When Binelli encountered a group of German college student poking through the gutted Packard plant, he asked what had inspired them to vacation in Detroit. One gleefully replied, "I came to see the end of the world!"

I am the cataloger of David Foster Wallace's final work, The Pale King, and I'm here to tell you that in cases like these, the rules will only get you so far.

I see a great blue heron, flying north, and as we pass each other, I stifle an urge to say, Turn around, bird, New York City -- where anything is possible, where it's cruel but magical and big things can still happen -- that place is SOUTH.

The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the oldest and most prestigious of its kind in the country, is a curious mix of summer camp, trade convention, and religious retreat.

It wasn't easy. I wanted to finish a book. Be a good dad. Get an MFA. Be a good husband. I'd lined up a teaching job at a university in Beirut. Got an essay in a publication that might impress you. Called my mom as much as I could. I couldn't call my dad, he was dead. When do you know if it's actually starting to add up, when you can say, OK, yes, this is real, it's actually happening.

Why it is that people gravitate to the most tragic or dramatic moments of their lives when given a chance to tell a story? There are, I think, two reasons.

Sheila Heti took the stage last, and told us that she would be dirty. And how. Reading from her new book about a divorced feminist playwright, Heti selected what can only be the dirtiest bits, an extended sex party between the protagonist and an artist named Israel.

Matt and Anne have also been asked, hopefully, if their menu has a melon cocktail. The disappointing answer is no. The melon has an exalted place in the novel because of a ridiculous but tender scene in which a young botanical pervert call Gene Harrogate steals into the fields by nights, shucks off his overalls, and begins to mount melons in the soil.

I could hear it in her voice when we spoke, her panic. She didn’t know what to do. She’d put in time and money to get that degree, there was supposed to be work at the end of it, and there wasn’t.

For those of us who had come to the hotel for the convention, the sight of all those tables laid out with postcards provoked an almost painful greed.

You could feel the love. Here was a group turned out to commemorate the brilliance of one guy’s colossal strivings, his dogged humility, the beautiful nuance and intricate recursions of a mind pushing past the simple given, which mind was everywhere and nowhere in the spaces between those of us gathered to follow his words as they were given life, and enlivened in turn, by each speaker, the glittering humor in their eyes, a sense of having been found.

I guess this is to say that the symposium had its share of characters one might expect to find in a David Foster Wallace novel.

It was going to be just me, a box of books, and Pico Boulevard. I was kind of scared.

I had nearly given up on the original manuscript of Confederacy of Dunces until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of John Kennedy Toole's best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.”

In a South Texas parlor room, 10 men eagerly hold shots of bourbon in their hands. Together they raise their glasses and down the whiskey in one go. This is the Oil Barons Society, an exclusive, men-only book club in San Antonio.

With language out of reach, it’s hard not to feel as if I’m in a dream, or that I’ve crossed over to another world.