David Foster Wallace Dead

I'm still in shock even now, almost an hour after first hearing about this. A few thoughts that must get out:

As suicidal as I've been over the past six months, I still wish for the chance to talk him out of this act.

This one is very hard to put into words, but I'll attempt it. With all of his writing that I've read, DFW thoughts hummed like a plucked string in my head, resonating whenever I watched tennis or contemplated Quebec politics or visited with the DJs at CJSW or even when I ate a trial-size chocolate bar or diapered a baby, for example. But now that string is broken. And there is no repairing it.

I cannot imagine a world without more DFW to look forward to. It's just WRONG.

Infinite Jest, at 1079 pages, was too short.

If you want to get a sense of his writing without plowing through nearly 1100 pages (although you would do that gladly once you started that book, I promise you), try this piece, Roger Federer as Religious Experience. As always, some of the best stuff is in the footnotes, so do not skip those. Here's the first one, as an example:

(1) There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

Update to add:
More DFW on the web:
·Good People (fiction)
·Host (about talk radio)
·Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage
·Consider the Lobster (pdf of Gourmet magazine article)
·Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address
·list of more at The Howling Fantods

Understanding why this means something:
·Thynk2much's entry expresses that connection one feels when reading his work. (That's also where I learned the news.)
·John Seery knew him.
·Infinite Space: Wallace by David Gates An appreciation.

He had a mind in which I wanted to dive and swim around, luxuriating in the complexity and sincerity.