Infinite Summer

Wallace also edited (more or less) the 2007 edition of the Best American Essays series, the forward of which, its self a kick-ass essay, can be read right here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Be ... 709274#EXC

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...the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. - Cormac McCarthy

...and turned on the t.v. and there is David Letterman, whom I've not watched in ages, and so I am thinking about "My Appearance" as he interviews Amy Adams, with whom he is discussing cooking Lobster for a movie she's in. And she mentions she no longer eats lobster b/c it was distubing to throw the live lobster in the boiling water, at which point Dave decides to gently scold her for not killing the lobster first because if you throw it in the water alive, "it has time to consider." Am I drawing too much into this if I believe Dave was intentionally subtly referencing DFW?

Has anyone read: ?

Doesn't it seem like Wallace is discriminating against people who have AIDS? I almost can't believe he was able to find a good thing about the AIDS epidemic, that it made sex less casual and put more focus on holding hands and body postures. What? This is what's good about a near fatal disease which doesn't just ruin the lives of people who are more sexually active than most? Unfortunately, AIDS is a very big deal--on an international level--I don't know how he can see this as a "gift from nature" (or perhaps, Jesus!) here to put to an end to "sport-fucking." Yeah, I wonder if such an act is so rampant and destructive it begs for nature to kill it off with a mere disease. Nothing too harmful, and hey it's not like it's any worse than syphilis or crimes of passion. I don't know how he can make up all these excuses and then say he didn't mean any offense when he praised AIDS. This is like a parody of an ultra-chaste Christian fundamentalist praising God for wiping out the evil Sodomites and their icky sexual practices so we can return to some good wholesome sex that requires a lot of hot, breathy phone conversations and "dragons" apparently.

I really hope he was joking with this essay.