rip david foster wallace
September 13, 2008
I can’t even begin to explain who dfw is- was- to me. The deep humanity that powered his writing that so many missed. Reading Infinite Jest was the discovery of a new element two empty columns over and two empty rows down. It was finding something so new and alien but somehow thoroughly human that the shock of it could only be the truth. Like traveling light years through space and finding humans. Or a familiar knock on the door you can’t quite place that opens and you are standing there on both sides.
I have to say or do something but there’s nothing to do and nothing that can be said. I’ve been so close but I’ve never understood it. There are no words. Maybe that was it.
I’m growing heavier and my mouth is full of ash.
All me-stream all the time.
content rss
September 15th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Nothing to do but grieve. Those who do not grieve, grieve for something else. Those who grieve for nothing are dead.
September 16th, 2008 at 4:17 am
I remember going through the list of Harper’s contributing editors each month to see if David Foster Wallace was still alive.
Your first paragraph is about the best one-par. tribute to him I have seen on the web.
Heres a one-sentence one: Disney professor of literature…..hahahahahaha
September 19th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Thanks for leaving me such a heartfelt note. And for this. I’ve been here before but didn’t think you actually lived in Fairbanks. We should get together for a chat and a few moments of silence.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:00 am
You are the only person I know who seems to understand me when I stagger around claiming “ashes, nothing but ash can I taste” which I have unfortunately had occassion to say more than a few times this last year. Yet I continue to swill it out with the milk of human kindness and the bittersweet backwash of sorrow.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:26 am
P.S. Rick Groen wrote a tribute in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. As I started to read it I wanted to rail “You idiot” as I felt like he, like so many, was missing the point. But by the end I realized he hadn’t:
“Yet I can’t, at the moment, stop seeing his death, his suicide, through my lens of self. I can’t, at the moment, adjust my default setting, or resist writing an inappropriately minimalist tribute to an obviously maximalist writer. Because it’s absolutely true - that the presence of his sensibility, manifested in his work, made me feel less alone. But then the converse is absolutely inescapable - that his absence makes me feel more alone. And, for the same brief flashes, less human too. But this is just personal.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080920.wwallace0920/BNStory/Entertainment/home
October 14th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
DFW was murdered.