david foster wallace: classic or dud

Nothing like discovering that my all-time favorite writer has committed suicide on the eve of my grandfather's funeral. I am just going to stop trying to process anything for a little while, thanks.

if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

so very very OTM.

Yesterday evening my friend Kevin and I had this big conversation about DFW because I saw IJ lying around. Husband didn't know who he was so we were explaining and he decided to borrow the book and give it a go. After five hours later at 2 in the a.m. we came home and saw the news. It was made even more WTF by the conversation we'd had earlier. :-(

jeez deric sorry man.

WTF?!

lol, classic or dead

also: when i originally read "a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again" i thought the title story, the account of the cruise ship experience was a great bit of non fiction writing.

last year, my wife and i went (somewhat unenthusiastically) along on a family cruise with her side of the fam...and goddamn...i realized it was not just great, but like absolutely amazing in how he explained the weird layers of dread/boredom/horror/relaxation/guilt that are build into a cruise.

oh good cankles is here

Douglas's comment way upthread -- "for verbal glory plus neatly masked high moral seriousness, there's nobody anywhere near him writing right now in English" -- dovetails excellently with Wallace's stated fondness for The Screwtape Letters (hardly masked there, admittedly).

This is really hard to process. It's got to be a pretty surreal and depressing way for Claremont Colleges kids to start their school year.

at least he got to see that last Wimbledon

Shit, this is a shocker. No doubt somebody has already recycled a joke from the Onion to depict
him writing a 76-page multi-footnoted suicide note. Me, I thought both "Broom" and "IJ" were wonderfully
entertaining reads (even tho parts of the latter were more satisfying than the whole) and I'm sad there won't
be any followup. RIP

I totally forgot about the article on cruises. Anyone read David Rakoff? The tone of much of the essays in Fraud reminds me of Wallace.

Who was doing the footnote thing first, him or Baker?

man i just assumed this thread was revived for some contrarian b.s. seemed too engaged with the world for something like this.

The Mezzanine is from 1988, and I don't know if there are footnotes in Broom of the System (1987).

Of the footnote generation, I've been more of a fan of Vollmann and Baker. But Wallace, poor guy, poor guy, and best thoughts to those who connected with his work. As with the week when Elliott Smith died, I think of the folks I love who are hurting from this.

I'm kind of dreading the thought of a published suicide note. That would be some heavy, dark shit.

― kornrulez6969, Sunday, September 14, 2008 4:46 AM (18 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^this

its really terrible news. my heart really goes out to the guy. i have a vhs of his appearance on charlie rose that ive watched a ton of times and i think if i put it on now im gonna ball my eyes out

i'd forgotten about this, which i read and liked when it came out and which struck me as possibly a small breakthrough for him.

Who was doing the footnote thing first, him or Baker?

jack vance ("dying earth") did the footnote thing first

I'm really sad about this. Motherfuck the haters. E Unibus Pluram is probably one of the most personally important things I read in my college years and it's still great.

In fact, going back to that essay now, I'd even say some of his thoughts about television were proto-poptimist.

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes? really?

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes?† really?

― rogermexico., Sunday, September 14, 2008 5:37 PM (2 minutes ago)
________________________________________
† (footnotes have, in fact, been used for some time)

haha

and they're endnotes, too, not footnotes

All the links posted have been great. Thanks.

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes? really?

Talking about what he wrote in context >> posts saying "RIP"

Sounds like it was fun to take his classes!

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=266836

I just searched my notes for mention of his name. He keeps coming up during 2005 when, through personal circumstances, I had the energy and opportunity to read and take notes on countless long articles and books and think seriously about them. I miss that.

Here's a great review of his book on infinity in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf. The fact that it got reviewed in this journal, never mind reviewed favourably, says it all really.

Salon interview: http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html

Last paragraph of this LRB review is a major bummer: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/maso02_.html

Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.

If you can track it down, there was a good review of the infinity book by Jordan Ellenberg in one of the first issues of SEED, which was also 2005. I'll see if I can dig up my copy.

n+1 manages to make itself useful for once:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/david-foster-wallace

(I mean I really thought this was a good piece)

10/23/03 writing 2 4 4 emoticon smiley 1215949 Very particular about usage. Excellent at explaining concepts. Very neurotic and tends to chew tobacco and spit in a cup while lecturing. If you are a female, do NOT fall under his spell...he's a heartbreaker.

At story's end, this narrative "I" is peeled back, revealing a David Wallace who's gazing at a picture of an acquaintance in an old high-school yearbook, "trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven himself to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way."

