David Foster Wallace commits suicide (1 Viewer)

[krista4]

The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace

Great article.

 

[Nipsey]

His 2000 RS article on McCain is pretty fascinating.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story...and_the_shrub/1

Some great nuggets like...

Let's pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. If you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs' point. If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who are not dumb and are keenly aware that it's in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV Spring Break on Primary Day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bull#### yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

 

[Moe.]

pretty sure not voting isnt in effect voting for the establishment. everyone on the ballot is part of the establishment. you are damned if you do, and damned if you dont. the game is beyond rigged at this point.

 

[The_Man]

New Yorker with very good (and long) Wallace article. Covers some of the same ground as the Rolling Stone article, but also has really good stuff about the novel DFW was struggling with for years and never finished.

 

[The_Man]

Hadn't heard about this book until my wife got it for me: "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" by David Lipsky.

It's basically the transcription of a 5-day interview Lipsky did with Wallace as he tagged along with him on the "Infinite Jest" book tour to report a Rolling Stone profile that never ran.

I'm almost 100 pages in and loving it. Makes me laugh, makes me put the book down sometimes to not cry.

 

[pecorino]

went to a reading of Lipsky's new book. he is a very personable guy and his book is an easy read once you get used to reading raw conversations. it inspired me to push on with Infinite Jest, having started and stopped reading it twice. this will be the summer!

 

[mon]

I've decided to read Infinite Jest this year. I've had it since Dec., but it's sheer volume is frightening. Just gonna have to jump in. I have to read it, because since his death I have read enough about DFW to know he and I are very similar. Not only do I look like him, but I'm also big into tennis and writing. Reading some of his thoughts, I've found other similarities between us. No, I am not suicidal, though.

 

[The_Man]

NYTtimes has the Kakutani of "The Pale King" today. I hate reading posthumous novels, but of course will do it with this. Not supposed to be released until April 15 - part of the PR campaign, since it's about the IRS - but apparently you can already get it on Amazon.

I don't like Kakutani that much, but her review actually lines up with what I expected the book to be like. Would link here, but don't want to mess anyone up with the paywall or anything. I still resent Kakutani for her review of Infinite Jest: "Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free."

Thinking about DFW still makes me sad. Did anyone read his short story in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago? Very painful for me - felt like a window into his mental illness.

 

[The_Man]

I posted in here because this has evolved into kind of the official FBG thread on Wallace. Let me know if I should change the title

 

[pantagrapher]

NYTtimes has the Kakutani of "The Pale King" today. I hate reading posthumous novels, but of course will do it with this. Not supposed to be released until April 15 - part of the PR campaign, since it's about the IRS - but apparently you can already get it on Amazon.I don't like Kakutani that much, but her review actually lines up with what I expected the book to be like. Would link here, but don't want to mess anyone up with the paywall or anything. I still resent Kakutani for her review of Infinite Jest: "Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free."Thinking about DFW still makes me sad. Did anyone read his short story in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago? Very painful for me - felt like a window into his mental illness.

I can't bleepin' stand Kakutani.I have mixed feelings about Pale King. I'm going to buy it and let it collect dust for a while. I fear it will be like watching Michael Jordan play for the Wizards.

 

[-fish-]

NYTtimes has the Kakutani of "The Pale King" today. I hate reading posthumous novels, but of course will do it with this. Not supposed to be released until April 15 - part of the PR campaign, since it's about the IRS - but apparently you can already get it on Amazon.

I don't like Kakutani that much, but her review actually lines up with what I expected the book to be like. Would link here, but don't want to mess anyone up with the paywall or anything. I still resent Kakutani for her review of Infinite Jest: "Somewhere in the mess, the reader suspects, are the outlines of a splendid novel, but as it stands the book feels like one of those unfinished Michelangelo sculptures: you can see a godly creature trying to fight its way out of the marble, but it's stuck there, half excavated, unable to break completely free."

Thinking about DFW still makes me sad. Did anyone read his short story in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago? Very painful for me - felt like a window into his mental illness.

