The Mumpsimus

Not from David Foster Wallace. Not Ulysses . (photo via Tony Shafrazi ) I, too, immediately thought, "Wow!" when I saw it. I, too, accepted the idea that it must be David Foster Wallace's copy of Ulysses , because, well ... you've heard of David Foster Wallace, right? I'm teaching a course in literary analysis in the fall and so am collecting whatever images I can find of the ways (reasonable or absurd) that serious readers annotate what they read. I zoomed in on the image to see if I could figure out the logic (or illogic) of it. But the pages didn't look like Ulysses to me. Nor, for that matter, did the style of annotation resemble what we know of DFW's style from the books at the Ransom Center . I zoomed in, and though the resolution was quite low, I made out what seemed to be two names: Maureen O'Sullivan and, at the top, Robert Mitchum. It looked to me like a biography of Robert Mitchum. It was easy enough to use Google Books to find a...

As you've probably heard by now, David Foster Wallace is dead . Ed Champion has heroically put together a huge collection of remembrances from all sorts of people, and it's a moving and funny and beautiful testament to the effect Wallace had on his readers. My own contribution to the collection, I told Ed, is written from the land of shellshock.