Sensible Erection | The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

Sunday, 2 November 2008

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

quote [ All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly. ]

Longish and goodish article on DFW from RS.

also,

http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf
http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1994-07-0001729.pdf
http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1991-12-0000710.pdf
http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf
http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf

[literature] [by Lord of the Barnyard@7:04pmGMT] [+10 Insightful]

Comments

xgp007 said @ 7:17pm GMT on 2nd Nov
Great read, thank you.

Space_1889 said @ 7:37pm GMT on 2nd Nov
Interesting read - helped me to understand why I can't stand his fiction but enjoy his non-fiction.

k0k0peli said @ 5:09pm GMT on 3rd Nov [Score:-2 Troll]
Another view, via Exile.Ru:

Daily Inquisition: David Foster Wallace

"Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: David Foster Wallace should have been dead to begin with—and it finally hit him, at age 46. That is, 46 years too late. The crime isn’t the suicide, but the belatedness of it. What took you so long, DFW—and why now, when the idiots who read you will mistake it for some grand existential act? He could at least have had the decency to make his death look more appropriate to his mediocre output—say, for example, death by bicycle accident, or death by some rare form of intestinal cancer. Most 46-year-old mediocrities die that way, why couldn’t he? His entire literary output barely ranked a step up from a Frasier episode; he leaves nothing behind but an embarrassing giant blowjob of John McCain from a 2000 issue of Rolling Stone, and some unreadable book as thick as an anvil, full of spot-the-literary-allusion games for middlebrow academics: Highlights magazine for grad students. His hackery was crime enough, and would have made him almost forgettable, except that he had the nerve to stink up the whole literary-suicide Grand Final Act. Now, no one with an ounce of literary vanity can kill themselves for at least another 50 years, until the stench of this fat-cheeked middlebrow’s suicide wears off, and the field is once again cleared of his three pompous whitebread names."

Go ahead, downmod this into oblivion.

Baxter_UK said @ 7:53pm GMT on 2nd Nov
Very interesting, especially his experiences with drug-therapy.

Sometimes it's a shame that life sucks so much.

Class1Product said @ 8:20pm GMT on 2nd Nov
"You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly."

I have never heard that spoken correctly until now.

Baxter_UK said @ 9:43pm GMT on 2nd Nov
Indeed.

J-Loser said @ 9:31pm GMT on 2nd Nov
Very moving.

k0k0peli said @ 9:38pm GMT on 2nd Nov

Cakkafracle said @ 11:26pm GMT on 2nd Nov
i dunno, but reading ads featuring a slogan 'Keep Going' in the article is a little... SE

f00m@nB@r said @ 12:14am GMT on 3rd Nov

sn said @ 3:10pm GMT on 3rd Nov
I keep remembering that he's dead, and why, and what it was like for him, and it terrifies me. I wish I could have done something to help him?