RIP David Foster Wallace
So David Foster Wallace killed himself on Friday. (Here's the LA Times obit.) This is somewhat shocking to me - I read Infinite Jest some year's back, and snippets of his other writing as well over time (including most of his most recent book of Essays, Considering the Lobster). It seems odd to me that I writer so in love with his own writing could be so suicidal. Infinite Jest has a special place, in that while I've never regretted having read it, the book had a remarkable decay-in-resonance after I read it; that is, I liked the book less and less as more time passed after I had finished it (this can be partially blamed on Wallace's terrible book about Infinity alone). So when the writer that you love to hate kills himself, that's shocking.
Also, within the context of the fact that I'm a grad student in creative writing, of all things, I can also state that most people assume that I really like David Foster Wallace, and often times find that my writing style is influenced by his (for instance, replace all the parentheticals I've ever written with footnotes, and uh oh...(and I was reminded late Saturday night, when I was first alerted to DFW's death, hanging out with a few other grad student writers, that I have, in fact, written a poem with footnotes). To the point where I would think to myself of the "Cartoon Wars" episode of South Park where Cartman goes off on a rant, saying "Don't you ever compare me to Family Guy!" and includes people just assuming that because of his sense of humor, he must like Family Guy, only I would be saying "Don't you ever compare me to David Foster Wallace." (Which is ridiculous, I know - don't think that this anecdote bears any kind of self-importance of my own writing.)
But, yeah, so at any rate, I guess literary suicides pop up every few years (the last being, correct me, Hunter S. Thompson (who totally earned his, I mean seriously, that was shocking, but not surprising). I'll be curious to see what kind of wildly discursive posthumous writings appear from DFW. I hope there's something.
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And if you care to read something in the meantime, this commencement address DFW gave a couple years ago is worth reading (though I'd bet its been hyperlinked to like a motherfucker in the last couple of days).
Also, within the context of the fact that I'm a grad student in creative writing, of all things, I can also state that most people assume that I really like David Foster Wallace, and often times find that my writing style is influenced by his (for instance, replace all the parentheticals I've ever written with footnotes, and uh oh...(and I was reminded late Saturday night, when I was first alerted to DFW's death, hanging out with a few other grad student writers, that I have, in fact, written a poem with footnotes). To the point where I would think to myself of the "Cartoon Wars" episode of South Park where Cartman goes off on a rant, saying "Don't you ever compare me to Family Guy!" and includes people just assuming that because of his sense of humor, he must like Family Guy, only I would be saying "Don't you ever compare me to David Foster Wallace." (Which is ridiculous, I know - don't think that this anecdote bears any kind of self-importance of my own writing.)
But, yeah, so at any rate, I guess literary suicides pop up every few years (the last being, correct me, Hunter S. Thompson (who totally earned his, I mean seriously, that was shocking, but not surprising). I'll be curious to see what kind of wildly discursive posthumous writings appear from DFW. I hope there's something.
---
And if you care to read something in the meantime, this commencement address DFW gave a couple years ago is worth reading (though I'd bet its been hyperlinked to like a motherfucker in the last couple of days).
1 Comments:
Interesting to me that I read the commencement address before reading your blog post (although I read an edited thing, not the actual transcription). Actually, skimming the transcription, the edited thing chopped out quite a bit. Huh.
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