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‘ 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.

DFW, R.I.P.

I was counting on him.

PEACE DFW

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.”

But maybe I just don’t appreciate Irving.

RIP DFW

I’m not going to understand.