is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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oh, sad.
I�m really sad about David Foster Wallace. And it�s a sadness that has hit me in a way that I would not have expected, had you asked me to expect such an unexpected death. I never met the guy. But his writing meant a lot to me and, more importantly, it stood for something. Sure, most people want to be quick to point out that David Foster Wallace might have been too in love with his own cleverness. But that might be a defensive sort of criticism�not many of us could muster the kind of brilliance he put into everything he wrote. And the cleverness of his writing, its involutedness and the deep use of reference to self and others, is also part of what made his work great. He was smart enough to know that writing takes sides even when it pretends not to, and that writing can be really selfish and self-involved even when it sets out to communicate with others or help others. It is a form of retreat from the world as surely as it is a way of reaching out. (And this is why the salon article on DFW�s passing by Laura Miller is the one I read today that I like best.) And so he always tried to undermine the possibility of that selfishness by offering other views within any view he authored. I think that�s why my favorite of his books (that I�ve read� I have to admit I�ve never been able to finish Infinite Jest) is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of short stories that imagines its way into the minds of people none of us want to be, or describes back to us things about ourselves that we might not want to see, or satirizes the many ways we keep ourselves apart from each other�and does so without slipping into the mechanism of irony that would only increase the distance. It�s no easy thing to do. He never tried to make it easy for anyone in his writing. That is one of the many things I admire about him.
A friend of mine who is a friend of his once declared that he wanted to set me up on a date with him. And who would say no to that?! A date with a man possessing one of the most brilliant minds of my generation. I said sure but somehow doubted it would ever come to pass. Apparently this was a plan this friend of mine had been hatching in his head for some time, waiting for DFW to move to California where the meeting might happen. My friend said that he wanted us to meet because he thought we thought alike, and I would understand him. Of course I can�t say whether that is true. We never ended up meeting. Life is complicated. I think that he and I have had some of the same thoughts. Perhaps many of us have�the thoughts that come to people who try to write about how badly human beings treat each other and then are harassed by the next thought, that they are only describing their own faults, hypocritically. I appreciated that about his writing. It was unapologetically erudite but always also pulled its own pedestal out from beneath itself. [Here's an admission�and I have not failed to notice that in order to do this I am employing one of his favorite devices, digression, and am even doing it for reasons similar to his own, but much less artfully�I am undergoing some self-loathing that, as I write about how sad I am about DFW�s death, I seem also to have made it into a story about me. You see? Why am I telling the story about the non-date? Does it add to the point I am trying to make as I think it does, or do I just want to tell the story for selfish reasons?] And so on. He was better at acknowledging the impossibility of any of us knowing whether we have escaped our own narcissism than I�ll ever be, and he did it in a way that really challenges the role of reader as much as it questions the place of writing. ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE, READING THIS? he might ask. IF SO, WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU UNTAINTED? We are all implicated in the sickness he was usually trying to describe.
But it wasn�t only about sickness. There is in his writing so much intense pleasure of text, a deeply well-read well-honed and unapologetically learned love of words and their many, many uses. He never made it easy, but the work rewards you for trying.
It seems that there were some depths to the despair in some of his writing that I myself cannot fathom, because today I feel not only sad but shocked, like someone punched me in the stomach. I do not understand. It is a terrible, regrettable loss.
12:16 a.m. - September 15, 2008
js - 2008-09-15 14:31:24
ps-- I couldn't really sleep last night, thinking about DFW's suicide, and his wife finding him, and why do people always hang themselves in their bathrooms, and did he have second thoughts when it was too late, and so on, all horrible. When I finally fell asleep I had a dream about him. This is strange because I don't often remember my dreams. In the dream, he and I and a lot of other people, all strangers to each other, were in a room together. Wedding gowns and other unimportant things were being discussed. Everything was in code. What seemed like an innocent conversation was actually a form of claim-staking about wealth, status, being single or coupled, successful or not. (I'm abridging this here because dream descriptions are boring.) I desperately wanted to say something to break through the conversation. And when I did, all I did was make myself look superior (not my intent, and part of the problem). I wasn't sure if he could see that I'm not a terrible person. Thematically, it was all very DFW. ....And now I have to go think about Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Everything is very ugh.
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