Remembering DFW

While I'm sitting here, writing some very strange new sort of metafiction art that isn't talking about itself as a story, but rather talking about itself (art) as art, I can't help but think about the fact that three hundred and fifty-six days ago, David Foster Wallace -- man of Infinite fame from footnotes, bandanas, and tennis -- had the one bad idea in his entire life, which unfortunately for him, me, you, and all the rest of this world, was the last bad idea in his life. I can't write a eulogy for him, not in any sense that would do him justice (a remarkably adequate one has already been written by D.T. Max and can and should be found at the following address: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max), so I'm really not going to try, but as the anniversary of his death approaches us, I still can't help but think of him in such deeply loving terms, and I've never even met him. A large part of that comes from the fact that I hadn't read anything of his while he was living, despite the fact that my parents had more than one copy of his books on our shelves at home, and that friends of mine were virtually shoving Infinite Jest down my throat with sugar cubes. In fact, I remember talking to a friend of mine in a restuarant in Chicago last year, and remarking upon what a sad several months that literature had gone through. "Yes," I had said, "it's a shame about Updike, but he was old, you know, and that sort of thing happens."

My friend said something resembling "Fuck Updike," but much kinder and along the lines of something you could potentially hear on the six o'clock news (she is, after all, a mother, and in good practice of censoring herself). "Don't you think David Foster Wallace's suicide was worse?"

I had remembered hearing about this, sometime in the fall, and seeing a different friend of mine tearfully paging through a dog-eared copy of Broom of the System, and I said: "Maybe, but Updike just had longer to say what he had to say."

I cringe, today, when I think about saying that, and more, the fact that I'm now publishing it for the whole world to read, if they choose, because I realize now how utterly uneducated I must have sounded. While I haven't taken the time to read all of Updike, as I am currently doing with Wallace, I can assure you that while Updike had his amazing and journalistic propensity for finding the facts of the matter at hand, David Foster Wallace was concerned with nothing less than finding out "what it meant to be a fucking human being."

There is nothing I can write in memory of him that will take away the literary equivalent of white-guilt that I feel every time I remember that I had every opportunity to read him while he was alive, but still for whatever reason chose not to (likely due to the fact that upon first look, his fiction is rather akin to reading the instructions on a ventilator). It is a very strange feeling to know that, were he alive, and were I to email him a question, I have very little doubt that he would answer me. I kick myself every time that I think about his life, and how every word he wrote was in pursuit of human beings dropping the charade of proper this-and-that, and just trying for one minute to get over themselves and to be unalone, instantaneously even.

All I've got to leave you with is a small collection of remembrances that I read when I'm trying to think of things to write about. One is above, the Max New Yorker piece, and the other is below, an interview on Salon.com by Laura Miller. Lastly, please read him, and if it's something hard to figure out or what-have-you, reread it. Everything he has written is worth it, I promise.

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html