And but so

"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don't get the sorts of things I've been getting from people who are merely...interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I'd fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-places pieces I was getting by the gross at Hung and Peck. I'm concerned about today's kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I'm a little worried. Really." David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

I won't sit here and belabor the point: yes, David Foster Wallace is and was incommensurably amazing and you should read everything he wrote, like, five times and then five more times. But on a side note: I sincerely miss the pre-nineties Vintage Contemporary softbacks with the cheesy art-deco meets pop-art for these pseudosurreal covers which pointed at something suggestively deep, emotional, painful, or harrowing possibly to be found in the text. I seriously miss those. Like this: Cormac McCarthy's early novel,and one of his best, far better than his smash hit The Road, Suttree.