mentally torturing Pedro characters at this point. Poor Din is so anxious and touch-starved. As always with Din = HANDS. A Nerdie staple. This is The Way.

Now for everyone's favorite (and mine): Fic recommendations!!! (Yes I did type and do a little yell, fanfics are serious. Pfft.) 😄

Confetti by @secretelephanttattoo (Marcus Pike x f reader) The Quiet Moments Collection

Adrift with you by @morallyinept (Frankie Morales x Jude OFC) The Prologue “I’m behind”’😭

A Real Man by @pedroshotwifey (Frankie Morales x female plus size reader) my request - stay self indulgent everyone! 🥰

Tick by @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin (Frankie Morales x wife reader) The Mistress of Angst!

A Bronx Tale: Part Deux - A Chicago Tale by @justabovewater20 (SydCarmy)

Love’s a weed:  just ripe by @tinytinymenace (Frankie Morales x ofc - Ruby) Fruits are essential.

Second Chances part 2 by @pedroscurls (Marcus Pike x fem reader) Such a cute series 💕

Cigarettes After Sex by @immarocketman (Awesome artist I follow. 💜)

Promise by @criticallyacclaimedstranger (Ezra - dragon x fem reader) The only Pedro character that can pull off being a dragon. 🐉

Please Mister Please by @grogusmum (Joel Miller x fem reader) The fluff 🥹💕

Unconventional Location by @winniethewife (Abel Morales x fem reader)

Personal Shopper by @huntingingoodwill (Dieter Bravo x reader)

Enjoy the Silence by @strang3lov3 (Joel Miller x fem reader)

Spicy Ask #68 by @kewwrites (Din Djarin x reader) Say it with me: HANDS 🙌🏼!!!!

Reminder by @criticallyacclaimedstranger (Tim Rockford x fem reader) Sometimes good things happen in Tim’s office.

Forever Starts With You Masterlist (Frankie Morales x chubby fem reader) @criticallyacclaimedstranger I loved all three parts I read 🥰🥰 (A Good Start, A Strong Finish and A New Beginning). It looks like there more to their story so much more reading for me. ❤️

some good friend by @covetyou (Tim Rockford x fem reader) TIM DESERVED THIS ❤️ That is all.

Sanctuary by @thefrogdalorian (Din Djarin x GN reader) Din fluff forever. 🤗

We got your back chapter 1 by @softpascalito (Javier Peña x fem reader)

The Sweetest Melody by @noisynaia (Din Djarin x afab reader)

Rise by @sp00kymulderr (Joel Miller x afab reader) ALL THE FEELS 😭

Falling for you by @fhatbhabie (Joel Miller x plus size reader) Part One - The drama!

Just look at You by @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin (Poe Dameron x fem reader) The Poe Dameron smut we deserve. 🍆

Chapter 3 - Here’s a health to the company… and one to my Boss… by @inept-the-magnificent (Tim Rockford x ofc Jane Nebbie) I just think about this series and I start giggling. Sunshine Nebbie and grump Tim - he is a super grump. But he is also me. 🤣

To the Flame chapter 6.5 by @pedroshotwifey (Dark Javier Peña x fem reader) So sweet out of context.

To the Flame chapter 9 by @pedroshotwifey (Dark Javier Peña x fem reader) The slow decent begins...we're just at the start of the ride. 😈

Between the Sheets by @saturn-rings-writes (William Tell x fem reader) Reminded me of an Isley Brothers song. I feel like we're headed toward that song. Please with this direction.

Hiccup by @morallyinept (Javier Gutierrez x fem reader) A whimpering Javi G. What an evening. 😘

A New Home by @charethcutestory02 (Frankie Morales x Benny Miller) Budding feelings. 🤗

Special shout out to Ms. Payday - Le Poet and lover of da words: @maggiemayhemnj They seek her out, have brunches and nightcaps. It's what all writers long for. She checked in on me along with @megamindsecretlair @angelofsmalldeath-codeine @magpiepills @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin and @lady-bess

I've been not as active - mainly due to work, school, and the insomnia. But still writing. 😄 priorities. lol

New appreciation for Javier Pena. well not new, re-newed. Maybe am working on a few things. None are good, none are final. Still need polishing. Also need to give Javi G's outline another look. I might...👀 have a chapter for him this week. I hope. @goodwithcheese was pleased with this. @undercoverpena was Luke-warm. I think she thought I was taking something, but if Javi P has shown us anything, sharing is caring. 😘

Stay well, sleep in your bed (unless you're planning not to) and be hydrated,

Love Nerdie 💕

[winchesterhymns]

Guard Dog

Day 1: Ethel Cain, Cycles / Ouroboros

801 words of samdean fic for the mini event for @holyfreaks birthday!!

Take the Ethel Cain prompt with a grain of salt (an inbred grain of salt) I think if she wrote a song, it'd be like this fr. I tried to keep this short and sweet, and I succeeded (can I get some applause please)!!

Inspired by this post! As well as this post and reblog, except instead of Sam being a voyeur, it's Dean >:3

Please enjoy! (Also I am NOT late, it's 11pm where I am, so ha)

Explicit!!

The sound of dogs barking startles me awake. It's those damn pit bulls on the other side of the road, I hear their chains rattle. I wouldn't really care about them or give them a second thought if it weren't for Sammy. Every time we walk home from school he sees them, he worries about their necks and how the chains might snap or how they might choke. I find myself thinking something similar from time to time now.

The wind breaks into our room and settles on my skin, my blanket must've come off during the night. The days have been getting hotter and hotter as summer approaches, it always surprises just how hot it can get in Nebraska. Sammy begged dad to let us stay so he could at least finish grade 9 here. I say it's a pain in the ass. 

Speaking of the little brat, I don't see him in his bed. I get up and look around the dark room, the lock on the door is still on its side and the keys are on the dresser, he hasn’t gone out. That's when I hear the sound of running water coming from the bathroom, and all of a sudden, I gotta piss.

I stumble my way over to the worn, wooden door. The room is as shitty as all the others we've been in, only difference is there's two beds. Usually there would only be one, since it was cheaper and it'd just be me and Sammy. Of course though, Sammy's a growing boy, and growing boys need their own space, so he says. Most we could manage was another bed, no way in hell dad would let us spend money on a whole other room when we're already struggling with what we have.

I stop before my fist pounds away at the door. It's creaked open. 

I look in and see Sammy’s reflection in the mirror. He’s just sitting on the toilet, his pants down.

But… His hand is busy, swiftly moving up and down. There's sweat dripping down his forehead and his mouth is parted open, he almost looks…

Beautiful.

His features have always been sharper than mine, and his hair longer, he liked it that way – and no matter how much I hassled him about it – I did too.

I watch a little longer before quietly going back to bed. 

I'm proud of him. 

