Foot Clinic sign

Tax examiner Chris Fogle was a drug-taking “wastoid” in college, at the University of Illinois at Chicago:

The dorm we roomed in was right on Roosevelt, and our main windows faced a large downtown podiatric clinic — I can’t remember its name, either — which had a huge raised electrified neon sign that rotated on its pole every weekday from 8:00 to 8:00 with the name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668 on one side and on the other a huge colored outline of a human foot — our best guess was a female foot, from the proportions — and I remember that this roommate and I formulated a kind of ritual in which we’d make sure to try to be at the right spot at our windows at 8:00 each night to watch the foot sign go dark and stop rotating when the clinic closed. It always went dark at the same time the clinic’s windows did and we theorized that everything was on one main breaker. The sign’s rotation didn’t stop all at once. It more like slowly wound down, with almost a wheel-of-fortune quality about where it would finally stop. The ritual was that if the sign stopped with the foot facing away, we would go to the UIC library and study, but if it stopped with the foot or any significant part of it facing our windows, we would take it as a ‘sign’ (with the incredibly obvious double entendre) and immediately blow off any homework or supposed responsibility we had and go instead to the Hat, which at that time was the currently hip UIC pub and place to hear bands, and would drink beers and play quarters and tell all the other kids whose parents were paying their tuition about the ritual of the rotating foot in a way that we all appeared nihilistically wastoid and hip.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

The real thing is found not on Roosevelt Road but on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles:

[Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for larger views.]

Laura Miller has tracked the Foot Clinic’s life in literature and music.

[3668? FOOT.]

The Foot Clinic sign

Los Angeles’s Foot Clinic sign (happy foot/sad foot) comes to life in a music video by YACHT: “Hard World.”

In 2011 I had the chance to see and photograph the Foot Clinic sign, which I first met in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Patience, Fortitude, and feet

Patience and Fortitude are back. And the happy foot/sad foot sign has a home.

A related post
Foot Clinic sign

Foot falls

“Oh no! The Silver Lake Foot has fallen down the steps at the #MetGala.”

Thank you, Rachel.

Related reading
All OCA Foot Clinic sign posts

Give ’em an inch . . .

. . . and they’ll take a foot.

[As seen on Twitter.]

It’s a Los Angeles thing. Specifically, a Silver Lake thing. It has to do with feet, or a foot, not guns.

Thanks, Rachel.

Related reading
The Foot Clinic sign (With in-person photos) : Leaving Silver Lake : A new home

Feet on the move

The Sunset Foot Clinic is leaving Silver Lake. And with it will go a famous happy foot/sad foot sign with a connection to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Thanks, Seth.

New not-new DFW

An excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been published by McNally Editions as Something To Do with Paying Attention. The excerpt, a section of the novel (§22), is indeed about paying attention, as is The Pale King itself. Someone who’s paying attention might notice that the McNally’s new paperback is more expensive than the paperback edition of The Pale King itself.

It’s not the first time §22 has appeared as a stand-alone piece of fiction: in 2013 Madras Press published §22 as The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax, a modestly priced paperback, with the proceeds benefiting Granada House, where Wallace began living in sobriety in 1989.

§22 is an extraordinary piece of writing, a first-person account by “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a one-time college “wastoid,” of how he came to work for the IRS. The narrative bears an eerie (non-coincidental?) resemblance to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, in which stepping into the wrong classroom changes a student’s life. With Merton, it was a class with Mark Van Doren at Columbia. With Fogle, it’s an accounting class with with a substitute faculty member, a pseudo-Jesuit who speaks of the work of the accountant as heroic:

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”

On a lighter note, it’s §22 that transplants Los Angeles’s celebrated Foot Clinic sign to Chicago.

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)