A long, fascinating, heartbreaking interview with Karen Green, David Foster Wallace's widow.

She's an artist and the first work she did after his death was something called The Forgiveness Machine.

"The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long," she says, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.

Green put the machine on display at a gallery in Pasadena near the Los Angeles suburb, Claremont, where she and Wallace had lived in the four years they had been married. She was fascinated by the effect that it had on people who used it. "It was strange," she suggests, "it all looked like fun, but then when the moment came for people to put their message actually in it, they became anxious. It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever."

*****

The whole piece is very moving. She's living in Petaluma now, a near neighbor of Tom Waits and close to where Winona Ryder grew up and where Polly Klaas was kidnapped. What an odd nexus.

I hate that plunge in my stomach when I find out someone I've just grown to love was already dead before I heard of them.

our rats are low

oh ffs, suicide?! Damn I wished I'd finished Infinite Jest before I found this out (I know, fat chance. With the book on my radar now there's no way). Now I'm going in to this with the same attitude that made me hate Confederacy of Dunces. I think I have to switch to Julie & Julia for a while. Shit, now I'm crying. bastard.

Dear Laga: Stay away from Hemingway and Sylvia Plath.

I haven't cracked Plath outside of school but I devoured Hemingway. I was never angry at him because he had a terminal illness and I think he had the right to choose his passing.

Is depression a terminal illness?

I wished I finished Infinite Jest when I started it, years ago. I tried to read it again a couple of years ago but I found the whole thing coloured by Wallace's suicide.

I'm going to see a staged reading of something from Pale King next week in San Francisco. As the only bit of DFW I've read is "Consider the Lobster", I expect to be completely out of my depth.

I wished I finished Infinite Jest when I started it, years ago.

If you want to try picking it up again, I'll probably be ready in a few days.

I brought Infinite Jest Along with me in 1997 on my trip to New Zealand, for the long plane ride. I ended up hauling the huge book with me the whole time. I can’t claim I understood all of it, and I skimmed a couple of really difficult chapters, but I finished it, and I really enjoyed it, and was mostly in awe of the writing.

I have to pop in to say that I'm reading Dracula and the Twilight series at the same time, a state which is pretty baffling to my little brane. Hee.

Maybe Dracula will eat Bella.