An inspiration. Found dead in his home. David Foster Wallace was 46.*
*He wrote so much about feeling alone. “The interesting thing,” he wrote, “is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”
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An inspiration. Found dead in his home. David Foster Wallace was 46.*
*He wrote so much about feeling alone. “The interesting thing,” he wrote, “is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”
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25 Comments, Comment or Ping
Jack
Oh no… Joe, thanks for letting us know but this is just awful. DFW is probably my favorite American essayist. His short stories are great too, but wow. His essays? Go back and read “Up Simba” or “Consider the Lobster” and then gape in awe.
A sad day. Damn.
Sep 13th, 2008
Andy
My girlfriend saw this just as it appeared on the NY Times website and drew my attention to it. Notable, in that I am currently reading Infinite Jest for the first time and am about halfway through it.
I’ve never read anything else he’s done, but man, that is some heavy work. I wonder what made him decide to hang himself. There was so much there.
Sep 14th, 2008
Thomas
As an Amherst student, I can’t fully explain the kind of influence David Foster Wallace had on the students here. When talking about his death tonight, someone remarked that we were acting like we lost a close personal friend. And in a way, we did. Very sad.
Sep 14th, 2008
Ben
The best fiction reading I’ve ever attended was when Wallace read at Wash U when I was an undergrad there (I think it was ‘98 or so). Anyway, he read one of the “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (the one that begins with the narrator picking up a “cruncher” girl at a folk festival), and I specifically remember it being the most fearless reading I’ve ever seen. Given the subject matter and narrative tone of the story, it was a gutsy piece to read–one that clearly risked alienating a large chunk of the audience–but he was spell-binding. He was funny and sad and moving, and he was willing to piss people off if that was what he needed to do. I learned as much about what writing can and ought to do that night as I did in four years of English classes. His death is a profound loss.
Sep 14th, 2008
mike
No. I just finished ‘Brief Interviews’ this week, too. No one could write like that guy. I didn’t even mind when I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me. (The fault, surely, was mine.) I would like to have read 100 interviews where he talked about what he was writing about.
Sep 14th, 2008
David Wintheiser
One of my personal favorite writers. Sad to hear that he’s gone.
He also wrote, or perhaps more accurately mentioned (as he never went into much detail) his agoraphobia — not life-crippling agoraphobia, if his writing is to be believed, but enough so that, despite whatever loneliness he must have felt, it was still a challenge for him to get out and stay out in public. My own favorite essay of his, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (about his experiences on a seven-night Caribbean cruise) captures this feeling.
Guess I should find some of his stuff I haven’t read yet — at least enrich his estate.
Sep 14th, 2008
MSS
I had my own problems with Wallace — little things, mostly — but I adored his essays and short fiction. Most of all, I loved his voices. Wallace was the only author I knew who people would sit down and *listen* to. Sure, in high school, there was always some insufferable wank who’d start reading Burroughs or Kerouac aloud without anyone’s asking him to. But by college, that sort of behavior got bred out of everybody the least bit socially aware. Wallace was the only exception, and I don’t really know anyone who minded.
I remember being at NFL-and-barbecue parties at a friend’s apartment in college. Everyone getting absolutely wrecked. People walking around with scotch-and-sodas in one hand and a Beck’s in the other, listening to Public Enemy and making fun of the Kurt Warner’s lizardwife and Favre GUNSLANGIN’ another interception, putting one booze-delivery-device down only when it was time to devour another drumstick in approximately 8 seconds. Someone would tell a story or say something obnoxious, and someone else would say, “That reminds me of this Wallace story/character/phrase,” and invariably someone would just fish the book off my friend’s shelf and try to find whatever they were talking about.
Not only were Wallace’s words important enough to a bunch of drunks to actually stop and do *research*, but people would want to listen. Amid the noise and distractions (most of us were also gambling on these games), if someone had remembered something from “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and tracked down the exact wording, someone else would say, “Screw it, just read the whole thing.” Wallace got individual voices so right that even inexpert and inebriate readers could evoke a unique character just by blundering through the text. Even someone else’s imprecision was secondary to hearing a whole and living voice.
I might quibble with his long fiction and some of his opinions, but I’ll always remember Wallace for his *sound*. I may not have liked the point he was making or the person he was creating, but I could sit back and just listen to it. I always wondered why fans of his treated him like such a rock star until I finally heard someone read him out loud. People treated him like a rock star because he was. So much so that drunks at a party would want to sit back and listen to him.
Sep 14th, 2008
Jeff G.
First, thanks everyone for these comments. Talking, typing and listening and reading seems really helpful now.
When I heard the news, it seemed right to come to this site. There’s something similar about these two great American voices (besides the digressions). And I think it’s this: empathy. Total, unflinching empathy. Even when it might be uncomfortable or embarrassing to emphasize, DFW and JP (will anyone ever be able to read initials or acronyms painlessly now?) turn down that bratty, judgmental voice we’re all born with and get to work explaining other humans for the rest of us who haven’t found the bratty, judgmental knob yet.
I don’t know if any of that makes perfect sense. I’m still devastated.
Sep 14th, 2008
Brian Gunn
I’m not sure there was a better essayist working than Wallace. He reminded me of Mailer in his prime — all those dizzyingly erudite digressions. But sometimes his simplest sentences were his best, like this one while reporting from the Adult Video News awards: “Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed.” That’s just perfect.
