Mark Morford has a column at sfgate.com—the online presence of The San Francisco Chronicle, which in the daily-delivered flesh is getting frighteningly anorexic—about your average Golden Gate Bridge jumper. A single 40-ish male, just like him. Mark always writes beautifully:

I do know that when I cross the GG Bridge these days, I tend to glance over at those guard rails and safety wires with a different sort of appreciation, awareness and sighing sense of wonder.

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I read with great interest David Foster Wallace: The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub. Just as I read a number of David Foster Wallace things recently. I don’t know why his death was especially frightening and sad, but it was. Perhaps moreso for writers, for if he with his industrial-strength talent and his ability to nail a thing it never crossed your mind could be nailed … Binding an existential wound you didn’t know could be bound …

It’s true, his writing plugged some of the holes through which leaks one’s vital matter, source of so much agony in life. Which suggests that pain is retrospective, and it probably mostly is. The courage to tolerate being in less pain, the wherewithal to live in full awareness what you suffered in the past… Perhaps this happened to David Foster Wallace. Perhaps he died of happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Tomasky, guardian.co.uk: “If you spent three years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a constitutional lawprofessor, spend eight years as a state senator representing a district with more than 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

On the other hand … Read the rest of this entry »