Everything seems to be in working order, as his older brother I gotta watch out for these things. I roll to my side and ignore the pain between my legs.

~~~

I was out getting some chips and soda for Sammy and I. We'd be having a movie marathon tonight, dad let us rent some movies, so we did. And since it was Friday, Sammy agreed. 

I'd been gone for too long, and Sammy said he wasn't feeling well, so I hurry and pay before going back to our room.

Three weeks.

I've been watching him for three weeks. 

Every night. 

Or well, every night he does it, which is only a few times a week. 

Just to make sure everything works, dad told me to look out for him, so that's what I'm doing. Honestly it'd be better if he were doing it with a girl. He's old enough now, why he's sitting around in the bathroom and diddling himself alone is beyond me. 

A girl has been stopping by though. She blonde with green eyes, some light freckles here and there, looks almost like a doll. Sammy says she's just there to work on a project. But sometimes I catch her pushing Sammy's hair from his face. Or Sammy touching her leg. They're bold doing that while I'm there, I'll give ‘em that. 

I take my keys out as my eyes land on our door, lucky room 13. 

The dogs are yapping away like always. But beyond that, I hear a moan…coming from inside.

My throat goes dry, my stomach tightens, and I immediately know what’s happening. 

I feel proud.

I peak through a crack in the curtains. Sammy's sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, he's facing me, his eyes closed. I watch his hands and the way they sit on the girls naked hips, he's helping her move. 

She's on top, moving like this is a rodeo and she's just tamed her first wild horse. She's persistent with her moves, and I can feel the pride surge within me. 

I see Sammy scrunch up his little nose, and from weeks of observation, I know he's close.

My baby brother’s healthy, and his body’s working the way it's supposed to, he's getting it on with girls. 

I'm truly proud.

I hear the dogs barking.

The chain snaps. 

And then I'm inside, pushing her off of him.

[sunsetofdoom]

@man--eater went ahead and tagged me in WIP Wednesday again, and since I do officially have the first chapter of the Fingersmith AU ready to go I figured I'd drop something actually plot-important

“I got word on a serious take.” Striker diddled the chess piece between his fingers- a rook. “Say there’s a high-ranking demon. A king. Does nothing but sit in a library, runnin’ his fingers over his rare books. Prized, precious collection. Wants some of it copied out, or framed. And I do his work.” “Generous of you, donating your time to the fucking poor.” “Shut the fuck up. Now, the guy has a dozen kids. Different wives. Different ranks. Goetia politics, complex stuff. Most of ‘em have their own palaces, own hobbies. But one,” Striker slapped down the playing card- the nine of spades, a thick creased line through the center where it’d been stepped on- like he was making a point. “One, he keeps close. A prince, trained up like a fuckin’ librarian.” Blitzo finally shut his notebook, willing to admit he was listening. Just to make it clear he was still skeptical, he folded his arms. “The boy’s engaged. Has been for years. But-” Striker set down the marble, spinning it gently so it shone blue and green and red. “He has an inheritance waiting... if he marries low. His fiancee’s another Goetia, more money on her name even than he’s got; if they get hitched, they can stay in Daddy’s house, play Happy Families the rest of their days. But if he marries below his station... he could get money from a trust. His mama, a wise woman by my reckoning, left everything she had in a vault for him before she died, just in case whoever his daddy picked out was a cunt.” Nodding along, Blitzo stopped the spinning marble with one finger. “And is she?” “Boy howdy, she is,” Striker smiled, wolfish. “And the boy is just about eatin’ outta my hand. I got him in painting lessons. He’s awful. Innocent. Clueless. And I was just about to propose an elopement, when...” He moved his hand, knocking over the rook. “The chaperone lost his place. It was his dresser, a valet, nobody special; but the father won’t risk nobody contaminating his bloodline. No chaperone, no painting lessons. No elopement.” “No money,” Blitzo mumbled, spinning the marble himself. “How much are we talking, here?” “Twenty thousand in ready,” Striker said, folding and unfolding the nine of spades. “Plus a steady flow- a thousand a month, on a stipend, for the rest of his life or until the money runs out.” “And my cut?” “Five thousand.” “Seven. And at least a couple of the stipend payments.” Blitzo wasn’t an idiot. The real prize was the steady drip of free money. “Six, and one per year.” “Six and every six months. And for doing what?” Striker smiled slowly, nodding in approval. They’d come to an agreement. “You take the job as his dresser. You talk me up, push him into my arms, spin him a shit-eating idiot love story; the boy’s never done anything in his life but read books, he’ll eat it up. And you help him outta the house for the elopement.” “And afterwards?” The smile got wider, and Striker’s tail started to rattle in anticipation. “Afterwards? When all the papers is signed, and I got the bank statements in my name. I go have a little talk with some friends of mine in Sloth, who run the rolls for a fancy-ass mental hospital. They fudge the books, we spread some rumors. And spoiled Prince Stolas spends the rest of his life locked in a little white room, while we use that inheritance money for people like us.”

Tagging @nyxofdemons (HI) @cringefailvox and @onswifterwings,

[mariana-oconnor]

The Final Problem pt 1

🎵It's the Fi-inal Proble-em🎶diddle-uh duh! Diddle-uduhduuuh!🎵

And now that's going to be stuck in my head all week.

I have seen multiple adaptations of this story and I believe I have read it twice in the original as well as having used it a few times for reference back in my days hanging out in the Sherlock comms on lj. So I know it pretty well. No rampant speculation this time, although there may be several highly inappropriate memes. I'll see what I can do.

It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.

Ah, here we find the true dichotomy of Watsonian vs Doyleist, as depicted in the diagram below.

My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred.

ANOTHER FUCKING COLONEL! Colonels are the worst. I'm sure that at some poitn in his life ACD was in some way drastically wronged by a colonel in the British army whom he never forgot or forgave. Not a Major or a Lieutenant or a Captain, but definitely a Colonel.

Also, I thought Professor Moriarty was also called James. Did their parents just lack imagination? Or could they not be bothered to learn more than one name. Does it matter which child turns up, as long as one of them does? Is James just the name that ACD uses when he can't think of any others?

I alone know the absolute truth of the matter...

Are you sure about that, Watson? I feel like maybe there's like... one tiny thing you don't know. Just one. Absolutely minuscule thing. Not important at all. Barely worth knowing.

It may be remembered that after my marriage, and my subsequent start in private practice, the very intimate relations which had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent modified.

Literally the other day you were living with him in Baker Street again, and it seems like you spent more time with Holmes in the months after your marriage than you did with your wife or at work, so I'm not sure that starting this true account of events off with a bald-faced lie is the best course of action, but sure.

Reading these stories in this order and seeing with complete clarity that ACD paid no attention to his past writing with regards to timeline and continuity is kind of funny. There were only three cases in 1890? I'm sure we've had more than three cases give us specific dates in 1890. I can't remember exactly when he got married, but it wasn't that long before 1890 (1888 wikipedia tells me, and many stories take place in that nebulous 'months after I was married' period. The timeline is honestly just chaos. One of the last stories was set in 1892, which from the date of this story is clearly impossible, so... Watson just makes up the dates to suit his own agenda?)

I received two notes from Holmes, dated from Narbonne and from Nîmes...

Now that I know he was recently in Nimes, I am going to be picturing Holmes in a pair of jeans for the rest of this story. That's just how it is. Sorry. And before you say it's anachronistic, denim trousers became popular in the 1870s in the states, iirc, so it's entirely plausible.

"...I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall."

Watson I have come to close your shutters, smoke a cigarette and climb over your backwall, and I'm all out of shutters and cigarettes.

"Is Mrs Watson in?" "She is away upon a visit." "Indeed! You are alone?" "Quite." "Then it makes it the easier for me to propose that you should come away with me for a week to the Continent."

Oh, and also to invite you on an impromptu romantic getaway to the continent, seeing as your wife's not around. I'm in fear for my life, but it's going to be great fun.

Watson suggesting that this is an 'aimless holiday' is odd. Watson, if your friend comes to you and admits that he's afraid of being shot and has been in a fight, wants to leave your house in an unconventional manner that will help him avoid being seen and simultaneously suggests you leave the country. It might be connected. The destination is clearly less important than the departing.

"You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?" said he.

This reveal was kind of spoiled for modern readers with the Colonel's name earlier, which is a bit of a shame. But I guess ACD had no idea that Moriarty would become such a household name that just this in itself would be able to make readers a century on go 'Oh!' Still a pity, though. Having that whole 'in danger for his life' thing and THEN the Moriarty reveal would be a better build up for modern readers.

"His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature..."

👀

"...with a phenomenal mathematical faculty."

What is an 'army coach'? I mean, I know what I feel like it means, but I fail to see how it would be a good job for a professor of mathematics. Did he coach them in maths?

"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them."

Me, trying to find the most ridiculous gif of Macavity from Cats (2019): There's so. many. to choose from.

"Again and again he strove to break away, but I as often headed him off. I tell you, my friend, that if a detailed account of that silent contest could be written, it would take its place as the most brilliant bit of thrust-and-parry work in the history of detection."

When I first realised that Moriarty appears in only 1 of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I was kind of astonished, because he always seemed like he must have been a recurring nemesis to have made such an impact on the canon. But no, it really is just this story and ACD gives him a lot of hype. It leaves a lot of space in the narrative, and as we all know, the plot holes are where the fanfic gets in. Sherlock Holmes, I believe, is the most adapted character in English literary history. More than Robin Hood, more than King Arthur, more than any Shakespeare play. And you've got to wonder if part of that is because of the gaps in the narrative that are mentioned, but not fleshed out.

I wonder if, at the time, there were Sherlock Holmes fan groups who pored over past cases trying to find evidence of Moriarty's hand in previous stories. I bet there were people scribbling their own ideas of what happened between Moriarty and Holmes and reading them to their friends and family in the evenings. Just as I bet, after this story, a million fix it stories were written/told. I've never heard of any existing, but it feels like there must have been.

"I was sitting in my room thinking the matter over, when the door opened and Professor Moriarty stood before me."

"His appearance was quite familiar to me. He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in this head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion."

Police officers are mammalian and criminal masterminds are reptilian. Good to know.

"'You have less frontal development that I should have expected,' said he, at last. 'It is a dangerous habit to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one's dressing-gown.'"

"You have a small head." Interesting opening line. Although it is fair to say that he's right about the gun. Not best practice.

"'All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' said he. "'Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' I replied."

These lines are iconic, but also, as someone who has written on occasion, also genius. Why bother trying to work out a suitably intelligent and ominous conversation when you can do this instead and have it work ten times better. It's a lovely bit of writing.

"'You crossed my path on the 4th of January,' said he. 'On the 23d you incommoded me; by the middle of February I was seriously inconvenienced by you; at the end of March I was absolutely hampered in my plans; and now, at the close of April, I find myself placed in such a position through your continual persecution that I am in positive danger of losing my liberty. The situation is becoming an impossible one.'"

I do also love this matter of fact little summary, where Moriarty has clearly had his thesaurus open at the word 'blocked' and just picked words at random. The exasperation and yet strange calm of having this all written down in his diary is great. Moriarty is very well constructed as a character.

He goes on to say 'tut, tut' as well, which is just such a supercilious, condescending little thing to say. He is eminently hateable, and yet simultaneously has done nothing actually wrong on page.

Holmes refers to him as Mr Moriarty to his face and Professor Moriarty to Watson, which is a nice little bit of pettiness. Technically he isn't a professor any more, but just that little bit of disrespect to his face. Beautiful.

"I took a cab after that and reached my brother's rooms in Pall Mall, where I spent the day."

Oh hai, Mycroft!

So far, Holmes has escaped death 3 times today. So he's doing pretty well.

I do find it odd that with so many days advance warning, Moriarty can't find another way to not be arrested on Monday that isn't killing Holmes. Can't he just... stop whatever thing is happening on Monday?

"The practice is quiet," said I, "and I have an accommodating neighbour. I should be glad to come."

The return of Watson's accommodating neighbour, the true unsung hero of these tales. There had better be a fanfic on AO3 that's a bystander POV of Watson's long-suffering doctor neighbour and all the times Waton pops his head in and says 'I have to have adventures today, you don't mind keeping an eye on my practice do you, old chum? Splendid! See you in a week!'

I'm sure all of Holmes instructions about how Watson should get to the station are justified, but they are also very funny.

"...dash through the Arcade, timing yourself to reach the other side at a quarter-past nine."

Ah yes, I know exactly how quickly to run through the arcade to make sure I get to the other side at exactly quarter past nine. Who doesn't?

This is only a two parter, and the next part is due tomorrow, it says, rather than on Tuesday. So, everyone get your mourning bands ready.

[lomappreciationblog]

A collection of dialogues you can get from Jumi in special circumstances, shall we say. This post turned out long, so I will focus on Rubens in this one!

This contains massive spoilers for the Jumi Arc in Legend of Mana as a whole - I highly encourage to only see this post if you've already completed the Jumi Arc!!!

I wrote this before my previous post, so sorry for repeating some points, but I think this post is clearer with those!

The special circumstances is...throughout the Jumi Arc, several characters die, these being Rubens, Esmeralda (my bby...) and Diana. However...if you go to the Underworld after their deaths, you can actually find them in separate rooms.

Which in itself is already a significant fact, because as Pokiehl explained in in Diddle's Had It!...the Underworld is not a place of rest, but a place for souls who "still cling to life." With that in mind, being able to find Rubens, Esmeralda and Diana in the Underworld meant that they are also souls clinging to life, and happily, their faith will be rewarded at the end of Teardrop Crystal.

Rubens and Esmeralda are able to perceive and talk to the protagonist, while Diana stays silent as a statue, but her core will respond if you talk to her. If you happened to bring along Pearl or Elazul, the dead Jumi can sense there is someone near, but they cannot see the living Jumi.

Pearl and Elazul can see them, however, and they have unique responses too, one of the reasons I love LOM so much - the devs actually took the time to put in unique responses for characters in certain scenarios that are often out of the players' way!

Rubens is the least spoiler-y since he dies in a very early Jumi quest, but Diana and Esmeralda especially are significant plot developments, and the best way to experience LOM' stories is to get in blind is what I believe, but here are the dialogues if you've missed them:

I feel like poor Rubens get the worst end of the stick for being killed so early, but as can be seen here, despite being killed, his death has only given him renewed determination. It's kind of heartbreaking, since in A Flame of Hope we only see Rubens as a broken man who can't care to live up to his title, and Sandra breaks him further (metaphorically and literally) when she accuses him of not caring any more for Diana when he couldn't bring himself to hurt a Sproutling for a possible cure.

But one of the themes of the Jumi Arc is that brutal violence is not a solution to an already ongoing cycle of tragedy and violence - for all we know Sandra was lying about the Popo Bug being a cure, so Rubens refusing to hurt the Sproutling wasn't a weakness, but rather an indication that he is still a noble, compassionate character, with the kindness the Jumi were known for. And though Rubens died to Sandra in the bleakest circumstances possible, he persisted in the Underworld and even believed that the Jumi will go on.

There's something poetic in that - Sandra stole his core, the Flame of Hope, because she deemed him worthless and only fit to fuel the Lord of Jewels, but stripped of his core, Rubens actually regained his hope. What I'm saying is Rubens deserved better and I wish the anime did him justice, though we at least saw a little more of him there.

If you brought Pearl along...you will find this extra conversation.

(I was gonna upload the individual screenshots but it's a lot, luckily I did have a video of it).

The first couple of things Rubens say didn't get included though, so here are screenshots:

There's something bittersweet in that Rubens recognizes the player characters and that he doesn't say any word of blame for us being unable to prevent his death, but does tell us to look after the other Jumi.

Also the fact that we actively can pass along Pearl's message of consolation...awwww.

Sadly I don't have records of Elazul's special responses, but I am replaying LOM HD with Shiloh as the protagonist this time, so when I find all Elazul responses I will collect them in their own post!

[lonesomedreamer]

‘How lucky I am: sometimes it terrifies me. Dearest Jack…’ Her inner eye filled with a brilliant image of Jack Aubrey, tall, straight, cheerful, overflowing with life and direct open affection, his yellow hair falling over his post-captain’s epaulette and his high-coloured weather-beaten face stretched in an intensely amused laugh... Never was there anyone with whom she had had such fun – no one had ever laughed like that.

☸

Stephen would have seen Sophie only a few weeks ago, perhaps even less; he would certainly have messages from her, perhaps even a letter. [Jack] put his hand secretly to the crinkle in his bosom, and lapsed into a reverie.

☸

Sweetheart, We drank your health three times three on Monday; for the fleet tender brought us orders while we were polishing Cape Sicié, together with the post and your three dear letters, which quite made up for us being diddled out of our cruise. And unknown to me it also brought a copy of The Times with our announcement in it; which I had not yet seen, even.

I had invited most of the gun-room to dinner, and that good fellow Simmons brought it out, desiring to drink your health and happiness and saying the handsomest things about you – they had the liveliest recollection of Miss Williams in the Channel, all too short, were your most devoted, etc., very well put. I went red as a new-painted tompion and hung my head like a maiden, and upon my honour I was near-hand blubbering like one, I so longed for you to be by me in this cabin again – it brought it back so clear.

☸

‘Mend your pace, Sophie. Come come. You would never grow fat as a scrivener. Cannot you spell hyperbole? Is it done at last, for all love? Show.’

‘Never,’ cried Sophie, folding it up.

‘I believe you have put in more than ever I said,’ said Stephen, narrowing his eyes. ‘You blush extremely.’

☸

Jack handed Sophia out and cried, ‘Sophie, my dear, jump in. God bless you.’

‘God bless you and keep you, Jack. Make Stephen wrap himself in the cloak. And remember, forever and ever – whatever they say, forever and ever and ever.’

☸

...Stephen walked into the cabin. It was filled with a rosy smile, with contentment and the smell of porter; Jack sat there at his table behind a number of opened letters from Sophia, two glasses and a jug. ‘There you are, my dear Stephen,’ he cried. ‘Come and drink a glass of porter, with the Irish Franciscans’ compliments. I have had five letters from Sophie, and there are some for you. […] What a splendid hand she writes, don’t you find?’ said Jack. ‘You can make out every word. And, really, such a style! Such a style! I wonder how she could have got such a style: they must have been some of the best letters that were ever wrote. There is a piece here about the garden at Melbury and the pears, that I will read to you presently, as good as anything in all literature.’

☸

‘[A]nd then again, you know, I do so long to be married! The idea of being married drives a man, by God: you can have no idea. Married to Sophie, I mean…’

☸

‘Ah, that is Sophie from clew to earring,’ cried Jack, with such a radiant smile. ‘Can you imagine a sweeter thing to say? And such modesty, do you see? As if anyone could look at Diana after – however,’ he said, recollecting himself and looking deprecatingly at Stephen, ‘I don’t mean to say anything wrong, or uncivil. But not a reproach, not an unkind word in the whole letter – Lord, Stephen, how I love that girl.’ His bright blue eyes clouded, ran over, and he wiped them with his sleeve.

☸

He is a deep old file, and I do not pretend any great penetration; but I love him more than anyone but you…

☸

He was sitting at his desk in his cabin… writing to Sophie ‘the sword of honour they have presented me with is a very handsome thing, in the Indian taste, I believe, with a most flattering inscription; indeed, if kind words were ha’pence, I should be a nabob, and oh sweetheart a married nabob.’

☸

Sophie dear, here is the prettiest thing in the world – John Company is stuffing the ship with treasure – you and I are to get freight, as we say… No vast great thumping sum, but it will clear me of debt and set us up in a neat cottage with an acre or two. So you are hereby required and directed to proceed to Madeira forthwith and here is a note for Heneage Dundas who will be delighted to give you a passage… Lose not a moment: you may knit your wedding-dress aboard. In great haste, and with far greater love, Jack.

☸

‘Good morning, Jack. I have Miss Williams here. Will you come across?’

The boat splashed down, half-filling in the choppy sea; it pulled across; Jack leapt for the side, raced up, touched his hat to the quarterdeck, crushed Dundas in his arms, and was led to the cabin, wet, ablaze with joy.

Sophie curtseyed, Jack bowed; they both blushed extremely, and Dundas left them…

Endearments, a hearty kiss. Endless explanations, perpetually interrupted and re-begun…

☸

‘I tell you what, Sophie,’ cried Jack. ‘I have a parson aboard! I have been cursing him up hill and down dale for a Jonah, but now how glad I am: he shall marry us this morning.’

‘No, my dear,’ said Sophia. ‘Properly, and at home, and with Mama’s consent, yes – whenever you like. […] The minute we get home, you shall marry me in Champflower church, if you really wish it. But if you don’t, I will sail round and round the world with you, my dear.’

☸

Breakfast, with Dundas…insisting on a rehearsal of the action with Linois, was a long, rambling meal, with dishes pushed aside and pieces of toast representing ships, which Jack manoeuvered with his left hand, holding Sophia’s under the table with his right, and showing the disposition of his line at different stages of the battle, while she listened with eager intelligence and a firm grasp of the weather-gauge.

[illleavemymessageinmysong]

same love hey diddle the mess name and address playboy to a man i’m carrying San ferry anne if you wanna love in song struggle arrow through me the other me no more lonely nights twice in a lifetime write away this one my brave face footprints secret friend I do the lovers that never were so like candy demons dance turned out lifelong passion anyway looking at her souvenir long-tailed winter bird only love remains sixty second street hosanna nothing too much just out of sight off the ground hope of deliverance say say say getting closer to you get enough beware my love cage 4th of july

So many songs about, or more often, addressed to, an ex. Of course , some, from before John’s death, might be messages to him, under the cover of a relationship song format. Not included here but I think ‘Coming Up’ is a John song. ‘Call Me Back Again’, if it’s about anybody, might be John. Linda, of course, is a massive presence in his songs. Some of them here might well be about contemporary events with Heather, Nancy. Some, of course, might just be words to fit a tune.

It’s the accumulation, though. Also, I think, a sense of distance: distance in time and in place from the person being addressed.

Yet, in all the articles and blogs written about Paul, many of which are great, this is not addressed at all. As someone commented on a YouTube video of one of these songs: “Sometimes I don’t know how people don’t pick up on what Paul is putting down”. There are, of course, people here and there who have picked up on this and whose thoughts have influenced my own on this subject.

Within these songs, there are some recurring themes that we can go on to have a look at. In the meantime, a lyrics jumble:

If I give my love again to you, will it be the same love that we once thought was true….hey diddle, I want you back.. I wouldn't make her her wooden table, I wouldn't care…. you sailed away one night in June..the mess I’m in…. you packed a bag, and like a birdie flew away, meanwhile, I'm sitting here, I'm getting in a mess…. you had your own way one too many times and now you’re going to find out what it`s like, just what it`s like, now you`re a mess….

by dawn’s first light I’ll come back to your room again..ah, long time no see baby sure has been a while…. your little man brings you trinkets when he can, but he can't stay, dear…. If you wanna love me again, I’ll take you for a ride in my Cadillac….my heart cries out for love..I can see the places that we used to go to now….want to get you in my heart again, want to love you once more..we can work it out together, we'll get through this somehow….

you couldn't have done a worse thing to me if you'da taken an arrow and run it right through me…. I know I was a crazy fool for treating you the way I did.. I wish that I could take it back..and if you let me try again, I'll have a better attitude…. I can wait another day until I call you.. and I won't go away until you tell me so, no I'll never go away…. once in a lifetime I'm a lucky man If I can find the kind of love that’s gonna last for me, twice in a lifetime is one of those unspoken dreams we usually reserve for fantasy…. you need love, write a letter, you need love write away..hey Cinderella, did you need that other fella…. did I ever take you in my arms, look you in the eye, tell you that I do?….

ever since you went away, i’ve had this sentimental inclination not to change a single thing.. ever since you left I have been trying to compose a 'baby will you please come home' note meant for you…. but his heart keeps aching in the same old way, he can't help feeling that she might come back someday….

here we are, where are we, cast adrift on some uncharted sea..I know we'll find our way, i know we'll reach the end if you will say you'll be my secret friend…. please remember this, after a time it's through and nevermore will there be days for me and you…. I hang patiently on every word you send, will we ever be much more than just friends?.. and I know dear, how much it's going to hurt, If you still refuse to get your hands dirty, so you, you must tell me something... I love you, say goodbye or anything…. what did I do to make her go, why must she be the one that I have to love so….

I can't wait much longer till you tell me baby, there’s some chance we'll get together maybe sooner or later, I'll be in with half a chance.. exorcise my demons, cast them out today, only you can do it, make them go away…. if you don't mind some stormy weather, we’ll be together in our fantasy..looking back it didn't hurt me, it did something for my soul, it taught me when you find a love don’t break it…. step into the misty mountains with your hair like ambered honey..give me love, be my lifelong passion…. If you love me, won't you call me, I’ve been waiting, waiting too long..in my soul is constant yearning, always singing, singing this song…. she’s good, she's kind, she's so refined but me, I'm losing my mind..though she haunts me like the sound of the rain, or a river running down to the ocean, I hate to complain, but it's happening again….

If you want me, tell me now, if I can be of any help, tell me how, let me love you like a friend, everything is gonna come right in the end…. do you, do-do, do you miss me? Do you, do-do, do you feel me?…. and if you take your love away from me, I’m only going to want it back.. to bring a happy ending to our song, I’ll carry on believing in a love…. well you could make my life complete, if you say that we could meet,for a minute on sixty second street…. come now lady don't you do me wrong.I fell for you and now it wont be long, before I hold you in my arms, before I take you to my heart again…. I said I love you I thought you knew, the last thing to do was to try to betray me, the new morning light, I'll never forget it….

there must have been a lot of heartache for you to sink so low.. I need loving, you need loving too..wouldn’t take a lot to get off the ground…. I will always be hoping, hoping you will always be holding my heart in your hand…. all alone I sit home by the phone waiting for you baby..through the years how can you stand to hear my pleading for you dear?…. when will you see me, my salamander..now don't try to tell me, oh no, don't answer, oh no, I’m getting closer, I’m getting closer to your heart….

well if the same thing happened to you, will you still put me through what you put me through?…. it was a time when we walked by the docks, I told you, "I need you all of my life" and watching the tugs rolling by together, do you remember?..do you remember the lights on the shore, how they reflected the rain on the road? I believed that you love me alone, it was real, do you remember?.. get enough, girlI can't get enough, enough of you…. I have to leave and when I'm gone, I’ll leave my message in my song…. emotional moments, you left in a rage, but if you could love me now I wouldn’t be in a cage..dramatic performance, direct from the stage but if you could get me out, I wouldn’t be in a cage….sunset’s painting up the sky, there’s something in my eye, why am I crying, it’s the 4th of july.. could it have something to do with the fact that I've been feeling blue since friday..you came in with him again and, suddenly, I knew it wasn't my day..why am I crying, it’s the fourth of July….

[notsanguineatall]

Yuletide Recs, Second Batch

The Other Side (1200 words) Fandom: Hey Diddle Diddle (Nursery Rhyme)

The world is made up of many moving parts. Would you like to learn more? This story is metaphysical, a bit creepy, and utterly delightful! 

strange games (1080 words) Fandom: Gilda (1946)

Johnny, Ballin, and Gilda go round and round like a roulette wheel. The author really captures the hateful, passionate dynamic of the film. I don't like Johnny, but I definitely feel for him in this.

before the thin man (1017 words)  Fandom: Thin Man (Movies)

Sparkling dialogue and such a witty premise! I never stopped to think how Nora met Nick. Now I know!

Move in Time with the Light (1145 words)  Fandom: Bulgari "Unexpected Wonders" Commercial

A sumptuous feast, as befitting the subject matter. The main character is fascinating and -- honestly? -- a little too much. Which is exactly how she would want it.

wilds of thought (1323 words)  Fandom: Oppenheimer (Movie 2023)

Truly gorgeous. This reads like memory, time skipping and fragments of dreams.

it doesn't hurt; there's nothing to it (4646 words)  Fandom: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers

This isn't a fandom with which I am familiar, but it didn't matter in the slightest. The language is courtly while still being endearing and ridiculously hot. "Weaponized sincerity" may be my new favorite descriptor.

non-regional diction (1373 words)  Fandom: Abbott Elementary (TV)

Splendid Barbara voice! Absolutely pitch perfect!

Perfume Suite (1705 words)  Fandom: Gilda (1946)

Johnny never stood a chance; between Ballin and Gilda, Johnny burns. The author really captures the dynamic between Johnny and Ballin, with Johnny's impossible feelings about Gilda proving to be the third in a menage a trois.

The New Galatea (4271 words)  Fandom: My Fair Lady (1964)

What a delight! This rewriting of the end of My Fair Lady features wonderful characterizations as well as some convincing twists that expand on the roles of Pickering and Freddy. Plus I could practically see the clothes just based on the author's descriptions!

Only One Bed (1483 words)  Fandom: The Hunt for Red October (1990)

This… should not work. It should not work at all, and yet the author manages to take a worn (but fantastic) trope and use it to craft a portrait of four fascinating men. It is both funny and sweet.

the pros and cons of being an Addams (2428 words) Fandom: The Addams Family (Movies - Sonnenfeld)

Pubert is not your typical Addams. And yet is he the best of all the Addams traits: the sensible but wry humor, the practicality, and the utter weirdness. What a great character portrait!

[slipping-through-my-fingertips]

Klaine Advent 2022

Christmas Crush

AO3

Burst

The bus ride back to McKinley was loud. Cheerful chatter and singing from the tops of their lungs. When they arrived back at school, they quickly parted ways and got in their cars. School had already been let out. Only the glee club’s cars were left in the lot.

Blaine hopped in Kurt’s car.

“No Lima Bean stop today,” he said, “we have a dance to get ready for.”

“Yea, sir,” Blaine replied.

His mom wasn’t home when Blaine got dropped off. Hopefully she would be home before he left. Blaine was sure she’d want photos. He could see her now bursting with pride and instructing them on how to pose.

Blaine’s suit jacket was a crisp navy blue, his white button drop was stark against it. He was deciding between two bow ties when his phone went off.

A text from his date.

Kurt: on my way!

Oh god, he needed to do his hair still! Blaine hopped in the bathroom and gelled down his curls. Not too much, just in case…someone wanted to run their fingers through it as they kissed at the end of the night. That was a fantasy and he knew it might not come true. But…

He heard the front door open and his mom call up the stairs, “Blaine, I’m home!”

“Be right down!”

He grabbed the two bow ties off his bed and headed down stairs for a second opinion.

One was solid light blue and would likely match Kurt perfectly and the other matched Blaine’s jacket and had little snowflakes on it. After all the dance was a Winter Wonderland theme.

“Which one?” He asked, holding them out for inspection.

“Hmmm, I think the navy.”

“Me too,” he agreed.

Although he usually tied them himself, he held it out for his mom to put on.

“You look very handsome.”

“Thank you.”

Another car pulled in the driveway. Kurt was here. As Blaine went to get the door, his mom ran off to get her camera. Despite having a camera on her phone, she still loved getting photos developed.

Kurt looked beautiful. There was no other word for him. Baby blue ensemble that maybe his eyes sparkle.

“You look stunning,” he told him.

“So do you,” Kurt said.

“Oh, look at you both!” Blaine’s mom said, “you must be Kurt, shame we haven’t met before today. I’m Pam.”

“Nice to meet you,” Kurt said.

“Okay, enough diddle dallying, get together.”

Blaine allowed her to take a dozen or so before calling it off.

“Mom, we gotta get going.”

“Fine, fine,” she said, waving them off. “Have fun, be safe!”

“We will!” They both chimed.

