Late last year I joined a literature club at work. The first book we read was 1984 by George Orwell. One of the members mentioned that he loved Orwell and was reading everything of his during the year (2025). When New Year’s Resolutions time rolled around, I happened to watch an uncut interview with David Foster Wallace. I really enjoyed the interview, in large part because it was uncut and you could really get a sense of his personality, but also because it touched on a lot of things that I had been thinking about and continue to think about.

And that’s when it hit me. Why not spent some time (I settled on 3 months) during 2026 on different authors? I called them heroes in my mind at first, but I think most of them will actually be “potential heroes” rather than a person I already view as a hero. Partly, because I don’t have a list of people I consider heroes, and partly because I wanted to explore some different things this year. And I’m reticent to pass judgment on their life and whether they lived up to what they wrote and so forth. Anyway, it sounded like a fun idea, and I chose DFW for the first quarter of this year.

“This is Water” is on my (very short) list of things I read/watch/listen to every year. In the past, I enjoyed Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and devoured Infinite Jest (though I didn’t really try to “understand” it). There is a scene early in the book in which you hear a man’s inner dialog on how he is going to quit marijuana, but for real this time. It is the scene in all of literature which I feel best captures my inner monologue, not the marijuana aspect, but all the rationalizations that he/I goes through. Even though he/I knows deep down that they won’t work. But maybe this time they will. So I have some familiarity with David’s work and I respect his prose and enjoy his humor. I won’t be able to read all of his works this quarter — The Pale King alone would likely take me the entire time. But I decided to read as much as I reasonably could.

Therefore, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been reading some of his essays and stories, watching interviews he gave, etc. I listened to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and on my pal DFW’s recommendation, I listened to Amusing Ourselves to Death. Impedimentally, I signed up for two books of the quarter at work¹, and listened to yet another book of the quarter² that seemed related to some themes from DFW. Now I’m far behind on Life and Death in Shanghai which is what the literature club is reading at the moment. I don’t think I’ve read this much long-form since high school. I enjoy it. It’s less frenetic and more fulfilling than my normal short-form and headline reading. But less seductive.

And does it count if I mention that I’m watching Sátántangó which feels similar to a book in that you have to slow down and take it in rather than flitting from one scene to the next? Does it still count if I tell you that it’s a very visual movie rather than symbolic/language oriented (I can’t resort to my common trick of listening to the movie rather than watching it)? I would like to read the novel that it’s based on (by Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai) but I’m afraid that will have to wait for another quarter.

Well here we are in February, the time that I told myself I would start writing about the author I chose. Then in the third month (March in this case), I’m going to try to emulate my “hero.” I haven’t decided if I’m going to write a David Foster Wallace style essay or short story or both. What I have decided is that I won’t be writing a DFW novel!

So expect a few more posts on what I’ve been thinking about while reading David Foster Wallace (hopefully one a week for four total), and then some banal, epigonic drivel.

The following is a decent approximation of how I feel about this blog:

I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week.

—Gwern Branwen

Since I haven’t been writing every week that must mean that

1. I’m not intelligent (unthinkable)
2. I’m not educated (I do only have one Ph.D. …)
3. I’m not motivated to write (that doesn’t quite feel true)
4. I’m too busy to write (bingo)

That last one certainly feels true. When during the week do I have time think about, let alone write about, something? But, every business book I’ve ever read says that you are never too busy, you are just bad at managing priorities. In my case, I do think that’s true: I’m horrible at making and managing priorities. And that’s why I chose to memorize this quote from Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk¹:

There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist… most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

—Thomas Merton, Trappist monk

I’ve always liked Ursula K. Le Guin, though I haven’t actually read much of her work. Mostly just The Earthsea Cycle and The Left Hand of Darkness. A few other short stories and maybe some books I have forgotten (I read a lot as a kid and don’t remember most of it I’m sure).

