Dear David Foster Wallace--
I am sorry you are dead. I am sorry for the loss of your family. I am especially sorry that Michiko Kakutani1 never really got you, which made me disregard her reviews for longer than necessary after Infinite Jest came out. I am so especially @#$&ing sorry that you won’t be here anymore to process the overwhelmingly schizoid, over-stimulating vast Technicolor2 splat of a world that we live in. You made me laugh until I cried about dealing with cockroaches, Canada, the concept of tennis,3 life and death and college admissions, of all things. But best? of all, you gave us back the footnote.4
So now that you’re gone, I have to deal with my footnotes. Categorize, organize, not screw up royally, biliographize them. Despite certain research librarians5 who like other software, after you died I clung to RefWorks like the sensitive bookish lover I never had.6 I felt compelled to find all your works on WorldCat and make a bibliography for myself, one that was online and therefore immortal.7 I forgot my password as usual, but luckily for me I had taped it to my wall with that especially cellophane-y tape that looks organic but isn’t.8 Apropos of nothing (or maybe everything) this tape reminds me of tapeworms.
Okay, I know the internet isn’t the solution to everything, but RefWorks does help me cope with the Sea of Overwhelm.9 I had a really annoying project in high school English class once where the teacher marked us down if we messed up a single comma in MLA.10 RefWorks would have saved my flailing word processing skills and my “style” grade. It will format in any style, from the conventional (Chicago, APA, &c) to the wacked (Wiener Tierärztliche Monatsschrift-Veterinary Medicine Austria).11 It doesn’t make the world make sense but it does make it all clean and Linnean.
RefWorks isn’t you, David Foster Wallace. It only sometimes make me laugh, and not intentionally. It lacks you manic high-wire virtuosity, your sheer verve with language that made me want to be a writer until I realized my calling was probably more on the academic footnote end of things.12 I grieve for you David Foster Wallace. I’m sorry my coping mechanisms are pretty pathetic.13 I’m selfishly sorry that We, The World, didn’t get any more books from you. Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m sorry, I’m pretty sad, and oh god, I miss your prose already? R.I.P., David Foster Wallace. I need to go compile some reference material.
Reverentially,
Alex
1 Incidentally a Yale Alumna.
2 Word insists that I capitalize this because it is a trademarked term. Who knew? Well television people, probably, but not me. By now you now know I’m a book person who caves for Battlestar Galactica and PBS period dramas.
3 In which I was completely otherwise uninterested.
4 C’mon, you already know who “us” is. Big scary readerships that like anonymous hardbacks with brown covers along with eating odd things at weird times and thinking too much.
5 Hello to you, too, Greg Eow.
6 Or, uh, a dead stick in a flash flood--which is probably a more appropriate metaphor.
7 You can export directly from WorldCat to RefWorks. Also, Google announced it is putting its data on GIANT FLOATING BARGES. Seagulls can now land on bibliographies and the old gmail I refuse to delete. You would have liked this, I think.
8 Yale insists that we do this, i.e. have different usernames and passwords for our RefWorks accounts than our general Yale accounts, which I guess makes sense, but my god, I can only come up with so many permutations of “SontagGirl87.”
9 
10 As if I wasn’t OCD enough? He also insisted that every college professor in the universe as we know it would hate me if I ever messed up MLA. Mmmhmm, right, so here I am happily using Turabian and MAA. But don’t think I don’t value citation!
11 Doesn’t this make you want to write an odd, taxonomically-themed short story about Austrian veterinarians?
12 Software, even really good software, will never make me roll on the floor, my belly aching, about paranoid cruise ship vacations. It will never know somehow EXACTLY how it feels to look at a group of people waiting and watch them all whilst taking strangely observant notes like a stalker.
13 What did you want me to do, smoke in a hidden heating pipe and consider your fate? Well probably, but research is how I deal with things. I can’t hit a tennis ball, or for that matter, a basketball served to me like a tennis ball.