Never read this before. I think it's spot on.

 

[Sigmund Bloom]

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

Outstanding, insightful, if painful piece made after reviewing some of Wallace's papers here in Austin at the Ransom Center. Must-read for any fans of DFW. Who out there has their copy of Pale King? Can't wait to get my hands on it.

 

[Sigmund Bloom]

bump for any DFW fans in the evenin crowd

 

[Facecow]

 

[Hellfire Snail]

bump for any DFW fans in the evenin crowd

I almost enjoy reading about Wallace as much as I do his writing. Good stuff here, thanks for the link. One of the most fascinating and brilliant minds of our time. I only wish he was able to produce more than he did due to his condition and perfectionism.

 

[Saints-Man]

 

[The_Man]

Just read Franzen's essay in last week's New Yorker - an essay about isolation, creativity, and Robinson Crusoe suddenly and devastatingly becomes Franzen's attempt to come to terms with his close friend DFW's suicide. Raw and honest and insightful and incredibly well-written, it's probably the best thing I've ever read about Wallace. I like his take on how the literary establishment, which never even nominated Wallace for any kind of award, suddenly transformed him into a literary giant upon his death. I also liked his take on how Wallace has become falsely sanctified as a pure soul who was just "too good" for this world. But the best stuff is when he takes Wallace himself to task for the painful and selfish manner of his suicide. It is a great writer, writing passionately and honestly about a subject that is obviously still raw. If you are a Wallace fan, you have to read it.

 

[njherdfan]

I just saw

Everyone who's read IJ will probably appreciate this.

 

[krista4]

Every time this thread is bumped for any reason, I get happysad.

 

[njherdfan]

Today Grantland re-printed Wallace's brilliant article on Federer, but with an interesting introduction and Post-script.

The New York Times' ambitious sports magazine, Play, was still in its early days in the spring of 2006 — one issue was published, another was about to go to press — when editor Mark Bryant persuaded novelist David Foster Wallace to write about Roger Federer.The assignment came as both writer and athlete were at the height of their respective careers. The story (for Play's third issue, published shortly before the 2006 U.S. Open) constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject, like John McPhee sitting down with Bill Bradley, or George Plimpton hitting the road with Muhammad Ali and his entourage. That wasn't just because Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was considered by many to be the literary voice of his generation. He had also proved (in both his novel Infinite Jest, and his exhaustively annotated Esquire piece, "The String Theory"), to be a spellbinding writer on the subject of tennis. Wallace had been a regionally ranked junior player during his teenage years in Illinois before giving up competitive tennis because, as he explained to Rolling Stone's David Lipsky, "just as it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play."That summer, the often-reclusive Wallace traveled to tennis' most hallowed ground, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, to survey the masterful Federer in the midst of a four-year run in which he won 11 of a possible 16 Grand Slam titles. The resulting story, which Wallace turned in 10 days after returning from England, still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level.The piece almost didn't happen. When Bryant called Wallace's agent, Bonnie Nadell, to float the idea, she told him it was a nonstarter ("He's completely focused on his fiction right now," Bryant recalled her saying). It was only months later, after another writer had bowed out of the assignment just weeks before Wimbledon started, that Bryant called Wallace himself and pitched the story again, saying, "David, I have three words for you: Roger Federer, Wimbledon." Wallace's response — "Oh, my god; would you would let me do that?"— showed he was game, and providentially, Wallace was already going to be overseas, at a literary festival in Italy.Even then, the reporting of the story was an ordeal for both Wallace and Play's senior editor, Josh Dean, who dealt with Wallace on a daily basis and was privy to the numerous calamities (and near-calamities) the writer encountered in England. At the time, Wallace didn't have a credit card, a cell phone, or an e-mail address he was willing to share, according to Dean. He was still naïve in the ways of pack journalism, and many routine matters — how to get from his hotel to Wimbledon, how to secure press credentials, even how to enter the grounds — often confounded him, prompting calls back to Dean, some of which came in the middle of the night in New York.Wallace landed a brief one-on-one interview with Federer during the tournament, but the setting was so sterile and impersonal that Wallace chose to confine his account of it to a lengthy footnote in the story. (Among Wallace's notes in preparation for his interview with Federer, there was this explanation he presumably shared when they sat down: "I'm not a journalist — I'm more like a novelist with a tennis background.") After watching Federer conclude the fortnight with his fourth straight Wimbledon title, Wallace returned to the States and wrote furiously, turned in the story on time, then worked closely with Bryant and Dean on everything involving the story's close — including the cover treatment, the headline, and whether a stray semicolon could be changed to a period. (Per Wallace, it couldn't.) Wallace had more ammunition than your average precious freelancer, as he was, in Dean's words, "a remarkable grammarian," and was on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.The "pre-article advisories" note he sent to Dean along with his first draft provided a peek into his philosophy of footnotes ("the big thing is to avoid breaking footnotes over pages — it gives readers a headache") and his fiercely protective stance toward his own prose: "I've got the ####er down to like 8,400 words. Another maybe 100-200 words can come out without much problem, if need be. Cutting much more from that will cripple the piece, which I've worked hard on and feel protective of. (If you decided, for instance, that you want to run only like 5,000 words of it, I wouldn't do it — I'd settle for the Kill Fee.)"There was no chance of that. Bryant and Dean did very little editing, and Bryant even sided with Wallace and against the Times' own fairly rigid policy against serial commas, going high up the masthead to gain approval.Another 100 or so words were trimmed for space, and the piece ran as Play's cover story on August 20, 2006.

