i'm really crushed.
i loved his writing so much.
it's hard to think of things to say about him, this is really hard for me because -- good old neon aside (good lord there's no way i could read that now) -- but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...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...
but the sad thing to me is that I always felt his worldview, while sad at times, was a positive one...that the things we love are worth it, despite all the mental horrors of the world....to find out he ended up losing to them is infinitely sad to me.
first thing i thought of was the above referenced Kenyon University commencement speech, which in it's own small way might be my favorite thing he ever wrote:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
"i wish you way more than luck"...i dunno...that line always sort of got me a little choked, what else can you say to a kid going out in this world?
― M@tt He1ges0n, Sunday, 14 September 2008 15:37 (fifteen years ago) link
but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...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...
yeah, this. he always seemed so....affable.
also:
By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.
i love the ending.
― the valves of houston (gbx), Sunday, 14 September 2008 15:46 (fifteen years ago) link
ugh i am furious. i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.
― 69, Sunday, 14 September 2008 15:54 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Deric W. Haircare, Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:08 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Mr. Que, Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:18 (fifteen years ago) link
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. :-(
― Fr. Jemima Racktouey (ENBB), Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:23 (fifteen years ago) link
jeez deric sorry man.
― M@tt He1ges0n, Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:39 (fifteen years ago) link
WTF?!
― Bright Future (sunny successor), Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:41 (fifteen years ago) link
lol, classic or dead
― cankles, Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:53 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― M@tt He1ges0n, Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:54 (fifteen years ago) link
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).
― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 14 September 2008 17:01 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― circles, Sunday, 14 September 2008 18:41 (fifteen years ago) link
at least he got to see that last Wimbledon
― you don't make friends with salad (Jordan), Sunday, 14 September 2008 19:18 (fifteen years ago) link
Shit, this is a shocker. No doubt somebody has already recycled a joke from the Onion to depicthim writing a 76-page multi-footnoted suicide note. Me, I thought both "Broom" and "IJ" were wonderfullyentertaining reads (even tho parts of the latter were more satisfying than the whole) and I'm sad there won't be any followup. RIP
― Myonga Vön Bontee, Sunday, 14 September 2008 20:20 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 14 September 2008 20:26 (fifteen years ago) link
Who was doing the footnote thing first, him or Baker?
― caek, Sunday, 14 September 2008 20:36 (fifteen years ago) link
man i just assumed this thread was revived for some contrarian b.s. seemed too engaged with the world for something like this.
― bnw, Sunday, 14 September 2008 21:20 (fifteen years ago) link
The Mezzanine is from 1988, and I don't know if there are footnotes in Broom of the System (1987).
― Casuistry, Sunday, 14 September 2008 21:58 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Eazy, Sunday, 14 September 2008 22:53 (fifteen years ago) link
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
― johnny crunch, Sunday, 14 September 2008 23:48 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― tipsy mothra, Monday, 15 September 2008 00:12 (fifteen years ago) link
jack vance ("dying earth") did the footnote thing first
― kamerad, Monday, 15 September 2008 00:19 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Everything is Highlighted (Hurting 2), Monday, 15 September 2008 00:21 (fifteen years ago) link
In fact, going back to that essay now, I'd even say some of his thoughts about television were proto-poptimist.
― Everything is Highlighted (Hurting 2), Monday, 15 September 2008 00:24 (fifteen years ago) link
jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes? really?
― rogermexico., Monday, 15 September 2008 00:37 (fifteen years ago) link
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)
― remy bean, Monday, 15 September 2008 00:41 (fifteen years ago) link
haha
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 15 September 2008 00:44 (fifteen years ago) link
and they're endnotes, too, not footnotes
― kamerad, Monday, 15 September 2008 01:05 (fifteen years ago) link
All the links posted have been great. Thanks.
― calstars, Monday, 15 September 2008 01:49 (fifteen years ago) link
Talking about what he wrote in context >> posts saying "RIP"
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 02:01 (fifteen years ago) link
Sounds like it was fun to take his classes!
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=266836
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 02:39 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 02:50 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 02:56 (fifteen years ago) link
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)
― Everything is Highlighted (Hurting 2), Monday, 15 September 2008 03:40 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― you don't make friends with salad (Jordan), Monday, 15 September 2008 03:45 (fifteen years ago) link
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 valves of houston (gbx), Monday, 15 September 2008 03:52 (fifteen years ago) link
The Charlie Rose episode mentioned upthread, I think. The DFW roundtable part starts around minute 36
― Jeff LeVine, Monday, 15 September 2008 05:12 (fifteen years ago) link
there's also one with just himhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7171768127610835594starts about 23:00
― circles, Monday, 15 September 2008 05:31 (fifteen years ago) link
(lump in throat)
― Pillbox, Monday, 15 September 2008 06:58 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Monday, 15 September 2008 07:25 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Marcello Carlin, Monday, 15 September 2008 08:14 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― toby, Monday, 15 September 2008 10:32 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 12:04 (fifteen years ago) link
More links:http://fimoculous.com/archive/post-5030.cfm
― calstars, Monday, 15 September 2008 12:07 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 12:07 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― toby, Monday, 15 September 2008 12:25 (fifteen years ago) link
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."
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.
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 13:18 (fifteen years ago) link
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."
― Convert your pencil into a large pole (caek), Monday, 15 September 2008 13:19 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Dr Morbius, Monday, 15 September 2008 14:23 (fifteen years ago) link