A year ago today David Foster Wallace died. Read the particulars here. All I want to say is very few, if any, writers have excited me the way Wallace has/does. His name on a magazine cover or in its table of contents was all I needed to know to buy.
I never had more fun reading a book, or experiencing, imbibing, what have you, any "work of art" than I did reading Infinite Jest in the fall of 1996. All 1,000 crazy pages of it, including all the funky endnotes. The short stories of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men still make me itch. And the breadth of his non-fiction writing, humorous and enlightening and so congenial, made whatever he was writing about--state fairs, junior tennis, grammar textbooks--the only thing you cared about.
Bob Mould, a fairly great guitarist himself, once said of seeing Richard Thompson in concert something like this: "I looked at my hands and thought I either have to practice a helluva lot more or give up the guitar completely." A writer could think the same thing about writing while reading Wallace.
I used to read to my classes an excerpt from his state fair essay in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. They laughed. I found this clip of him reading a different excerpt from the same essay.
A professor I once had, remarking about the people who criticized the poet Anne Sexton for killing herself, said something like this: "They never give her credit for all the days she woke up and lived." Thank you for living and writing, David Foster Wallace.
Pylon-Read A Book
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