We

Exposition collective

Giovanna Belossi, Steve DiBenedetto, Jérôme Hentsch, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Denis Savary, Anouk Tschanz

David Foster Wallace

The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as “the poet’s poet” or sometimes simply “the Poet”, lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally declinable canvas chair on the tile deck beside the home’s pool, a poet who was among the first ten Americans to receive a “Genius Grant” from the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 6’8’’, 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems-brand transplants, he sat, or lay ­– or perhaps most accurately just “reclined” – in a black Speedo Swimsuit by the home’s kidney-shaped pool, on the pool’s tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35° w/r/t the mosaic tile, at 10:20 A.M. on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet in the history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade of the umbrella, reading Newsweek magazine, using the modest swell of his abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, using the modest swell of his abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, also wearing thongs, one hand behind his head, the other hand out to the side and trailing on the dun-and-ochre filigree of the deck’s expensive Spanish ceramic tile, occasionally wetting a finger to turn the page, wearing prescription sunglasses whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed, wearing on the trailing hand a wristwatch of middling quality and expense, simulated-rubber things on this feet, legs crossed at the ankle and knees slightly spread, the sly cloudless and brightening as the morning’s sun moved up and right, wetting a finger not with saliva or perspiration but with the condensation on the slender frosted glass of iced tea that rested now just on the border of his body’s shadow to the chair’s upper left and would have to be moved to remain in that cool shadow, tracing a finger idly down the glass’s side before binging the moist finger idly up to the page occasionally turning the pages of the 19 September 1994 edition if Newsweek magazine, reading about American health-care reform and about USAir’s tragic Flight 427, reading a summary and favorable review of the popular nonfiction volumes Hot Zone and The Coming Plague, sometimes turning several pages in succession, skimming certain articles and summaries, an eminent American poet now four months short of his fifty-seventh birthday, a poet whom Newsweek Magazine’s chief competitor, Time, had once rather absurdly called “the closest thing to a genuine literary immortal now living, “ his shins nearly hairless, the open umbrella’s elliptic shadow tightening slightly, the thongs’ simulated rubber pebbled on both sides of the sole, the poet’s forehead dotted with perspiration, his tan deep and rich the insides of this upper legs nearly hairless, his penis curled tightly on itself inside the tight swimsuit, his Vandyke neatly trimmed, an ashtray on the iron table, not drinking his iced tea, occasionally clearing his throat at intervals shifting slightly in the pastel deck chair to scratch idly at the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other foot without removing his thongs or looking at either foot, seemingly intent on the magazine, the blue pool to his right and the home’s sick flask sliding rear door to his oblique left, between himself and the pool a round table of white woven iron impaled at the center by a large beach umbrella whose shadow now no longer touches the pool, an indisputably accomplished poet, reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home. 

David Foster Wallace