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David Foster Wallace Commits Suicide

I only discovered DFW two days ago....and already I know, I will remember him like I do Jeff Buckley. I hope he is now getting the answers he so obviously sought.
 
He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism -- because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing.
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wow I bet he was real fun to be around! This dude should have got himself a lobotomy.
 
Pander Bear said:
I kind of hate to be happy at this time, in this thread, but :D. Discovering Dave Wallace is an exciting thing.
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Fuck yeah. I'm hieing off this weekend and purchasing both books asap <3
Me is giddy and excited.
And yes...this was a week old plan too.
ahhh synchronicity.
 
I've never read anything by him, but I think I'll look into it.

It's sad that his death will probably be the catalyst for more people reading his books.
That's how it works, though, usually.
 
Indelibleface said:
It's sad that his death will probably be the catalyst for more people reading his books.
That's how it works, though, usually.
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Why is that sad? In our Capitalist world, one can only hope their popularity sky-rockets when they die!
 
I was away for the weekend at a festival, completely out of touch with all news. First thing I heard was that one of my firm's biggest clients (yeah, that one) was going bankrupt. Next, that my football team had lost to their greatest rivals.

Then I switched to Metafilter (no Bluelight at work, but I can MeFi). I see a thread about how the Wallace obit thread is turning into a moving tribute. I don't, quite, get it, not then. I click through and see the news, and my mind can't really process it, even though it seems like the most logical thing in the world. Then it all sort of hits me and it's all I can do to stop myself crying at work, and I need to talk to someone who gets it, but there isn't going to be anyone. Next best thing is to text my gf, who at least knows what he means to me.

My post on Metafilter (I use the same name there) is basically the word 'fuck' multiple times over. It's not, let's say, the most articulate post in the thread.

And But So DFW: you could really see it coming, I guess. The way he wrote about addiction, about depression. You could tell he wasn't just fictionalising, he was writing what he knew. He was writing from his soul.

And the work: Infinite Jest is, (IM unsurprising O), the greatest novel of the late 20th century. It's unrepeatable, untoppable, unfollowable (was part of the reason for his suicide the knowledge that he couldn't write any novel that would compare?). It's the details I love: the fact that there is so much more going on in there than in anything else you could ever read. The knowledge that I must have missed a huge number of references. My favourites:

* Orin and Hal's first conversation is the lyrics from 'Got To Get You Into My Life' by the Beatles.
* "It's snowing on the map, not the territory"
* [in a list of film-makers] "Some Russian guy named Tarkovsky"
* A minor character called Czikenkmihalyi (named for a very influential psychologist, whose work was all about the idea of flow and peak states, and getting yourself into a state of happiness by doing the most fulfilling thing (whatever that was for you) - which so totally resonates with Hal's story[1] but DFW never explains this.
* [discussing JOI's suicide]: Hal: they had to reconstruct the scene.
Orin: reconstruct? As in, the scene was somehow...deconstructed?

[1] and maybe Don Gateley's too.

Plus the immense insight into human nature that he had. That book was my fucking bible when I was going through a bad period.

I'm not even such a big fan of his other work. Broom of the System? Competent enough novel, sure. Oblivion was good. The non-fiction is amazing. BIWHM, and Girl With The Curious Hair? Mixed, IMO. Haven't read Signifying Rappers. Couldn't finish Everything and More.

But fuck, the guy was a polymath. Decent tennis player. Apparently brilliant student in multiple disciplines: literature, philosophy, maths. Knew all about tennis and film and literature and other sciences and way more stuff than almost any of us know.

I don't, actually, feel sad for us that we're not going to get any more of his writing. I could keep re-reading IJ forever, and not get tired of it. I feel sad that someone whose work I love so much, felt enough pain that he had to choose to end it [2]

RIP DFW.

