FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: cutout on September 13, 2008, 10:08:48 PM
-
Wow -
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-wallace14-2008sep14,0,246155.story
-
Wow indeed. He was a tremendous talent.
-
This really, really depresses me. I was so sorry to hear about this and hate to think of his wife finding him.
-
Stunning. DFW is, by far, my favorite writer of all-time.
-
Very, very sad.
-
i'm still jaw-droppingly shocked, hours after finding out.
but mostly: i feel horribly for his wife.
-
Stunning. DFW is, by far, my favorite writer of all-time.
His influence is evident in your recaps. Seriously.
This is totally fucking sad and makes me wonder why this world is so mean to its geniuses.
-
makes me wonder why this world is so mean to its geniuses
DFW was worshiped for his work since a young age, no? I never heard a bad word about him as a person.
-
makes me wonder why this world is so mean to its geniuses
DFW was worshiped for his work since a young age, no? I never heard a bad word about him as a person.
I think a lot of people vocally hated him in egghead circles. Also, I think he felt underappreciated in a way that I have to admit hits home. From a 1996 interview, quoted on the LA Times blog:
"[My] secret pretension ... I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn't be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won't be quite that ... glittery. but cold....
Fiction used to be people's magic carpet to other places.... You know, 'Oh, a really boring formulaic story but it takes place in Tibet.' But now you turn on PBS and watch someone milking a yak.... Which means that one of fiction's fundamental jobs has been supplanted. But it has another one now. TV's illusion of access to other cultures is, in fact, an illusion. TV itself cannot comment on that."
I dunno, he was probably just unhappy, maybe I'm reading too much into it. Like it was really Kurt Cobain's stomach ailment (or possibly El Duce) that did him, in and not any concerns about selling out or whatever. But anyway, that's what this made me think about.
-
Judging from his writing, my first (unconfirmable) thought was that his hyper-obsessive nature led to major unhappiness, as it usually does with brilliant people who can't escape their own head. He mentioned suicide in that famous speech to Kenyon (http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html):
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.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
As he got older, I'm sure it only got worse.
-
Judging from his writing, my first (unconfirmable) thought was that his hyper-obsessive nature led to major unhappiness, as it usually does with brilliant people who can't escape their own head. He mentioned suicide in that famous speech to Kenyon (http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html):
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.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
As he got older, I'm sure it only got worse.
I think about this speech every time I'm in line behind someone annoying at the grocery store. And I get annoyed anyway, despite my education, which I've always found strangely reassuring.
-
This really sucks. I only started reading him in the last couple years and Consider the Lobster was one of the better essay collections I've read. Maybe I'll try to tackle Infinite Jest now.
-
Yeah, much of what's troubling is how attuned he was to some of the less glamorous (than spectacular youthful drug or accident flame-outs) but equally (long term) damaging aspects of life - the crushing, dehumanizing boredom of the corporate gig, the slow realization that you probably aren't going to 'make a difference', actually both of these covered extensively in stories in 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men'. So when he does this, you think, well, it was too much for DFW, do I stand a chance?
-
I don't have much to add, except that this is a pretty devastating way to start my Sunday. He was one of my favourites, and the qualities of his that I admired most were the way that he was alive to the world, generous in his appraisals of others, and (I thought), able to express the joys of life. Depression kills.
RIP - I'll miss him.
-
Judging from his writing, my first (unconfirmable) thought was that his hyper-obsessive nature led to major unhappiness, as it usually does with brilliant people who can't escape their own head. He mentioned suicide in that famous speech to Kenyon (http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html):
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.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
As he got older, I'm sure it only got worse.
This is really depressing.
One of the things I always liked about his writing, beyond the incredible verbal dexterity, was his need to keep doubling back and reevaluating his own thoughts and beliefs about the world, aiming for more and more precision with each go-around. That tendency seemed to me the reason why he loved footnotes so much -- and I don't know of any other writer who can belabor a subject and look at it from so many angles without seeming like a total bore.
But looking at this excerpt makes wonder if he didn't feel cursed by that way of looking at things. In his essay on 9-11 in 'Consider the Lobster' he eloquently expresses how intense self-consciousness can feel like a retreat from real experience.
-
Again, not much else to add, except that "Infinite Jest" is also one of my favorites, and that he wrote one of my favorite pieces of sports journalism ever:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=david%20foster%20wallace%20roger%20federer&st=cse&oref=slogin
What a tragedy.
-
I read Infinite Jest twice following my catastrophic car wreck in 1998 (I was out of work for 6 months.) It was really important to me at that low point in my life, though I am not sure I could tell you much about it now.
Very sad.
-
I feel really stupid right now, but I haven't read a thing he wrote. I've heard of him, recognize the name, but that's about it.
-
This is awful. I suppose it's too early for anything more than speculation as to why he did it?
I remember reading Girl With Curious Hair in high school, wondering how the hell I was comprehending sentences that were over a half a page long--and not only comprehending them, but seeing the story in my head with so much clarity. It was this amazing sleight of hand that tricked me into feeling smart.
And dead-pan lines like this, dropped in the midst of something profoundly dark, are my favorite kind of humor:
"There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches."
Maybe Jason Grote can speak to DFW's career woes better than most? Was Infinite Jest a bit of a Citizen Kane situation for him? It must be hard for people who kick so much ass at such a young age.
-
Someone texted me that he hanged himself while I was at a wedding. I changed my phone a while back and lost a lot of numbers, so I didn't know who it was. The bride walked by and I turned to her and was like "Someone just texted me that David Foster Wallace hanged himself!" which in retrospect was a stupid thing to do.
