Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace
There’s an aspect of the David Foster Wallace nonfiction reading experience that hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been much remarked upon. To read his essays, reviews and articles is (for me at least) to feel a kind of retrospective anxiety on behalf of the unknown editors who commissioned them in the first place. For instance, one of the pieces collected in Both Flesh and Not, the new assortment of Wallace’s nonfiction, is a review of a special issue of a journal dedicated to the form of the prose poem. Early in the piece, which originally appeared in the literary periodical Rain Taxi, Wallace makes a point of explaining the unorthodox way in which it’s written (essentially, it takes the form of an exhaustive itemised list of aspects of the text): “The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognised grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against RT‘s rigid 1,000-word limit.”