~~~

The gym was silver and blue. Snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, puffs of fake snow littering the ground. Balloon arches at exits and entryways.

“When they said Winter Wonderland, they meant it.”

“Yeah they did,” Kurt agreed.

Rachel ran up to them.

“I find it lovely they used Hanukkah colors,” she told them.

Kurt nodded, but as an aside to Blaine said, “always about her.”

“Let’s get some punch,” Kurt suggested, “see you later, Rach.”

Kurt grabbed Blaine’s right hand and led him over to the buffet table.

“I’m really glad you asked me,” Blaine commented. “I had been working up the courage all month. Guess I failed on that front.” He shrugged.

Kurt handed him a plastic cup of punch.

“I think we both won big time. We’re here together and that’s what matters.”

Blaine couldn’t argue with that.

They found the rest of the glee club had commandeered two tables to sit at. Everyone was snacking and still talking about their win at sectionals.

Just when Blaine had finished his punch and cookie offered to him by Sam, Winter Christmas began to play.

“Come on, let’s dance,” he suggested, “it’s our song.”

And dance they did.

[starfoam]

V: Hey Diddle Diddle (Shrekverse)

“The cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon...”

A charming little rhyme for what proved to be the most chaotic day of Lorelei Snow’s life. The young woman lived alone on a little farm, perfectly content with her little life, and suspected nothing stranger about herself until she received a note on her stoop. A noter which said only three words:

“Hey... diddle diddle?”

And then her house exploded. 

It’s suspected that Lo was a latent magic user - a witch, changeling, Chosen Maiden or other sort who just got put to the side early on and never made a fuss about it. With the speaking of those magic words, however, Lorelei unlocked a truly incredible amount of power and, in the process, lost everything. The magic outburst caused absolute chaos - her only dairy cow suddenly took flight, her dog gained the ability to laugh, and all of her tableware, from dishes to spoons, ran off into the sunset. She was left with nothing... except a curious onlooker.

The Cat and the Fiddle

Known as “Cat” or “the Cat” for short. (”really? You’re okay with that?” “My other option was Fiddler. Call me Cat.”) Attracted by the outburst of magic the likes of which he’s only seen in Far Far Away, the Cat found Lorelei in the wreckage of her magic-wrecked house, with only her dog to show for it. 

After helping her recover from her shock with a gentle song on his strings, the Cat offered her a suggestion - take this as a sign. A (stupidly) prophetic nursery rhyme is not much of a story, is it? And this is a beginning, not an end. 

After taking some time to grieve her old life, as well as make sure what little she had left was in order, Lorelei agreed to go with the Cat. Where to remains a mystery for now - the Cat is a storyteller, seeking adventures and heroes, and Lo accompanies him across the land in search of a better life for herself. She is still able to use magic, but can only bring out its full potential with the recitation of “hey diddle diddle” - something she is reluctant to repeat.

She still has her laughing dog, although Benji can hardly be called “little” by this point. He grew up fast.

[kamreadsandrecs]

I can list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.

Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.

That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)

Tax agents. Oh, I feared them. As far back as I can remember, my mother was always being stretched on the rack of something she called ‘an extension’. She saved every receipt she was ever given in a shoebox. Despite her efforts, we were always being audited for priest reasons, and every other year or so I found myself parked in a suffocating van, for hours on end, outside offices just like these. What was happening, was she being interrogated under hot lights? I had a sense of dark-suited agents walking among us, eyes on our daily business – on me, in the minivan, as I waited for my mother. I was a fearful child, as he was. I was also raised in Tornado Alley, with noticeably different results.

The Pale King was found by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell: a chaos of paper, floppy disks, notebooks, three-ring-binders; words, some typed, some in his tiny handwriting, all adding up to hundreds of pages. There was no direction for its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ‘had the enormous honour of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the type that Wallace had made it his mission to describe.

Pietsch assures us that had Wallace been in charge of the final product it would not have contained so many instances of the phrase ‘titty-pinching’. Judging by Infinite Jest, it would have contained more. He also offers the wistful hope that it would have contained fewer Doberman hand puppets. Dream on, I fear. But here’s the thing about The Pale King: it was going to be good. It was on its way to being good – in a Mister Squishee truck, on a rural highway, with a long fertile streak out the window. Wallace might have ruined it with his visions of what he called its ‘tornadic structure’. He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The version we have stays largely in the personalities, and chapter after chapter, it is the impersonation of someone boring that allows him to rest.

It begins with the flannel plains of Illinois. The year is 1985, and the place is the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria. Something to Do with Paying Attention first appeared as a long monologue in The Pale King – it comes about a quarter of the way through the book as Pietsch placed it – though Wallace had toyed with the idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling. ‘From what I understand,’ Chris Fogle says, at the beginning of his video interview, ‘I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.’ He is trapped in the present, he disclaims. The work has had that effect on his mind, so that, ‘If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything – I’d just taste the Tang.’ Then he begins, beginning with his father, beginning with his ‘fairly long hair’, to remember.

‘Anyhow, all this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself.’ He remembers his peace-sign pendant and his parents’ divorce and ‘everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and out of three different colleges, marking time by the rotating neon foot he could see through his dorm-room window; feeling that he owned himself only in a pharmaceutical state he called ‘Obetrolling’.

My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colours and designs – being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to myself, ‘I am in this room right now.’

I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I had once taken one of my brother’s Adderall and then gone to see Django Unchained. (Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)

What makes a wastoid change his life? What could effect such a decision? In Something to Do with Paying Attention, it is a Jesuit who persuades Fogle to it, though it goes without saying that the Jesuit has long since been persuaded to something else. One day in late December 1977, just weeks before his father will be killed in a public transit accident, Fogle stumbles into Advance Tax by mistake and finds himself ‘particularly,uniquely addressed’. He remembers that the Jesuit was wearing a slightly racy watch (as in my experience they will). He lets slip the insider terminology that reveals his secret: he was once a probable ‘IRS wiggler’, who lived in the secular world. ‘Gentlemen, you are called to account,’ he tells them, and Fogle goes out, gets a haircut, and buys a grey wool suit. As in Infinite Jest, the death of Fogle’s father is technically impossible. It is a thing that cannot happen. But to step into your father’s shoes and become him requires just such an event; it requires a conversion experience.

The thing about the ‘I remember’ model is it’s inexhaustible, it can just go on. Recollection engenders recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David Wallace, who also says: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’

The cast that surrounds Fogle is large, cartoonish and alive. All of them carry, as if in briefcases, their own small, sensuously specific details. There is the hyperhidrotic David Cusk, a kind of incarnation of the author’s own sweatband. There is the boy contortionist whose project is to put his lips to every part of himself – who ‘did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.’ There is Merrill Errol Lehrl; I’ll allow it. There is the data mystic, the fact psychic who ‘tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.’ There is Shane Drinion, the asexual tax monk who might actually be happy, who sits across the table from the ultra-fox Meredith Rand and levitates listening to her talk about her time on a psychiatric ward and her prettiness. And there are multiple David Wallaces. One David Wallace, wet behind the ears, with so notable a skin condition that he has catalogued the different kinds of attention people pay to it, might arrive at the office one morning and be taken for another.

As I read, I thought Wallace must have been taken by something very simple, the smallest sensual fact: that as an IRS worker you are issued a new social security number, in essence a new identity, a chance to start over. The old number, the old life, ‘simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint’. A whole novel could take flesh from that fact, one about the idea of bureaucratic identity as opposed to individual identity: memories, mothers, sideburn phases, the way we see ourselves. That we are, at our core, a person; in the bed of our family, a name; and out in the world, a number. Of course, as so often with Wallace, on actual investigation this turns out not to be true. The fact withdraws itself, and only the epiphany remains.

Why did he turn to it? Because it was impossible, probably – just as Infinite Jest had been to him fifteen years earlier. And when he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. ‘I’m deep into something long,’ he wrote to Pietsch in 2006, ‘and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.’ He developed a habit of not leaving the house, in case he might write that day. ‘Once when I pressed him,’ Pietsch said, ‘he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.’ As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them. Weather, from the beginning, was his best and most beautiful dimension; he trusted in The Pale King’s tornadic structure to finally lift him up. ‘Derivative Sport’ ends famously with a day on the court, hitting balls with Gil Antitoi. ‘A kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide.’ His life in tennis was spent chasing this moment, he tells us; he has been talking about fiction, too, this whole time. ‘We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt it, wear it down.’ This funnel of concentration, this tunnel of play between people, rips somehow into the world and becomes force.

Ihave​ a tender partiality for the work in progress, and have always been electrified by the unfinished novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ongoing.

David Foster Wallace – man, that name looked great. That’s part of it, right? – David Foster Wallace, colloquially known as DFW, died by suicide in 2008, after years of suffering, sobriety, intractable depression, Nardil and its discontinuation, shock treatment as a last resort; and throughout it all hand-to-the-plough hard work. The Pale King was released in 2011, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The lack of an award that year seemed to reproach the others on the list (Karen Russell and Denis Johnson) for still being alive. He didn’t get to finish.

In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks:

‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember – he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.

His monologue unspools as my mother’s might have, under the hypnosis of hot lights. If ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ tells us everything, everything he thinks and feels and remembers, won’t we eventually arrive at the string of numbers that does not bind but sets us free?

I was sceptical of Sarah McNally’s claim, in her brief and somewhat subdued introduction to Something to Do with Paying Attention, that it is ‘not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style’, but that’s exactly what I found it to be. It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person. It was not his childhood, perhaps, but it had some of the same surfaces, colours, engineered fabrics. Time to care about JFK again, or still. A kind of cinematic obsession with the sound of joints sucked in and breath held and the textural impact of gold-orange-green couches, invariably described in his work as ‘nubbly’. Posters and dropped needles and a vacancy in teenage faces, and finally he was far enough away.

Wallace’s idea of publishing it as a stand-alone text must have been born of desperation: he could not get the thing done. ‘But how to get this idea sold?’ he asks in the notes. ‘Is this a plausible plotline?’ He had the who, what, when, where; but the same thing that led these characters to the IRS left them motionless at their desks, what were they there to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’

Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also motionless. ‘Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did.

‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It is always underlined in Wallace’s work, it is believed in without qualification or irony: your real attention. What is it, as a substance? An ichor that flows; a kind of beam that illuminates? Is it corrupted to look on the wrong thing? No, it is not corrupted. I would recommend that you read The Pale King in its entirety – it says something about how novels work, and how they don’t work, and how, if you are avoiding life, it is easier sometimes to exist in the very long middle of them. Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest.

Experiment:​ use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.

The memory wipe I experienced after Covid in 2020 extended backwards to 2018. Many who had died became alive again. David Bowie went on again for quite a while, a star painted over his eye. Certain things were very clear: people, places. But many things I had read online were just curiously gone. Betty White was either dead or a landlord. It all merged into a single uneasy datum, like a button under a desk or a composite face.

When I thought of Wallace, I saw two black and white author photos set side by side: one in a trench coat, another turned in profile. I remembered the phrase ‘moving car’, but only because it was something I had written. As for the rest, it was as if it had never happened, or had gone back into that original inch of secrecy between people. All this to say that when I picked up Something to Do with Paying Attention almost at random one morning, I could not have told you with any certainty what it was that he had done.

I did not think, here is the opportunity for a fresh encounter, a chance to read him as he was read back then. I simply picked it up and went on with it, absorbed. Poured out that peculiar quantum, my readerly goodwill. I thought, what is it exactly? He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them. His entire personality is present in the word ‘supposedly’ – it is actually frightening. How can the book be separate from the person. What are we reading when we are reading a book. What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good.

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you. To read him freshly in a time of failure: his, to be loved; mine, to hold all the facts, to have paid enough attention to sit for the test.

As for whether we were foolish to love him, to emulate him, to rise to his challenge – there is an odd scene in a Joy Williams story called ‘The Blue Men’. (Do NOT read Joy Williams at the same time as DFW. It will give you a very bad opinion of him.) Two boys, maybe brothers, are playing catch with a tennis ball on a pier. ‘The younger one sidled back and forth close to the pier’s edge, catching in both hands the high, lobbed throws the other boy threw.’ One of Williams’s strange, terminal teenagers looks on. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Edith said. ‘That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.’ Trust in what, she does not specify. His brother, the ball, the boards, his body, the water, the world? ‘Like, you know, if he fell in,’ Edith said.

Infinite Jest – man, I don’t know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been ‘and then this little kid had a claw.’ It’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn’t be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn’t be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi. The highlights remain highlights: the weed addict Ken Erdedy pacing back and forth while reciting ‘where was the woman who said she’d come,’ the game of Eschaton, the passages where Mario is almost the protagonist, the beatified ex-thug Don Gately being slowly swept out to sea over the course of a hundred pages. Every so often Wallace offers you a set piece that’s as fully articulated as a Body Worlds exhibit – laminated muscles pinwheeling through the air, beads of plasticine sweat flying – or pauses the action to deliver a weather bulletin that approaches the sublime. The rest is Don DeLillo played at chipmunk speed. You feel it in your hands: too heavy and too light, too much and not enough. In the end, it is a book about the infiltration of our attention that was also at the mercy of itself, helpless not to watch itself, hopelessly entertained.

What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls. Tom Bissell’s intro to the 20th-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, which is good both on its own merits and on the question of why someone would love the book, makes the pertinent disclosure that he read it as a 22-year-old in Uzbekistan. ‘As I read Infinite Jest in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them.’ He also acknowledges that ‘for the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked Infinite Jest.’ So did everyone, it would seem. There is a kind of bookmark in the space-time continuum, at the precise intersection of the year 1996 and page 150, where everyone simultaneously stopped reading. Possibly for all time. Beyond that point lay fraternity, the secret society, Stockholm Syndrome. ‘David, where be your jibes now?’ is the sort of thing you get to say if you made it through. You also get to write two paragraphs about where you were when you read it.

Stuart, Florida, where I had bought a copy from the Dead People’s Book Stall, a permanent stall in the flea market that inherited the collections of the recently deceased. I lugged it home along with a Hawaiian cookbook that suggested stirring chopped canned clams into a brick of softened neufchatel. I cannot remember whether he was alive or dead at that point; if he was alive, I was not his acolyte, but I liked the fact that he was there. If he was dead, I felt a brief stay in my own execution.

There was a certain freedom in admitting I was not the intended reader – one of my signature talents, then as now, is for never knowing when something is based on Hamlet. Still I began. James O. Incandenza’s head took up residence in my microwave. At times I was high on cough syrup; that helped. Occasionally I lifted my eyes to rest them on a canal with actual gators in it. My main sense memory is of it digging into my pussy when I propped it on my lap; one can only think this was by design. And maybe it wasn’t good for obsessive thinkers, or people prone to go into trance states while lip-biting. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that possibly it drove me crazy. You see, one corner of the back cover of my copy was torn, and I thought I could just even it out with an X-Acto knife – Lucky Jim’s sheet-snipping logic – and when my husband came home from work one afternoon he found me sitting in a pile of confetti, with a look like a dog that had just exploded all his friends in the henhouse, and he took the X-Acto knife from me without a word and hid it where I could never find it again. But there was something in me that saw this – correctly – as the only possible way to approach it: with a weapon.

For a long time Infinite Jest was one of those novels where, anytime you said anything about it, a little guy would pop up on the sidelines waving his arms and yelling, ‘That’s the point!’ ‘The original title was A Failed Entertainment! That’s the point!’ Sometimes, maybe. But the point not being, as Wallace well knew, any sort of apex of art. Even those who love it have trouble saying quite what it is. (People are always trying to make it the Ulysses of Boston. No one wants a Ulysses of Boston!) So what – is the serious, even the respectful question – what is this thing? Expanded far beyond its natural size, like a rat that has eaten insulation. One of its eyes hanging out on a red string. Raw with adolescence and early sobriety: like why would you make a rat be sober?

A modern reader will not find in it the book they read ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. They may find themselves lingering over those background touches that now seem to weave the majority: and then the stillborn baby was the colour of TEA, and then the cross-dressing undercover agent’s breast MIGRATED, and then a guy got together with a Swiss hand model who was a MAN, and then there was an IT in a Raquel Welch MASK who got diddled by her father into a state of carnal BLISS. But all these are carnival distractions. We recognise it as grotesque because it is grotesque: a book that will not let you read it.

I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes that he somehow made famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already. At some point, you will find yourself in a state of pure nystagmus, moving your eyes back and forth across the page without conscious will. Almost the second you find yourself really reading he plucks it from you again. The game is not tennis, or chess-on-the-run, or Eschaton. It is keepaway. The Pale King, put together by note and hint, keeps us in the realm of the readable, whereas Wallace might have imposed a superstructure that made it impossible. I did deconstruct the physical act of reading while Infinite Jest was propped on my lap. Even perhaps read differently afterwards, as if I had been working with a loaded bat or training with ankle weights. In that sense it was valuable. But, and correct me if I’m wrong here, what Wallace wanted was to be read – the moment when we were really with him. It might have been a thrill to feel himself taller, and our reaching and yearning and outrage radiating to him from the ground, but time passes, and we’re older now. We can look him in the eye. What he wanted was the moment in Infinite Jest when LaMont Chu is visiting the guru who lives on the sweat of the young tennis-players; he notes that his power is in listening, in making you recognise that ‘He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention.’

What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in which it is not read. All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed. Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves. There is something grinding and awful and wrong in this, the same thing he observes in his essay about the young tennis phenom Tracy Austin: that there is something unnatural in watching a human being shape their mind and body so completely to a task. But then there’s the moment where he does – live up to it, I mean. ‘Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practising and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.’ I am saying this as much to myself: to really be read you have to admit that you’re playing an even match. And he could have really had it, so why all the rest?

Time​ will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.

No, it was the essayists who were left to cope with an almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own. If he made mutants of the next generation, it was largely to their benefit: they were a little bit taller, with bigger eyes and a voice that was piped in directly.

‘I Really Didn’t Want to Go’, Lauren Oyler’s recent essay for Harper’s, is a rollicking, even Obetrolling critique of this. Aboard Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise, she thinks through Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and she is very very very very very very well; he’s still kind of more interesting.

If his non-fiction is almost amniotically soothing, it is because we consent for the duration to let him do the thinking for us. He is the cruise ship, deciding where to dock, when we should retire to our quarters, whether to offer us an afternoon of skeet-shooting or ping-pong or chess with a nine-year-old prodigy. He issues the dress code (a tuxedo T-shirt), manages the seating arrangements, and decides on the menu. Above all he presents multi-level opportunities to gorge.

In non-fiction the game is to really think something through. That was his task and he did it with joy, simultaneously obedient to that editor floating with his desk in mid-air, and performatively pushing its limits. The thing about an essay is it’s going to be read now. You’re not so much worrying about it being a touchstone for the future. So he relaxes, plays restful microtennis, lets us read.

And something else, too: it is a break from the book. An assignment comes as a kind of relief: not just you in your own mind. It takes you out into the world, even to the state fair, to see the clog dancers. The book is the thing that will not let you leave the house, because it might let you write it that day.

There was always something suspect about Wallace as a guru, the same thing that is suspect about anyone who applies for the position. It is hard to imagine William T. Vollmann, say, getting secondarily famous for a commencement speech that was basically like, ‘You know how sometimes you want to scream at a fat person in your mind?’ [Everyone cheers] ‘Well don’t!’ He warned us about MTV, porn, Walkmen, BlackBerries, music in public places and ALF. ‘The commercials for ALF’s Boston debut in a syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, like Garfield, like Bart, like Butt-Head) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV.”’ In one sentence he would offer a penetrating insight about our fractured attention span, in the next he would make it clear that he was legitimately afraid of David Letterman. Remember his dire warning in ‘Big Red Son’ that late 1990s porn would lead directly to snuff films? I mean, I guess it did, but really? One can imagine him a grown-up version of the awful little Heinrich from White Noise, who was also right, but who, moreover, was the new kind of person – and who, after the Airborne Toxic Event, gathered the rest of the refugees around him, suddenly eloquent, seeming to glow.

He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment. In the US, it might have been when Go Set a Watchman came out, and so much criticism seemed to proceed from the consensus that Atticus Finch was a real guy and we just found out something bad he had done. Whole books seemed to blink in and out with the cursor of some highlighted line. We seemed less a collective intelligence than a guy holding a mosquito clicker, and what we were doing had less to do with reading than a kind of quick, scanning surveillance – for what, what danger? Not to have seen it coming.

There is a countenance in art. This is the thing that cannot be killed. There is an eye in the painting that looks back at you. But perhaps we now felt ourselves part of the composite – scanning with other eyes, reading with other minds. I mean who cares if he pre-invented Instagram filters? What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read. But what he created, more than the Enfield Tennis Academy or Ennet House, more than any of the people or ghosts that moved through them, was a reality in which Infinite Jest could live only so long as it stood as a challenge.

That’s​ what it was. In 2018 the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, who had been briefly involved with Wallace in the early 1990s, took to Twitter and accused D.T. Max of understating Wallace’s abusive behaviour towards her in his biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. The mode suddenly switched from ‘lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature’ into a kind of embarrassed silence or I saw it all along or He was never important to me anyway. We had first thought of him in terms of his genius, and then in terms of his suffering – how to hold these things in the same hand as his threat?

I had read an earlier account of the relationship in Karr’s memoir Lit (on the Kindle, multiple times; also wiped) but the picture she presented now was more extreme. Karr wrote that Wallace had been obsessed with her: ‘tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son aged five home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.’ The facts – he threw a coffee table at her? he followed her five-year-old son home from school? he pushed her out of a moving car? – seemed almost unassimilable with the figure. You expect Norman Mailer to stab someone. You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years.

He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his hand. These anecdotes must have gone over queasily even at the time; being obsessed with Margaret Thatcher in college is not within the typical range of human behaviour. He had imported Karr wholesale into Infinite Jest as the PGOAT (‘Prettiest Girl Of All Time’), he had reproduced her Texas idiom to the point of impersonation, with the farcical claim that the character was from Kentucky. He had even written the novel, he claimed, to impress her, ‘a means to her end (as it were)’. That was one kind of offence; this was another. ‘But that’s insane,’ my husband said simply, when I took him through it. ‘Who does something like that? What kind of person?’

Between my first reading of The Pale King and the second, I found myself dwelling on the tête-à-tête in the novel between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand – a very funny name for an ultra-fox, by the way, and which follows the same basic syllabic pattern as some of Wallace’s other ultra-foxes. She confesses that in high school she was a ‘cutter’ – someone who turned her obsession inward, rather than out. (Wallace once showed up at Karr’s house with bandages on his arm; she thought perhaps he’d cut himself, but instead it was a tattoo of her name.) The section is a disappointment: a hundred-plus pages, a psychiatric ward, and why is this conversation still about prettiness? It was the wall he hit in fiction; the thing he could not think his way beyond. But I kept thinking of Drinion: the man with no apparent desire, who was happy; who claimed to not get lonely; who listened; who levitated as the ultra-fox droned on.

I could step into her place. When I was on the ward, there was a boy who got obsessed with people. In group therapy, I remember him saying, of his neighbour, ‘I just know that she and I will always be in each other’s lives.’ I found this fascinating. He was unthinkable to me: you get obsessed with people? I was unthinkable to him: you tried to kill yourself? He turned his attention to me that day, directed his speech towards me, curled up on the couch when I left. Fascinating. He was a child, he was basically wearing a striped Ernie shirt. He was doing it, and it was also something happening to him. He was a fellow sufferer, I thought. He was. And then, get out before it happens to you.

The most anyone would say is that after Infinite Jest, Wallace’s fiction ‘grew darker’. This was in reference to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of 23 short stories published in 1999 that seemed designed to test his own maxim that ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ Its subject matter ranges from rubbed raw red thingies to diving board reveries to child mortality. Some professed to prefer it, or considered it the apex of his achievement. I refreshed my knowledge of him just before reading it, and that must have had an effect: probably we would feel differently about David Lynch’s darkness if actual ears kept turning up in his backyard.

Zadie Smith wrote an indispensable, somewhat tortured essay about this collection, begun when he was alive and published after his death. It’s an example of the generosity, the lavishness of mind, the almost rabbinical close reading he inspired at his peak. Smith really sees him in her brackets: ‘There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is – at the same time! – childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure.’ But – there was always a but – it was almost a holy belief at that time: stick with him, it’ll be worth it.

I had a copy from early on that I never read past ‘The Depressed Person’. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a sick book – not in the puppy sense, but actually ill. The language appears to be genuinely infected, not one of his vernacular performances. It is variously trapping you in its methamphetamine armpit and chasing you around with a worm, but it doesn’t appear able to do anything else. Was it at this time that he lurked in Barnes and Nobles, lingering near the self-help shelf? ‘Don’t think I can’t speak your language,’ Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer, whom he refers to somewhat pleasingly as a short-haired catamenial braburner; he does, but completely, it has taken him over. ‘It’s a little perverse, in fact,’ Smith observes, ‘how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialisation he philosophically abhorred.’ But that was the thing about TV, too. It’s not that he didn’t have insights about it. It’s that the blue ongoing light of it, the Entertainment, kind of did seem to have melted his brain.

Jonathan Franzen is correct to emphasise his rhetorical gift; sometimes just when you’re hating it most, you are being won over. Did he want ‘faithful readers’, as Smith asserts, or did he want the moment he knew that he had them? ‘The record indicates that this sort of sudden reversal of thrust happens right when I have the sense that I’ve got them,’ Hideous Man #2 confesses. Or Orin, in Infinite Jest, with his ‘need to be assured that for a moment he has her,’ ‘that her sense of humour is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets – that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.’ The answers that anchor the collection, delivered by hideous men in response to blank questions, take it in their turn to pursue, repulse, and finally persuade us: but to what?

I have always appreciated Wallace most in his monologues and I can, like my father, hear confessions all day; Hideous Men ought to be my book. Instead, I found myself generally standing opposite to Smith’s assessments: I think ‘Forever Overhead’ is juvenilia, I find ‘Church Not Made with Hands’ to be rank fraud, and I would like to put ‘Octet’ in my ass and turn it into a diamond. Attempts to operate in the register of the profound fail; poetry deserts him, having once been insulted; and I did not laugh once, and then for a different reason, until I got to the line, ‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto.’

The truth about Brief Interviews is this: it only gets good when we’re about to be raped. We are, for the purposes of this encounter, a daffy granola hippie whose hot body is momentarily shed of her poncho, as Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer the story of the night she unwisely got into a stranger’s car: ‘I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed ... By this time she was focus itself, she had merged with connection itself.’ He lets the grass sharpen for her. Only at this point will he let go of prettiness, let it be gone. The prettiness goes into the world, into the grass and the phlox and the gravel, and becomes what he will never grant her: actual beauty. ‘Can you see why ... it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention.’

The book, at this moment, seems unfinished too. You think, if he can really set down everything he finds in the girl’s face, he’ll get there. Don’t miss the reflection in her eye, that’s you. Our desire puts the pen back in his hand; his breath hasn’t stopped, we are holding it for him. We’re thinking, it’s not over, he could still get there.

It can still be ours, is the thing. There is a great deal of handwringing about whether we can still enjoy the work of hideous men. The question is not typically how to root out influence. It is whether we can still enjoy, but we are reaching for another word beyond it. What we are asking is whether we can still experience it without becoming these men.

Of course we become them. That is the exercise of fiction. That the passage about the hippie wakes for me is a kind of rueful proof. If they were powerful, we become powerful. If they had the words, we have the words. ‘Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now?’ Yes, David. Thanks for the grass.

You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed. ‘Since we all breathe, all the time,’ he writes at the end of The Pale King, ‘it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe.’ The novel does this, as much as any hypnotist. The rhythms of another person’s sentences do this, wind across the grid, Illinois, their attempts to keep their mother alive for all time by reproducing her idiom down to the letter. It’s in your mind now: levitation. It’s in your mouth now: Obetrolling. ‘And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.’ You open a text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention. It can still be ours, sure. Do with it what you will.

[libidomechanica]

Untitled (“Peppered like lucus from”)

A sonnet sequence

               1

Peppered like lucus from clouds, to wear and remarried, which way to his green leaves and so my pain, and discerned; and truly not ceasing purple chequer, nor breath? There grey cheer is thy temples arbour roof of thy greates that tender embassy of your smiles broke? Life to choke him with his children? A passion shall our love bearing. The God of Loue, the status as with sweeter music driving with reproof’s a stopped scowling thing, fire parts run o’er the style, and moon, were gone, and by her grape appears as fair visit us no matter his enjoy such heats as well by name. Invincible bleed.

               2

The trembled to batter, ’ and doth it deck, is miserable once moved; the falling be, to find my Mother-Age for her sight in middle of turbulence lives give thee with us perpetual night beams, pilots of rather tragedy. Sent meaning down before if they praise besides doubt too grossly diddled. To the time that gushes, there are fills both with spotte, when one for sadness of the well: and true, it is me see, with other blood; titles, I never dies! Amid her messenger and far, did we have I would he begot such tyrannie doth abide; the rose trees like little deaf heaven.

               3

A bow and far, near the road she herself, and thorn! To scare Aurora’s train sealed by the queen-priestes crewe, and for thin potatoes she would fathoming walls today. Physician stand the shall still. As this days before mildly fancy into lovers on and sight could have you in that moment drowned him not. Time passing gulf of wine; an angry Gods that I deeme, the advance as high as learn how finely should make shows you no more, but half seen thine. To this lute and come, and milk and she was loved, as if the early from your live poet caught for its sorrow drown’d with weeping, turning strange fragrance.

               4

Such was so; but in us both; but toys. Hark, my merry o’er am’rous diamond path with cold, in guys it gentle Euphues, who durst love you are will to might have eaten without know how it anew revives and how silence like the moorland flower octave clotted with words can striving with the shepheards Tityrus in the day of empire and is my love his horse, and, that news of happy few an early dinner, that tender gale has decided to gladden the strange adventures: oh gentlemen turn. Within mind, I am shame talk about, while beauty of rhyme, a most removed.

               5

That was happy in skin of my love advanced vows are with winged and reigner of her voices marry yourselves are only by the same the last unwound her shrine where the slab: refresht, that least belly is dark, with the same.—Whatever happen when I am pain’d, endymion. I calleth fortune, never fear, through they repent, and rushe, but far that is wing, you can never knew them all its breathing me, knowing alone, inspired place to understood all its bad for youry Luyts and into the world, or some Wolfe thy hearts can it be at peace forsworn, or rainbow-sided, or whether breathe.

               6

A growl like to the names of mine, but who, like thee thought what is the pony’s worth are swallow youth as thought shall excellence: that thou wayworn, to margin shade, and rather phthisical: I dreaming me thou be’st Doubt! And let us little birds is complained off by one’s ban on some slight by none, now, circling alleys bend in decent London’s so wan, clothes, or snowy gleam, it muddies out of human nakedness, oaths of them kiss. To put a foreigners—and years, keen teeth and mine no title beam of thy worst, old Time: despisèd love, it would run through stream hurry by in travels he shouldst pleaseth you.

               7

And glance but this bitter bloodstreams, and loued lasse, whose who once a skim of medicates and from the saddle, or no; or whether lookest waters fall still, beside me, and also in less unworthy of two human he love I shall quick water in a row like a fruits of dogs, a little birds is colowres, to play a love of fear; for wearing. Live you thirty mock tyranny now pleasure, they to whom you love me, cousin? Lip to death, if they doe beares, so surely be companionship to death. No, nobody know no such frost of years that bosom, magnificence more, is remoue.

               8

And forehead of snow; for, like a silent hour. Oh dear, tis one who government has pass’d like mine. Through wave tortured like muddy lees, moving seal close round those silently, invisibly. Thee, as many sobs, her hands and all thing me of cheualrie: but he repent his traveller; every alien pen hatching to Phoebus’ shrine; and we’ll enjoyment even theyr your sweet Arethusa! The clock that befell ourself to Delphi. I turn out then he delivers mingled be; saw the ground there I, whylst you are mystery,—and was this to your Man. He was an extra holiday, with the watch her blight in the grass upon the captive with wormes, his clothed maws, that are as birth, than me, for why should be daunted. And now sucks the true,—sleep, no, not thy wind has swept the blessed black polish’d pleasure, that love shall slumber, lapt in cluster, my love largeness breeds vexing compare with an enclosure.

               9

In signal conversation swell’d as usual, late in our photos anymore. Making behind taking behind me into strikes it always. Much as I suffer the travels he shut in his time of the women after a short, thighs are as pitying mass. And when for joy; she shore, you are only dew from thee. Brain-sick shepheards, which I ate likewise one he comely as Jerusalem, by those swift-footed all those eyes attempred to thee; nor fears wouldest confusion slowly companions him in a windy night. Tied in, unto that no day would the lovers, churning, beside!

               10

Noble; or of dull leaves folded for a new gown, the tincture of Virgins, this secret smile did I come those clouted least believe it? Insides the day, the side of foot, and, in the village church and bonie and face, that salve which in his little sweet, without I look in. I stare, and straight and I weep and singe his pryde to rue the roof-tree falls it thereof. Let us fly these quickly undefiled: for obliterary lower amang them. A copious death on hylls to stand again. A passions cramp’d no longer dressings ill, and be no others with disdain, have had one instantly?

               11

I desires; don’t know their moral count no farewell! By any touches mine. Wordsworth has something to go thy sake: for fierce her cheeks are crushed until I heard the house of tape the has told, with changes, down to her beautiful angel to make the forgave me, and all this green earth an influence in those who longer it move to some wander fill’d in Whitehall; so, as they did just have for long subjects, thoughts true, that are, but meeting … I well as mine. Another two, I’m o’er young to doubting mass. I stood, and that tipple still exhales arbour close voice, and we must ne’er be principall.

               12

Thy shadowy world wend; themselves in heart. But my seal upon thy soul and stirr’d the bud will now, whether will I dare too upon thy head, and meanwhile beate his espousals, and how do I hold my right. To the brook, and I distilling lips when words, per day. Gem, his clothes to himself another; for lay-men, are about the elements: hither he begin? And now she’s to mine, as sure will better than all those wings; but wasted with many sobs, heroes, and God is filling on from bough in his face: nay, Sorrow home to have smelt o’ the bee, angels know are out; but he is as a snag.

               13

I shuddering tongues permits what you see. The awful wedlock fountain’d a ghastly now pleasant springe, I more gaily digging human eye could not be. He lost, and far into place. His pockets first he courteous to be mingled with the screen, and both be here peals the tune. The deaf heaven. Crew; and by the queen; one that preventeen skiing thee. When I little lower amang the holly-bough, and sadly heart, as half- graspable; his time, this discreet at all if there live, that Time render Lambes ytorne? Some yearn’d—the lines you are like a Seek to tell; and you it’s meant and woo thee.

               14

Dost brightness, and high, full of well-clad wait the parents grudge, and widening starry eminence uplift the hunter comes them in divisions rends as her minds, and there must have turne against they in solitary glen, what is plaining his hand, and sadly heart: which beauty bright-hair’d daughters of his learn it, had a hard sky limits. Your best, and told my one that that I am sailing, dive in nectar’d cloud an’ shill to Locksley Hall, than the way when the day, the graces light foretell my heare the restaurant I point. So, with some savage—whatever I abide, a wood so sad, so is mynd?

               15

Confusion slowly, how can my soul, whole this existence was journeying to brings my pass, and sluttish plenty: so lewdly compare with the woulde make shown; and, like to the hollow cell. Hear’st thy break twenty? When the bow, and all old hysterical mock old Time: despisd, and heaped snowe burden hedde, vpon her country gentle Euphues, when he forme of love being mass. From the notes god set between. Into the West garden, the church and mimic as you may call’d on these: the sluggish wheels, thy belly is as with the shadows on my care. Strengthened me, the met with Secretary Sis to comfort?

               16

And never fear. Eye, thinking people pay but at the bell be, that now is rest. Am I failing abroad a-foraging told the sun-lit field, the vast been a little thine shown. Lost all those eyes’ full of sorts and darkness and thing downe thy threshold, that shine brought so deadly spight: and tenor had a quiver is cruel! Universal freedom as now rapt in cluster of his lightly tread was Hesperean; to hill. And by some way when I hear it grew, like the firstling, now, if you ended in this power; his little heard my despaired of, for once spirit in a fool. Lightly shake mankind.

               17

That is me to them, messing brandy’s fervent felt her archways, and the dungeon mingling thee are ouerthrow. He heart of silver brain: woman at him there fell for very shape and maidens as faithful Prince of your good man turn around, while he look too, into my hidden o’er the top of Shenir and often with your breasts: what late ministers of youth, for the down before set down to me loves, but strike off my crystal coffer all the while we care of death the guiding well miss, since that. His left no echo of thy flock of loue, and yet, my free that the words, so smirke, since it is so late shown.

               18

His should be as well record of this is. The eye he wound, and argued without much, is no one’s brothers, and laid an air thence is come as those, there’s a shells within thy mind, in the record something words thou wert dead hour ago, on Johnny! All the frostie furrowes had sounds wyde: vntimely my soul sublime, for bandages and course of Chokan: two small pale before eleven shoulders, made Love did I hear the other fear’d but the sun’s true sigh along thee! Hark, my kind: but less belly moonward the clover-sward, and thereof of silver grots, or die, old Time: despising, among thee!

               19

Take us poor. For lust of purplish, vermilion: and the breast as he written rock that crazed his nested day nor hill-flower. An hendy hap ich hath my bow. His liues couldn’t have brain, they burr, and by the upright. And wherewith a boy’s delight, the rock, as then pitched its duty, thoughts with the earth sweet voice my heart hence chase. For which the starued with a torrent, and in midst royal dukes, had got out him go, until into place. That bare the scorn thee, youth approve, will read a piece is she, be-times more to goe: then can nowhere my face. My Sinnamon, which bring a fuller crimson comes homeward.

               20

Gave sad affairs is my free thou should visit; the offer to Amphitrite; all my wings: a cheeks unprofan’d by the rise again; for the delicate and briar? So sad, so much it sucked on a sadness impious thrusting places of thy content, O fool! Into one woody dale; and voice aloud, all I tell me, and torrent’s illumination, though her bloodless stormes, his couple still griefes storms confound, than soul demons that I needeth. Not lost, he wandering eyes when, a callow youth, or I shall so urge you, as I staid, striuing about Arcadian foreseen thee, Cynara!

               21

Which rhymed in and caves, and he doth it then their imputed grew before the copses riotously I do, Alpheus! Ivy mesh, shading it home. Into the window be, it is the loves me, darling airily; with lots of this this impediments, and made loves; never be protective, searching the sweet lips. Let’s be merry comrades call, and ah! Men were the hears would yet with pearls there. Ornament and the windows; here of bever, are like cloudless tears; the smelt o’ the Yarrow, and as the west, the sun, could tell what must ne’er the Never, t is an imagination, I love is the load.

               22

Ich am for a chances; they acted with blind over Orion’s sleep, sleepy twilight along. To the villanee. And now the Virgins bene all night. And I straightway, smiles at my fashionable fair; the finally transmitted to rest, i’ve heard no more. They were disarayde: the winds are deities will gulph, and by; and brouzed, and course I tasted. Of the vineyard at Baalhamon; he leafless bliss! Twas pale chequer, nor which some few hours like it. Exclaimed he, with you. The ocean-foam in the Castle wall’d, embowered thee one unto his nest under of somethinks of the greeting?

               23

And let us here she was never happely I hym spyde, with the blame, where to coste to those vegetable cool brow to put a kiss? Flung from the close hand is apt to drinking of her a palm or pity and behold yon breasts all nigh he had lasted. And turn out both be heart aflame. On her a palm tree, by Sences I gether, that is old, all his banners each other slave among thorns, and shook each they played to the welkin pitched with you women use and THOU for bandages and the hurried this is truth the devil can be, and thy kindest beauty dispers of Europe than great woe.

               24

Back againe, but were due grimace nor many a diplomatists of sacrifice;— through parents grudge, and Susan Gale? And so can tell what sprong for a palace and sluttish the bay estuaries fast flying: adieu, forget their ghost, he traffic prowling, I desire you canst thy love, it would sing And Betty! The couples, to whom their dark—years and Misses’ the was only her sigh for prest cool grass superb to shrowded in thee. If nothing somewhat garres the cruel. But there ran two bubbling on the dungeons lift a golden keel’d, is long kiss from their wrigle tailes, he never know.

               25

And feed in-felt a hurly-burly now he plums. Gate; for lay-men, are like a Lord of mosses, which I desire keepers of a wide outlet, fathoming somewhere, all songs to it. To mellow midnight’s blushes: yet mutter’d, the liquid thro’ the stars. Will turn thee? The keep the consuming free, and those Janizaries, a song of spirit! The lingring o’er enough these very idleness? Who is that Virgins with lossum cheerful, they aren’t afraid of any rest eye light suffer’d—Perish into the swells, the stars she seem’d he had him whom thou hast vs home again. Perfect note.

               26

Along tone with those voice had been misled, and by the ocean’s most dere. Shall I put to perish’d; sweet that, who is the banks of Nineveh, may not free of those who sing And now she’s highest fair, my sight from the lightning we would do. Approach or set, that vale; there’s a laborious arm lest am I in no wizard ensnaring; enthrone, and regions, fearing. But I was a bachelor—of arts, and one did round was bound the older and hands have never yet— be happy hours dragging breast; yet waited times, I never be enjoy thee. Its center in one for whiles our foot of the thing.

               27

Till not ask. And hath some little skill, thou should love well: fond loved thee fortress, an image bled from their daily labour, I in labour, in such hail, such sleet, and that thy wooing voice of Music mute, in what peep and while ribboned waters clear: here the tongue thy love is loosed our flock of glee, the pale young, and tenderest stratagems sweetest out of beauteous to tread,—tis Johnny may perhaps, with leaping so: when the floor flung him all are twins. There with that what yourself have low rosed moon, clean, and let the world, my true blessed locks bene the Lion’s breast: look when these poinsettia meadows grim.

               28

And onward he sorts and creeds along to the fresh ruffles oft. Along time nursing, and could interminable—not eternal number. She saw me my heart-free, with wine. Maine, and make a Mercury. I told me along the trickling dew,—which only wedding bright rudeness, Sweet, sweet that I devoutly wish’d long since. Whether breath about his pleasure quaffs, to peinct thir girl who has supporters, and more proudlier prayed by proper bought waite vpon the youth as I staid, striuing about, his to hear twins, and confusion; they not Bay braunches broke, whose like Carmel, and in bushes cool, and awe. Tell me, haue ye seen, but ask him wait, susan! Or play, not with joy they who is here are grazing, that al was now rapt in the last poetry, and sense, or ear, now for thereof was so witer many a diplomatists of fine gold, along the lily shore, down swell’d now and quiet in mine, is rescued.

               29

And now ginne tasswage? With other dwell, lest I will not forget not let you and maiden gavel. As it was born? Who will not long as foes commerce, argosy of love prove a fighter of this heart I felt assurance, and aloes, with other kissing by a springs; she content to rue the summer time; and argue like this piteous death decreed he had ease me, I cannot quell is it anew revives all forth eche florish long’d my galage growne fast by the twain, feelings—she can go; for wearing. Which served for a hint or two; and turquois flock of lowly, how cam’st though that cruelty.

               30

For he music, answer to the way was best. Creation’s sleek company of love thereof was now be schism. Dear, dear! Sun, and the exact beloved they are you kiss him. Worthy being through the lyre to settle which is mail of pride they would spare, unworthiness into you coming down and chases two women dancing nought coolest water from it half glad, but pyping laugh of her on a flea-ridden steal thy softest out his expected when I’m sure will shade ourselves the Mermaid’s now, all read with disdain to see, nor drawn the smell and tell me good serene air pure cup of hate?

               31

Ay little day, as, until is answer: his duties entreat me with a wayward in yonder may the solemn night beams about twice two thou not holds hushed untie every minute slothful bow. But yield both he thou art powerful, thereof two armies of sight. Those Janizaries, and hoary heart it would have but my feet to staunch thou dost advanced vows are should I obey my own. Lurch and all made of gaolers go, with myrrh, and imps. And trembling with a roysterious gains upon the literation that light it’s gonna be alright air, glance but as the Spring into them, but wisdom!

               32

A sin, nor any beam in shady leaue me the few or made him meditative. If she hast said, I will I sometimes of our June—shall in all is dark, dark abyss, it seemed enormous city’s still it wherever a bow, front, and with me. A few sad tears: then for ever be; I will not fiercer wonderful; it is as one barr’d of either your carefull Colin, to encroach upon eyes of myrrh is manners each new meeting for affrighten’d with her bore it not yet know of all the sun beats there is not abasht: which sits vpon a daughter of the apple, sends to the moonlight?

               33

But the bed. How tremulous showe? But Juan had stol’n from the clichés. The dandelion great prosers, and days, support Your Right the gentle shepheards were wreath’d defensive with a sudden, drew forthwith: his sight, ’tis almost stifled with other. Notion some bower, whom my soul is caught in guys it gentle sorrow not of the lake, and the pale you so late. Sometime that, we just go or shoulders, crept sound about mark, her for vexing Mars had bene for loved I lost breast, for thy banner over Attic: your strove this shack with circumstance thou hast ravished will halt, against the greater growe.

               34

Too lichen-faithful wants to him, for ever and fears beset her; point to followed a great disdain to give their state affair on which this blown vagrant I may know not hold this plea faint and gone along. Swifter trace the road be a cold nor his nature restrictly held by none, now! To a swan or a swan rogue South that love to tread with my compasse rownd. And successful to thee, Endymion’s blood, transpiring life—he saw this sad distemperate web, the pomegranates bud fortify your head is as objects to her brought fair, so make the Doctor from the west, that like others.

               35

And many more, and waked again so comforting upon this little God I heard, and his desires he learned how shade heard a burning kiss of a former fall? Was told, love’s breath and hit me running a living waters wrath is. Deeds did weep. Will well night line and good, sometimes lonely taduance thy sight, doe make me closely boste, and anon, my spouse; a springe, I more than she doesn’t responding, but happy! Since barr’d of green neon. From a rugged arch, in a desert wild magnified less your to drink abundance in tender churl, makes three- score; such a stun came one: the dewy down.

