David Foster Wallace
It doesn’t take much to remain shallow in this culture we live in. I know I managed to stay unconcerned well into my early twenties despite an unconventional childhood and a frankly stellar amount of opportunities for personal improvements in my adolescence. Eventually though the fear of an unnoticed death crept through my hardened defenses. It happened while I was working in Ye Olde Sandwich Shoppe 1 in Garmisch Partenkirchen. Every day I sliced open six ounce plastic sacks of processed lunchmeat, poured out the juices which kept the meat 2 fresh 3. I couldn’t open the packets too soon before the lunch rush due to the individual servings discoloring wherever they were exposed to air. Apart from that small bit of strategizing my days were my own and I was free to stare out the window or read until someone came in and ordered something.
I ploughed through the classics, Heinlein and Asimov, Silverberg and Zelazney but it was the thought of rereading Piers Anthony’s collected works 4 that drove me to ask for reccommendations from a well read peer.
That’s it. That is the extent of my interaction with David Foster Wallace back then. His name went down on a list next Bret Easton Ellis and Mark Leyner. I had the whole of Henry Miller’s output not to mention the beats to get through before I could even think about reading something contemporary.
So let’s move a few years forward in time and three thousand miles in space. I am living on the South side of Chicago above a Lithuanian Laundromat. My neighbors are an entire family of gangbangers, we don’t talk much. I don’t know anyone in Chicago and I don’t want to because I have fallen in a sort of platonic love with the Main branch of the Chicago Public Library; A full city block rising eight stories above the street, crammed with books and reference materials which I spent all of my spare time with.
I was pursuing any materials about William Vollman at the time 5 Wallace and Vollman were featured in the same Review of Contemporary Fiction 6 and I read E Unibus Pluram 7 before I returned the journal.
So I gave that big doorstop of a book that everyone was talking about a chance. 8
so he switched to chewing tobacco ...
A month 9 later I emerged from my seedy den with a new purpose. My lodestone had been Pynchon but here was a new and different approach to the massive fictions I had been working my way through. I immediately discarded Gass10 and Cheever11; Auster12 went out the window along with Brett Easton Ellis13.
Thank you David, for pointing out how interesting real people are and Thank You for freeing them from the pathos ridden sympathetic14, sympathetic. reportage ghetto they had been corralled in. If you weren’t around then let me tell you how it was. Literary Criticism15 had taken a turn into Post-Modernism16. A typical PoMo commentator will use quasiscientific phrases and turgid, murky outrage to “shock” the bourgouise establishment into recognizing the inherent inequality endemic in Post Industrial cultures. Art, Letters and Film had begun a serious period of navel gazing as it was considered taboo to speak in an “other’s” voice17. So what ended up happening18was that artists and writers19 began churning out self indulgent reflections of their own alabaster magnificence and left the larger cultural questions to the minority writer or artist20. So what David did was write in the voices of all kinds and colors of people and he did it well, so fucking well. Here is a passage from the first tenth of Infinite Jest in which he speaks in the voice of a young person from the projects21.
Reginald tell Wardine to hush herself and lie down quiet. He put Shedd Spread out the kitchen on Wardine cuts on her back. He run his finger with grease so careful down pink lines of her getting beat with a hanger, Wardine say she do not feel nothing on her back ever since spring. She lie stomach on Reginald floor and she say she ain’t got no feeling in her skin of her back. When Reginald gone to get water she ask me the truth, how bad is her back look when Reginald look at it. Is she still pretty, she cry.
I don’t know if you have ever tried it but it is hard to speak in someone else’s voice. There is the whole business of that voice in your head asking you, “Who do you think you are anyway?” and, “The nerve of this guy, can you believe it?”
Not to mention the eyes of all those potential readers, now or in the future and everyone of them with a better grasp of whatever is true and right than you due to their having lived that much farther down the timeline. It’s daunting and perilous and any other word you might think of which indicates uncertainty and danger and toil.
Last year on September 12th David Foster Wallace was found dead by his own hand. He left behind a wife, two dogs and a black screaming hole in the fabric of reality. I never met him but I had hoped to. I feel like I knew him through his works but maybe that wasn’t so.
I feel in some way responsible for his death, like if I had written that letter I composed in my head and sent that letter that it would be the letter that put the whole business off for another day and then maybe that day would have been just an awesome fucking day and then he would have opened that dog shelter the New Yorker mentioned22. Scenarios like that and others ran through my mind in between just staring at the wall and forgetting and then remembering again and that’s how it’s been for me and I am guessing some others in this world and maybe if we all had written that letter it would have made a difference even if it was just a difference in the amount of guilt we all feel now about this guy who was sad sometimes whom we never really knew very well except through the words he had written.
On Wikipedia
New Yorker Article
News
Excellent Interview with Charlie Rose
Fanboys
Excellent Interview with Dave Eggers
- on the American kaserne ↩
- Whether it was turkey, ham or roast beef the meat had the same grain and mottled complexion. ↩
- as defined by the FDA ↩
- especially the later Xanth novels ↩
- having just finished The Ice Shirt ↩
- with Susan Daitch; Summer ‘93, Vol XIII, #2 ↩
- which should be in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again ↩
- I had read Broom of the System but that was when I was still hoovering up everything in my path and I didn’t think too much about it at the time. ↩
- Okay two. ↩
- irrelevant , like Cheever he writes about people who simply weren’t me, white (although I too am white, most of the time) wealthy educated Easterners whose concerns seemed to be elaborations on the theme of “Am I still a valid person although I’ve never suffered?” (no) ↩
- see above ↩
- a gaseous ruminator ↩
- haha, David once commented on his incipient jowls but I can’t find the quote so you’ll just have to take my words for it. It was during his 80’s brat pack star turn. I can’t remember him writing anything as cruel as that since and BEE does have them now, the jowls I mean. ↩
- not empathetic ↩
- The savvy writer follows such things ↩
- A philosophical cul-de-sac first used as a tool to “fix” cultural institutions during the sixties. Very effective when tearing things down but you know, babies and bathwater … ↩
- and really, it was necessary for while. White people did get all the good gigs for like, two hundred years or something ↩
- because they still ran things ( people of the future, the time I speak of is the time you know as “PreBama”) ↩
- who like to eat. ↩
- to great effect, check out Negrophobia or The House on Mango Street just off the top of my head ↩
- race and gender unknown ↩
- here ↩
[...] David Foster Wallace an appreciation [...]
[...] David Foster Wallace an appreciation [...]
Hugely enjoyed this piece. Serves as a timely reminder to not put off the things we were ‘thinking’ of doing and instead make them a reality..and then some.
yes and on that note I’ll be adding another page to this soon. Just some of his text and reviews that haven’t been swept up into the omnibus that will come out with his posthumous novel.
thanks for the props as well. had my heart on my sleeve in this one.