The acclaim that greeted the piece was nearly instantaneous. It was among the most discussed stories of the year in the journalism industry. Five years later, Bryant, Dean, and Wilson can all conjure up phrases from the story, which they each view with the kind of reverence and shared gratitude common to eyewitnesses of something truly remarkable.The correction that ran a week later in the Times was, perhaps appropriately, only a minor footnote to Wallace's story. Fact-checker Chuck Wilson, who'd worked at the fortress of exactitude that is the fact-checking department of the New Yorker before going to the Times, spent hours on the phone with Wallace before the story went to press, going over the myriad details that were reported in the piece as best as he could (video for some of the matches Wallace wrote about weren't readily available). Writers often loathe their fact-checkers, but Wallace had grown fond of the polite but rigorous Wilson, at one point writing to Dean, "Chuck Wilson is unusually cool, for a factchecker, and appears ready to believe that I'm not Jayson Blair."A day after the story ran, Wilson noticed, amid the chorus of reader praise for the story, a few critiques arguing that Wallace had incorrectly described the Federer-Agassi point in his lead. That prompted further investigation that led to the Times' correction and — in the aftermath — Wallace's repeated apologies to Wilson. What can be learned from a gifted, conscientious writer and a thorough fact-checking process still allowing a small error? The eternal lesson of human imperfection, as well as a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant writer. "For me, I thought maybe he fell in love with the way he described it," says Wilson, "and maybe he was more committed to that than the actual truth of what happened in the point."In the spring of 2008, Bryant tried to bring Wallace back to Play, pitching him on going to Beijing to cover the Summer Olympic Games. Wallace begged off, sounding preoccupied and apologetic, adding, "I'm not sure I'm well enough to travel right now." Within six months Wallace committed suicide.Bryant, reflecting on it all later, is most grateful for Wallace's unique combination of "this joy, this sadness, and this staggeringly endless curiosity."For Wallace's closest friends and family, the story remains more than a testament to his skill. It was the fulfillment of a dream, a chance for Wallace, so often plagued by depression and self-doubt, to become utterly absorbed in a story he was perfectly suited to write. As his agent, Nadell, puts it, "It was a joy to do — and he was so happy he did it."

I wonder how many Grantland writers will appreciate that it was DFW who pioneered the use of footnotes that Grantland now uses.

 

[The_Man]

DFW would have been 50 today.

All the things he ever published in Harper's (where I first found him) are here.

The first thing I ever read by him was the one about visiting the Illinois State Fair. It blew me away and - upon today's rereading - still does.