I recently listened to a podcast, The Word For Man Is Ishi (a clear homage to The Word for World is Forest ), and it made me want to read some more of Ursula — especially her early works. I’ve had The Dispossessed on my shelf (unread) for a long time. So I opened it up and read it. Ha, ha! Just kidding. I got an audio version from our library (via Libby) and listened to it. I need to get back in the habit of reading instead of just listening…

Anyway, similar to The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed is largely about culture and, in this case, political systems. It’s a thought experiment of what a true socialist utopia might be like. Or maybe it’s a libertarian’s paradise. Or perhaps I should just use the word anarchist, which is what the book itself uses. Now, I’m not a student of political scientist, so I’m sure there are important distinctions between those three philosophies, but the Odonians seem (to me) to share traits with all of them.

Because the name is the thing and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Anyway, it’s An Ambiguous Utopia, and the part that really stuck out to me was near the end, about freedom or liberty. The people of Anarres have no laws, so they are completely free in theory. They can do anything they want without fear of the government reprisal. And yet, at the same time they have very little freedom in practice because they are bound by shame and social pressure to behave in certain ways. As a simplistic example, I am of a legal age to smoke or drink, so I could do either without any legal repercussions. And yet (because of the culture where I was raised and now live in), I cannot do those things because I would lose the respect of all my friends as well as my immediate and extended families.¹ In fact, the mere act of writing that sentence may cause doubts to form in their minds.

I thought about writing some more about this, since there is much more that could be said about different limitations on freedom, when they are justified, etc. Instead, I’m going to exercise my freedom to stop writing and encourage you to use your freedom to pick it up and start reading (though I won’t stop you from listening if you prefer) since it’s actually much better than I’ve made it sound.

But I will end by throwing out a semi-gratuitous reference to recent pop-culture: the hero of The Dispossessed was modeled after J. Robert Oppenheimer (who was a friend of Le Guin’s parents).

Until recently, our shower had 3 problems of which I was dimly aware and had mostly compensated for by changing my habits.

The first was that the diverter on the tub spout sometimes gets stuck in the “shower” position. Once the water is turned off, it’s supposed to fall back down in the tub position. That way, when you turn the water on the next time the (invariably) cold water with flow into the tub. However, if it’s stuck in the shower position, then when you turn it on, you get a face full of cold water. So, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking both when turning off the water and when turning it on, that the diverter is in the rest position.

The second problem is that the water was getting colder. Or rather, wasn’t getting as hot. This was a gradual process, and I assumed it was just me misremembering or something. However, as you’ll see later, I now believe it to be the case.

The third problem, and the last one to manifest, was that the faucet would leak if you turned it off “slowly.” If you went straight from hot to off with a good ol’ flick of the wrist then it would be fine. But if you took a detour at cold, or especially if you turned it on just a trickle and then turned it back off it would drip. Hence, I got into the habit of turning it all the way on before turning it all the way off.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

—George Bernard Shaw

I spent several months being eminently reasonable. Then the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune turned me into an unreasonable man, and I was able to make progress.

One day, the shower knob started spinning (almost) freely, and only with some luck and cajoling was I able to turn off the flow of water. I didn’t have time to fix it for a few days, so I told Rachel that we would have to shower in the kids bathroom. Once we did that, I noticed that the water got hotter! So I hadn’t been dreaming after all.

I assumed that the faucet was broken and that we would have to pull it all out and replace it, so I asked Rachel what kind of shower handle she likes. She even floated the idea of redoing the entire bathroom. Ours is pretty plain as far as bathrooms go, so we’ve thought about remodeling it before, but it’s a big project and not one we were particularly eager to take on at the moment. Still, if we had to replace the shower, why not do the whole thing?

Luckily, before we invested too much energy into thinking about a remodel, I removed the handle to take a look at things. That’s when I noticed that the plastic handle had simply broken. It consists of a plastic grip (which was fine) and a plastic sheathe which connects it to the metal of the valve itself. This sheathe had cracked lengthwise so that upon turning, the crack would widen and it wouldn’t apply the full force to turning the valve. That was why the water didn’t get as hot—it wouldn’t turn the valve all the way to hot. It was also why I turning it off from a dribble wouldn’t work—it couldn’t transfer enough force to overcome the friction of the valve (instead it merely widened the crack a bit). Fortunately for me, it was an easy fix so that we don’t have to contemplate remodeling the bathroom until we are ready.

It makes me wonder how many of my other problems would be as straightforward to solve if I just knew their true cause.

Here is a first post, because everybody needs one these days.