david foster wallace rip - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 09-14-2008, 04:33 AM

reports are that he hanged himself.

i really liked infinite jest.
but there was always a significant zone of despair in his writing.
this is sad indeed.

Quote:

Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.

Mr. Wallace, 46, best known for his sprawling 1,079-page novel “Infinite Jest,” was discovered by his wife, Karen Green, who returned home to find that he had hanged himself, a spokesman for the Claremont, Calif., police said Saturday evening.

Mr. Wallace was a professor in the English department at Pomona College in Claremont.

“I know a great novelist has left the scene, but we knew him as a great teacher who cared deeply about his students, who treasured him. That’s what we’re going to miss,” said Gary Kates, the dean of Pomona College.

Mr. Wallace had taught at the small liberal arts college since 2002 and held the school’s Roy Edward Disney Chair in Creative Writing. He taught one or two classes each semester of about 12 students each, Mr. Kates said.

Mr. Wallace burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s with a style variously described as “pyrotechnic” and incomprehensible, and it was compared to those of writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

His opus, “Infinite Jest,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1996, is set in the near future, in a time called the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and is, roughly, about addiction and how the need for pleasure and entertainment can interfere with human connection.

In a New York Times review of the book, Jay McInerney wrote that the novel’s “skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail.”

“The overall effect.” Mr. McInerney continued, “is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola.”

The novel was filled with references to high and low culture alike, and at the end had more than 100 pages of footnotes, which were trademarks of Mr. Wallace’s work.

The blurbs are by contemporary novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody, each of whom was a friend of Mr. Wallace.

Michael Pietsch, who edited “Infinite Jest,” said Saturday night that the literary world had lost one of its great talents.

“He had a mind that was constantly working on more cylinders than most people, but he was amazingly gentle and kind,” Mr. Pietsch said. “He was a writer who other writers looked to with awe.”

Mr. Wallace was born in Ithaca, N.Y. His father, James Donald Wallace, was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and his mother taught English at a community college in Champaign, Ill.

Mr. Wallace majored in philosophy at Amherst College and had planned on embarking on a career in mathematics or philosophy. But after graduation in 1987, he enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, where he wrote his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” which was praised by critics.

He followed a year later with a collection of short stories, “Girl with Curious Hair,” which cemented his reputation as a master of the postmodern. Eight years later returned with “Infinite Jest,” which became a literary sensation.

“It was ironic, but at the same time it was attempting to take emotional risk,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, chair of the media studies department at Pomona College, who knew Mr. Wallace. “A lot of contemporary literature uses irony as a self-protective gesture, but he never did that. He was like a lot of postmodern novelists, but braver.”

Mr. Pietsch said although Mr. Wallace’s work was complex and layered, it was his sense of humor that kept people reading.

“He wrote showstoppers,” Mr. Pietsch said. “He was brilliantly funny. People stayed with these long, complicated novels because they made them laugh."

Among his other works are “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” a short story collection, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” a collection of essays

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/bo...allace.html?hp

more here:
The Howling Fantods! David Foster Wallace News, Info and Links. - Home

i suppose i should have something more to say.
starting a thread like this implies that you have something more to say.

i did not know him.

he was just one of those people who made the world seem a bit less grim for knowing he was out there, doing his thing, vector, moving along his own, whether one liked the outputs or not is really beside the point.

Locobot · 09-22-2008, 03:59 PM

He is the first person in my life to have successfully committed suicide, whatever that that actually means. I was in a graduate creative non-fiction class taught by him and another professor several years ago. That class was, by a huge margin, the most intense academic experience I've ever had. As seen in his writing, the man was acutely sensitive to the various pressures of social interaction. He could, in the most scholarly and unemotional way possible, bring those pressures to bear on anyone in the class at will.

All the articles I've read have focused on the "darkness" in his writing, which I suppose is appropriate when someone kills themselves, but it isn't at all the first thing I think of in relation to his writing or on a personal level. David Foster Wallace was uproariously funny in person and on a regular basis in his writing. Without his constant and brilliant sense of humor his class would have been and unbearably stressful. Three or four times per class when someone else was talking DFW would mutter "no pun intended," and once the gears in my head caught up to the level of language he existed on, it would be the most devilishly funny thing imaginable.

