r.i.p. david foster wallace.

[mudd]

http://gawker.com/5049526/david-foster- ... cide-at-46" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;

this was a surprise. perhaps not a favorite anymore, but at a time and place his work was pretty important to me.

m

[faster]

Yeah, I've always been on the fence about his work, but he was definitely one of the good guys. His wife was the one who found his body, yikes.

[hatta]

Yeah this is a huge shock to me. I really loved Inifinte Jest and I definitely think it is one the of the great books of the last couple of decades. I enjoyed a lot of his essay writing as well and a number of his short stories. He seemed to have a way of finding a lot of pleasure in things, so this is really unexpected.

RIP indeed.

[apfEID]

By far my favorite essayist, and one of my favorite authors; this news has horrified me.

[Jesse]

I have read long passages from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again to several people, choking with laughter. I've also found him aggravating, brilliant, indulgent and capable of completely absorbing me with his skills, whatever the topic.

This is a link to a fan site, as it lists numerous obit links.

http://thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/

RIP Mr. Wallace

[surfer]

46 is way too young, what a loss. I always thought his best work was still ahead of him. He got his MFA from UofArizona back in the late 80s, ten years before I was there. Everyone who knew him described him as a complete hermit, who was obsessively dedicated to his craft. RIP

[markt]

When I was in my second year of university one of my profs lent me A Supposedly Fun Thing..., and it quickly became one of my favourite books. The fiction never really did it for me in the same way (I love both, though); his essays are amazing... Very sad news, indeed.

[free math]

damn, RIP. while relentlessly analytic and cynical, he seemed to have a good humor. his talent was almost too big for practical purposes, and Infinite Jest might not add up to more than the sum of its myriad parts, but it is packed with entertainingly impressive feats of literary orchestration.

and i'll link to an essay from the atlantic monthly, which occupied me for a couple days while stranded on a mexican beach with nothing else to read. "Host," it's called, an in-depth look at a politically conservative radio pundit.

Code: Select all

http://www.sendspace.com/file/nvn9be

[mitch]

Man, what a drag.

I actually love his fiction way more than the non-, though I thought the non- was great. Really wasn't anything he did that I disliked. Still one of my favorites, sometimes has been my all-around favorite.

sigh, RIP.

-mm

[Fourier Transform]

Very few books have made me laugh out loud. The Broom of the System did that, on a number of occasions. It was a truly exhilarating read. And he wrote it when he was 24! Shit.

A sad, sad loss. I feel sad that he was clearly suffering with the world, I feel sad for his family and friends, and I also feel sad for myself that there won't be any more of his work. Bad times.

[surfer]

DFW on linguistics and the Dictionary of Modern American Usage and state of dictionaries in general. Brilliant and compulsively readable.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/D ... tense.html

First line: "Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? . . . . ." (you have to scroll down a bit to the beginning of the article)

excerpt:

. . . .let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant — as a thought experiment if nothing else — that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes — shout yes — to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a U.S. male and also have a U.S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself — you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. In our culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is Making a Statement that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences.

You see where this is going.

What do pants have to do with dictionaries? You'll have to read the article.

First appeared in Harpers 2001

[Jesse]

A nice reflection on DFW by A. O. Scott:



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weeki ... gewanted=1

[mitch]

nice, that pretty much atones for the shameful Kakutani hatchet-job from last week.

-mm

[surfer]

DFW's private self-help library,

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-da ... p-library/

[faster]

Pretty funny takedown of Vollmann, Eggers, Wallace, & others:

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wa ... ited-mind/

[Wombatz]

That would better be the last word he ever wrote.

(I btw hold Eggers to be the chief vermin, but see no sense in the Wallace and Ellis take-downs, whatever crap they've written, I think they've also done some serious work.)

[mudd]

that essay is garbage.

m

[surfer]

Wow, I was coming here to post the same thing. Couldnt get through all of it. Awful and unfunny, with an alarming amount of pure bile.

"Nowadays Wallace is seen as a brilliant young(ish) author who was tragically tiger-mothered to death, killed by his own voluminous intelligence."

wow

"Yet there’s another, seedier literary tradition that Infinite Jest can lay claim to – the Great Protestant Addiction Novel, a gloomy genre developed by Hubert Selby Jr. Selby’s strategy was pretty similar to what Insane Clown Posse (ICP) did in the 90s – taking an Evangelical message and dressing it up with enough Korn dreadlocks and John Wayne Gacy makeup to slip it past the kids, hoping they wouldn’t notice how strangely pro-family and anti-drug those albums by “Psychopathic Records” were. In other words: pure stealth Christianity."

"The McSweeneyite clique that nurtured David Foster Wallace is slightly less mass-market than Frey and Ellis, but still a hive of bland, wholesome crypto-cons. "

"Who rarely gets mentioned, though, is his [Eggers] older brother William, an equally ghoulish-looking neocon who was once Director of Government Reform at the Koch brothers’ free-market Reason Foundation. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an ultra-right Republican think-tank whose other members have included Charles Murray, author of an infamous book (The Bell Curve) arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.

Kinda puts a damper on Eggers’ goody-goody pretensions, doesn’t it?"

(huh? wtf at this point I have no idea what he is talking about)

"This wouldn’t work in Vollmann’s favour, because there are few things more uncool to his hipster audience than believing strongly in something. Even the vegetarians in those circles usually claim to be doing it for “economic reasons,” since shouting “meat is murder!” is almost as uncool as being a pro-lifer. In all those indie ensemble films that hipsters love it’s usually characters with strong beliefs that get played for laughs, whether it’s the Nietzschean teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, or the existentialists in I Heart Huckabees "


Total nonsense

[faster]

Well, I like all those writers except Selby, who I haven't read (I've had Eggers, Wallace, and Vollmann on my syllabus at some point), and I didn't find the "hipster" angle interesting at all, but there's some truth here. Vollmann, who famously wrote "I actually believe I have a shot at winning the Nobel Prize" to his publisher; Eggers, who always seems to want his sympathy both ways; and Wallace, whose pedantry is maybe best exposed here are devoutly worshiped, after all. If they weren't great and beloved, there'd be no point.

[mudd]

is it possible to come out of the article thinking anything other than what you did going in? it's a gossip column with a chip in its shoulder.

m