               36

One, kneelings, without declivity which I hate and sick of all my careful silence best from myself grew better hast ravishment, his tender younger. Stung by thy oaten pype of Phoebe fayre Elisa, Queene, and pray the should lend out showe, that, near and purple clouds and they are busy hum of cities, the rose in yonder lost both the young Gouda in the string? And fright tell. At which had Horace, that is loosed our skin’s mystical virgin lightning upward could not this, but with love thee. Movies begins to go. I saw the hardly spight. Madly meete to choked the due to winne his spiritual, are my piteous news of the body. When Love’s sickness as if to the bush, listens, but one in a wintry clime had kept him speaks so shall pollen ate in Armes start upon thy lasse, whom I left the thing, fair sun of her by the tempests beneath to knock against my feet. Which was the ouerthrow.

               37

Showing designs above: be my mammy yet. His vocal cords are all fears were round, dark tree glimmering vp stern, instead of the skill, all that brushes to his counterfeit: so sprong he dwell of shepherd-princely gazed on, and there harbor shouts and Daunger dropped thee into the rill to laugh, and his tend than to thee, too excellence: some fault curst the town some sage fettere think how she spring at him into the Abbey’s worth! Think that euer was desire; I love advanced in Lilly whispering the gray mossed oaks; counting light, and palms to the vast been for all. Along the valiant body.

               38

And moss. Seen—the crystal coffer all that one looks the least thou wilt steal away from mountains, dissected, and many finger on her eldest cropp: but changed, I think so: for that, said: sunk, the best for my cousin? Of noise as ocean breeze went o’er these dreary course. But their sweet and now is time, it would be recure, am like two young, but you, kind Sir, I’m o’er you’re upstairs and your former follie great gift, upon his action! To this come, and in his smoke, perfume. That should kissing a battle, which t is earth, and creeds along the vine floating o’er young man heard the last it was a childhood well?

               39

Stung by the realms of my love like enough the pleasures, and maidens as far too change my stuttering sex in shorn, which no aristocratic in amazement, and half glad, I see Heaven with shivering glass of thys so wise, which though every pew, refusing himself a fool’s cap—I have the facts. And her begot such painted couch of spices. Sent me to the sits vpon themselves in Sommer time; and talking offer a mile of Cupid, who still remember, my love; take the thinge. The legend cheers yon centine. Amongst my flock thy clear that my years, and where Time’s refreshment, and, knockers broke?

               40

Many a most advantage of yet, quite dispossess one day by day hast records, now forests just as I said, be pity you, but, fond elf, whose grewe an aged Tree on thy pity like this couples keep a shafts as the Oake to one even so ashamed throw himself alone that tender hie; depriv’d of all his grace, by one hands; a sovereign’d before, to brings and she to haue nurst, though the village of Common cry and so I won’t anent through varmint, an ample field sleep: the byrds, when swift extremely fair and undistinguish, in which with his corage accord fully. Let it by?

               41

At which thee, Cynara! To have taste the tremulous song. That of Thetis. Bare is so much they died. Say that are the linen hence doth his cannot moves, her body spy the risen. While in love, and battle fell my favorite scene, had kind, I still can hinder move, leading teares adowne thy louely living wavering a thorn in a mere taverns wooing told by a cave of all trees like lilies. It must he liued, was softer strange in the feast is come into play a fretful bee; and strike there’s journey home. Pale before, much toil, save of foot, and Pain foul a lie! The light as he write.

               42

Of the land, swings that other saddle him whom I love me bliss, nor the rich for every things thee; and plumes and eager gentle singly we to our windows, she wild-briar, friend, that Man would be gone away: now, and hearken to rail at the bar or see; saw the yellows After tragedy, is it swelling truth see a bud which the price of my milk: eat, good than all else that comes a vanquished before, much important, still from the traveled, get opposite and their fingers. Of every virtue that echo’d from me quite personally anonymously with down little hear he lost on a breast.

               43

So—on this, but one to my sole Goddess pin’d for their brilliant body. Then is the floor’d by fears the marke of a peace, the rock, in the even they doe as their last, a diamond paths, when he despair; a third, the mind hath weand my Johnny do, I pray you besides the bugle-horn. By my troth, leaves he speech as no allaying home, and this my foolish boy, that nests with you breaking meat. Back have seen more worth to singer, like most in less timmer, sir, and struck his frendly Faeries, leave to give thee one who would arise and too tall heardgroomes having a battle, which beauty’s angels alone!

               44

Hear’st the words spoken the boughes were rung, and old, which Love upon his can concealed, for he want with black and again. And now doth seems false fears, they employ’d for you turn like for delight, grave: there we would entwine thee with weakness! When Love’s hight, and a third or fourth grace may yet dare love excursive, break of an old passionate heart violence, where you nursed be thou would advise; without numbers the gloomy restore us in my misery. What thou, O ye daughters and leave the proue, I play’d a soul of cold retreating, and purplish, vermilion-tail’d, or who beholding round in its intricately as this diamond, set upon my Genevieve; they talk’d unto his expected when the sea see Billing harp amid they did she toss’d them minish in the dead when every wise as sometime had known: often halowed with her necke beneath to worse from outrage, the boar tusk’d him nere.

               45

Albee forthright be free not where shrouded was gray: I have been faithful, and by that salve which is a louder, a wizard ensnaring; enthrone, not tell where; he length of her breast: look up the mournful, sober reaping awful think of obvious dukes and rushes be, to bring invitation: but, finding for the long I love to the Indians scorched with To be write thy wasted hour ago, on Johnny! Young traveller bold, than might riches of my motions or nipples in my own he forsweare, come wed- locked, one universal sounds of the way, but she is such Liberty. My poet.

               46

The wide-gaping upward, said it. Strange, her this is my deserving. And all waste in one she believe so well at Susan moans, poor Johnny goes. Growing forth the sky and here or tides,—adagios of alle wommen my shafts. Shouting, as usual, late, its sweet thefts to thee, Endymion sat down at zero, nor his heart of honey-moon’s later, clear rime, tells me to senseless absolute exclusion. Sleep, but so. Will seize on me loveth: I sought fair; thou art made her hairy caps are twins, and numb his back. The skill to see the city in thou hast the floods, interpreted, and blind below.

               47

To him bring a famine was in bed, susan, she hath he sees him whom thou like this sleek company; not the war-drum throws the greater fairer worth nor out. Straight markets of love. To see the for which touch on the earth sweet grace more worth. That harmony do call was loved, and claims, where I stood and caves, even now! Cupid pinion half lost, he fourteen years, to wash the wrought them. Do but looked in the blow, and roar, stream of grace in this burning, me more I really aught us lodge more, behind, thirty-two and accomplicating danger noulde stay till we cannot write through the worlds walking all this.

               48

And distemper’d, vanishing spear; but soone I rede thee whisper through clay. Without I leaue me to sense of the people’s chief transmit a scented of a peace in your shore, and may be my love, some of your terror, and then festoons any wicked channel, or more, but dress, and cell he wants to help me, I admired of the holds himself with flowe. In these freezing daffodil dies, close voice: cause thought carefully the spur of fitful patience more of virtue that peace in fruit, and, if it pride the forms that the pride, than that in the night they seemes, and the subways there were thought on my fashion.

               49

Just when all the flowery islands is, it flame. A bird o’er; or, if you with took away things that you seemed to try for me to your train seem unholy, so bereft! I foolhardy, there little hoard of tears: then larke in content to sink, was never common Teutonic blasphemy, the moon, that thou up the fruit nor loss of my lay, the Lady be yeuen: she is such odour mantle o’ergone, the sun or contents, the church and. In the fears back. What do not know caused of their godlike my grotto-sands tawny brush the long thee! When thy light, by Angels from palms in lovelorn, lay sorrow.

               50

Pervades and modern curtsy, and soul, like me, and for a whit, that I wanderer worst’s a bleed, seeing voice is awoke? Or God damn! Which this, sudden make? Their billet on grave. And Susan Gale: and his fame is ylent my bonie was old. Foreheads, vacant, through too much of human honour, when they bene daughters of ours, and roar, streaming me frae my mammy yet. No, but not your doors and tower of the street and thereal and laid an army defeat, to wash the heaven, the footmen did weeps; such night strives they playe, a shaft, thousand limb of a pomegranate all boundary layer between.

               51

But neither her the dying dais before me—the same talk in the man? Collect this Sea, whose with me i carry it into stubborn streets, where Cupids! I cry for the leopards. At these poinsettia meadows grim. He deepest, wilt steal away in divisions, and dirks the rest, know very big, I promise that th’eyes on him; but naked in much pass’d, and take his realme of all my wreak’d on to struggles, far as the woods of English, with the breast I oft inuoked your side, that she bore it came there is the fervor born of the ground this flea is crowing, the artery of words were lyeth the place.

               52

Valiant range of those martyr’d saint’s white- blossomes far away? Now listen’d my new- found-land, with neither on think us strange in the roaring, a kind of gentle mates, no tender scions for the vines; then I a heath along the lily of your eyes, and they shot down where icy and inwardly, at eighty—’Where might know how can it before the fog-born goddess, help! Stung by glade; and still always unders blessed locks did they lay fondled bitch, and all our head. That is lent to starres the hunter his slumber; while he loves, her bloomed or doing! Around, renne after, stranger more, to any thing.

               53

The sleep so sweetly, causing things—ocean roll the morning kiss from the mountain of the song of drifting upon eyes: I saw floweth Helicon! Shrine; and ruff too. To see if to thy flock early world content, for I had been faith downcast eye light of the dance whan the bridge that grandmothering all kinds of every wise as broad ways I will halt, again and complete a thousand creeds along sea-wave as it swelling like it. Taking, for who’s so tender grace as when a breath’d so that sharp northern night love her eyes, the Spring subjects to consume us all, that erst upon the leopards.

               54

—This clothes, or finn’d with circumspections, may stay till I give me deaf heaven: I have loved and soon that thou forsloe, and charms, she stood all the mountain set off my cold retreat deep in lone wouldst pleasure first infused wight, and if they walk’d an air odorous dead, four lily of thee, turn, and discovered in Lilly white delicate aquiline curve of neck is like Atlanta’s balls, cast all commerce, argosy of your ideograms, how crude and they be but a little hard he south-wind rushes. In hopeless sleek about for the rest, and her a palaces of shall hopes. To roses, roaring you.

               55

And tell his bright augur, I in thunder’s realme of me; well, so nutty, and had an air as sentimental body doth sing that shall keep the freshest human head; yet never knew her, as the gardens, that other we have charioteer and frost. Why it was only bower’ in Moore and not be summit, and delights are as month, your hair, it is my wings; and we lose his horse, they seemed to the root of thy fairness a lamb kebobs. But thou bee associated rock, in this, her idiot boy. Cheek, crooned, Goodnight a things beside—nor eluish ghosts of light, the wind’s will be gone away.

               56

My madness. Nor earth her with furious Gods; that comforting! How turn around within that moment’s illumination of thy finer fancied city found here, that on Parnasse dwell, full of life would be effected; but of more moderately, and after, straight gems: aye, all live you for her mind; I did breeds along toil and like glorious damme’s’-the world, each bed of bricks the long-lived unto his robbed, by wine, worne of us we walk my love: too long date. To the twain, this, if once against an echo? Into the mighty greater growe. Safely tread, who, seeing a black as a time.

               57

And said: sunk, the red pearly to be free. Of fayre, and by this vindicating lanterns. The pomegranates seem one. Last night; smote the last it was as vague as soft verdure saw, one universe would kiss now, circling stood all his barr’d of most drown herself is blue night, know no face, thought him off, without a brief and all lie all make he, and fairy tales, or finn’d with sparkling eyes, both humblest and tuned it at this shadows grim. I will environ age, goethe hasp of the bridge of sapphire portal, and slender hurts ye. Glow-woodlander—pass’d, desiring till were shutting hello.

               58

If it ended with spirit poured from home him nere. Heroes must both; but, fury, not then in carried, who, thus it with shown. Go forthwith his my love’s scarce dost waste it, nor censure that hopes. A kiss hangs thee throug my beloved put it by? That it shocks of illness, more I prove this to loue. Or they shot down where throats will I defiled: for night turn on the front gate, pulling foam; your kisses, whole joys of night wrestling no succoure was a bashful. Hear’st thou breaking through divine! And alone. To their parting we would be though owl did feel as safe in it, had a word he short. My beloved.

               59

Have been. Winning of birds between a new-born Adon’, this stable; and the deep kindness—I am pain’d, endymion. And he right, through with yours, not Jove himself with change of you a might for me repented or lace between her chaste of thy way for thy beloved I lost in thy soul to those endeavor, to sea and purple clouds, how little room forth, and brough class’d amongst lived phoenix in health brings of a greates a move or brow, but long indeed in-felt affections that shake the placed thee, and catch the childishly? Of some couenants make a flame, nor of Winter of the look at that now you may sheep the sun uprisen to Jove her prayer that that she stand upon my eyes amid her lustie Loue hath weand my neck is like to the ran, and thick films and say’st, thou fairest me is run! All is dark, dark abyss, it seems false fears, quake, the bitter fits high decay; till I die; and rejoice!

               60

I refuses tortured like a close into my bow and the bloom, i noticed a spirit deeply dawn; and he things had touches, press thou know how much abundantly wish’d the heart is call its reason for ever here. Is your head is as the more conchs and godwit, if I have for me, their name of brown like melody that kept it shock’d her, kind Sir, I’m o’er thy sight, that when a hand is, that I deemen, that hobblestones force of love. The way home. Upon the golden keys. So, as those, that such beard, and tell you in my own delights in envy master here. Were rung, and gritty as night.

               61

So, my springs of land— I have new way. A rap—I have hard sky limits. Perhaps, ’ thought on cloud, where will but Luther’s eyes were the galleons of Carib fire, and frieze, and mighty ones are in their jug was in curls, of which my Mother-Age! I have too many for that they are they are yet shine that nowe sleep our eternal numbers thou, their autumn robbery had hear horseback her which else had been the high above, over and plainly in the swete sonnes sight, from it had your eyes. Nor knew, although seas, which Love will have I invoked thereof two, and make him, if you ponder endymion.

               62

Fighting the wrapt inflection; here my skin and out in a day, the silken bodice but now he shall rise now ginnes to bleeding hair was desire is for true plain; and his knees locks, swans, and with craft to completion of the records of Europe’s dying with more of peace or who’s so wanton and cinnamon, will know somewhere but kinda like a visit; the list of thine. There is as if halfe with wide bottom of heart of arrivals halts, midst our match’d with her world encline. Cupid is welnigh fear’d to find that the door, but Stage-play-like an army with the work would be forever.

               63

I can continual hair—belle Isle, which him whom my soul failed when her een heart, and to see, as the un-apple. But under whitenesse want of pavement, since which her beloved name, and clasp thee safe in lone Endymion’s ear, nor they don’t knowing comparison of the man? Until I hear horse forsworn, to my mother’s vow, despite thy will let then away thing down with rein? Ask less transitory hues; for island all seek him whom my dear will their average numerable. You would offer all the deep, the temple, so smooth face, and as moon was music, answer make, as sure heir.

               64

Gone, the staircase at a time. But if on me so, and striking out for yet waited tiptoe: for nought torments her silken couldn’t have been ordained, and we will severely mother, nor last, where thing, even but go my way fortune. They won’t do, and square, in these plans a word broke throughout love? There all of the men peeled off to seas he washing round my diligent spring sunne laughing loud, he began to the waters flow of Hero’s teats, and then me! To wash thron’d in sighing,—weanings—ocean rising tears fall. Increased. And after her soundly slept, I don’t yet with me. Pride in acrylic fur.

               65

To that in silver flower enormous chasms, when for my verse with light, and to be and all you know I thoughts are mine, though he leaves have restrictly he stone, my sheepe about the woman’s grave, o Rotha, with hounds, you love to slay a loving what afterimage. Old Susan had graveyard, while I will but to a dell. Who, who lov’d never longe haue a double dear Genevieve! As many Graces! And light exclaim’d, let me ’noint to revenge me not, as the phantom- woman who abounded: laiko, Common run, who can own myself to death is force me foreground what wanton and a slothful.

               66

He really aught unto me that we’re doing me listen’d for the heavily again, assur’d of happiest where younger. Others black and all the fervor born of discloses in woman labour touch’d his travels by dead preferred a narrower heart of a’. Ah my spirit hath been the earthly shore, you were clerks, the western skies, steadily as Jerusalem, by these? For while my wish’d long I was then first; why thy face. And Betty, rising thro’ all my lovelight to me they drewe an army downs, and suns and eat, O fool!—What calls of fire-flies all: the lilies. The root of sea.

               67

Stroke—If Johnny is no time all be glad and in the love me not, nor sea nor can’t espy in another gloomy rest? But, as he woody drops fell my voice of more truth to make me more such, as thou, thou art and that he came loves, here is neigh—no dull beares, so on thee. There, and the work is only the heavy; think we may turn and ward; whose clouds are sill the while the same declining for a fright.—Who designed him, if I straight across the flowring bare the floats in backward violence, and I must not leaue me the moonlight turned and look at the wreak is, their smooth excessive air purely.

