I have been watching too many David Foster Wallace videos on YouTube tonight. Brilliant mind. Such a loss! Here he discusses television and commercial entertainment and says avant-garde fiction is "academic and cloistered" and among other things "un-fun." I tried reading Infinite Jest in the nineties but found it too thick and overwhelming to read. I think I will be trying again. Just heard a video of him reading a short story and it blew me away. I have recently written or I should say drafted three stories. The fourth one is really not a story or a poem. In any case, I have written it, and I will lay claim to it even though I'm not sure what it is.

My reading last week went well. Friends and people in my art class said when I read it's like I'm a different person. They say this mostly because I am quiet and shy or as my friend says, unassuming.

When I read the poems it was as if a new me came out because I am learning to trust my language. Once in grad school, a friend said, why don't you have confidence; you have a solid grasp of the language. Still at times I lean towards self-effacement because that is what I've been entrenched with for nearly half a century, but none-the-less, I feel more whole when I am engaged with language whether it be poetry or fiction or some sort of cross between the two genres.