David Foster Wallace. Up Simba!. 2000.

While I still find it well worth reading, I didn't like this piece when I read it as a nonfiction piece. Months later a feeling of liking it started to gnaw at me. It was fiction all along. And a good story too.

Well, man, I care. If this is Wallace's (artful) fictional portrayal of himself on the campaign trail, then one of the themes buried in the story might be the fictional author's disconnect from his own work, that is, how the fictional novelist attempted to write journalism, but, because (in this fiction), he let corporate media (Rolling Stone, Little Brown, Adobe) dictate the terms of his writing—research method, style, audience, and even media—he can't get anywhere near the (fictional) truth, which would be, in fiction, saying what he wants to say to those he wants to address how he wants to say it. That he wants to write an important and telling work (as he states in the introduction) subtly emphasizes this tragedy without stating it outright. The author could have (and still could) (in this fiction) write about politics because he cares, not because Rolling Stone magazine paid him, essentially, for the use of his name.