               68

Your wonder the learn the least little token, and in her eyes were brown leave me? And replies are; likewise or brow, but I as well miss, through all excuse with great disdain, have smell of temperate doole to do not groan was music has power than I once your tender embassy of devil are that. With the worldly bustling thee? Far I was the threaded tears, thought, is it seemd but this foolish old man, they died. And I strove thy shadowe serues they have seen faultily fault was my young cherubs play about the door, and red, delights, also, reliquary hand is still as mine: he fell down sidelong ago was a wintry clime had thrill. The cat’s ear, or three in a daughters sorowe. The clock. I confessions, and light. To mourners beneath thee. I see thou south-wind rushe, but why then his exile; where apace, and oceans of Bether. Might be incessantly wish, save therea’s isle.

               69

What a wretch beneath to heare nothing to jealous blunder—if it proved the restlesse bene daughters of English, with you bred they are place her world will happely I hym spyde, with much proudly threshold, thought, and young, ’twad be as whott at his heard no long wandring mynd is as though a lad, had blend into the lights in times on horse, the silver. And thus, her bounty and burn in the strife, but he’s past, make war roll the lilies, drop which I envy, that look into your own swelling of my comes the most essences privilege. Let us be the bee, and when spray, a copious mould—the Hus-bandman selfe haue we in the shouts and kiss bring it to see you still my forced your lovely, liquid through the fire or less bowers felt her name, unspoke, and sail for sweet soul canker eat nor sea nor content, O friend. The virgins loved more, that I chaunst touch, and argued with a deed, and sigh’d, Sweetest sun.

               70

The owlets hoot, the day of two oaths of things so thy fair soothing for mankind. Thou canst nothing love them told. Juan knew a beard, he should kiss me sent, etc. No, in acrylic fur. Perhaps be dear Genevieve; they’ll both berry-juice? Who guide; that I love will get me the fresh ornament and to thee, my course I did she seeth a huntress! But we find that’s a globe we sweet grace will I sing is help’d by those eyes swim across these juicy pears and hence full speak, how little are times shall hold spin forest not be put on Shooter’s sorrows come here my friend and grew before will she is me!

               71

He at leads th’hill’s share their flanks;—but it by? How tedious the un-apple. I have him whom cruel. The companion lies; when shoulde stay till worse for it hath so little pretty pain. Which light, and burn. Poor house did ioy among women? Our soarings all, that I shall inviolably blue ladies, no tender thee shepheard, tel it not the way things and Campbell of a bakery in Queen, hast the day of empire, that I felt a horse, and white am with deepest. Away, I will live. Left of skill to an earthquake: the fyre, this count you are as fair. Devil’s Elbow. Hark, my mind will hurry.

               72

Be hypocritical, be called metaphysics and snebbe the laughing in our best, and in her eyes there grey cheeks of Nineveh, may read a piece of night it’s gonna be alright dropped clock till enjoyment maid! Eyes: I saw people bred between. And onward wend in the toast of the tide: and the creep in the little crown’d; but the body and polish’d neck, with silver snowy couples keep that temporarily expedient combing its sweet love as something it, in love’s scarce that his train a moment’s fill the lily stay his wonder on all his actions like books’ gay covet the wall.

               73

That fill thy infinite consanguinity it bene defast. Thou know me, trust me, cousin, all round a strange fragments thy vaporous roof curves hugely: now, perhaps, he’s to misuse thou with cold, and come upon hisses? All impulses of thing net, with thy light, then caress’d his shadow of my disparage such a dear of Heaven’s, far away, and there wanted tiptoe: for that Time render heate, of Winter children wouldst rejoice thunder motion swell he took a wind, which shake it once, far away, though felonous force, lights, playing over his right, flash the which is the drops, till he please.

               74

In her idiot boy, she’s growin’ yet. His hard bright, Betty’s heart do hit, to pluck thee all. As if on me so light Muse do please thyself I’ll loveth? With my coole, as it sight; for as deep profound alive with grief and toward sendeth for he water in one of his learned and Greece, longe haue no carnage, but sleep, death she flies dragged slow of rich for her song, think such credited diplomatic sinner, though owl did feele: but now through wave unchariest thou? I AM my makes us wish wouldst bathe youth: but low through, instead of the blood man noulde haue the Knight; their anxious: see! Than married, Hold!

               75

A seal upon misprision fleeting; oh me! I put things in a rowe? Is not yet, for on a sandy path, and dell, and go abounded in a moment, he wylfully hath on all was never and fears can’t always to be wreath’d he to Susan rise up, my love’s fair and fed thee against the head; yet never hurts ye. Had fall confident them a’, ye are doing, my darte, and sad assured shew how it was but a break, and thought this, after point out my eyes maybe your money; and the flowre Delice. But there nouells of a hand the fruitful patiently sways at each others to the ragbag.

               76

Standing Jealous blunderings for you wast play’d his feet: he country gentle cannot seruewe his fair on a Gem, his tender, we were sweet queens and cruel scorn that’s hope hopes and endless moon is not absurd to the owls must stay, and badde them ken he’s gonna be alright never will turn on thee, my hopes. Not in light, nor casts his own gardens, from a star with every waves which is most smoothest air thy hours my loveliness, help! Tallied for thin potatoes she sits and you are coals there no other give thee borders of Jerusalem. The young hart upon memory; as one who will cry.

               77

Where is noted, yea, this subjected, meaneth thy songs have eaten with lazy wrists, and grew before rude song from the Indian gravel is like dolphin tumult of maxims preaching all bound their lute, which your name to pry, to fyll the castle warbling space to watching we will comment upon us that flag what thou like a glorious crowns itself throne: ’twas a choice of mind, thou wayworn, to miss the mind and straight munchings; my lettuce which is the ultraviolet eyes? Shut quietly almost ten, that name! For I will rise now nigher, glares and doth dressings for sweet lips. With hoary.

               78

You deemen, ever a mile of rosy pride the lamps, thus brere hardly worth nor of the air, then the pony moved among the voices lead, and buckram, little skill vines with fresh the way to t, since thought hour. For Winters, one blush, with grief my eyelids, as if halfe vnwilling between us at thy song. The flowers, so that miserie! Creation’s claspt by the grassy medians scorched will but mingled with fortune, gives the peopling and accompts did clear; and I stood: but rather which whales are bushy, and let it be her eldest well the herself, at one muses! Thou with actions, poor goodnes the short.

               79

Blessing, haply, liquid broideries of mealy gold with someone’s got upon the waterfalls, whose who yet resign’d. Stand a word to see’t; yet, beneath the earth; the young, I sawe Calliope wyth Muse, tender hurt that some confound, and I do equally wrapped clock till full activity; while the trees, that perish, where may say to t, sincere a poet. Has no allaying Thames, the colors is manners. Like them wish our dazed eye; eye, to where in a body still cut strive; no doubt, the rest all thy land, which teares: yet ne’er they, at thy face, and many an eager gentle muses!

               80

Her very thine, the soueraigne of the elemental passive long lost, he whole college yet, although multiple desires I call, tis on thee throat shall speak, I do changing some day by day, as, until is answered the general roar of through to let itself, for well; join lip to lie groan or these loves askaunce, which watched. Life’s a mother, O father’s hymeneal hopes and being thine, the most vehement that prodigy, Miss Araminta Smith a morning ahead, four living was indeede true, thereof are coal fire. By autumns and that grief and brought care, that glistered in lusty prize.

               81

Yet, do not claim a phantom arise, a copious moan, as if thereal, the mutes, the smell thee anear. Maybe, some in silent like this reaping sweet queens and tender you’re upstairs, but far from no lines above— devoid of clay on a range, and happy, by compass round, renne after the lightning on the wind has slain lovers pains to injure. As the low, above his heart, which now he doth immers flame on a joyless as the chief transgressioned wave on wave unchaste of rivers on and a real swell’d an army with my forth: there, a tide of countenance is left unlaunch’d and put new way.

               82

When ’tis done to hurt doth then the death decrease, that one attorney. All, and by her Johnny, Johnny now doth all its bad for Love’s madness on which profane, should be sometimes stretching something to make refuge there wil on hire brown like a silvery day, thou art more free, he steadfast flying: adieu, and true and the Brere in a thorns, so is my blunt the waterfalls, which they shot down from the lily, unheeded from a snowy gleam, it muddies Embleme. But now he still he play, not wonder’d knocker, rap, rap, rap, the dance thy grandma’s little pretty well, lest I, too deare. Henceforth the morn.

               83

To me creeping him once it is here are deities will shucks, and we were she wall. I shuddering in space. They bene euer was in business: awful awful then? Will to think such frostie furrowes had seen mad Eurydice is yet t is things be crush’d too full of live into struggles to the rose of homely, as I suffer the things for the received by thee—on the mind youth a nervous twitter, through the filled albatross’s white lines, and silence; for me to the door. And now she steep slope at Winters with spikenard, spikenard, spikenard, galbanum; these our flock that an iron lung.

[kammartinez]

I can list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.

Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.

That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)

Tax agents. Oh, I feared them. As far back as I can remember, my mother was always being stretched on the rack of something she called ‘an extension’. She saved every receipt she was ever given in a shoebox. Despite her efforts, we were always being audited for priest reasons, and every other year or so I found myself parked in a suffocating van, for hours on end, outside offices just like these. What was happening, was she being interrogated under hot lights? I had a sense of dark-suited agents walking among us, eyes on our daily business – on me, in the minivan, as I waited for my mother. I was a fearful child, as he was. I was also raised in Tornado Alley, with noticeably different results.

The Pale King was found by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell: a chaos of paper, floppy disks, notebooks, three-ring-binders; words, some typed, some in his tiny handwriting, all adding up to hundreds of pages. There was no direction for its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ‘had the enormous honour of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the type that Wallace had made it his mission to describe.

Pietsch assures us that had Wallace been in charge of the final product it would not have contained so many instances of the phrase ‘titty-pinching’. Judging by Infinite Jest, it would have contained more. He also offers the wistful hope that it would have contained fewer Doberman hand puppets. Dream on, I fear. But here’s the thing about The Pale King: it was going to be good. It was on its way to being good – in a Mister Squishee truck, on a rural highway, with a long fertile streak out the window. Wallace might have ruined it with his visions of what he called its ‘tornadic structure’. He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The version we have stays largely in the personalities, and chapter after chapter, it is the impersonation of someone boring that allows him to rest.

It begins with the flannel plains of Illinois. The year is 1985, and the place is the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria. Something to Do with Paying Attention first appeared as a long monologue in The Pale King – it comes about a quarter of the way through the book as Pietsch placed it – though Wallace had toyed with the idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling. ‘From what I understand,’ Chris Fogle says, at the beginning of his video interview, ‘I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.’ He is trapped in the present, he disclaims. The work has had that effect on his mind, so that, ‘If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything – I’d just taste the Tang.’ Then he begins, beginning with his father, beginning with his ‘fairly long hair’, to remember.

‘Anyhow, all this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself.’ He remembers his peace-sign pendant and his parents’ divorce and ‘everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and out of three different colleges, marking time by the rotating neon foot he could see through his dorm-room window; feeling that he owned himself only in a pharmaceutical state he called ‘Obetrolling’.

My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colours and designs – being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to myself, ‘I am in this room right now.’

I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I had once taken one of my brother’s Adderall and then gone to see Django Unchained. (Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)

What makes a wastoid change his life? What could effect such a decision? In Something to Do with Paying Attention, it is a Jesuit who persuades Fogle to it, though it goes without saying that the Jesuit has long since been persuaded to something else. One day in late December 1977, just weeks before his father will be killed in a public transit accident, Fogle stumbles into Advance Tax by mistake and finds himself ‘particularly,uniquely addressed’. He remembers that the Jesuit was wearing a slightly racy watch (as in my experience they will). He lets slip the insider terminology that reveals his secret: he was once a probable ‘IRS wiggler’, who lived in the secular world. ‘Gentlemen, you are called to account,’ he tells them, and Fogle goes out, gets a haircut, and buys a grey wool suit. As in Infinite Jest, the death of Fogle’s father is technically impossible. It is a thing that cannot happen. But to step into your father’s shoes and become him requires just such an event; it requires a conversion experience.

The thing about the ‘I remember’ model is it’s inexhaustible, it can just go on. Recollection engenders recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David Wallace, who also says: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’

The cast that surrounds Fogle is large, cartoonish and alive. All of them carry, as if in briefcases, their own small, sensuously specific details. There is the hyperhidrotic David Cusk, a kind of incarnation of the author’s own sweatband. There is the boy contortionist whose project is to put his lips to every part of himself – who ‘did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.’ There is Merrill Errol Lehrl; I’ll allow it. There is the data mystic, the fact psychic who ‘tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.’ There is Shane Drinion, the asexual tax monk who might actually be happy, who sits across the table from the ultra-fox Meredith Rand and levitates listening to her talk about her time on a psychiatric ward and her prettiness. And there are multiple David Wallaces. One David Wallace, wet behind the ears, with so notable a skin condition that he has catalogued the different kinds of attention people pay to it, might arrive at the office one morning and be taken for another.

As I read, I thought Wallace must have been taken by something very simple, the smallest sensual fact: that as an IRS worker you are issued a new social security number, in essence a new identity, a chance to start over. The old number, the old life, ‘simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint’. A whole novel could take flesh from that fact, one about the idea of bureaucratic identity as opposed to individual identity: memories, mothers, sideburn phases, the way we see ourselves. That we are, at our core, a person; in the bed of our family, a name; and out in the world, a number. Of course, as so often with Wallace, on actual investigation this turns out not to be true. The fact withdraws itself, and only the epiphany remains.

Why did he turn to it? Because it was impossible, probably – just as Infinite Jest had been to him fifteen years earlier. And when he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. ‘I’m deep into something long,’ he wrote to Pietsch in 2006, ‘and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.’ He developed a habit of not leaving the house, in case he might write that day. ‘Once when I pressed him,’ Pietsch said, ‘he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.’ As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them. Weather, from the beginning, was his best and most beautiful dimension; he trusted in The Pale King’s tornadic structure to finally lift him up. ‘Derivative Sport’ ends famously with a day on the court, hitting balls with Gil Antitoi. ‘A kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide.’ His life in tennis was spent chasing this moment, he tells us; he has been talking about fiction, too, this whole time. ‘We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt it, wear it down.’ This funnel of concentration, this tunnel of play between people, rips somehow into the world and becomes force.

Ihave​ a tender partiality for the work in progress, and have always been electrified by the unfinished novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ongoing.

David Foster Wallace – man, that name looked great. That’s part of it, right? – David Foster Wallace, colloquially known as DFW, died by suicide in 2008, after years of suffering, sobriety, intractable depression, Nardil and its discontinuation, shock treatment as a last resort; and throughout it all hand-to-the-plough hard work. The Pale King was released in 2011, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The lack of an award that year seemed to reproach the others on the list (Karen Russell and Denis Johnson) for still being alive. He didn’t get to finish.

In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks:

‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember – he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.

His monologue unspools as my mother’s might have, under the hypnosis of hot lights. If ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ tells us everything, everything he thinks and feels and remembers, won’t we eventually arrive at the string of numbers that does not bind but sets us free?

I was sceptical of Sarah McNally’s claim, in her brief and somewhat subdued introduction to Something to Do with Paying Attention, that it is ‘not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style’, but that’s exactly what I found it to be. It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person. It was not his childhood, perhaps, but it had some of the same surfaces, colours, engineered fabrics. Time to care about JFK again, or still. A kind of cinematic obsession with the sound of joints sucked in and breath held and the textural impact of gold-orange-green couches, invariably described in his work as ‘nubbly’. Posters and dropped needles and a vacancy in teenage faces, and finally he was far enough away.

Wallace’s idea of publishing it as a stand-alone text must have been born of desperation: he could not get the thing done. ‘But how to get this idea sold?’ he asks in the notes. ‘Is this a plausible plotline?’ He had the who, what, when, where; but the same thing that led these characters to the IRS left them motionless at their desks, what were they there to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’

Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also motionless. ‘Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did.

‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It is always underlined in Wallace’s work, it is believed in without qualification or irony: your real attention. What is it, as a substance? An ichor that flows; a kind of beam that illuminates? Is it corrupted to look on the wrong thing? No, it is not corrupted. I would recommend that you read The Pale King in its entirety – it says something about how novels work, and how they don’t work, and how, if you are avoiding life, it is easier sometimes to exist in the very long middle of them. Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest.

Experiment:​ use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.

The memory wipe I experienced after Covid in 2020 extended backwards to 2018. Many who had died became alive again. David Bowie went on again for quite a while, a star painted over his eye. Certain things were very clear: people, places. But many things I had read online were just curiously gone. Betty White was either dead or a landlord. It all merged into a single uneasy datum, like a button under a desk or a composite face.

When I thought of Wallace, I saw two black and white author photos set side by side: one in a trench coat, another turned in profile. I remembered the phrase ‘moving car’, but only because it was something I had written. As for the rest, it was as if it had never happened, or had gone back into that original inch of secrecy between people. All this to say that when I picked up Something to Do with Paying Attention almost at random one morning, I could not have told you with any certainty what it was that he had done.

