Author David Foster Wallace commits suicide. RIP

[RetroLounge]

God damn...

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_popmachine/2008/09/david-foster-wa.html

I was about to go to bed when I read the terribly sad news that novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace was found dead in his California home at age 46 after apparently hanging himself. He was married and had been teaching English and creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont.

I profiled him for the Tribune back in early 1996 when his brilliant, prescient 1,000-plus-page novel "Infinite Jest" was being hailed as a masterwork. Wallace, who grew up in Urbana, was teaching at Illinois State University in Normal at the time and was wary of what all of the acclaim might do to him.



:cry:

RL

[RetroLounge]

1. Newsweek Article

http://www.newsweek.com/id/158935

When the news came that David Foster Wallace, only 46 years old, had hanged himself in his home in California, I opened his masterpiece, the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," at random and happened to land on a scene in which a recovering drug addict recalls a childhood moment of existential dread. "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted . . . I understood on an intuitive level why people kill themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling, I'd surely kill myself." We'll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work: some writers-Hemingway was one-seem to take years composing their suicide notes right under our very noses. In Wallace's last book, a story collection called "Oblivion"—oh, now we get it—the self-tormenting protagonist of "Good Old Neon," an ad man who has felt like a "fraud" his whole life (and who used to know one "David Wallace" when he was a kid) swallows antihistamines and drives his car into a bridge abutment. And in Wallace's commencement address to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, he dragged in—if not exactly out of left field, certainly out of left center—"the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."



RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. It is a terrible loss, my dear Retro...

Why is it that so many of our gifted authors are such delicate souls?

They write so beautifully, yet the world hurts them so much...

Safe passage to him...

:hug:

[Call Me Wesley]

3. Damn is right ...

Heidi told me this morning. Safe passage to him, and might he be free from suffering. Terrible loss. :cry:

[RetroLounge]

8. It really is...

It's been bothering me all day...

He was just a year younger than I am.

Damn, so much life wasted, and his poor wife...

:cry:

RL

[Tyrone Slothrop]

4. This is really upsetting me

I saw the news last night, and I still can't really believe it's true...

I too grew up just outside Urbana...I went to college at U of I and was living across the street from Hessel Park -- where Wallace learned to play tennis -- when my girlfriend loaned me a copy of Girl With Curious Hair. It was my first introduction to his work.

Having literary ambitions myself, he inspired me on a number of levels. He was a master of the language and an amazingly entertaining story-teller.

You will be missed, David. I hope you found some peace.

[RetroLounge]

6. Girl With Curious Hair

was my first intro to his work also.

I just found a first edition hard copy a few months ago. I will be rereading it this week.

:cry:

RL

[Tyrone Slothrop]

7. I've read all of his work except for Infinite Jest

I'll be starting it next weekend, I think.

[Shakespeare]

5. Great loss, and my heart breaks for his wife, who found him.

While I don't discount his pain--and I say this as someone who has suffered from severe depression, and considered suicide at one time--what a hideous thing to do to his wife.

A tragedy on so many levels. :cry: