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David Foster Wallace dead
stilist
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Registered User regular
I’ve only ever read an essay or two, but I know he’s pretty popular around here. Au revoir, sir.David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as "Girl with Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." In 1997, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College.
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*that's from Hamlet**
** Hamlet is a play1
1 A play from a long time ago, written by a guy named Bill 2
2 Bill's dead, too
It is terrible that it is a suicide, because so many people on replies to the articles on his death have said that DFW convinced them to stop drinking or to leave an abusive spouse. I can only pray that his wife is ok, and that the world does not martyrize him for an untimely death, but can evaluate his work for how truly great it is.
Came back to say
Found out last night, got drunk with cel and commiserated. Fuck.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158935
How is this even remotely fair, world?
EDIT: Oh shit, I didn't see that it was a suicide. Fuck, that makes it even worse.
I don't know enough about Wallace's life to say with any degree of truth, but I have a hard time comparing the two beyond that they both committed suicide.
That being said, one of the saddest parts of this is that I'll mention it at work and pull some of his books to display, and no one will probably care.
Why?! WHY?! God damn it, DFW, I am exceedingly irked with you right now!
......................
People who are that introspective are often very tortured souls.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
In the NYT article, his father said DFW had been suffering from and medicated for depression for 20 years, and he went off the meds last year after suffering side effects. He went back on but they didn't seem to be working and he was hospitalized a couple of times this summer and underwent electro-convulsive therapy, which is to my understanding is done only in the most extreme cases. I think he may have just been in a downward spiral of depression. It has a tendency to feed on itself, especially in heavy case like his, if the what I took away from the article is accurate.
God damn it. The more I think about it, the worse it gets.
I guess I mean, no one's going to come in looking for his books. Sometimes when a famous person dies, there's a rush to buy books by that person (like Tim Russert), but sometimes not. We haven't sold any Wallace books in the past few days, but I did notice he's a top search so maybe it's not my particular store.
Anyway, the reason I came back to this thread is that there a new, relatively lengthy article on DFW on the NYT website, for those interested.
XBL: Slimebucato
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and Oblivion are some of the best fiction I've read in my entire life. Some of the stories in there gave me more than like ten selected novels I've read combined. To say there is nothing to read by DFW is absolutely misleading, and his non-fiction ALSO stands as a major contribution to modern letters by itself. The man could really do ANYTHING.
I would recommend everything he ever wrote, ever, but if you ask the question, "Where to start?" invites the question, "What do you like?" because, really, he did everything.
And yeah, I'm way more than heartbroken about it.
I've spent a lot, I mean a lot, of time trying to wrap my head around the mystery of Max Hardcore and what he represents. I've seen his movies, his covers, his advertising, his face locked in that constant state of rage as he inserts a blazing, photoshopped penis (I mean literally photoshopped to be on fire) into a comically exaggerated "schoolgirl" of American porno, and DFW's reportage about him was interesting in that (1) Max Hardcore was the person he was also fascinated with at the convention and (2) because of the small insights he gave us into the man, but at the end it's one of the few essays by DFW where I felt it was very surface level. It didn't really do a very good job of exploring or justifying exactly why it was being written, except to say that it was an essay about the AVNs, which is a fertile topic which will draw an easy readership. Max Hardcore is a much deeper mystery than all that, and his essay about the AVNs is actually one of my least favorites, although to tell people to read the porn essay is one of the easiest ways to get into his work ... anyway ...
But besides that -- his other writing there is obviously fairly profound, but it still falls short of what is collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing. I would say that the titular essay is the best thing he wrote about present-day America, if it weren't for his story "Mr. Squishy" at the front of Oblivion (which, said story, could have easily been published as a stand-alone, short novel, and been perfectly well received). The story about the Illinois State Fair is easily overlooked, if only because it is followed by the gut-wrenching thrill ride that is "A Supposedly Fun Thing," and of course "E Plurubus Unum" (I hope I'm not fucking the Latin up) feels, to me at least, like one of the most important things written within our generation. I pity the people who haven't read it and felt its insight.
Yes -- when you read some of that stuff, you have to put it down every fourth or fifth page and simply think a little while, but such is life when reading things which are simply brilliant.
I think you may have misunderstood what I meant. I wasn't belittling the impact of his work at all. What I meant was that there haven't been a vast number of books published by him, total, having nothing to do with the content or impact. So it's fairly easy to just grab something off the shelf by him and find it worthwhile because there isn't a huge selection to begin with.
NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death
You can read an excerpt here
XBL: Slimebucato
I suggest you read it.