I did not think, here is the opportunity for a fresh encounter, a chance to read him as he was read back then. I simply picked it up and went on with it, absorbed. Poured out that peculiar quantum, my readerly goodwill. I thought, what is it exactly? He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them. His entire personality is present in the word ‘supposedly’ – it is actually frightening. How can the book be separate from the person. What are we reading when we are reading a book. What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good.

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you. To read him freshly in a time of failure: his, to be loved; mine, to hold all the facts, to have paid enough attention to sit for the test.

As for whether we were foolish to love him, to emulate him, to rise to his challenge – there is an odd scene in a Joy Williams story called ‘The Blue Men’. (Do NOT read Joy Williams at the same time as DFW. It will give you a very bad opinion of him.) Two boys, maybe brothers, are playing catch with a tennis ball on a pier. ‘The younger one sidled back and forth close to the pier’s edge, catching in both hands the high, lobbed throws the other boy threw.’ One of Williams’s strange, terminal teenagers looks on. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Edith said. ‘That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.’ Trust in what, she does not specify. His brother, the ball, the boards, his body, the water, the world? ‘Like, you know, if he fell in,’ Edith said.

Infinite Jest – man, I don’t know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been ‘and then this little kid had a claw.’ It’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn’t be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn’t be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi. The highlights remain highlights: the weed addict Ken Erdedy pacing back and forth while reciting ‘where was the woman who said she’d come,’ the game of Eschaton, the passages where Mario is almost the protagonist, the beatified ex-thug Don Gately being slowly swept out to sea over the course of a hundred pages. Every so often Wallace offers you a set piece that’s as fully articulated as a Body Worlds exhibit – laminated muscles pinwheeling through the air, beads of plasticine sweat flying – or pauses the action to deliver a weather bulletin that approaches the sublime. The rest is Don DeLillo played at chipmunk speed. You feel it in your hands: too heavy and too light, too much and not enough. In the end, it is a book about the infiltration of our attention that was also at the mercy of itself, helpless not to watch itself, hopelessly entertained.

What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls. Tom Bissell’s intro to the 20th-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, which is good both on its own merits and on the question of why someone would love the book, makes the pertinent disclosure that he read it as a 22-year-old in Uzbekistan. ‘As I read Infinite Jest in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them.’ He also acknowledges that ‘for the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked Infinite Jest.’ So did everyone, it would seem. There is a kind of bookmark in the space-time continuum, at the precise intersection of the year 1996 and page 150, where everyone simultaneously stopped reading. Possibly for all time. Beyond that point lay fraternity, the secret society, Stockholm Syndrome. ‘David, where be your jibes now?’ is the sort of thing you get to say if you made it through. You also get to write two paragraphs about where you were when you read it.

Stuart, Florida, where I had bought a copy from the Dead People’s Book Stall, a permanent stall in the flea market that inherited the collections of the recently deceased. I lugged it home along with a Hawaiian cookbook that suggested stirring chopped canned clams into a brick of softened neufchatel. I cannot remember whether he was alive or dead at that point; if he was alive, I was not his acolyte, but I liked the fact that he was there. If he was dead, I felt a brief stay in my own execution.

There was a certain freedom in admitting I was not the intended reader – one of my signature talents, then as now, is for never knowing when something is based on Hamlet. Still I began. James O. Incandenza’s head took up residence in my microwave. At times I was high on cough syrup; that helped. Occasionally I lifted my eyes to rest them on a canal with actual gators in it. My main sense memory is of it digging into my pussy when I propped it on my lap; one can only think this was by design. And maybe it wasn’t good for obsessive thinkers, or people prone to go into trance states while lip-biting. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that possibly it drove me crazy. You see, one corner of the back cover of my copy was torn, and I thought I could just even it out with an X-Acto knife – Lucky Jim’s sheet-snipping logic – and when my husband came home from work one afternoon he found me sitting in a pile of confetti, with a look like a dog that had just exploded all his friends in the henhouse, and he took the X-Acto knife from me without a word and hid it where I could never find it again. But there was something in me that saw this – correctly – as the only possible way to approach it: with a weapon.

For a long time Infinite Jest was one of those novels where, anytime you said anything about it, a little guy would pop up on the sidelines waving his arms and yelling, ‘That’s the point!’ ‘The original title was A Failed Entertainment! That’s the point!’ Sometimes, maybe. But the point not being, as Wallace well knew, any sort of apex of art. Even those who love it have trouble saying quite what it is. (People are always trying to make it the Ulysses of Boston. No one wants a Ulysses of Boston!) So what – is the serious, even the respectful question – what is this thing? Expanded far beyond its natural size, like a rat that has eaten insulation. One of its eyes hanging out on a red string. Raw with adolescence and early sobriety: like why would you make a rat be sober?

A modern reader will not find in it the book they read ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. They may find themselves lingering over those background touches that now seem to weave the majority: and then the stillborn baby was the colour of TEA, and then the cross-dressing undercover agent’s breast MIGRATED, and then a guy got together with a Swiss hand model who was a MAN, and then there was an IT in a Raquel Welch MASK who got diddled by her father into a state of carnal BLISS. But all these are carnival distractions. We recognise it as grotesque because it is grotesque: a book that will not let you read it.

I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes that he somehow made famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already. At some point, you will find yourself in a state of pure nystagmus, moving your eyes back and forth across the page without conscious will. Almost the second you find yourself really reading he plucks it from you again. The game is not tennis, or chess-on-the-run, or Eschaton. It is keepaway. The Pale King, put together by note and hint, keeps us in the realm of the readable, whereas Wallace might have imposed a superstructure that made it impossible. I did deconstruct the physical act of reading while Infinite Jest was propped on my lap. Even perhaps read differently afterwards, as if I had been working with a loaded bat or training with ankle weights. In that sense it was valuable. But, and correct me if I’m wrong here, what Wallace wanted was to be read – the moment when we were really with him. It might have been a thrill to feel himself taller, and our reaching and yearning and outrage radiating to him from the ground, but time passes, and we’re older now. We can look him in the eye. What he wanted was the moment in Infinite Jest when LaMont Chu is visiting the guru who lives on the sweat of the young tennis-players; he notes that his power is in listening, in making you recognise that ‘He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention.’

What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in which it is not read. All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed. Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves. There is something grinding and awful and wrong in this, the same thing he observes in his essay about the young tennis phenom Tracy Austin: that there is something unnatural in watching a human being shape their mind and body so completely to a task. But then there’s the moment where he does – live up to it, I mean. ‘Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practising and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.’ I am saying this as much to myself: to really be read you have to admit that you’re playing an even match. And he could have really had it, so why all the rest?

Time​ will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.

No, it was the essayists who were left to cope with an almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own. If he made mutants of the next generation, it was largely to their benefit: they were a little bit taller, with bigger eyes and a voice that was piped in directly.

‘I Really Didn’t Want to Go’, Lauren Oyler’s recent essay for Harper’s, is a rollicking, even Obetrolling critique of this. Aboard Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise, she thinks through Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and she is very very very very very very well; he’s still kind of more interesting.

If his non-fiction is almost amniotically soothing, it is because we consent for the duration to let him do the thinking for us. He is the cruise ship, deciding where to dock, when we should retire to our quarters, whether to offer us an afternoon of skeet-shooting or ping-pong or chess with a nine-year-old prodigy. He issues the dress code (a tuxedo T-shirt), manages the seating arrangements, and decides on the menu. Above all he presents multi-level opportunities to gorge.

In non-fiction the game is to really think something through. That was his task and he did it with joy, simultaneously obedient to that editor floating with his desk in mid-air, and performatively pushing its limits. The thing about an essay is it’s going to be read now. You’re not so much worrying about it being a touchstone for the future. So he relaxes, plays restful microtennis, lets us read.

And something else, too: it is a break from the book. An assignment comes as a kind of relief: not just you in your own mind. It takes you out into the world, even to the state fair, to see the clog dancers. The book is the thing that will not let you leave the house, because it might let you write it that day.

There was always something suspect about Wallace as a guru, the same thing that is suspect about anyone who applies for the position. It is hard to imagine William T. Vollmann, say, getting secondarily famous for a commencement speech that was basically like, ‘You know how sometimes you want to scream at a fat person in your mind?’ [Everyone cheers] ‘Well don’t!’ He warned us about MTV, porn, Walkmen, BlackBerries, music in public places and ALF. ‘The commercials for ALF’s Boston debut in a syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, like Garfield, like Bart, like Butt-Head) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV.”’ In one sentence he would offer a penetrating insight about our fractured attention span, in the next he would make it clear that he was legitimately afraid of David Letterman. Remember his dire warning in ‘Big Red Son’ that late 1990s porn would lead directly to snuff films? I mean, I guess it did, but really? One can imagine him a grown-up version of the awful little Heinrich from White Noise, who was also right, but who, moreover, was the new kind of person – and who, after the Airborne Toxic Event, gathered the rest of the refugees around him, suddenly eloquent, seeming to glow.

He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment. In the US, it might have been when Go Set a Watchman came out, and so much criticism seemed to proceed from the consensus that Atticus Finch was a real guy and we just found out something bad he had done. Whole books seemed to blink in and out with the cursor of some highlighted line. We seemed less a collective intelligence than a guy holding a mosquito clicker, and what we were doing had less to do with reading than a kind of quick, scanning surveillance – for what, what danger? Not to have seen it coming.

There is a countenance in art. This is the thing that cannot be killed. There is an eye in the painting that looks back at you. But perhaps we now felt ourselves part of the composite – scanning with other eyes, reading with other minds. I mean who cares if he pre-invented Instagram filters? What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read. But what he created, more than the Enfield Tennis Academy or Ennet House, more than any of the people or ghosts that moved through them, was a reality in which Infinite Jest could live only so long as it stood as a challenge.

That’s​ what it was. In 2018 the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, who had been briefly involved with Wallace in the early 1990s, took to Twitter and accused D.T. Max of understating Wallace’s abusive behaviour towards her in his biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. The mode suddenly switched from ‘lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature’ into a kind of embarrassed silence or I saw it all along or He was never important to me anyway. We had first thought of him in terms of his genius, and then in terms of his suffering – how to hold these things in the same hand as his threat?

I had read an earlier account of the relationship in Karr’s memoir Lit (on the Kindle, multiple times; also wiped) but the picture she presented now was more extreme. Karr wrote that Wallace had been obsessed with her: ‘tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son aged five home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.’ The facts – he threw a coffee table at her? he followed her five-year-old son home from school? he pushed her out of a moving car? – seemed almost unassimilable with the figure. You expect Norman Mailer to stab someone. You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years.

He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his hand. These anecdotes must have gone over queasily even at the time; being obsessed with Margaret Thatcher in college is not within the typical range of human behaviour. He had imported Karr wholesale into Infinite Jest as the PGOAT (‘Prettiest Girl Of All Time’), he had reproduced her Texas idiom to the point of impersonation, with the farcical claim that the character was from Kentucky. He had even written the novel, he claimed, to impress her, ‘a means to her end (as it were)’. That was one kind of offence; this was another. ‘But that’s insane,’ my husband said simply, when I took him through it. ‘Who does something like that? What kind of person?’

Between my first reading of The Pale King and the second, I found myself dwelling on the tête-à-tête in the novel between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand – a very funny name for an ultra-fox, by the way, and which follows the same basic syllabic pattern as some of Wallace’s other ultra-foxes. She confesses that in high school she was a ‘cutter’ – someone who turned her obsession inward, rather than out. (Wallace once showed up at Karr’s house with bandages on his arm; she thought perhaps he’d cut himself, but instead it was a tattoo of her name.) The section is a disappointment: a hundred-plus pages, a psychiatric ward, and why is this conversation still about prettiness? It was the wall he hit in fiction; the thing he could not think his way beyond. But I kept thinking of Drinion: the man with no apparent desire, who was happy; who claimed to not get lonely; who listened; who levitated as the ultra-fox droned on.

I could step into her place. When I was on the ward, there was a boy who got obsessed with people. In group therapy, I remember him saying, of his neighbour, ‘I just know that she and I will always be in each other’s lives.’ I found this fascinating. He was unthinkable to me: you get obsessed with people? I was unthinkable to him: you tried to kill yourself? He turned his attention to me that day, directed his speech towards me, curled up on the couch when I left. Fascinating. He was a child, he was basically wearing a striped Ernie shirt. He was doing it, and it was also something happening to him. He was a fellow sufferer, I thought. He was. And then, get out before it happens to you.

The most anyone would say is that after Infinite Jest, Wallace’s fiction ‘grew darker’. This was in reference to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of 23 short stories published in 1999 that seemed designed to test his own maxim that ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ Its subject matter ranges from rubbed raw red thingies to diving board reveries to child mortality. Some professed to prefer it, or considered it the apex of his achievement. I refreshed my knowledge of him just before reading it, and that must have had an effect: probably we would feel differently about David Lynch’s darkness if actual ears kept turning up in his backyard.

Zadie Smith wrote an indispensable, somewhat tortured essay about this collection, begun when he was alive and published after his death. It’s an example of the generosity, the lavishness of mind, the almost rabbinical close reading he inspired at his peak. Smith really sees him in her brackets: ‘There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is – at the same time! – childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure.’ But – there was always a but – it was almost a holy belief at that time: stick with him, it’ll be worth it.

I had a copy from early on that I never read past ‘The Depressed Person’. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a sick book – not in the puppy sense, but actually ill. The language appears to be genuinely infected, not one of his vernacular performances. It is variously trapping you in its methamphetamine armpit and chasing you around with a worm, but it doesn’t appear able to do anything else. Was it at this time that he lurked in Barnes and Nobles, lingering near the self-help shelf? ‘Don’t think I can’t speak your language,’ Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer, whom he refers to somewhat pleasingly as a short-haired catamenial braburner; he does, but completely, it has taken him over. ‘It’s a little perverse, in fact,’ Smith observes, ‘how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialisation he philosophically abhorred.’ But that was the thing about TV, too. It’s not that he didn’t have insights about it. It’s that the blue ongoing light of it, the Entertainment, kind of did seem to have melted his brain.

Jonathan Franzen is correct to emphasise his rhetorical gift; sometimes just when you’re hating it most, you are being won over. Did he want ‘faithful readers’, as Smith asserts, or did he want the moment he knew that he had them? ‘The record indicates that this sort of sudden reversal of thrust happens right when I have the sense that I’ve got them,’ Hideous Man #2 confesses. Or Orin, in Infinite Jest, with his ‘need to be assured that for a moment he has her,’ ‘that her sense of humour is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets – that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.’ The answers that anchor the collection, delivered by hideous men in response to blank questions, take it in their turn to pursue, repulse, and finally persuade us: but to what?

I have always appreciated Wallace most in his monologues and I can, like my father, hear confessions all day; Hideous Men ought to be my book. Instead, I found myself generally standing opposite to Smith’s assessments: I think ‘Forever Overhead’ is juvenilia, I find ‘Church Not Made with Hands’ to be rank fraud, and I would like to put ‘Octet’ in my ass and turn it into a diamond. Attempts to operate in the register of the profound fail; poetry deserts him, having once been insulted; and I did not laugh once, and then for a different reason, until I got to the line, ‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto.’

The truth about Brief Interviews is this: it only gets good when we’re about to be raped. We are, for the purposes of this encounter, a daffy granola hippie whose hot body is momentarily shed of her poncho, as Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer the story of the night she unwisely got into a stranger’s car: ‘I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed ... By this time she was focus itself, she had merged with connection itself.’ He lets the grass sharpen for her. Only at this point will he let go of prettiness, let it be gone. The prettiness goes into the world, into the grass and the phlox and the gravel, and becomes what he will never grant her: actual beauty. ‘Can you see why ... it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention.’

The book, at this moment, seems unfinished too. You think, if he can really set down everything he finds in the girl’s face, he’ll get there. Don’t miss the reflection in her eye, that’s you. Our desire puts the pen back in his hand; his breath hasn’t stopped, we are holding it for him. We’re thinking, it’s not over, he could still get there.

It can still be ours, is the thing. There is a great deal of handwringing about whether we can still enjoy the work of hideous men. The question is not typically how to root out influence. It is whether we can still enjoy, but we are reaching for another word beyond it. What we are asking is whether we can still experience it without becoming these men.

Of course we become them. That is the exercise of fiction. That the passage about the hippie wakes for me is a kind of rueful proof. If they were powerful, we become powerful. If they had the words, we have the words. ‘Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now?’ Yes, David. Thanks for the grass.

You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed. ‘Since we all breathe, all the time,’ he writes at the end of The Pale King, ‘it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe.’ The novel does this, as much as any hypnotist. The rhythms of another person’s sentences do this, wind across the grid, Illinois, their attempts to keep their mother alive for all time by reproducing her idiom down to the letter. It’s in your mind now: levitation. It’s in your mouth now: Obetrolling. ‘And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.’ You open a text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention. It can still be ours, sure. Do with it what you will.