 

[rockaction]

DFW would have been 50 today.

All the things he ever published in Harper's (where I first found him) are here.

The first thing I ever read by him was the one about visiting the Illinois State Fair. It blew me away and - upon today's rereading - still does.

That when one is traveling east, the personal and the political merge somewhere around Cleveland? Always loved that.

 

[Jeff Vader]

Every time this thread is bumped for any reason, I get happysad.

This.

 

[pantagrapher]

:(

 

[njherdfan]

:(

It would have been his 50th birthday yesterday. He left us far too soon.

 

[krista4]

Every time this thread is bumped for any reason, I get happysad.

This.

:(

 

[Jeff Vader]

Just read Franzen's essay in last week's New Yorker - an essay about isolation, creativity, and Robinson Crusoe suddenly and devastatingly becomes Franzen's attempt to come to terms with his close friend DFW's suicide. Raw and honest and insightful and incredibly well-written, it's probably the best thing I've ever read about Wallace. I like his take on how the literary establishment, which never even nominated Wallace for any kind of award, suddenly transformed him into a literary giant upon his death. I also liked his take on how Wallace has become falsely sanctified as a pure soul who was just "too good" for this world. But the best stuff is when he takes Wallace himself to task for the painful and selfish manner of his suicide. It is a great writer, writing passionately and honestly about a subject that is obviously still raw. If you are a Wallace fan, you have to read it.

I'm glad I saw this and read the article.First off, it's heartbreaking.Secondly, I'm going to meet Franzen in a few weeks, and in the back of my mind I thought if we got a moment alone I'd quietly offer some condolences. I probably wouldn't have done it, but now there's no way I'll even bring up DFW. I'm thinking I'll post this article to the small audience's listserv so there's no unfortunate gaffes.Thirdly, I'm meeting Franzen in a few weeks. Anyone got any questions they want me to ask? Should I post this in the book thread instead?

 

[The_Man]

No Pulitzer awarded in the Fiction category. That's kind of a slap in the face, isn't it?

Wallace was one of the 3 finalists:

Nominated as finalists in this category were: "Train Dreams," by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years; and "The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.

"The three books were fully considered, but in the end, none mustered the mandatory majority for granting a prize, so no prize was awarded," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, declining to go into further detail. "This is the 11th time this has happened in the fiction category; the last time was 1977. It's unusual, but it does occur."

 

[Crazy Canuck]

A movie about his life gets a solid thumbs down from his estate -

http://www.avclub.com/article/david-foster-wallaces-estate-isnt-happy-movie-abou-203709?

This motion picture is loosely based on transcripts from an interview David consented to eighteen years ago for a magazine article about the publication of his novel,Infinite Jest. That article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie.

Seems like pretty weak material to base a film on, even if the guy successfully turned it into a book first (Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace).

 

[T Bell]

Just heard that my favorite writer, David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. I'm so bummed by this. From the LA Timesavid Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as "Girl with Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." In 1997, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant.Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College

RIP, Why is that many people of humor seem to end their own lives in one way or another?

Old post, but good question.

Mood disorders are often positively correlated with both creativity and humor, which go hand in hand given that comedy is often based upon offbeat or skewed perception or irony or surprise.

Also, humor is a good coping mechanism for depression, and is naturally developed in its own right.

I've meant to read DFW's stuff, and this article reminded me of that. I think I'm going to go and check out one of his books. I know many people rave about him.

 

[pecorino]

I love DFW and miss his presence in America greatly, but the Pale King was not worthy of a Pulitzer. Infinite Jest, sure. It's s masterpiece. Pale King is a sad read, knowing what might have been and also shedding a light on his mental issues. I wondered who would fill his shoes and no one has. Without Vonnegut or Wallace I feel we are adrift.

 

[rockaction]

Just heard that my favorite writer, David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. I'm so bummed by this. From the LA Timesavid Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as "Girl with Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." In 1997, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant.Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College

RIP, Why is that many people of humor seem to end their own lives in one way or another?

Old post, but good question.