:(

The Charlie Rose episode mentioned upthread, I think. The DFW roundtable part starts around minute 36

there's also one with just him
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7171768127610835594
starts about 23:00

(lump in throat)

this: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

was my first exposure to wallace, in fact. It was laid out like that with colored boxes scattered about the page, if I remember correctly. Maybe works even better like this.

I can't say he was a major influence on my writing.

What I learned from him, however, was further, vivid confirmation that life is too short not to write about everything and include everything.

What I now learn from him is further, garish confirmation that life is too short not to wait for the rest of everything so that you might write greatness as well as live it.

The importance of telling the whole tale.

So long, bandana man.

Here's a great review of his book on infinity in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf. The fact that it got reviewed in this journal, never mind reviewed favourably, says it all really.

I'm not really sure that this is true; I don't think it's a very favourable review, and a lot of pop math books/novels with a math theme get reviewed in Journal of the AMS. E&M was pretty disappointing, basically.

Sure, but they're all by mathematicians and they're generally not the kind of high profile mainstream pop sci that gets reviewed elsewhere. A book by an English professor is an exception.

More links:
http://fimoculous.com/archive/post-5030.cfm

ryan, there was a PDF of that article that reveal the boxes in some weird magical way. I am trying to track it down now.

Sure, but they're all by mathematicians and they're generally not the kind of high profile mainstream pop sci that gets reviewed elsewhere. A book by an English professor is an exception.

Not to labor the point, but this isn't true (except in as much that there aren't so many books by English profs that mention math). For example, just picking up the current issue, there's a review of a young adult novel featuring some math (this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Katherines-John-Green/dp/0525476881 ).

It would be weird if anyone wrote a popular book on the subject of E&M and it didn't get reviewed in the Notices of the AMS, frankly.

I stand corrected : )

Anyway, here's the Ellenberg review I was talking about (webmail me if you want a copy of the full thing):

Wallace is an inspired choice of guide through this briar patch: His characters, from the overly abstract tennis players in Infinite Jest (note title) to the eponym of the brilliant and excruciating story “The Depressed Person” tend to get caught thinking about their thinking, landing them in infinite cycles strangely reminiscent of the ones logicians tangle with in Everything and More. And the famous paradox of the barber who shaves only those people who don’t shave themselves (question—who shaves the barber?) plays a key part in his first novel, The Broom of the System. Among Wallace's strengths is an ability to bring to bear in fiction not only the simple, lyrical truths about human life, but the complicated and hard to grasp ones, the ones requiring some preliminary structural setup—that is, the technical ones. In a review of his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, I wrote that higher math (along with NAFTA and the House Ethics Committee) was a subject to which I think Wallace’s prose would be uniquely suited. Now I’ve got my wish.

Everything and More is not a math book of the usual kind. Most general-interest books about mathematics scrupulously avoid technicalities; Wallace, on the other hand, dives into them exultantly and rolls around. This is not to say that the book is a dry monograph; there are figures and formulas, yes, but they tend to come flying at you like debris in the flow of Wallace's torrential narrative. Reading Everything and More is like nothing so much as having a conversation—a one-sided conversation—with that really smart guy you knew in college who responded to the briefest questions by sitting you down in a chair and launching into an impromptu dissertation. In this case, the question is: "How did mathematicians figure out how to handle the concept of infinity in the late 1800s?" And the dissertation begins: "Look, we'd better start with Zeno and Aristotle... have you got a few minutes?"

Wallace is taking a swing at the problem he wrote about in his 2000 essay "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama:"

"Not just professional mathematicians, but almost anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels... Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and context-less formulae fall away and all that's left are pencil and paper and what gets called 'genius,' viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind."

This OTM-ness of that final paragraph, coming from a non-mathematician, is stunning.

Also, this is going in my teaching philosophy statement:

Early in the book he makes a wise comment about the decontextualized nature of school math: "That we end up not even knowing that we don't know is the really insidious part of most math classes."

my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong.

Well, I'm aftraid that is not an intellectual attainment. I don't know what kind it is, either.

xpost

i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.

What I thought too. I'm torn up about this.

From the NY Times obit (sorry if already quoted, haven't read whole thread):

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst. [...] James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

From a posting on the DFW e-mail discussion list, extracted from a remembrance by a professor of his at Amherst:

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst: a creative thesis in English that was his first novel, "The Broom of the System," and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here's what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of both of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

God damn it.

mmm amphetamines

or maybe just the mania side of the depression.