I’ve spent the last few days trying to process my grief over the loss of my colleague Dave Wallace, trying to imagine saying something even remotely significant about it. The phrase “words fail me” has never seemed quite so appropriate; the thing that I feel right now feels quite literally impossible to say.

But I want to try, if for no other reason than that I feel I owe it to him: so much of his life was devoted to trying to find ways to say the unsayable, to communicate a pain that simply cannot be communicated, to find a way inside something that won’t let you in, and to share what’s in there with the outside when the in there won’t let you out.

Dave was, in multiple ways, my culture hero — the single person whose creative work meant more to me than any other. His writing, both the fiction and the essays, represented for me the first really successful attempt to meld the pyrotechnic postmodern gamesmanship that I adored with something more — something real, heartfelt, and vitally important — something, if you’ll forgive the truism, deeply human. This is what I was attempting to convey to the reporter from the New York Times who wrote the first obituary they published: that while his work got described as ironic, it never used irony as a self-protective gesture, a mode of maintaining a pose of disaffection or distance from genuine emotions. Rather, his writing was always brave enough to wallow in the muck of real human life, with all its ugliness and pain. And it’s that bravery that made his work stand out for me — while his work had all the stylistic panache and uproarious humor and analytical savvy of the best of postmodern fiction, it also taught me, in a way that the work of no other postmodernist ever could, something about what it is to live.

I developed an unbelievably sappy intellectual crush on Dave when I was working on my dissertation, the project that later turned into The Anxiety of Obsolescence, when one of my friends handed me a copy of “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Though I disagreed with (and still do) his reading of the Most Photographed Barn in America scene in White Noise, the essay struck me then, and still strikes me now, as being exactly right — that if there is a danger presented to contemporary novelists by television, it has nothing to do with the usual fears of couch-potatodom and the disappearance of the reading public. Instead, it’s the distance that some modes of television work to create between people and their emotions, a hip, knowing, safe ironic distance that allows us to watch and sneer at the same time. Dave understood this kind of distance to be corrosive to the project of fiction writing, and said at the close of that essay that

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.

And this, for me, was the genius of Dave’s work — and the genius of his life at Pomona. His commitment to his students here was entirely composed of those single-entendre values, a determination to really know them, to treat them as actual people whose struggles were every bit as real as his own. But he also had the respect for them that led him to refuse them the easy way out, to forbid any laziness in their expression, to force them to wrestle with their sentences with the same ferocity that he did.

Dave was my hero, and I had for six years the unimaginable privilege of working with him. In the English department’s meeting, back in 2000, during which we first discussed our desires for the new endowed chair we’d been given, I tentatively floated the idea that the kind of writer I most wanted us to hire was someone like David Foster Wallace — someone in the midst of a formidable career, someone with a range of writing that would clearly translate into a range of teaching that would enrich the life of the department and the lives of our students.

Sometimes the universe hears your wishes, however briefly.

But during these six years, I never told Dave what his work meant to me, primarily out of the certainty that it would have pained him far more to hear it than not. As I wrote several years back, a significant percentage of my collegial relationship with Dave was founded on not-saying, on the polite fiction that, for instance, he didn’t know I was teaching his work, and that I didn’t know that he knew, a fiction necessary for both of us to avoid being mired in a kind of useless, paralytic self-consciousness.

I wish now that that hadn’t been so, but it was. I wish we were going to get the chance to finish the conversation we’d started about The Wire. I wish that he were going to be able to help the department think through the transformations it’ll be undergoing in the next few years. I wish that I were going to be able to work with many, many more students over the years who’ve been transformed by his classes. And I wish, utterly selfishly, that I were going to get the opportunity to read more of his work for the first time.

But I’m grateful for having had the privilege of those conversations, those students, that collegiality, and that work for as long as I have. And I’ve been grateful to see, over the last three days, the enormity of the response to his death — the sheer number of lives that his work not only touched but changed. The evidence — as if it were needed — that the unflinching courage that meant so much to me meant that much to others as well.

