
David Foster Wallace. Dead at 46. - llimllib
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/09/14/david_foster_wa.html
======
doubleplus
And here's DFW's turn on Charlie Rose 11 years ago:
<http://www.charlierose.com/guests/david-wallace>

And a great commencement speech from Kenyon U. three years ago:
<http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html>

fwiw: "This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface,
actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit
coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot
themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that
most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal
arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your
comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to
your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely,
imperially alone day in and day out. "

------
fallentimes
Cheers to Kedrosky for saying "Dead" instead of "Passed' or something else
equally infuriating or ambiguous.

Depression is a very serious problem and the US has one of the highest
depression rates in the "first world." Rest in peace David Foster Wallace; I'm
sad you weren't able to find it here.

------
babyshake
His essay about descriptive and prescriptive approaches to dictionary writing
changed my life.

If you read the essay, you'll see it's actually about much more than that.

~~~
fallentimes
Could you please link to it (I tried finding it via google)?

Edit: I found this: <http://is.gd/2CpH>

Is that the one you were talking about?

~~~
jraines
[edit] -- That's it. I think the version in "Consider the Lobster", which is
called "Authority and American Usage" is a bit longer, though

It's my second favorite essay of all time -- after DFW's "E Unibus Pluram"[1],
which is television and, more broadly, the modern life of spectation.

[1] From "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

------
tptacek
If this isn't "Hacker News" to you, it will be soon: start with "Consider The
Lobster" or "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", two amazing essay
collections. The audiobook for "Lobster" is narrated by DFW and footnoted _in
the audio_.

Here's a DFW piece on the McCain 2000 campaign for Rolling Stone, which is
especially resonant this year:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18420304/the_weas...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18420304/the_weasel_twelve_monkeys_and_the_shrub)

------
brianmckenzie
_Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need
ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your
intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud,
always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these
forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're
unconscious. They are default settings._

RIP DFW.

------
yan
Feeling slightly ashamed that I haven't heard of him earlier, I have a
question to the HN crowd: How did you hear of him before?

It's a shame to hear of someone people respect this much post-mortem. I wonder
if you can infer a body of work that's important today and published recently
from a group of similar-minded people like HN.

~~~
delackner
I had the great luck to be given Infinite Jest by a friend who had read it,
and I cannot praise it enough. It is by far the most amazing book I have ever
read, achieving a clear and full vision into the world of its characters'
internal thought processes to a degree I had not known was possible.

After reading Infinite Jest, I have struggled to find any author to equal its
vitality, and have been frequently disappointed by the flat hollow fakeness of
most works I have read since it, by authors both new to me (Paul Auster) and
old (William Gibson).

His use of language has a kind of magical... it is hard to get exactly how he
does it but his writing brings his characters alive.

I am crushed and saddened by his death and the tragedy of its cause.
Depression haunts the people in many of our lives. It is a terrible disease
made worse by the mistaken notion that melancholy is somehow noble or simply a
fact of creativity, an illness to be proud of. It is certainly not.

------
david927
I think Wallace was the greatest writer of his generation. Period. This news
breaks my heart.

~~~
unalone
I think his generation is pretty close to this current one. Infinite Jest was
the 90s, right? (I've never read it, sadly.)

I feel like the novel is winding down, actually. There's no great
proliferation of ideas any more. The last great author I can think of was
Beckett; after him, everybody I've read really seems to be struggling to do
something new. Even Murakami (who, not counting Wallace, I think is the
greatest of the generation) is less innovative than the authors who preceded
him.

Is it possible that a novel as a pure-prose medium can be exhausted in terms
of ideas? Because I think (and I've written rather extensively about this)
that for the novel to go on, it'll have to evolve to match current technology,
in the way that Coupland and Danielewski do it. But that means a departure
from pure literature, in a way.

