Re: The D.T.Max article in The New Yorker.
What I found affirmative or inspirational, I'm not sure which, was reference to Wallace's enormous ambition for novels to mean something positive to the reader, to serve some purpose. I was moved by the quotation from his Dostoevsky essay in Lobster asserting his desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction." What I have admired about his writing besides his enormous intelligence and the energy poured into the work was the admirable quality of wanting to get at the truth of anything he wrote about while maintaining, always, a belief that life can and should have more meaning than enslavement to acquisition of whatever's desired: a more desirable state of mind, a more desirable ranking (as among Tennis players), more wealth, more hedonism, more distraction. He so thoroughly grasps the clusterings of different kinds of acquisitiveness that his aims in his final novel, if not misrepresented, strike me as inescapably similar to the premises of Buddhism, which I would oversimplify as designating the primary cause of suffering as craving. And that craving can be slaked by attention to the fullness of what you have and are at any moment, instead of what you don't want to be or feel and what you think you want or need.

Living in the present. Beyond boredom, beyond wish-fulfillment, the quiet joy of dwelling in the moment.

On a completely different note, I was reminded how profoundly difficult mental illnesses are, and the culpability of self-improvement prophets, including some of our most admired Buddhist teachers, in insisting that antidepressants cloud the mind and that giving them up will allow mental clarity.

I have a son who has suffered from extreme depression and he almost did not make it through his teens because of his resistancce to 'medicating.' He
wanted to be his 'authentic self,' even if that meant suffering. Taking antidepressants is not homologous to taking addiction-provoking drugs (alcohol included). Somehow, though, it acquires an almost worse cultural connotation, especially among young people. If you take 'drugs,' if you get high or loaded, you're 'fun.' If you take anti-depressants, there's something wrong with you.

The Max article sent me off on a writing jag about depression, DFW, cultural perceptions about mental illness, and our "in-justice system."

Finally, I am reading Wallace on a regular basis. I hope I will be able to stir up a resumption of some discussion about the works themselves. We'll see.
I have posted reviews of A Supposedly Fun Thing... and Consider the Lobster. I have
dozens of pages of response to Infinite Jest as well but not posted: he seems to inspire gargantual garrulity in my responses. Not as brilliant as his, but such fun to write.

David Foster Wallace’s Last Novel Forthcoming

Published: March 2, 2009

A third and final novel by David Foster Wallace will be released posthumously by his longtime publisher, Little, Brown & Company, The Associated Press reported. The novel, "The Pale King," is expected to be released in 2010. According to The New Yorker, which published excerpts of the manuscript on Monday, it focuses on a group of I.R.S. agents working in a Midwestern office and was about one-third complete in 2007. The novel was unfinished when Mr. Wallace committed suicide in September. Little, Brown said that it would release the book, which runs "several hundred thousand words," along with "notes, outlines and other material," according to The A.P. Little, Brown previously announced that it would publish in April the 2005 graduation speech Mr. Wallace gave at Kenyon College in Ohio as a book called "This Is Water."

- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/books/...

And more assorted things:

An article with several good links embedded (two really good articles on Wallace, one which focuses on his struggle to write the aforementioned, forthcoming novel):

http://kottke.org/09/03/the-pale-king-da...

and most excitingly a chunk of the forthcoming novel (The Pale King) called "Wiggle Room":

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/feature...

and two marked up pages of the original manuscript for The Pale King plus two pieces of accompanying artwork done by Karen Green, Wallace's wife:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bo...