[2] De-map himself, as he would say.
 
just one last thing <3

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season

NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death

nascar_article_large.article_large.jpg


LOUDON, NH—Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

In deference to the memory of Wallace, whose writing on alienation, sadness, and corporate sponsorship made him the author of the century in stock car racing circles and whom NASCAR chairman Brian France called "perhaps the greatest American writer to emerge in recent memory, and definitely our most human," officials would not comment on how points, and therefore this year's championship, would be determined.

At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup.

"All race long on Sunday, I was dealing with the unreality presented me by his absence," said #16 3M Ford Fusion driver Greg Biffle, who won Sunday's Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the first race in the Chase For The Cup, and would therefore have had the lead in the championship. "I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It's no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective."

"I'm flooded with feelings of—for lack of a better concept—incongruity," said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace's novels to his fans. "David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony."

"And now he's gone," Johnson added. "He's taken himself away. We can't possibly race now."

David Foster Wallace's work came to stock car racing in the mid-1990s, just as the sport began experiencing almost geometric yearly growth. But the literary atmosphere of the sport was moribund, mired in the once-flamboyant but decidedly aging mid-1960s stylings of Tom Wolfe, whose bombastic essays—notably "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!"—served as the romantic, quasi-elegiac be-all and end-all for NASCAR fans and series participants alike. Racing was ready for new ideas, and when a new generation of young drivers like Jeff Gordon arrived on the scene, sporting new sponsorship deals on their fireproof coveralls and dog-eared copies of Broom Of The System under their arms, an intellectual seed crystal was dropped into the supersaturated solution of American motorsports.

"Suddenly DFW was everywhere," said #88 Amp Energy Chevrolet driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose enthusiasm for Wallace is apparent in both his deep solemnity and the Infinite Jest-inspired Great Concavity tattoo on his left shoulder. "My Dad was against him, actually, in part because he was a contrarian and in part because he was a Pynchon fan from way back. But that was okay. It got people reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, and hell, nothing wrong with that. But now, to think we'll never see another novel from Wallace...I can't get my mind around it."

"David himself said that what he knew about racing you could write with a dry Sharpie marker on the lip of a Coke bottle," said NASCAR president Mike Helton, who announced the season cancellation late Monday after prompting from drivers and team owners in a statement that also tentatively suggested naming the 2009 Sprint series the Racing Season Of The Depends Adult Undergarment in referential and reverential tribute to Wallace's work, a proposal currently being considered by Depends manufacturer Kimberly-Clark. "But that doesn't matter to us as readers, as human beings."

"Racing and literature are both huge parts of American life, and I don't think David Foster Wallace would want me to make too much of that, or to pretend that it's any sort of equitable balance," Helton added. "That would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever cultural deity, entity, energy, or random social flux produced stock car racing also produced the works of David Foster Wallace. And just look them. Look at that."
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LOL
 
^
Beautiful. Not as good as 'girlfriend finally finishes reading DFW break-up letter', but pretty good.

(I also only just clicked on the textual reference in that image you posted - Yes it's long but is it long enough? (Pemulis' 'am I paranoid enough?').
 
After scouring every bookstore in town for Infinite Jest, and being told that there was such a run on all DFW's works after his death that the publisher was going to have to reprint it, and seeing Amazon was commanding $500 for a used copy, I happened upon a bookstore right next to the University of Texas that had three remanded (but brand-new) copies for $5.98 each. I bought all three.

I was up all night reading it. It's as amazing as everyone says.

I am incredulous that I was able to get a Bachelor's degree in English and one in Philosophy and was never exposed to this book.

Ah, well. Better late than never. :\

I have never been so excited to have 1000 pages of text stretching out in front of me. 50 pages in and I'm already enchanted. :)
 
a decent description of what events led up to his suicide. :(
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/print.html
salon.com said:
The last days of David Foster Wallace

Following David Foster Wallace's suicide on Sept. 12, stunned fans, colleagues and friends paid tribute to the writer in countless articles and blog posts. They wrote of his imagination and breadth of knowledge, of the ways in which his books and essays inspired a generation of writers and forever altered the literary landscape. They used words like "virtuoso" and "genius." Many, like Jocelyn Zuckerman, the Gourmet editor who went to bat for Wallace's infamous and groundbreaking essay "Consider the Lobster," a masterwork that morphed from a scene piece about a festival in Maine into an essay about whether it's ethical to boil lobsters alive (short answer: no), now mourn the enormous talent the world has lost. "A lot of people," she says, "are really sad for all the books we're not going to get to read."

