Metablogging: Blogging About Blogging

This interview with David Lipsky over at The Howling Fantods made me very, very excited for the Rolling Stone journalist's new book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.

This man, Wallace, will be, or maybe is, a legend. Dude was able to make you crack up with familiarity and blow your mind right out of its skull in the same damn page. He could use the words "catadioptric," "astigmatic," "cojones," and "weenie," in one breath. One sentence, even. There will be a very interesting tension between " author: the person" and "author: the writer" embodied in Lipsky's book. Or perhaps its not a tension at all, but a congruence? Either way, it will be fascinating and sad and hilarious and profound and, I'm sure, deeply inspiring.

This quote from Wallace himself in the Fantods interview really got to the nut of what makes his work so special:

“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

And isn't this, in a way, what bloggers do with the Internet, too? Give us the freedom to be hyper-aware of the world around us and share it with the world? (Or four subscribers on Google Reader?)