david foster wallace: classic or dud

sad news. rip

Terrible news.

holy shit.

got such a kick out of his writing. so much pleasure and humor and wisdom in Infinite Jest. read it during a sad time in my life. it gave me so much hope. read it at the dinner table, read it during breaks at work at my job in a bookstore, laughing the whole time. was waiting anxiously for a new novel from him. . .such a very very sad thing. RIP.

here's his kenyon college commencement speech, well worth reading, from 2005

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Such bad news. RIP.

OMG I am speechless and so, so sad :-(

RIP

I reread his Kenyon commencement speech a week or two ago and was really inspired by it again. God, this is just awful.

All I ever got around to reading by the guy was the cruise ship essay and that great list of book recommendations that included Wittgenstein's Mistress. Still, this makes my very sad. RIP.

;_;

the tennis-as-geopolitical-power-struggle bit in infinite jest was the best thing ever

OK, that list was called "Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960" and was on salon.com.

Ye, this is it here; http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/12/wallace/

Infinite Jest meant a lot to me when I was 19 or so. Very sad to come home to this news.

As a writer of fiction I thought he was mostly terrible, and a dangerous influence on the young; but, to echo what Ned and a couple others have said, he was on occasion a terrific essayist, one whose, shall we say, discursive tendencies dovetailed with genuine insight. His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

clud

His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

Agreed, I'm pretty positive that's the first thing I actually read by him.

Huge, huge loss. He was a genius.

i think he was a sometimes great essayist and a mostly failed fiction writer, but the failures were interesting. i like a lot of the pieces of infinite jest, even though the thing as a whole is frustrating. (to him too, it felt like.) i guess i also identified with him as sort of a generational voice, smarter and funnier and more not-making-me-want-to-punch-him than the whole dave eggers/ira glass nexus.

his whole sort of wrestling with moving beyond irony, postmodern self-awareness, all that gen-x angst, i think was really emblematic of artists of his generation in a lot of different ways. he articulated the problem better than anyone else, even if he never really solved it.

One thing you quickly realize when reading DFW was he was one ridiculously smart dude. Maybe too smart for his own good, based on the horrible events of yesterday.

Any writer as ambitious as he is will have some hits and misses, but when he was 100% on, like the Cruise Ship essay, or the Illinois State Fair, the John McCain 2000 piece or the highlights of Infinite Jest, he was a wizard who could seemingly do anything.
RIP

Guys, where is the ideal place to start in Foster's oeuvre?

This is so weird because just last night I reread parts of the John McCain piece, to remind myself that at one time there was something likable about him.

i think ideal place to start is a supposedly fun thing, but that's because i think his nonfiction >>> his fiction.

For fiction, Infinite Jest is clearly the magnum opus. Broom of the System is great too. His short stories aren't as much fun as the longer stuff.

But my favorite DFW stuff will always be his nonfiction pieces, particularly "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and the Illinois State Fair piece.

Thanks for the suggestions. I generally prefer nonfiction to fiction, by the way... if that helps.

you start with his non-fiction, i'll go and try cracking infinite jest again. 10th grade clearly wasn't the right time for that.

i gave infinite jest to my brother for christmas a few years ago, because i knew he'd dig it if he ever gave it a shot. a few months ago he called me to tell me he was a few hundred pages in and loved it. (he's 27 now, i think i was 28 or 29 when i read it, which is probably also about the age dfw was when he wrote it. it's a very late-20s/early-30s sort of book.)

Maybe I'll give it a few years then. I'm 23.

well you could be prodigy.

anyway infinite jest makes more sense in the context of his nonfiction. it's a lot of the same themes, recast.

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

Too bad. I liked reading him, but I loved him for his imperfections.

failure

(never understood his proclivity for goofy bandanas. but anyway.)

whoa, wtf? wtf? This is a strange death/suicide to process. Really hard to believe.

RIP

i get so scared and confused when people i consider to be wiser than me yet kindred souls give in to this personal darkness that they always so eloquently teach you to fight against....

Poor dude. Never got into his writings, but all my friends love his work. But I can understand ... no matte rhow good life gets, there will always be this intense darkness inside of you that never goes away, regardless of love and success. My second cousin hanged himself depsite having the most amazing life possible. Who knows what that's about. The mysteries of biology and the concept of the human soul.

Ouch, fuck. Yeah, that.

this is crushingly sad.

I'm really still too just shocked and torn up to add anything except just tipsy mothra as OTM as ever but even more so because this is a hard hard hard thing to be OTM in the face of

I enjoyed a lot of his nonfiction pieces, always meant to start on IJ and maybe I will someday. Incredibly sad indeed. RIP.

so okay this: "The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

oh shit

(he's 27 now, i think i was 28 or 29 when i read it, which is probably also about the age dfw was when he wrote it. it's a very late-20s/early-30s sort of book.)

IJ was published when he was 34, so he likely wrote it in his early 30s. He published Broom of the System when he was only 25 though, and its protagonist was a 24 year old

RIP

I remember Stevie T showing me The Broom of the System, years ago. I didn't like the title much, I don't think.

I have never read him except things like the first paragraph or so of an essay on Roger Federer. Steady Mike has read him a lot more!

i read A Supposedly Fun Thing recently and absolutely loved it. apart from the quality of the writing and the insight and the jokes, i enjoyed it because DFW came across as extremely likeable. i can't believe he's dead, it's too horrible :(

i'm totally gutted about this, espcially since i clicked the thread with expectations and high hopes for news of new work to be imminently released. damn. RIP big guy.

Fucking Fuck.. This Is crushing. He was one of my favorite contemporary authors, for his fiction, yes, but (as many of you have noted) ESPECIALLY for his essays. Ned, OTM regarding the Lynch piece: Easily the finest appraisal of Lynch's work I've come across, and perhaps the single piece of writing I've reread most in recent years.

Devastating. R.I.P.

..a dangerous influence on the young - I would have to agree with this, however.

holy shit... this is terrible

this also needs to be posted:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

There's this one: "Federer as Religious Experience"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Make sure you print the footnotes if you're printing it out.