Mood disorders are often positively correlated with both creativity and humor, which go hand in hand given that comedy is often based upon offbeat or skewed perception or irony or surprise.

Also, humor is a good coping mechanism for depression, and is naturally developed in its own right.

I've meant to read DFW's stuff, and this article reminded me of that. I think I'm going to go and check out one of his books. I know many people rave about him.

Some thoughts: Don't pick up Oblivion, and I'm jealous of you for getting to read him for the first time. Oblivion was a brutal read, even for someone who loved Infinite Jest and other works.

Also, ironic that an article about sincerity and irony comes to a message board that can traffic in it like a briefcase of cocaine.

That said, thanks for your post and I echo the sentiment up top by krista4 and Jeff Vader. Any time this thread gets bumped, it's a good thing.

eta* This is an example of irony gone right http://time.com/37494/this-generic-brand-video-parody-is-about-nothing-and-everything-and-is-thus-perfection/

 

[T Bell]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

 

[rockaction]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

Wow. I don't know. Jest sang to me at twenty-eight, even as a lay reader. Not too expensive, nor, if you've watched modern movies, that disruptive in terms of structure. I think there are many, many levels to it, but you can enjoy it just as a reader. I also have a predilection for non-fiction and New Journalism, so the rest was easy after that. I would probably read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

I wouldn't read Broom of the System, either. That gets weirdly philosophical, juvenile, and not that exciting.

Girl With Curious Hair is a weird entry, but not a bad one.

Also, consult other, better readers on the board. This was just my personal way, based on a recommendation and a whole lot of empathy for the author at a specific time in my life. Others will steer you well.

IJ and Girl With Curious Hair are my favorite books by him.

 

[rockaction]

Today Grantland re-printed Wallace's brilliant article on Federer, but with an interesting introduction and Post-script.

The New York Times' ambitious sports magazine, Play, was still in its early days in the spring of 2006 — one issue was published, another was about to go to press — when editor Mark Bryant persuaded novelist David Foster Wallace to write about Roger Federer. The assignment came as both writer and athlete were at the height of their respective careers. The story (for Play's third issue, published shortly before the 2006 U.S. Open) constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject, like John McPhee sitting down with Bill Bradley, or George Plimpton hitting the road with Muhammad Ali and his entourage. That wasn't just because Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was considered by many to be the literary voice of his generation. He had also proved (in both his novel Infinite Jest, and his exhaustively annotated Esquire piece, "The String Theory"), to be a spellbinding writer on the subject of tennis. Wallace had been a regionally ranked junior player during his teenage years in Illinois before giving up competitive tennis because, as he explained to Rolling Stone's David Lipsky, "just as it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play." That summer, the often-reclusive Wallace traveled to tennis' most hallowed ground, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, to survey the masterful Federer in the midst of a four-year run in which he won 11 of a possible 16 Grand Slam titles. The resulting story, which Wallace turned in 10 days after returning from England, still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level. The piece almost didn't happen. When Bryant called Wallace's agent, Bonnie Nadell, to float the idea, she told him it was a nonstarter ("He's completely focused on his fiction right now," Bryant recalled her saying). It was only months later, after another writer had bowed out of the assignment just weeks before Wimbledon started, that Bryant called Wallace himself and pitched the story again, saying, "David, I have three words for you: Roger Federer, Wimbledon." Wallace's response — "Oh, my god; would you would let me do that?"— showed he was game, and providentially, Wallace was already going to be overseas, at a literary festival in Italy. Even then, the reporting of the story was an ordeal for both Wallace and Play's senior editor, Josh Dean, who dealt with Wallace on a daily basis and was privy to the numerous calamities (and near-calamities) the writer encountered in England. At the time, Wallace didn't have a credit card, a cell phone, or an e-mail address he was willing to share, according to Dean. He was still naïve in the ways of pack journalism, and many routine matters — how to get from his hotel to Wimbledon, how to secure press credentials, even how to enter the grounds — often confounded him, prompting calls back to Dean, some of which came in the middle of the night in New York. Wallace landed a brief one-on-one interview with Federer during the tournament, but the setting was so sterile and impersonal that Wallace chose to confine his account of it to a lengthy footnote in the story. (Among Wallace's notes in preparation for his interview with Federer, there was this explanation he presumably shared when they sat down: "I'm not a journalist — I'm more like a novelist with a tennis background.") After watching Federer conclude the fortnight with his fourth straight Wimbledon title, Wallace returned to the States and wrote furiously, turned in the story on time, then worked closely with Bryant and Dean on everything involving the story's close — including the cover treatment, the headline, and whether a stray semicolon could be changed to a period. (Per Wallace, it couldn't.) Wallace had more ammunition than your average precious freelancer, as he was, in Dean's words, "a remarkable grammarian," and was on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. The "pre-article advisories" note he sent to Dean along with his first draft provided a peek into his philosophy of footnotes ("the big thing is to avoid breaking footnotes over pages — it gives readers a headache") and his fiercely protective stance toward his own prose: "I've got the ####er down to like 8,400 words. Another maybe 100-200 words can come out without much problem, if need be. Cutting much more from that will cripple the piece, which I've worked hard on and feel protective of. (If you decided, for instance, that you want to run only like 5,000 words of it, I wouldn't do it — I'd settle for the Kill Fee.)" There was no chance of that. Bryant and Dean did very little editing, and Bryant even sided with Wallace and against the Times' own fairly rigid policy against serial commas, going high up the masthead to gain approval. Another 100 or so words were trimmed for space, and the piece ran as Play's cover story on August 20, 2006.

