Oh I am so sad.
I loved Wallace's book Infinite Jest. When the book first came out it was one of those wonderful exciting things. There was whole buzz around it, kind of like a William Burroughs book, or when Generation X was first published. It was so exciting to read a peers novel right in it's own time.
1 hour ago
CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead in his home, according to police.
Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.
It's so weird...I was thinking about him all this week. I was thinking about his novel...and something else. On one of my online book clubs last year, I had misquoted something about David Foster Wallace...and one of his agents came online and corrected my misquote. I always thought that was so cool and so efficient. I felt like an idiot, but I also thought how wonderful he has this person looking out for his reputation and legacy....
The novel Infinite Jest is a book I highly recommend and it is an amazing reading experience. I am sure like a few other amazing novels, one could spend a long studying the characters and juxtapositions. We have lost an incredible artist. Shit, that just sucks. And even mre admirable than being an inventive writer...it seems as if Wallace was good teacher. Shit this sucks.
In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College.
Gary Kates, the college's dean, called Wallace's death "an incredible loss."
"He was a fabulous teacher," Kates said Saturday. "He was hands-on with his students. He cared deeply about them. . . . He was a jewel on the faculty, and we deeply appreciated everything he gave to the college."
From Salon Magazine: David Foster Wallace's low-key, bookish appearance flatly
contradicts the unshaven, bandanna-capped image advanced by his
publicity photos. But then, even a hipster novelist would have to
be a serious, disciplined writer to produce a 1,079-page book in
three years. "Infinite Jest," Wallace's mammoth second novel,
juxtaposes life in an elite tennis academy with the struggles of
the residents of a nearby halfway house, all against a near-future
background in which the US, Canada and Mexico have merged,
Northern New England has become a vast toxic waste dump and
everything from private automobiles to the very years themselves
are sponsored by corporate advertisers. Slangy, ambitious and
occasionally over-enamored with the prodigious intellect of its author,
"Infinite Jest" nevertheless has enough solid emotional ballast to keep
it from capsizing. And there's something rare and exhilarating about a
contemporary author who aims to capture the spirit of his age.
Los Angeles Times Obituary
Infinite Jest at Wiki
Interview between Salon Magazine and David Foster Wallace
3 comments:
Yes, sad news. Here is a good quote for you from Foster Wallace
"[My] secret pretension ... I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn't be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won't be quite that ... glittery. but cold....
Fiction used to be people's magic carpet to other places.... You know, ''Oh, a really boring formulaic story but it takes place in Tibet.'' But now you turn on PBS and watch someone milking a yak.... Which means that one of fiction's fundamental jobs has been supplanted. But it has another one now. TV's illusion of access to other cultures is, in fact, an illusion. TV itself cannot comment on that."
Infinite Jest, Generation X and Fight Club, all 90’s books, and all with characters from your generation, Candy, reflect powerful visions of the world. I can see why David Foster Wallace was important to you.
Here are the liner notes for Generation X and Fight Club and they resonate with Infinite Jest. These authors seem to all have a vision in common of the world they live in.
“Finally…a frighteningly hilarious, voraciously readable salute to the generation born in the late 1950’s and 1960’s-a camaera shy, suspiciously hushed generation known vaguely up to now as twentysomething. Andy, Clare, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit “pointless jobs” in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they’ve mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory.
Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of storytelling, boozing, and working McJobs-“low=pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry.” They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.
A dark snapshot of the trio’s highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges-landscapes peppered with dead TV shows, “Elvis moments,” and with semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longs for permanence, for love, and for their own home.
Andy, Dag, and Clare are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have no where to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.” Generatiion X
“An underground classic since it’s first publication in 1996 “Fight Club” is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in this decade. Chuck Palahniuk’s darkly funny first novel tells the story of a godforsaken young man who discovers that his rage at living in a world filled with failure and lies cannot be pacified by an empty consumer culture. Relief for him and his disenfranchised peers comes in the form of secret after-hours boxing matches held in the basements of bars. Fight Club is the brainchild of Tyler Durden, who thinks he has found a way for himself and his friends to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler’s world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.” Fight Club.
Shit, I totally loved him too.
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