Part three in the series of David Foster Wallace Examinations is up at Culture Map Austin.
Click through to read Samantha Pitchel's piece, Consider the Author: Literary detectives find big meaning in a small collection:
[...]
But he’s learned that, while the exact titles he’s looking for may not have been included in the stacks received by the HRC, Wallace’s disorganization may actually be an asset. For example, additional notes on “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise,” the Harper’s essay that eventually anchored non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, turned up in the most unexpected place.
“While he’s on that cruise he’s reading Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky biography, volume four,” notes Whiteside. “Which isn’t anywhere in the essay, but when you look in the Dostoyevsky bio, on the front page, there’s tons of information about the cruise; the towel boy, just all kind of different things going on. Skeet shooting gets referenced on the inside of that cover.”
Digging into the archive, we quickly see that this style of note-taking was common for Wallace.