The acclaim that greeted the piece was nearly instantaneous. It was among the most discussed stories of the year in the journalism industry. Five years later, Bryant, Dean, and Wilson can all conjure up phrases from the story, which they each view with the kind of reverence and shared gratitude common to eyewitnesses of something truly remarkable. The correction that ran a week later in the Times was, perhaps appropriately, only a minor footnote to Wallace's story. Fact-checker Chuck Wilson, who'd worked at the fortress of exactitude that is the fact-checking department of the New Yorker before going to the Times, spent hours on the phone with Wallace before the story went to press, going over the myriad details that were reported in the piece as best as he could (video for some of the matches Wallace wrote about weren't readily available). Writers often loathe their fact-checkers, but Wallace had grown fond of the polite but rigorous Wilson, at one point writing to Dean, "Chuck Wilson is unusually cool, for a factchecker, and appears ready to believe that I'm not Jayson Blair." A day after the story ran, Wilson noticed, amid the chorus of reader praise for the story, a few critiques arguing that Wallace had incorrectly described the Federer-Agassi point in his lead. That prompted further investigation that led to the Times' correction and — in the aftermath — Wallace's repeated apologies to Wilson. What can be learned from a gifted, conscientious writer and a thorough fact-checking process still allowing a small error? The eternal lesson of human imperfection, as well as a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant writer. "For me, I thought maybe he fell in love with the way he described it," says Wilson, "and maybe he was more committed to that than the actual truth of what happened in the point." In the spring of 2008, Bryant tried to bring Wallace back to Play, pitching him on going to Beijing to cover the Summer Olympic Games. Wallace begged off, sounding preoccupied and apologetic, adding, "I'm not sure I'm well enough to travel right now." Within six months Wallace committed suicide. Bryant, reflecting on it all later, is most grateful for Wallace's unique combination of "this joy, this sadness, and this staggeringly endless curiosity." For Wallace's closest friends and family, the story remains more than a testament to his skill. It was the fulfillment of a dream, a chance for Wallace, so often plagued by depression and self-doubt, to become utterly absorbed in a story he was perfectly suited to write. As his agent, Nadell, puts it, "It was a joy to do — and he was so happy he did it."

I wonder how many Grantland writers will appreciate that it was DFW who pioneered the use of footnotes that Grantland now uses.