His command of the English language was second to none. He deserves mention with the greatest: Pynchon, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, Dickinson, and who else? His class taught me the absolute limits of our ability to communicate with language. His preciseness with English, I believe, grew from a desire to eliminate the ambiguity he so easily saw in even the most basic use of language. There was no room for irony in his writing.

I'm slowly working towards sadness at his passing, but it's definitely the last thing I'm feeling. After the initial surprise I have had a strong sense of anger. He was well aware of what a shitty thing hanging himself was to do to his parents and wife who survive him and the students who had probably just started the semester in his class. Certainly though, his voice in the world will be missed.

Jozrael · 09-22-2008, 04:06 PM

Are there any indications as to -why- he did this?

Locobot · 09-22-2008, 04:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jozrael

Are there any indications as to -why- he did this?

His father said that his anti-depression medication had become ineffective despite increased dosages. He had started on a course of electro-convulsive therapy. Beyond that I suppose we're all left to speculate.

Jozrael · 09-22-2008, 04:52 PM

He was depressed. Okay, thanks. All I needed to know.

roachboy · 09-22-2008, 05:21 PM

well, first off locobot thanks for posting that.
you were fortunate to have taken courses with him, and reading what you've to say was interesting indeed.
i was wondering about this--and lots of folk have said the same thing--that his writing will now come to be read through the suicide and, worse, for it in a way.
but some of it is too good and will outstrip that temptation.
this despite the work of someone like richard ellman on james joyce, which i suppose goes to show that i could be wrong and some creepy academic critic could make a career out of reprocessing all his work through his biography.
well, we can do other things with it or because of it.

09-22-2008, 05:21 PM	#6 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, first off locobot thanks for posting that. you were fortunate to have taken courses with him, and reading what you've to say was interesting indeed. i was wondering about this--and lots of folk have said the same thing--that his writing will now come to be read through the suicide and, worse, for it in a way. but some of it is too good and will outstrip that temptation. this despite the work of someone like richard ellman on james joyce, which i suppose goes to show that i could be wrong and some creepy academic critic could make a career out of reprocessing all his work through his biography. well, we can do other things with it or because of it. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

09-22-2008, 03:59 PM	#2 (permalink)
Locobot is awesome!	He is the first person in my life to have successfully committed suicide, whatever that that actually means. I was in a graduate creative non-fiction class taught by him and another professor several years ago. That class was, by a huge margin, the most intense academic experience I've ever had. As seen in his writing, the man was acutely sensitive to the various pressures of social interaction. He could, in the most scholarly and unemotional way possible, bring those pressures to bear on anyone in the class at will. All the articles I've read have focused on the "darkness" in his writing, which I suppose is appropriate when someone kills themselves, but it isn't at all the first thing I think of in relation to his writing or on a personal level. David Foster Wallace was uproariously funny in person and on a regular basis in his writing. Without his constant and brilliant sense of humor his class would have been and unbearably stressful. Three or four times per class when someone else was talking DFW would mutter "no pun intended," and once the gears in my head caught up to the level of language he existed on, it would be the most devilishly funny thing imaginable. His command of the English language was second to none. He deserves mention with the greatest: Pynchon, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, Dickinson, and who else? His class taught me the absolute limits of our ability to communicate with language. His preciseness with English, I believe, grew from a desire to eliminate the ambiguity he so easily saw in even the most basic use of language. There was no room for irony in his writing. I'm slowly working towards sadness at his passing, but it's definitely the last thing I'm feeling. After the initial surprise I have had a strong sense of anger. He was well aware of what a shitty thing hanging himself was to do to his parents and wife who survive him and the students who had probably just started the semester in his class. Certainly though, his voice in the world will be missed.

09-22-2008, 04:06 PM	#3 (permalink)
Jozrael Junkie	Are there any indications as to -why- he did this?

09-22-2008, 04:52 PM	#5 (permalink)
Jozrael Junkie	He was depressed. Okay, thanks. All I needed to know.