I’m speechless. I can’t imagine a world without a Molly Ivins newspaper column. Hopefully, I can serve up some kind of tribute once I digest this terrible news.
Month / January 2007
This Explains Everything About Hemingway
Silverblatt’s Scripted Pathos?
Escapegrace: “Anyway…at one point, Silverblatt recounted the interviews he had conducted earlier in the week – Mailer on The Castle in the Forest and Dave Eggers on What is the What – and seemed unexpectedly overcome with emotion at the state of the world depicted in the three novels. I don’t think the pathos was necessarily scripted and I was sort of touched.”
Speculating Upon Gasps
Jonathan Ames: “On the oral-sex front, I then made a concerted effort to lick the labia, which was something I’ve been guilty of neglecting in the past, and again the results were quite good. I also plunged my middle digit in about two inches, counting off the distance with my finger along the inside of the young lady’s vagina the way you march out the steps between your car and a fire-hydrant. I may have actually located the G-spot, if I’m to judge by the gasps of pleasure that were elicited.”
DFW Rewritten
Here is the first paragraph of David Foster Wallace’s “Good People” rewritten:
Lane A. Dean, Jr. and his girlfriend sat at a picnic table. They’d gone to different high schools but attended the same junior college. Now it was springtime and they were near a lake. The air was suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs, almost too much for them to take in. The recent storms had downed trees. One tree had collapsed near the shallows of the lake where Lane and his girlfriend were now sitting. Lane liked his girlfriend and her smell, but he was distracted by another man, whose incongruous hat reminded him of his grandfather. This stranger was still, more like a man than a picture.
DFW’s paragraph is 502 words. My revised paragraph is 107 words.