NO, NO, NO.

His essay about playing tennis in a child in Illinois is so poignant it’s uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time. No easy feat, that.

Thanks for everything, DFW.

as a child*

R.I.P. May death quell the demons you dealt with in life. Your legacy lives in the body of extraordinary prose.

“Fiction-writing’s lonely in a way most people misunderstand.”

I’m not going to understand.

He once said “you’ll worry less about what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” He was wrong.

This news crushed me when I heard it last night. I’ve been re-reading Infinite Jest ever since I finished it in 2000 — just opening it up in random places and reading a few or 20 pages. What he did with language was beautiful and brilliant and meaningful. DFW was a shockingly smart person, the kind of writer who makes you understand what the word “genius” might actually mean.

Q.
“In the end, I don’t think I want to understand what drives a man to those ends. Maybe it is a side effect of the creative mind; an imbalance and trade-off for being able to produce consistently interesting and often great writing; it is that certain [finger flexion] je ne se quois, if you’d like to put it that way. I believe the best way to put it is that we were lucky to have him while he was around, and he is still there on bookshelves. Those are the riddles he left us to try and understand him by.”

[sigh]

Saying critics compared him to “Thomas Pynchon and John Irving,” seems odd to me. Isn’t that like saying, “This? Oh this is both a hand grenade and an apple.”

But maybe I just don’t appreciate Irving.

RIP DFW

gonna have the howling fantods the rest of the day. also going to reread consider the lobster.

This one hurts more than any of the other ones so far this year, even more so than Carlin, for me.

IJ is really unlike any novel out there, and I’ve ready Pynchon, and Gaddis. Brilliant and funny and sad, many times all at once.

And for the next week at least, I’m going to reread this passage of his each morning:

“TRY TO REMEMBER

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation — fun. And, if you can find your way back to fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double-bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the extreme unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you’re now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint."

The collective mind is now, suddenly, significantly less intelligent.

I was counting on him.

PEACE DFW

A very bright light has gone out. The world will be dimmer without him in it.

DFW, R.I.P.

DFW’ will be missed.

’ David Foster Wallace, MacArthur fellow, and author of Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster ‘’ and others.
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   ’’ A collection of short stories where Wallace goes to the adult film awards, sees the humor in Kafka and debates the merits of different editorial directions in the OED ‘’’
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          Oxford English Dictionary, the stalwart of prose, whose underbelly was exposed by DFW using the dreaded triple footnote.

One of the only living writers worth a shit. It feels selfish to say that what I mourn is what we’ve lost.

Shit! I’m reading Broom of the System right now. Shit!