He hanged himself, it seems.
David Foster Wallace found dead
Sad.
Almost every night before I go to bed, I pick up one of his novels or collections. I was just reading Westward Ho a few minutes ago. Shocking and terribly, terribly sad.
Damn. I liked some of his essays and kept thinking he’d eventually write a novel worth reading all of. Infinite Jest annoyed the hell out of me, and I only read a couple hundred of pages into it, but it was usually funny - Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment? - and often clever.
(I’m trying to think of a moderately tasteful line involving death and his love affair with end notes, but I’ll stop right now.)
He wrote a few great tennis articles, as I recall, but I think this is my favorite essay of his. It’s about Updike, mostly:
Goddamnit.
How absolutely horrible!
Buy his signed books now. They’re already rare.
God damn it.
It always seemed that he was mostly idling after Infinite Jest, just searching for something to fill his life after the masterpiece. I guess he never found anything to fill the hole.
A jerk in person, a pompous asshole, but his writing will last. I think it’s overrated, personally, and way more pomo-jerkoffy than it could be, but still, each of his books was something of an accomplished, flaws and all.
And he’s dead, lissener. The guy’s dead and you just called him an asshole. Feel good?
This is a big blow to me. Next time I read Infinite Jest is going to be really intense, I think.
Wow… I’m rereading Brief Interview with Hideous Men right now (as in, like, literally right before I opened this thread). Infinite Jest was, to my mind, brilliant and I’ve enjoyed much of his work since then (even some of the really out there stuff). A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was hilarious, as much of his non-fiction observational writing is. He always seemed exceptionally self-aware and overly self-conscious and certainly wrote about depression and mental illness (as well as drug abuse) extensively… Quite a loss…
Hell, that’s taken the shine off my day. Consider the Lobster is probably my favourite collection of his.
That’s such unexpected and depressing news. A genius by fits and starts, the work I most enjoyed of his was Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
Just cause he is dead doen’t mean you have no right to express your view.
I’ll never forget stumbling across the Broom of the System ay a library and diving in - the fist paragraph about how pretty girls can have ugly feet, the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous, “the Anti-Christ sucked at the red eye of the corpse of his joint” - the intelligence humor, and technical writing skills blew me away.
I figured a talent like his would carry a price but this is awful.
Sad but maybe true - I have a signed first of Broom (first published in both hard and softcover so the hardbacks are really rare - just like Snow Crash) and a few others…
Didn’t know I had authority to strip people of their rights by commenting.
Not at all. Sorry if I offended.
The first two are true and the third is false (of you, I mean, not Wallace).
That fucking sucks. I got hooked on Wallace through a review he wrote (for Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s; I can’t remember) of some recent dictionaries. I figured if he could make me laugh out loud while reviewing dictionaries, of all things, he was a goddamned genius.
Over on Metafilter there’s a very nice/upsetting thread for him, and it’s all making me surprisingly thoughtful, given that “I hardly knew the man”. Although I haven’t read a lot of his stuff, I do like the short pieces I’ve read a lot (I got bogged down in the second chapter of Infinite Jest and then was busy and never got back to it) and he seems to have been a very sensitive thinker and a very intelligent writer who didn’t cow to lower common denominators-- I can see why his fans are so ardent (I suspect I would have gotten there, and may yet. I know some complain about his vocabulary, but words mean certain things and what appears to one person to be snotty obfuscation is, to someone who actually knows the damn words, crystal clear and specific).
This and other suicides (most recently upsetting to me was Spalding Grey) make me wonder whether people who are a little too insightful/aware/whatever and choose to make a living thinking about such things-- dwelling on rather than insulating themselves from thinking too hard about, well, cold, diamond-hard stripped-down existence (his Kenyon talk was rather poignant, for example) are at risk of this sort of end. Or maybe some of those who are at risk of such an end tend to dwell on it publicly for us to see (confirmation bias?). Like all those existentialists and critical theorists-- these Kierkegaard types. I guess I start to wonder about myself a little. I think about suicide quite a bit-- not think about committing it myself, but think about what goes into it. I’m just glad I don’t have clinical depression, because I can imagine myself on a thin edge, and things like this make me worry about myself sometimes-- how horrifying existence is at 3 AM in the morning when I realize that the person sleeping next to me–who knows me better than anyone in the world-- will never be able to KNOW me (there’s nothing more alienating and lonely than realizing this fact about the people closest to you) and how it’s all so arbitrary and how the only way to get through a day is to whistle in the dark and pretend like this is what life is for (as I get older I find this tendency in myself more and more, to go by autopilot because thinking about what I’m doing is too horrifying), or how well I could rationalize such a act, and what a good decision it could look like from the perspective at the bottom of an emotional hole.
So I wonder how this guy’s death has sort of set me off?