Anyway, this is truly sad. He is my favorite writer, and a real inspiration to me, creatively. This really says something quite sad about our world, and I'm not even sure what that is yet.
-
I had never heard of him, but I just read that Federer article and wish I had. I'm going to check his non-journalism but that was one of the best things I've read all year. He talks about sport the way I wish everyone did.
-
I dont think he was having career troubles. I think maybe I was trying to squeeze some sense out of this, but depression is never logical. Thats a great story, though, Junk. I think DFW would have liked it.
-
http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/david-foster-wallace/ (http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/david-foster-wallace/) <= a reading and an interview at the Lannan Foundation from 2000.
-
Michael Silverblatt did some great interviews (http://www.kcrw.com/archive/index_html/archives_search?do_search=1&SearchableText=david+foster+wallace&program_id=bw&format=All+Formats&dates_radio=all&fmonth=MM&fday=DD&fyear=YYYY&tmonth=MM&tday=DD&tyear=YYYY&submit.x=0&submit.y=0) with DFW over the years on KCRW's Bookworm.
-
I had never heard of him, but I just read that Federer article and wish I had. I'm going to check his non-journalism but that was one of the best things I've read all year. He talks about sport the way I wish everyone did.
Be sure to check out "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" in the A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again collection.
-
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7171768127610835594:1395000:1956000&hl=en
Charlie Rose interview from March 27, 1997.
Begins at 23:10.
-
Omar, your DFW appreciation sheds a whole new light on the recaps. Makes so much sense!
-
one of my favorite pieces of sports journalism ever:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=david%20foster%20wallace%20roger%20federer&st=cse&oref=slogin
YES. I printed that article out and retyped it several times, hoping I'd absorb some of the skill (didn't happen). This is sad news.
-
Omar, your DFW appreciation sheds a whole new light on the recaps. Makes so much sense!
Absolutely.
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html
His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.
In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”
James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.
“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
-
I have little to add to what has been said but..
DFW was a fantastic author. It is very sad that his life ended at only 46.
While his fiction gave him his greatest fame and acclaim it seems to me (and probably deservedly so), I think his non-fiction essays are also superlative. His writing always clearly demonstrates his profound intelligence and insight about whatever topic he addressed and, where warranted, the hilarity and absurdity of this modern world.
Yes, his writing is challenging and often quite long but it is almost always worthwhile. What I especially enjoyed about this essays were that even if I had little interest in the topic, he was able to keep me engaged and eventually entertained and probably enlightened.
For those interested, here is a list of some of the various topics of his essays: John McCain, David Lynch, Sept. 11, the porn industry, grammar, right-wing talk radio (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace), pleasure cruises, state fairs, Dostoyevsky, tennis...
I'll post some links in the Links section of his work from Harpers, most of it, I think, collected (and revised) in his collections of essays.
-
PO (http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=86).
-
i understand that he was sick and that nothing seemed to be working. i completely get that depression is irrational and allows you to get to a place where you think that suicide is the only choice--the obvious choice.
but i can't wrap my mind around his leaving himself where he knew his wife would be the person who found him. that seems cruel to me, and i know he wasn't a cruel person. there are lots of ways to off oneself, but having to see the hanged body of the person you love most in the world is a trauma i wouldn't inflict on my worst enemy, so it makes me profoundly upset that he chose that. i am glad that his pain is over but am heartbroken for her.
-
I was so sorry to hear about this and hate to think of his wife finding him.
i experienced this first-hand myself; it makes me sad to think about what his wife is going through. the loss is a serious disappointment considering the influence he had as a writer and undoubtedly a human being, for those who knew him. for decades, the tortured soul has been a tried, but true, cliche of many great writers and artists- DFW was living the dream.
-
but i can't wrap my mind around his leaving himself where he knew his wife would be the person who found him. that seems cruel to me, and i know he wasn't a cruel person.
I think we should be generous in our assessment of this. He was a sensitive and thoughtful person (in his writing, at least, and by all accounts he was a super guy.) He must have been in profound pain to commit suicide, especially in those circumstances. We can never know how others are suffering.
p.s. So sorry, von Tito, to hear that you experienced a similar loss.
-
but i can't wrap my mind around his leaving himself where he knew his wife would be the person who found him. that seems cruel to me, and i know he wasn't a cruel person.
I think we should be generous in our assessment of this. He was a sensitive and thoughtful person (in his writing, at least, and by all accounts he was a super guy.) He must have been in profound pain to commit suicide, especially in those circumstances. We can never know how others are suffering.
p.s. So sorry, von Tito, to hear that you experienced a similar loss.
it wasnt suicide, but ive had the merciless and unfortunate experience of finding my husband dead. the feeling of stricken grief is an emotion i wouldnt wish on my worst enemy. i feel terrible for his wife and family, despite the circumstances surrounding the reason for death; his fans have all lost the tremendous insight that he brought with his work.
anyone who had the pleasure of reading David Foster Wallace, whether you liked it or not, provided the discussion and debate to give his books a life i believe he wanted, on both paper and in thought. personally, i always wanted to discuss with him my love/hate relationship with the art of footnotes and how he brought that to a head.
-
I'd guess that others are still thinking about this even though there's little more to say on a forum about it. In case others may be interested, I came across this letter (http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/a-letter-from-david-foster-wallace-maybe/) posted online - there's no sure proof it was written by DFW, but it at least seems credible.
-
There was a nice repeat from a '97 interview on Fresh Air yesterday. I began to cry towards the end, right there in the car. It's so sad that someone so talented and earnest is just...gone.