i am in the middle of oblivion and somehow managed to miss the fact of his suicide until i saw a review here yesterday. apparently i live under a rock. i have loved his work since i read brief interviews & girl with curious hair and can't wait to read infinite jest (although my reading time is chiefly on the subway, and it's quite a tome to cart around...)
RIP david wallace- we do love thee.

That syllabus was really cool. Even that had footnotes. The people that got to take that class were really lucky.
What a tragic, tragic loss.

Sophia, that's a great syllabus. Thanks for posting.

That really made me laugh, Rustam.

So, I found this kind of funny. Of all the brilliant observations and insights that Wallace imparted, I was most struck by his love/hate relationship with irony. And now for the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nas...

Thanks, Sophia.

I read your blog entry yesterday (linked from the Infinite Jest thread), and I thought it was really thoughtful, and really touching.

oh thats really nice - thanks for that.

I posted the syllabus of the class I took from him at Pomona, in case you want to read it and see the stories and books he chose to teach. http://www.alasophia.blogspot.com

I think I might be in the minority about the NYT piece. I would have felt very sickened by it if her highness of all things literary had a big change of heart and started praising him without reservations.

And on ghouls (which I'm happy to see you decided to call them independently of me), there were a couple of times today I wanted to started screaming at someone in the bookstore I work at.

First at the people who were leafing through the lone copy of Broom of the System, and then putting it back. I guess they decided if they couldn't get Infinite Jest they weren't going to jump on the bandwagon yet. It's irrational but I wanted to grab them and tell them to buy the book, because at least they might read it. Maybe I was being even more close minded than usual but I couldn't help thinking that someone who runs out to buy a book once they hear someone is dead probably isn't going to actually read a gigantic book.

The second incident was with a woman who was getting a little snotty with the idea that we didn't have any DFW non-fiction. I really wanted to scream at her that we had lots of copies when he was still alive.

Fuck, I never thought the death of an author would hit me so hard.

Marty,

That makes me sick, and it's clear in some of the other newspapers' send-offs as a well, like the critics feel the need to 'stick to their guns' about the petty differences they had about his work.

It's like they had saved a list of one-liners about Infinite Jest to slide into their review of DFW's next book. Because you can't review anything of Wallace's without mentioning IJ. Christ.

Daren,

I never met him, but in the back of my mind I always thought that I would. Like Karen, I'm just sad and a little weirded out by the people rushing to his stuff.

Also, it's just making it more expensive for me to buy the last few books of his I did not already have.

McSweeney's has a page of reminiscences:

http://mcsweeneys.net/

i had met him before, and spoken with him but i didnt know him in any real way. but when you read a monstrous book 7 times you feel a sort of affinity with the writer. not offended, just really sad, and just hate the ghoulish instinct that makes people want to read someone only when they have recently died.

Hey Karen and Chris, I hope I didn't offend you. Did you know Wallace personally?

It's not comforting to me, either. I would have rather had his next novel win the Pulitzer, THEN had people rush to read everything else.

But what can you do...Here's a quote from Infinite Jest that a friend sent me (I guess these sorts of things are floating around):

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

somehow thats not really comforting me.

I've been talking to a number of people about this and have been surprised by folks who have told me they haven't read anything by Wallace ever. He was the hot writer in the late '90s. Sounds like his death has inspired people to by his books in droves now.

there is a discussion board on the actual "infinite jest" page.

@Chris, I was also surprised that there weren't other groups. I suppose there might be an "Infinite Jest" discussion group. I logged on yesterday, and searched the groups and this was the only one that I found.

ugh. i am still sick-feeling about everything. i only met him a handful of times, its not like we were best pals, but he was such a sweet, unaffected, brilliant man.
and i had expectations... there is no one writing like him today, and it seems unfair that so many crappy writers are still alive.
i am (still) uncharacteristically speechless right now.

I was surprised that there wasn't already a group on Goodreads when I looked for one.

I tend to think of Goodreads as a better place for people who like literary fiction than places like Shelfari, but I guess that impression could be wrong.

Are groups themselves not very popular?

What a shock. A friend of mine messaged me last night to tell me about it, and I thought she was joking at first.

My first introduction to his writing was reading "The Asset" in the New Yorker. Right after that I jumped into Infinite Jest. I liked his writing quite a bit, but I was hard-pressed to say he was my favorite writer back then. Over the years, I began to appreciate him much more because his non-fiction writing really hit home with me. It's interesting to me that his non-fiction complemented his fiction so well.

I began with the essays, with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

Very bright mind, and a great observer of our culture.

All of the obituaries I've seen are just the journalist trying to prove that they're smart enough to have gotten his work, which is sort of irritating, but what can you do.

I don't want to see the word "postmodern" again today.

It's tough to know how to start, but I think the first thing I read by David Foster Wallace was his collection, The Girl with the Curious Hair. The story I read that first impressed me was Lyndon. His work was innovative and sharp. What else can I say? I think I'm still in shock about it. I was waiting to read his next great work. He was only 46.