Those who knew him personally speak of his kindness: Longtime agent Bonnie Nadell recalls how he stood on line at FedEx the week before Christmas to mail an autographed book to a fan. "He would just do things like that because he was a really sweet person," she says. His students at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., remember the committed, engaged teacher: Amanda Shapiro had taken writing classes with him the past three years, and recalls the copious comments she got back from him about her assignments. "He would write five pages of notes on a six-page story," she says, "and put so much care and thought into helping us as writers. He would type out the letters, and then annotate them, in pen, with little smiley faces and notes and corrections."

A common thread running through the many magazine and newspaper tributes, the online eulogies and recalled anecdotes, was shock. Wallace may have been a hugely influential and critically celebrated figure, the winner, in 1997, of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, but he was also a very quiet one. He had given few interviews in recent years, and he found much of the fame that came with literary success, the adoration and spotlight that countless other writers would have killed for a taste of, embarrassing and uncomfortable. He taught creative writing at Pomona, wrote short stories and essays and attended the occasional book reading and conference. When news of his suicide began to spread, fans were left wondering: Why? Why had this gifted, funny, often disarmingly humble writer -- a man with seemingly so much to live for -- taken his own life?

Unbeknown to most, Wallace had suffered from clinical depression for the past two decades. Family and close friends knew of it, but few others did. Over those years, Wallace had taken powerful anti-depression medication that had allowed him to work and write, according to his father, James Donald Wallace. But recently the drugs had been having very serious side effects. In June of 2007, Wallace and his doctor decided that they would have to try another course of treatment.

"Going off the medication was just catastrophic," his father remembers. "Severe depression came back. They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalized twice. Over the summer, he had a series of electro-convulsive therapy treatments, which just really left him very shaky and very fragile and unable to sleep."

Suffering from near-crippling anxiety, Wallace found himself unable to write. "I don't think he'd been able to write for more than a year," says his father. Wallace told the human resources department at Pomona College that he would be unable to teach there in the fall, and he was granted a medical leave for the fall semester.

"I knew this summer had been particularly bad," says Nadell. "My job was just to keep everyone and everything away from him."

On Aug. 18, Wallace's parents came to Claremont to stay with their son. Wallace's wife of four years, Karen Green, had been called away on an urgent family matter, and Wallace did not want to be left alone. He had canceled previous visits with his parents over the past year, telling them that he couldn't bear to have people in the house, even those he loved, so the invitation came as a welcome surprise to them.

When Mr. and Mrs. Wallace arrived, they found their son exhausted and gaunt. "He was very, very thin," says his mother. "He weighed about 140 pounds, so I immediately started to try to put 40 or 50 pounds on him, the way mothers will." She cooked and cleaned. Wallace couldn't eat, he told his sister later, but he liked the way the house smelled, and how clean everything was.

Mornings were spent walking Wallace's two dogs, Werner and Bella. Wallace and his parents strolled the streets of Claremont, talking of small things. In the afternoons, they spoke some more, and helped their son deal with the paperwork and insurance issues that had been piling up. "He was very glad we were there," says his mother. "And he was very emotional. He was just terrified of so much. We would just try to hold him." The memories bring tears. "He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom."

The time together, she says, was a gift. "We hadn't spent that much time with David since he was a small boy. Once they grow up and leave home you see them, of course, and you visit, but you don't spend hours and hours with them."

Toward the end of their visit, Wallace and his parents called his sister Amy. "I'm a public defender," she says, "and I had just lost a trial that I was really upset about. He was really in a lot of pain, but he said all the right big brother things, you know, like how lucky my client was to have me." She pauses. "That was the last time I spoke with him, and it was his last chance to be a big brother. I think it really made him feel better, at least for a few minutes. I know it made me feel better."

