Ok. DFW is dead. He hung himself.
I just re-read Consider The Lobster and finished it last night. I loved his essays best. He could pull me into any subject, even if I didn't care about it, even tennis players! and I'd wallow in his lovely analysis, annoyed by the pages-long juicy footnotes, annoyed because to read them all and jump back to my spot was so hard, but loving it. I rarely get so engrossed in anything anymore. To take David Foster Wallace and his footnotes to bed with me. . . bliss.
I'm too shattered to write about this. Honestly. No snarky irony intended, which is what he was all about. Getting past irony. Try it it's not easy.
On writing:
The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
Read about his death here.
And here's a transcript of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address.
And here's his essay on David Lynch that pretty much made me obsessed with DFW and contributed to my already building DL obsession, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, called David Lynch Keeps His Head.
Watch him on Charlie Rose here.
Great tribute in Salon here.
Now I'll get out Infinite Jest again and try to get past page 250. It's just so hard to read in bed.
Fuck.
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