David Foster Wallace, Publishing and Nostalgia

The recent death of David Foster Wallace has been shocking or unfortunate or wasteful enough to get some of the media and publishing corps to turn their attention briefly from the even more unfortunate economic turns. 

Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief, Sara Nelson, who spoke at the recent AAP Intro to Publishing seminar I attended, wrote about Wallace in her column this week. In her article, Nelson concludes finally that while "marketing and publicity and distributing and platforms do make a difference," that maybe "we are also in the business of finding, nurturing and disseminating writers and their ideas." 

The world of publishing, as I come to know it in a piecemeal fashion via AAP, alternately and equally repells me (for the former mechanism Nelson mensions) and attracts me (for the latter.) Her reflection gnaws at what bothers me when I take an imaginary stroll down a future path as a book editor. Nelson says Wallace was "a writer of the old school" who was welcomed into  a "similarly old-fashioned" publishing world.  

How many editorial assistants, aspiring writers and english majors, I wonder, would reflect on the fact that writer-centered-publishing is "old-fashioned" with extreme sadness? I do. 

True, economics students and investment bankers are seeing their future careers erased in real time. But I can't help but feel now that I have had every "when-I-grow-up" fantasy struck off the list already. When I was in grade school I had a short-lived to be a Disney animator, a now defunct sort of aspiration, as disney movies are almost entirely computer animated. My next passion, journalism, was born from equal parts Upton Sinclair, Harriet the Spy and the movie version of All the Kings Men. Skip ahead 10 years and meet me circa graduation, when every major newspaper in the country was downsizing its newsrooms and installing mobile bloggerism. J-school degrees abound, but the backpocket reporters notebooks and press passes are practically extinct. Then there is publishing, another art-breeds-fantasy where I imagine myself the Ezra Pound to some unknown T.S. Eliot. You see the trend... 

I recently joked with my cousin Caroline that post-modernism killed true love. Now, in an exclamation romantic hyperbole, I feel like broadening that statement to post-modernism killed everything, especially authenticity. And back to Wallace - who maybe felt the same way when he described life's little rat race in a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. 

Clearly it is possible to experience nostalgia for things you haven't experienced (hell, most of America feels it for some good ole day that never really was), and what I yearn for is a career of  ideas, one that holds Truth and Beauty (keats?) as its two guiding lamps. Where? No clue. Did someone say grad school?