This is also the guy that bowed out of the tennis excursion you're talking about. He's a great non-fiction writer in his own right. John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Here is the link to his review of the Pale King, which is interesting.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/201105/david-foster-wallace-the-pale-king-john-jeremiah-sullivan

 

[The_Man]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

I would read this essay, "Shipping Out," first. It later became the renamed title essay in the collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

If you like it, you could get that collection, though I think his later collection, "Consider the Lobster," might be the best place to start. I wouldn't recommend jumping in with "Infinite Jest." It's a big, challenging book and you might not like his style.

I was a huge Wallace fan from his essays in Harper's magazine, and I made two failed attempts at reading IJ before I got all the way through. One time, I was about 350 pages in, realized I still had 700+ more to go, and just felt too tired to go on. The time I made it, I warmed up with the essay collection to get in the right frame of mind, then read it on vacation when I could devote 3 and 4-hour chunks of time. I doubt I would have ever finished it, just reading in 45-minute increments before bed or whenever.

 

[krista4]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

I would read this essay, "Shipping Out," first. It later became the renamed title essay in the collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

If you like it, you could get that collection, though I think his later collection, "Consider the Lobster," might be the best place to start. I wouldn't recommend jumping in with "Infinite Jest." It's a big, challenging book and you might not like his style.

I was a huge Wallace fan from his essays in Harper's magazine, and I made two failed attempts at reading IJ before I got all the way through. One time, I was about 350 pages in, realized I still had 700+ more to go, and just felt too tired to go on. The time I made it, I warmed up with the essay collection to get in the right frame of mind, then read it on vacation when I could devote 3 and 4-hour chunks of time. I doubt I would have ever finished it, just reading in 45-minute increments before bed or whenever.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with all of these suggestions.

 

[CletiusMaximus]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

If the 4 people in front of you are anything like I was when I tried to tackle it, plan on getting to the top of the list in about 15 years.

 

[Crazy Canuck]

Aside from Jest, what should I also target to read first? I'm like 5th in line on the request list at my local library for IJ.

Wow. I don't know. Jest sang to me at twenty-eight, even as a lay reader. Not too expensive, nor, if you've watched modern movies, that disruptive in terms of structure. I think there are many, many levels to it, but you can enjoy it just as a reader. I also have a predilection for non-fiction and New Journalism, so the rest was easy after that. I would probably read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

I wouldn't read Broom of the System, either. That gets weirdly philosophical, juvenile, and not that exciting.

Girl With Curious Hair is a weird entry, but not a bad one.

Also, consult other, better readers on the board. This was just my personal way, based on a recommendation and a whole lot of empathy for the author at a specific time in my life. Others will steer you well.

IJ and Girl With Curious Hair are my favorite books by him.

This is the right answer. Then Consider the Lobster. Then Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Then Infinite Jest. The rest don't matter much. Girl with Curious Hair is a collection of his first published short stories. Some are very good. But it's a completely different style of writing from the titles mentioned above. Same can be said about Broom of the System, his first novel (and partly his MFA thesis at Arizona). Those two early works are good, worth a read, but not the DFW everyone spanks their pud about.

 

[kupcho1]

The Infinite Jest Review That Dave Eggers Doesn’t Want You To Read

Apparently that foreword Eggers wrote for the 10th anniversary edition might qualify as an egregious work of staggering hypocrisy.

In 2006, Little Brown published a 10th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that featured a foreword by Dave Eggers. Eggers’s introduction observed that Infinite Jest was “1,067 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence. The book is drum-tight and relentlessly smart and, though it does not wear its heart on its sleeve, its deeply felt and incredibly moving.” There was one significant problem with this assessment. It did not match, much less acknowledge, a review that Eggers had written for The San Francisco Chronicle on February 11, 1996, which claimed just the opposite:

Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length

.

 

[Crazy Canuck]

I can't stand Dave Eggers. He's like the Oprah of the literary world, a trendy d-bag who is far better at promoting his works than actually writing them.

 

[pecorino]

Had a chance to meet and hear David Lipsky talk a few years back about his memoir covering a week on the road with DFW at the tail end of the Infinite Jest book tour. Lipsky was great--friendly, open to questions and even replied to some of my emails after the event. I had no idea that his documentation of that road trip was turned into a movie. The End of the Tour https://www.yahoo.com/movies/the-end-of-the-tour-trailer-jason-segel-jesse-120023171112.html--trailer on Yahoo. It will be tough to watch come July 31 but always good to keep Wallace fresh in my mind.

