David Foster Wallace commits suicide

[pure_mercury]

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead at home - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080914/ap_en_ot/obit_wallace)

I haven't read his stuff, although Infinite Jest has been recommended to me before. This is sad to hear. Too many of our great writers go out this way. His family is in my thoughts.

[Haight]

Well I'll have to admit that Claremont would be a really crappy place to live.

[V Profane]

Never read him myself, either, but that title, Infinite Jest, always stuck in my mind. From his Wiki page, he sounds like a guy who was too smart and too conscientious for modern life (which is rubbish).

[OK Radio]

I haven't read Infinite Jest, but for some reason I have seen that title recently. I can't remember why or how or in what context and that annoys me. Deeply.

[Jae Rae]

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead at home - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080914/ap_en_ot/obit_wallace)

I haven't read his stuff, although Infinite Jest has been recommended to me before. This is sad to hear. Too many of our great writers go out this way. His family is in my thoughts.


Thanks for posting this Merc. I never heard of him and should have. Three library reserves for Infinite Jest already.

Hideous Man and A Supposedly Fun Thing (about taking a cruise) were also recommended.

[Algora J]

What a tragedy. I loved his work and seen him at book readings.

Wow, we lost a genius to suicide. Incredible.

[Jae Rae]

From The Nation:

"One of the most vexing frustrations of the human condition is the fact that we are forever caged inside our own minds. Love, romantic and familial, and friendship, bring us as close as we ever get to inhabiting the soul of another, to see the world through others' eyes.

Reading is only other thing that comes close. A lot of reading is done to acquire information, to satisfy curiosity, to while away time, or engage in escape. But the rarest and most elevated experience a reader can have is to feel, briefly, in contact with another mind. To see one's one inchoate sentiments articulated so precisely, that our own inescapable and endemic solitude momentarily lifts. It's a profound connection. We can probably all name authors we feel this way about, and for me David Foster Wallace was that first and foremost. That's why I cried last night when I learned that he had committed suicide at age 46.

I read Infinite Jest, the summer between high school and college and it blew my mind. I loved it so much I returned to it again while living in Italy in 2000. I devoured his short story and non-fiction collections. (Stop what you're doing and go read the title piece in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.) My senior year of college I adapted his brilliant (and under appreciated) book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for the stage. One of the actors in it was John Krasinski (of TV's The Office), who is now making a movie version of the book. As much as any single writer and thinker, Wallace shaped my own sensibility. And I always held out hope that I'd meet him one day.

Wallace's project, which he lays out pretty clearly in this 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, was empathy. And as a hyper-brilliant mind, the path he took towards it, in his writing, was to use his raw intellectual horsepower to achieve a kind of moral enlightenment. There was, in this way, a merging of form and content: his writing worked because he was able to achieve this kind of brilliant, self-conscious, painfully self-aware, but nonetheless robust and heart-breaking empathy for his characters and subjects. And as a reader, the prose itself made one feel a similar kind of soul connection to both the writer and the people the writer described. He felt close. His characters felt close. And reading him I found that the prison bars of my own embedded subjectivity, my own selfish "default setting" was shaken, bent, expanded just enough to be able to glimpse something eternally, capital-T True. Something sublime.

His loss is an unimaginable tragedy."

[kuranes]

Bad news. I read "Infinite Jest" and an interview he did with David Lynch. He was a bright articulate guy.

[OK Radio]

I just figured it out. I bought Consider the Lobster on sale at Barnes and Noble at the end of August without knowing anything about him. He wrote a great essay about the McCain 2000 campaign.

[Sarcasticus]

So what was his MBTI type?

[proteanmix]

So what was his MBTI type?

Depression? Hypersensitivity? Creativity? Suicide?

Probably INFP. ;)

[Sarcasticus]

Depression? Hypersensitivity? Creativity? Suicide?

Probably INFP. ;)

I was thinking INTP but after watching this video, I think I agree with you.

YouTube - Le Conversazioni 2006 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVzhhvCRTCo)

[V Profane]

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23638511/the_lost_years__last_days_of_david_foster_wallace)