David Foster Wallace

[Mirabell]

David Foster Wallace, maybe the best American writer of his generation and one of the best American writers alive, is dead.

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead - Los Angeles Times

I wanted to post this in our DFW thread and realized we, for whatever strange reason, do not have one. Situation rectified, I want to express my shock and grief.

Wrote an insipid obit-ish post at my blog and getting drunk now.


fuck.

[fausto]

Terrible news. Beyond my own selfish sadness, I really feel terrible thinking about his wife who discovered the body.

fuck indeed.

[spooooool]

It's his wife i keep thinking of now

[Mirabell]

would you call him selfish for doing that? I'm just wondering. The net is full of strange attacks against him.

[spooooool]

I wish he hadn't, but i don't see that it's for me to be angry for her. The net is too full of people being greedy about another person's grief. I'm very very sad that he's not here anymore

[Mirabell]

When a writing writer goes away it's like this hole in the air, this interrupted trajectory of a great mind. Looking at the fragments of a dead writer, such as Bachmann's last novels/poems makes that trajectory palpable. A teacher once, when I was trying to digest Sylvia Plath's suicide, proposed this world view to me: the line that leads from someone's birth to their suicide is not an interrupted line but a clear line, and the writing is part of that trajectory. If the person wasn't suicidal, their writing would be different. You can't get one without the other.

[Mirabell]

Kakutani's obit

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15kaku.html?hp

[spooooool]

i think the teacher was muddling two, three things, i agree that it's hard to fathom the Sylvia we know without the suicide. That isn't for me the same thing as atrajectory, a clear line, which is an assertion after the fact, only seems inevitable because theyre able to say it There's a bit early on in "phenomenology of perception" when Merleau-Ponty talks about people behaving in a certain way and afterwards attributing their attributing those behaviours to their character. So i think i think that people just are, and to look for reason is understandable but reason is oftentimes exhausted by "stuff"

[Patrick Murtha]

What a terrible sadness this is. It has been now been reported in the blogosphere that Wallace spoke to a friend of suicidal impulses early in his publishing career, and actually considered checking himself into a hospital for observation at one point. I have also seen it suggested, on what basis I'm not sure, that Wallace suffered from bi-polar disorder.

Whatever the truth of these or other observations, it is possible that Wallace lived with this tendency for a long time. We will probably learn more in the coming days. Having lived with a suicidal partner, and having suffered from acute depression and suicidal thoughts myself, I do not think it is fair of anyone to suggest that Wallace acted selfishly. But no suicide is inevitable; much can be done to pull people through, and there are more resources to assist in that way than there ever have been. Whatever Wallace did to reach out for help, it is not unreasonable to wish that he had done that much more.

[nnyhav]

David Foster Wallace, [...] one of the best American writers alive, is dead.

He would have appreciated that phrasing, I think.

Caleb Crain on an interview 5 yrs ago:
Steamboats Are Ruining Everything: "The great postmodern uncertainty that we live in"

[Patrick Murtha]

Apparently he did try quite a lot. I read today that he had several stays in psychiatric hospitals over the years, and the New York Times obituary described Wallace's anguish in some detail:

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...

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.?

[Mirabell]

three obits:

decent

Conversational Reading: David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008)


good

paperpools: oblivion


excellent

Tabula Rasa: Rollercoaster ride - un petit au revoir

[ions]

Best:

Inside Higher Ed

To be fair I'm being cheeky and not really comparing.

[nnyhav]

Another from a few years back: Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with DFW" in Review of Contemporary Fiction (via Conversational Reading)

[Eric]

I'm afraid I nothing about David Foster Wallace, except what I read on the Toomas Vint thread. Wallace wrote two novels, three short-story collections and committed suicide on account of depression, so much I know, but those who are more knowledgeable than the Wikipedia could write a little about him here.

Wikipedia:

David Foster Wallace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wallace should not be mixed up with Toomas Vint, an author who has written some eight novels, several collections of short-stories, since the 1970s, and is still alive.

[Mirabell]

you know nuthin 'bout dfw? the dfw thread we already have could have set you straight
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...r-wallace.html

further down there are a few good obits which are good in summing up his writing and career.

[Eric]

I've now read the infinitely jestful article on the net and the Wiki article on him. I have decided that his type of manic hopping from subject to subject is not for me.

But as I was saying about Toomas Vint...

[lionel]

Well hijacked. So come on then, Toomas Vint...

[Stewart]

Let's keep Vint to his own thread.

[miobrien]

Anyone here a fan of David Foster Wallace, the American writer? He died back in the fall of 2008 (committed suicide), sadly enough, but is one of my favorite writers. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction, though I think he considered the former his main interest, and the latter simply a paid break. Interestingly enough, while his fiction has its detractors and critics, almost everyone I've encountered praises his nonfiction. He is normally described as a postmodernist, though his writing is more nuanced than that: postmodernist, metafictional, but also a reaction against these genres, and altogether grounded in a very empathetic, moralistic approach to fiction. His posthumous novel, The Pale King, is coming out in 2011. Excerpts from it have appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's. Anyway, if you're interested in DFW, let's discuss!