it's really fkn sad that david foster wallace hung himself.

david foster wallace is dead, hung himself, not put his head in a microwave as one of his characters had. he was the author of my genxeration. i had been patiently waiting 12 years later for the sequel to infinite jest. that book which for me like many others felt not like a book, but something totally new. a different medium. texture. and lots of footnotes. it was the pagerank of fiction.

infinite jest wasn’t a book you read quickly. at over 1000 pages, some nights u couldnt get thru more than 2-3 pages because the language was dense, sometimes invented, but often requiring a large dictionary if u really wanted to have a clue what he meant. amongst my friends there was a competition as to who could read “IJ” the quickest, assuming that is that “you got it”. those that “didn’t” were sadly banished in a literati means grrl sense. dfw was just that important.

books like franzen’s corrections, which was compelling, zadie smith’s white teeth, safran foer’s everything illuminated and others would get close, but at best felt like tributes or in the shadow of dfw. they were a great supporting cast, but for 12 years i’ve walked into bookstores like a white collar drug addict asking if ‘u got anything like infinite jest’. most in the know bookstore owners would empathethically laugh and suggest some titles like fortress of solitude, and more recently brief wondrous life of oscar wao (which im fortunately and it seems timely reading at moment) - but they never even attempted to attain the film script hidden in the 400 page footnotes of infinite jest, or the use of not having an ending other than having to read chapter one again, which retrospectively u learn is the ending.

dfw pushed the fiction structure further than any “author” could whatever the medium. different characters allowed different narrative voices and writing styles, so while there was a pomo ironic tone to alot of the writing, there was such a spread of writing styles u could only have envy for his ability to cross styles. he was as happy talking about tv, mathematics, tennis (check his roger federer essay), addiction, entertainment, customer service, cruise ships, and david lynch whether it be thru his characters or his short essays some of which such as a supposedly fun thing ill never do again were pure semantic gold.

i dont think many of us expected a followup to infinite jest immediately from dfw. we knew he was teaching. but as the years went on, and he published books on hideous men + oblivion , the next infinite jest didnt seem to be coming. from his or his peers. to say he will be missed is an understatement, alot of us will be reading infinite jest again, sad in the knowledge there will not be a followup. we will hope that the zadie smith, safran foers, junot diaz and johnathon franzens will hear the readers call to arms and deliver us the post david foster wallace tribute.

DFW was quoted in Salon : “If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.”

I’m totally the same as Maura : “every time i found a new piece written by him it was a treasure, and i never wanted to read them too fast (it’s a bad habit of mine) because i wanted to savor every word, every crazily contorted yet perfectly correct clause that he committed to paper. i read ‘the broom of the system’ once a year and it’s one of those books that i get something new from every time i read it. that’s not to say it isn’t flawed, but. fuck, you guys. i am so sad. this year has involved way too much loss and pain. i am devastated, and i also feel awful for his wife. can you imagine.”

DFW Commencement Speech to Graduates : “By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college…”

“…But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera. Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year. But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is…”

It is cliched but I did have the same thought, DFW would be mortified : “It feels like when Kurt Cobain died. I suspect those who were alive at the time could make comparisons with the deaths of Elvis or Jim Morrison, or perhaps, for those in Europe, Vladimir Vysotsky. It’s not just a man committing suicide or even a loss to the literary world - it’s a seismic shift in American culture.

Via Snarkmarket, here is a para from Infinite Jest, note the long paragraph, I’m going to miss those : “‘I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New Formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spiral of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the last generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world’s best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver –

‘

”..Look here then who’s that in there? Is someone in there? Do open up, I’m on one foot then the other out here. I say Notkin someone’s been in here locked in and well, sounding unwell, amid rather a queer scent.’ – and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching……”

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is ! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now ?”

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i.  Re: DFW. (via Rocketfuel)