Books Sep 11, 2008 at 4:00 am

David Foster Wallace 1962–2008

Comments

1
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.
2
A great obit one wishes not to have been written so fucking soon.

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."
3
As Tiny Tim would have said, God bless us everyone, sinner, bastard, poet, the dead.
4
From 2002's "Good Old Neon":

Think for a second—what 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 don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?

I hope that's true. Thanks for everything, DFW.
5
'David Foster Wallace Suicide Chatroom' has a posse.
6
Why does an obituary so poorly generalized, typical and short as this get such a big frontpage banner.
7
It's not so much of an obituary as an attempt for the writer himself to show off poorly written and overblown prose.
8
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.
9
. . .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 . . .
10
No footnotes here.

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