Traffic has picked up considerably around here — I assume with folks looking for a reaction.

I can’t have one right now. It’s too raw, too painful.

There will be something, but not yet.

Answer here. (Be sure to read the source code.)

The big news around here is last night’s announcement that the Media Studies program at Pomona, in which I’ve taught for the last ten years, and which I’ve chaired (other than the semester I was on sabbatical) for the last four, will as of July 1, 2009, be converted into a department.

On the one hand, this seems a small, symbolic change; media studies already has tons of majors, a strong faculty, and a coherent curriculum. But the conversion will actually have enormous effects: we’ll be able to hire faculty directly into media studies, without requiring that they be joint with another field; we’ll have dedicated space, both for the faculty (instead of being spread throughout the campus) and for the department itself, so there will finally be a there there; and we’ll have a budget more appropriate to an academic unit our size.

But I don’t want to discount the symbolism here — and I’ve been shocked this morning to discover how much this means to me. Pomona College, in many ways a very traditional bastion of the liberal arts, a place whose faculty has at times joked that our school motto should be “We Have Never Done It That Way Before,” has decided that media studies is genuinely a discipline, not a flash in the pan, not a fad, but something that should be considered on a parallel with English, or history, or psychology, or chemistry. I hadn’t really realized until this morning the degree to which I had internalized and accepted the two-tier system here, in which media studies was for years “only” a program, held together with volunteer labor and duct tape.

Of course, there’s a lot more labor that will be required in order to get this conversion underway, and in order to get a new department up and running. But it feels, on some level, like the labor you put into painting your very own house, the house you own, as opposed to the apartment you’re renting. I’ll be happy to put in the work, because I’ll be building something permanent, someplace I and others can live for years to come.

This completely made my day:

The neighborhood they’re talking about in this article is where my parents live (though the image is from another neighborhood not too far away).

I talked to my mother a little while ago, and the news from post-Gustav Baton Rouge (which only Josh and The Advocate seem to be reporting on at all) is not good: much of the city could be without electricity for as long as four weeks, with temperatures in the 90s, enormous lines for gas and basic supplies, and of course the usual incidents of price-gouging going on.

You’re not hearing much about this, because very few people have died, and the damage isn’t terribly picturesque, but many folks in Baton Rouge are, or will shortly be, in dire straits. The city got slammed with the worst hurricane damage it’s faced in more than 40 years. If you can help, and are at a loss for how, can I suggest a donation to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank? They’re very highly rated among local charities and their services are no doubt going to be in increasing demand, the longer the power stays off.

We’re all ecstatic, of course, that New Orleans was spared, but people in Louisiana still need your help — and they need to know that we’re paying attention…

Yesterday was the first day of classes around here, but today’s my first day of teaching. In preparation, I’ve done a major revamp of my teaching site, built a blog for one class and a wiki for the other, and am now just looking forward to getting the fun underway.

That’s the good news. The other good news is that I’m more up to speed with my administrative duties than I think I’ve ever been, not least because I have to be: this fall, I have a tenure review to conduct, a job search to chair, a national workshop to organize and produce, and a number of other assorted issues to contend with, and I’m feeling — for the moment at least — fairly well on top of them.

The bad news is that things in the rest of my work life have pretty much ceased to progress since I got home from Paris: I’ve got a book review due in a few days, and while I’ve made myself a really good and thorough outline, the review itself isn’t written; I’ve got a couple of presentations to give this fall, and while they’re coming from material I’ve already written, they’re still going to require some culling and organizing; and then there’s MediaCommons, which we’re hoping to relaunch soon, and that book, which I need to keep making progress on.

So things are likely to be a little less active around here for a bit than I’d like, and the gradual accretion of my twitterings, which demonstrates how little I’ve got to say even at the baseline threshold of 140 characters, is just becoming a bit embarrassing. So I’m going to turn that feed off for the time being, and at some point when those posts seem to have more to contribute, I might add them back in.

For now, onward. And happy fall!