Curiosity.

My tenth grade English teacher, the one in whose class Wallace called me out, often cited Nabokov:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”

I like memoirs. Honest ones, fake ones, dishonest ones. The Hemingway I most re-read is "A Moveable Feast." Hemingway's kind of a jackass about people he presumably considered friends, like Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald. He's especially weird toward the latter, in an oft-noted scene in which Fitzgerald frets about his penis.

So at my first newspaper job, I learned that my editor was a Hemingway fan, and I mentioned how much I loved "A Moveable Feast" because, while it was obviously just as calculated as Hemingway's other voices, it was different and looser and just plain funny and horrible and disloyal.

My editor, Hank, remembered none of this. His "Feast" was a genteel romp through 1920's Paris, all clinking glasses and literary ambition. He didn't remember the scene in the urinal, which to me would be like remembering "The Scarlet Letter" as a book about an island with genetically recreated dinosaurs.

A week later, he wrote a column for the paper's leisure section about having recently re-read "A Moveable Feast." He said he now found it distasteful and childish and unworthy of Hemingway.

Folded in quarters.

In tenth grade I shared an English class with Wallace, kind of a loud, arty dreamboat. He was smart and ambitious. He wore heavy black boots and tight white band T-shirts and kept his hair shaved close.

He had a coterie of girls: artistic, scarily thin, smoking cigarettes. They were appealing women
but not a popular crowd, per se. They were distant and self-contained; appealing for their distance, like mannequins with poetry journals.

Wallace had ideas and opinions and was literate. I wasn't those things, though I had a lot of loud opinions. I read popular nonfiction and watched a lot of television. Newspapers held my interest more than class, and more often than not I had a section of newspaper folded into quarters underneath my textbooks.

And one day, Wallace called me out. I had said something, or disagreed with something he had said, or made some sort of asinine joke at our teacher's expense. As near as I can remember, he said: 

"Your opinion would mean more if you put the damn newspaper away and had actually read the book."

And he was right. He's now a successful fiction writer. He also has led, I gather, quite the adventurous life.