 

[The_Man]

Nice to see this thread again, nice to see names like Krista and Pantagrapher. I don't really do iFriends but they - like Wallace who brought us together - are smart, funny, interesting people whose writing I always enjoyed and miss reading.

So now I'm 46, same age as Wallace when he died. I always used to think life would get easier as I aged. What a surprise to learn I had it backward.

 

[cstu]

Still have not read any of his books, but did watch The End of the Tour and recommend it.

 

[cstu]

Is this good writing?

And as InterLace’s eventual outright purchase of the Networks’ production talent and facilities, of two major home-computer conglomerates, of the cutting-edge Foxx 2100 CD-ROM licenses of Aapps Inc., of RCA’s D.S.S. orbiters and hardware-patents, and of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little technology of HDTV’s visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and 2(√area)! more lines of optical resolution – as these acquisitions allowed Noreen Lace-Forché’s cartridge-dissemination network to achieve vertical integration and economies of scale, viewers’ pulse-reception- and cartridge-fees went down markedly; and then the further increased revenues from consequent increases in order- and rental-volume were plowed presciently back into more fiber-optic-InterGrid-cable-laying, into outright purchase of three of the five Baby Bells InterNet’d started with, into extremely attractive rebate-offers on special new InterLace-designed R.I.S.C.-grade High-Def-screen PCs with mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards (recognizably renamed by Veals’s boys in Recognition ‘Teleputers’ or ‘TPs’), into fiber-only modems, and, of course, into extremely high-quality entertainments that viewers would freely desire to choose even more.

http://widsith.booklikes.com/post/395774/the-trial

 

[cstu]

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/

That’s what most of his style adds up to, taking easy concepts and pretending they’re harder to explain than they really are. Like the scene I mentioned before, with the tennis brat, where a university administrator wears his tie in a “Kekulean knot.” In this context, all “Kekulean” means is hexagonal. (Yes, it also allows Wallace to namedrop the discoverer of the six-sided benzene ring. But what does that prove?) Or a withdrawal chapter where a cross-dressing junkie imagines “ants formicating up and down his arms’ skinny length.” Care to guess what “formicating” actually means? Anting. The guy’s being harassed by anting ants – “a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills.” Now that’s how you pad a sentence, calling the ants “red” twice, and making it clear the insecting insects aren’t just “militaristic,” but “martial” to boot.

 

[krista4]

Nice to see this thread again, nice to see names like Krista and Pantagrapher. I don't really do iFriends but they - like Wallace who brought us together - are smart, funny, interesting people whose writing I always enjoyed and miss reading.

So now I'm 46, same age as Wallace when he died. I always used to think life would get easier as I aged. What a surprise to learn I had it backward.

Missed this post until now. Thanks for the kind words. Right back atcha. I don't post in the Bernie Sanders thread but have been enjoying your thoughts in there.

 

[kupcho1]

The Infinite Jest Review That Dave Eggers Doesn’t Want You To Read

Apparently that foreword Eggers wrote for the 10th anniversary edition might qualify as an egregious work of staggering hypocrisy.

Just starting Infinite Jest.  Been a while since I've read it.  Only through chapter 1 (Year of Glad) and already picking up on some things I missed even the second time through.  Will go slow and savor 

 

[RokNRole]

Just heard that my favorite writer, David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. I'm so bummed by this. From the LA Timesavid Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as "Girl with Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." In 1997, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant.Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was teaching writing at Pomona College

RIP, Why is that many people of humor seem to end their own lives in one way or another?

They learn humor as a way to cope with the horrors of reality.

 

[wikkidpissah]

They learn humor as a way to cope with the horrors of reality.

One of the horrors of reality is that you might have to wait 9 yrs for someone to respond to your post on an internet forum. Is there a floating bottle emoji?