Pixels tidily cast in lucite, pages served from somewhere deep in the bat-cave, Suck (”a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”), the once mighty webPub and meme-machine-’zine emerged this morning through clickage associated with a hunt for David Foster Wallace. Nick Maniatis’ Howling Fantods, an extended DFW bibliography, has the top Google rank for David Foster Wallace 2024, but just guess which little blog o’ mine stands second behind it.

When you drop the “2006″ qualifier, Listics falls to number 19 in the race for fame through critical appreciation or just mean spirited criticism of the Infinite Jester, a placement well above - I competitively must add - the notorious Languagehat who nitpicks DFW to death in a lengthy diatribe here. (Notice: any satiric intent inferred or imputed to any content on the Listics blog should consider first the profound and more recent influence of TOM Swift, and only then the marginally interesting stylings of the DEAN.)

Languagehat’s essay calls for a response, and respond I may. I have tucked away a draft post titled “The Reconstruction of David Foster Wallace.” I’ll work on that after I have finished my current, more critical blog-in-prog: “Soylent Diesel; an examination of alternatives for resolving the emergent petrochemical problem.”

A blogger could do worse than to simply follow after Mark Woods…  here then, a story of fishes:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

-  David Foster Wallace, Kenyon commencement address, May 2024