The respite, though, was brief. "He told me that he wasn't OK," she says. "He was trying really hard to be OK, but he wasn't."

His wife returned home shortly after, and, on Aug. 30, James and Sally flew back to their home in Urbana, Ill. It was the last time they would see their son. Two weeks later, Wallace hanged himself. He was 46.

News of Wallace's death shocked fans and colleagues worldwide, even those who knew firsthand of his struggles with depression. Longtime friends busied themselves with preparations for a memorial service in October, even though the very thought of speaking publicly of their friend filled them with dread. Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," who knew Wallace for two decades, found it nearly impossible to speak about him, noting that if the words barely came now, how, in a month, would he know what to say?

His sister Amy described emotions ranging from disbelief to sadness to acceptance, of a sort. "Inevitably our thought was, if only he could have held on a little bit longer," says sister Amy. "And then we realized, he did. How many extra weeks had he hung in there when he just couldn't bear it? So we're not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him."

While friends and family recalled the anguish of Wallace's final weeks and days, they also wanted to talk about his sweetness, his unfailing politeness, his generosity of spirit. Amy spoke of the "magical uncle" who wasn't so big on kids, but adored his two nieces. "He took them to Disneyland a few years ago," she remembers, "and God, he hated stuff like that! Just all the people and the parking and the driving in L.A. But he absolutely delighted in being with them." His mother talked about him as a husband who had, in Karen, found his best friend and soul mate. A painter and mixed media artist with her own art gallery, Beautiful Crap, in Claremont, Karen had met Wallace through a mutual friend and married him on Dec. 27, 2004, in the Champaign County Courthouse in Urbana. "The happiest he had ever been in his life was being married to Karen," his mother says. "She was the one ideal person on the planet for him, and thank God he found her."

When David was 5, his mother recalls, he decided that he had two careers to look forward to. He would be a professional football player, for one. In the off-season, while the other players were recuperating or doing whatever it is that pro football players do when they're not running or passing or slamming their bodies into each other, he would be a neurosurgeon. His mother has no idea how, at 5, her son might have heard about neurosurgeons or what they were or did, but he had. The first day of his medical career, he promised his mom, he would take out all of her frayed nerves and fix them. "Somehow he knew about neurosurgeons," she says, "and he knew that my nerves needed fixing."

After Wallace's death, readers began revisiting his books and essays, searching for clues to his death, hints of suicide notes planted between the lines. There were, of course, plenty to be found. There were references to depression, death, paranoia and, yes, suicide -- more and more clues, the more one chose to look. But those who knew him hope that what we now know of the demons he struggled against won't forever color the way his books are read, or the way he is remembered.

"I understand that he was apparently depressed, but that wasn't the only important part of his life," says former student Amanda Shapiro. "And I don't think that's where his genius came from. I think his genius came more out of his passion, and the things that he thought were worth living for and writing about in the world."

"I hope he'll be remembered in the way that every writer hopes to be remembered," says Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch, who acquired and edited "Infinite Jest" in 1992 and had worked with Wallace ever since. "That people will continue to read his books. His mind is there on every page. 'Infinite Jest,' in particular, is one of the great works of a mind in our time."
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i bought yet anotehr copy (the first copy i read belonged to my ex, and then i was at a used book store and found a hardback for $ 0.50!!! too bad phreex still has that copy...).

so, strangely enough they sent me two copies and only charged me for one.

i gave the other one to my mother. take THAT agatha christie!
 
I have never came across David Wallace before but I am certainly glad I have now, that speech at the Kenyon graduation was mind-opening, compassionate and spot on. Reading some of the stories posted further down in the thread gave me some of the strongest emotions ive had in a long time, for someone ive never read until today and had never met I felt a great connection. RIP bro your work will certainly live on and inspire many :(
 
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