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.

By: Jarrett

Jarrett — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:03:49 +0000

It would be a good time to reread his story “The Depressed Person,” which first appeared in Harper’s and later in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The story is remarkable because it describes depression from just outside the depressed person’s point of view, in a way that captures both the depressed person’s experience and that of her friends, but all in a clinical tone that evokes how fundamentally tedious depression is. Sometimes, suicide is a response to being bored.

By: The Poignant Frog

The Poignant Frog — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:59:49 +0000

So sad that David could not reverse the torment that finally won over his brilliant mind.He had everything to live for and I wished I could have given him my vision to make him see how life is worth to challenge.So sad. I am in tears.

By: missvolare

missvolare — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:56:52 +0000

may he rest in peace.

By: April

April — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:50:52 +0000

SO.BUMMED.
I am reading Infinite Jest for the 2nd time and loving it even more this time.

By: Ellipsis

Ellipsis — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:51:40 +0000

“Love is simply a word. It joins separate things. Lyndon and I, though you would disagree, agree that we do not properly love one another anymore. Because we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a ‘love’ to span any distance. Lyndon says he shall cherish the day when love and right and wrong and responsibility, when these words, he says, are understood by you youths of America to be nothing but arrangements of distance.”

from “Lyndon”, in _Girl with Curious Hair_

That, and “John Billy” from the same collection, absolutely have to be read. As the NYT said, he “succeeds in restoring grandeur to modern fiction.”

By: Jacob Russell

Jacob Russell — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:43:32 +0000

Thank you for pointing out that passage… this, perhaps the oldest recorded brain disorder… which has stimulated great creativity, and made for great misery, not only for those who suffered its ravages…

Once again.. how much it matters–REAL understanding versus mythology, received notions, folk tales …

I’ve been there.

My bets are on good science, all the way.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 03:04:27 +0000

He was a remarkable author and this is an immense loss. I loved Infinite Jest, but found Brief Interviews with Hideous Men even more memorable. I'm not naturally drawn to short stories the way I am to novels, but this was an extreme exception.

By: Peter Buckland

Peter Buckland — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:55:16 +0000

My wife will be very sad. She loved his essay collections, especially “Consider the Lobster.” Great post.

By: Freiddie

Freiddie — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:14:01 +0000

RIP Mr Wallace.