Comments on: David Foster Wallace

By: Pullman on Censorship and Religion | Cosmic Variance

Pullman on Censorship and Religion | Cosmic Variance — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:36:20 +0000

[...] religion because it is false. I also like plenty of things that aren’t true – the works of David Foster Wallace are a timely example – but the things I like that aren’t true don’t claim to be true. [...]

By: daisy rose

daisy rose — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:52:45 +0000

“How come she never got sad?”
“She did get sad, Booboo. She got sad in her way instead of yours and
mine. She got sad, I’m pretty sure.”
“Hal?”
“You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by
the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it
goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag, Boo?”
“Hey Hal?”
“Don’t cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole?
Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you
listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So
listen – one way to lower the flag to half mast is just to lower the
flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole.
You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me?
You understand what I mean, Mario?”
“Hal?”
“She’s plenty sad, I bet.”

–from “Infinite Jest”, David Foster Wallace

By: David Foster Wallace at Harper’s « Quomodocumque

David Foster Wallace at Harper’s « Quomodocumque — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:14:18 +0000

[...] via Cosmic Variance, this quote from DFW’s book Everything and More: n modern medical terms, it’s fairly clear [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:09:07 +0000

All I can think is, “G*d Dam*it!” I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut, just as I felt when I heard of Spaulding Gray’s death in 2004. The Shakespeare quote above is beautiful and fitting: thank you. Wasn’t it DFW who said — and I’m paraphrasing, badly — “Perhaps that desperate and unending searching for home is, in fact, our home?” I want to produce t-shirts that say “Pynchon is right!” on the front and, as Elvisco wrote above, “Avenge David Foster Wallace!” on the back. I know DFW escaped most comparisons to Pynchon with Infinite Jest, but I’ll quote from Against the Day anyway: “They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.” Peace.

By: the imbroglio » Blog Archive » Great sadness: DFW eliminated his own map!?

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:11:37 +0000

[...] Maybe the best response I’ve seen (from Shakespeare via “anon” commenter #13): Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He [...]

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:34:08 +0000

As a fellow ISU alum, I ran across this article:
http://media.www.dailyvidette.com/media/storage/paper420/news/2008/09/15/News/Novelist.Former.Isu.Professor.Found.Dead-3429891.shtml

By: anon

anon — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:02:22 +0000

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a
thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.

By: Elvisco

Elvisco — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:23:27 +0000

Avenge David Foster Wallace! Avenge the inexorable vortex of his fall scaling a tower just as tall, built on prose, with the mortar of footnotes, the sturdy footings of digression, the illumination of exhortation and the surveillance of exposition — avenge his undoing, all who care, with honesty transcendental and fair!

Avenge him, holding opposites in arms, as Archimboldo holds the the farms, building a portrait of still-lives at odds, forming chin cheek and jowl after all!

Come on! Is your tongue frozen to the glass? Get up off your ass! Be Stately as Gately, demure as Lenore! Pettiest Goad of all Texts, draw your face in the trucked-in sands, veil your visage, mirage, escatage — punt on forth and tense!

Grow infinitely as ectoskeletal feeler-flesh left to propagate, a Bombardini bombardment, cycling shadows of the arc of the celestial day.

By: Jonathan Lubin

Jonathan Lubin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:22:31 +0000

A friend of mine who knew him said to me in an e-mail this morning, “he was an incredibly nice, humble, and conscientious man.”

By: Lawrence B. Crowell

Lawrence B. Crowell — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:54:45 +0000

This is a loss. “Infinite Jest” was in some ways prophetic, and written at a time when the craziness of recent decades started.

L. C.