Sep 14th, 2008
BrianGriffinLovesYou
Infinite Jest. What more is there to say?
Sep 15th, 2008
Michael
Best American writer in decades. It’s a real loss for all of us. And at the personal level, it’s all just very, very sad.
Sep 15th, 2008
Franklyn
He gave the most incredible commencement speech at Kenyon in 2005 - I am drawn to it from time to time as a reminder of how to view and approach life in general.
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
Sep 15th, 2008
Sloth
Never even heard of the guy until today…but if what everyone here is saying is true - and the news of his death is the #1 story on CNN - then I better get off my ass and start reading his stuff.
Sep 15th, 2008
Bellweather Johnson
Joe,
I am pleased that you would place such a fitting tribute to DFW in your blog. Like many others, I was completely shocked by the news.
Literally last thursday, I finished the task reading Infinite Jest. Less than 12 hours later DFW took his own life. I feel very connected and somewhat burdened by this.
Infinite Jest was the most excrutiating, exhilirating, mindbending, enlightening, saddening, burdensome, eye-opening read that I have ever experienced. The expertise with which he swung a pen was remarkable, and he left his talent dripping off of every page. I have never read anybody so adept at emersing you in the experience of the work. He was truely a magician of prose, and will never be forgotten.
For those with a stout heart and an inquisitive mind, I can think of nothing better that to recomend Mr. Wallace.
Rest In Peace.
Sep 15th, 2008
Mike
Sloth — I’d recommend starting with the book ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’ A collection of essays, so you can start with the subjects that interest you most and get exposed to his style on the most ‘accessible’ level for you personally.
I’m also surprised he had this many fans, as evidenced by the CNN note.
Franklyn — thanks for the link.
Sep 15th, 2008
MSS
Sloth,
I’m going to genially disagree with Mike, here, and recommend you start first with his other essay collection, “Consider the Lobster.” While the collection Mike recommended is very good, it has more of an abstracted, navel-gazing philosophical attitude toward much of it, whereas the essays in “Lobster” are grounded more firmly in reportage. I think it’s a better starting point because it opens the door for you to Wallace’s prose style and the scope of his intellectual curiosity while still grounding you in a familiar journalistic mode. The reason I recommend this is because, in *my* experience (and I realize mine is statistically meaningless), people who start out with the headier Wallace stuff stand a better chance of not connecting with it. The prolixity and involution are more off-putting; the labor seems more intense. Conversely, people I’ve met who’ve started out with his more conventional journalism and then delved deeper into his more complex fiction have had a higher incidence of really enjoying the latter — I think because there’s less chance for frustration or bewilderment if you’re already fond of the style.
I also just want to thank Joe again for having this site. Without the opportunity to work out what I was thinking on the comments section, here, I think I would have been sort of hazy about this for a couple days. Thanks for the therapy.
Sep 15th, 2008
Jacob
Suicide is for wussies!
Sep 15th, 2008
Pete
Joe - I’d like to echo others’ expressions of thanks for posting about Wallace. I was stunned when my wife passed on the tragic news, and with the friends I’d normally discuss DFW with scattered across the globe, it’s been surprising and helpful to find a community right here to share with.
Sloth, MSS, and Mike - while MSS might be right about “Consider the Lobster” containing a greater variety of essays suitable for an introduction to Wallace, I’d specifically recommend the state-fair and cruise-ship travelogues from “A Supposedly Fun Thing”, both being chock full of both humor and insight while being utterly accessible.
Franklyn - thanks for the link; I’d never read that commencement address before, and it seems a perfect window into what Wallace and his writings were all about.
Sep 15th, 2008
mike
Yeah, no hard feelings directed at MSS either, but the reason I suggest A Supposedly Fun Thing the book is because of the disparate topics, most notably (for readers of this blog) tennis. If you really want to go for accessible, you could even look up the piece he did on Federer for the NYT Sunday Magazine some months back.
Here are some links to some of his stuff online:
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/web-publications.html
As for me, I actually read Infinite Jest first, but the first essay of his I turned to was A Supposedly Fun Thing, the cruise ship piece, having gone on a cruise not long before that.
Joe, I know gods don’t answer letters, but if you were to write at greater length about Wallace, it’d blow my mind.
Sep 15th, 2008
Elliott
Air Marshall Kittenplan. It’s like he wrote the whole book just so he could write those three words. What a loss.
Sep 15th, 2008
Noel
Wow, what a shock! I’d like to echo the recommendation on “Consider the Lobster”.
Mike, as a fan of both DFW and tennis it was a thrill to read his “Federer as Religious Experience” piece for the NY Times a few years back. At the time I hadn’t realize that he was quite an accomplished tennis player when he was younger.
Sep 15th, 2008
Bellweather Johnson
Here’s the Federer story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=1
I was looking for this quote all day before I realized that it was actually part of the commencement speech Franklyn posted earlier…very poignant, but very, very sad indeed:
“As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”
Sep 15th, 2008
Vlad
Infinite Jest was one of my two favorite books. I’m going to miss him, but I’m going to miss everything he would’ve written if he’d lived even more.
Sep 16th, 2008
Creacher
Not to be disrespectful or anything, but you really should check this out:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season
Sep 18th, 2008
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