on the necessity of brain refreshing.

Creative nonfiction is difficult to write, this is something I have come to find. Writing for classes, i.e. hum and soc, always seems so necessarily sterile, like boring the reader is a kind of academic, student-to-teacher obligation. I always bore myself, which is why I so often take such opportunities to develop new interests in things like Slavic languages and bottling water. I have even resorted to looking at lists of ingrediants and wikipediaing bizarre subfoodish listings (see: silicon dioxide, which didn't even sound remotely safe but snuck quite alarmingly into my Land o' Lakes hot cocoa. Oh and, it gives you cancer if inhaled.)

Anyway, my poor uncreative sterile brain has recently uncovered the joys of creative nonfiction via the adorably semi-pretentious yet terribly self-conscious essays of one David Foster Wallace. I haven't read the ambitious, fictional "Infinite Jest", for which is arguably better known... though I'd like to eventually. What I DID read was both "Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All", about visiting the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", chronicling his ultra-pampered voyage upon a commercial cruise ship.

He is hilariously hyperobservant and well-researched. My one critique--I sometimes got the feeling that he narrowly exaggerated appearances and events for the sake of the humor--is more of a skepticism... I can hardly get the guy to prove it. Still, his observations and style make me fall in love a little, and there's a gentleness toward his subjects that really is important.

"...every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United States lies between the Coasts and figure they'll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish."

...

Anyway, now for chocolate fondue (no joke).