the thin man

This is how David Foster Wallace’s editor described his early writing. Wallace, it seems, was good at everything, but depressed.

This inscription appears at the beginning of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, which I was reading on a cross-country drive over the summer. It’s attributed to Neruda, a Chilean poet and politician. In 1966 Neruda was invited to participate in the International PEN conference in New York City but denied entrance to the US because he was a communist. Arthur Miller intervened on his behalf.

This post marks the beginning of an experiment. I’m not much of a blogger, but a picture, as they say, is worth a lot, sometimes.