The thing is that there's not a whole lot of decoding to do in re-reading his writing. It was often warm- and open-hearted, yes, but almost all of it was also part of a large catalog of all the different and similar kinds of sadness, too.
Think for a secondwhat if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you dont even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone elses room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?
Attempting to imitate a writer's style in his obituary is not, in fact, a form of flattery. It's a form of insufferability. Especially with a writer like DFW, whom pretty much everyone thinks they can imitate and whom pretty much no one can.
Yeah, he wrote manic, paragraph-long sentences with many dependent clauses inserted in various ways and used lots of adverbs and hyphens, but there's way more to it than that. Reducing his style -- which was both generous and demanding at the same time -- to merely an annoying fucking tic really misses all that was great about him.
. . .man, some bitchy comments . . .do you people talk this way at funerals, too? nice obit. . .sometimes dfw took my breath away . . .there were moments in brief interviews with hideous men that made the top of my head open up, though i can't help but begrudge him for putting his wife in that position . . . there's gotta' be a more humane way to check out for others involved . . .
I didn't find out till Sunday night at dinner with friends. I am now re-reading "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."
Think for a secondwhat if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you dont even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone elses room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?
I hope that's true. Thanks for everything, DFW.
Yeah, he wrote manic, paragraph-long sentences with many dependent clauses inserted in various ways and used lots of adverbs and hyphens, but there's way more to it than that. Reducing his style -- which was both generous and demanding at the same time -- to merely an annoying fucking tic really misses all that was great about him.