David Foster Wallace: The Early Years

The New Yorker's book blog has an article this morning (by Meredith Blake -- Who she? Talk about a deep bench) about the acquisition by the University of Texas of David Foster Wallace's papers and books.

I admire Wallace almost as much as my co-blogger does Russell T. Davies..... What is fun here, though, are not his drafts of "Infinite Jest" or the couple of hundred heavily annotated books, but this poem by a very very young writer, a facsimile of which is above.

I find particular promise in the concluding couplets:

If you were to see a viking today
It's best to go some other way
Because they'll kill you very well
And all your gold they'll certainly sell
For all these reasons stay away
From a viking every day.

UPDATE: Even great, death-haunted novelists are prone to a bit of buffoonery sometimes.... Wallace's copy of Suttree: