David Foster Wallace

[lenny nero]

:sad:

Novelist David Foster Wallace found dead
Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:07 AM EDT
The Associated Press


CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46.

Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College.

"He cared deeply for his students and transformed the lives of many young people," said Dean Gary Kates. "It's a great loss to our teaching faculty."

Wallace's first novel, "The Broom of the System," gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humor. The New York Times said the 24-year-old author "attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok."

Published in 1996, "Infinite Jest" cemented Wallace's reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page tome, praised for its complexity and dark wit, topped many best-of lists. Time Magazine named "Infinite Jest" in its issue of the "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005."

Wallace received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997.

In 2002, Wallace was hired to teach at Pomona in a tenured English Department position endowed by Roy E. Disney. Kates said when the school began searching for the ideal candidate, Wallace was the first person considered.

"The committee said, 'we need a person like David Foster Wallace.' They said that in the abstract," Kates said. "When he was approached and accepted, they were heads over heels. He was really the ideal person for the position."

Wallace's short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper's, The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Collections of his short stories were published as "Girl With Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men."

He wrote nonfiction for several publications, including an essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine and a profile of the director David Lynch for Premiere.

Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace attended Amherst College and the University of Arizona.

 

[Stewart]

Have you read any of his books?

 

[lenny nero]

I couldn't make it through Infinite Jest, I got about 200 pages in and gave up. He was an avid footnoter as I remember there were a lot in that book. I loaned it to a friend and never saw it again. He wrote a great article on the porn industry for the now defunct movie magazine, Premiere and it had the most footnotes I've ever come across in a magazine article.

That makes two recent author suicides, Thomas Disch's was 4 or 5 months ago.

 

[Peder]

Good People

Good People is a short story that is so blindingly brilliant as to turn around completely my earlier inability to get interested in the writing of David Foster Wallace. I cannot praise it highly enough, especially in view of the recent exceedingly savage attack upon Wallace's reputation by Bret Easton Ellis.

The story opens on the shores of a woodland lake where a young couple just out of junior college have come to discuss again a predicament they are in. When they should have been thinking, they weren't, so now they have spent a few weeks of agonized torment praying and thinking and talking about how to handle the unwanted pregnancy they have. They have been keeping it a secret, out of shame, consulting neither pastor nor family, and time is soon running out before it will be a secret no longer.

Wallace describes the frightened young man's torment in vivid and flowing prose.

“The worse he felt, the stiller he sat. The whole thing felt balanced on a knife or wire, if he moved to put his arm up or touch her the whole thing could tip over. He hated himself for sitting so frozen. He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing past something explosive. A big stupid looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon. The whole last black week had been this way and it was wrong. He new it was wrong, knew something was required of him that was not this terrible frozen care and caution, but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He pretended that it had no name. He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings."​

In this story, Wallace sees keenly the conflicts humans face when religious belief clashes against the existential reality we all inhabit, and when moral conscience is at odds with selfish interest. Wallace adds layer upon layer of torment to the poor couple's plight as the young man struggles within himself, turning every which way for a way out.

The story continues with them having already edged up to the likelihood of an abortion, but with each reluctant to make the final decision, until now is their last chance to decide how to go forward. Complicating the situation is that, of course, it is not a good time. Her having the child will upset his plans for work after junior college and also her plans to go off to college. Further complication is his feeling that he doesn't truly love her, and his surmise that she also knows that to be the case. He hasn't quite figured out what to say to her to get her to opt for the abortion without his accepting responsibility or sounding as if he is suggesting it. Nor has he figured out how to square their sinful situation with their religious beliefs , family and church membership. Finally, time for thinking runs out and the time for action is at hand, just as Wallace concludes the story with an incipient and possibly ambiguous resolution for the reader to think about.

This story shows Wallace to be deeply insightful about the human condition and is, I think, a work of genius. Now, I realize that up above I said that the story revised my level of interest in Wallace, and I know that only a single story I have read might not be exemplary of his general talent. But I think that, in both style and content, it is unlike anything else I have read and that every work of creative genius deserves widespread admiration and respect. This work of genius is connected with the name David Foster Wallace.

 

[Peder]

Commencement Address, Kenyon College

David Foster Wallace gave an unconventional Commencement Address to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005, which has attracted some notice. Excerpts of his speech follow.

“. . . Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. . . .

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

. . . But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

. . .None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

. . . Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.”​

 

[SFG75]

Wallace speech goes viral

 

[Peder]

Wallace speech goes viral

Thanks SFG. It deserves it. What he said/says is still amazing to me.