DFW 1962-2008

I am a person who dwells in discomfort. I look askance at happiness. It’s an alien land. I mistrust the easy, the normal, the enjoyable and the sane. I am, at heart, both a misanthrope and a masochist. Perhaps for those reasons, I am often struck most soundly by writers to whom I take an immediate and almost knee-jerk heartfelt loathing. These are the writers who shake me, whose words grab me in their pitbull jaws and whose words from which I extract myself embittered, bloodied and bettered. Although there are writers from whom I’ve learned and whom I love (Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, MFK Fisher), I have learned more from those I’ve hated (James Joyce, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding).

David Foster Wallace falls into this last camp. Since the year that it took me to read Infinite Jest (I read it at night, after stripping, in short and manic bursts while waiting to come down from the whirlagig night, while counting with an absent mind the throbs of blood in my pounding feet; I read it doggedly, I read it devotedly, and I read it disliking every artifice, even as I fell in love with it as a whole), I rarely go a day without summoning an image from the novel. The veiled face of the shrouded beauty, the P.G.O.A.T. The boys playing Eschaton. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants perched above the rim, observing all that America has become and pondering its imminent demise.

I swallowed the book in tiny, bite-sized morsels, all three narratives that unfolded with mechanized precision, every self-indulgent footnote, all needless thousand-plus pages. And then I went on to read everything else DFW had written. Which I loved and hated with equal measure. I ate his prose like brussel sprouts: something unpalatable to be ingested for reasons too complex to ponder and certainly not simply for the taste. I read it, and I often loathed it.

But I always admired it. I almost always felt the cutting green flash of jealousy. I frequently marveled at the twinned bodies of hubris and genius. And when I read signage that employs phrases like “One in ten businesses never reopen after a disaster,” I always think of DFW and his pigheaded, narcissistic devotion to English usage.

Last Friday, David Foster Wallace hung himself. I can’t not imagine his hands tying the knot. I can’t not wonder about his suicide note. I can’t not think of his wife finding his body, a thing once loved passionately and now blue and bloated and suddenly horrific. My mind goes that way, and not just because my family history circles around a long and rococo tradition of finding our loved one’s bodies in similar hideous states. What can I say? I read a lot.

An acquaintance of mine took a class with him. My acquaintance said that DFW was an unbelievable asshole, pompous and difficult and contradictory. My acquaintance was once embroiled in an altercation with DFW that ended only once DFW head-butted him in the solar plexus. I consider my acquaintance a lucky man. Were I once head-butted by DFW, I would have a story to tell until I died.

I’m very sorry that David Foster Wallace killed himself. I shall miss him and console myself with his insufferable, and often painfully beautiful, prose.

Comments

[Svasti]

Chelsea - first of all, welcome back!
Second, I have given you a blog award, which you can pick up here: http://svasti.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/my-nominations-arte-y-pico-award/
Third, I've only just posted a story on suicide myself: http://svasti.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/on-not-contemplating-suicide/

Its an awful subject. It doesn't matter if the person who killed themself was an asshole or not, its still a horrible experience.

I sincerely hope you keep writing.
~Svasti

[wingwoman]

Chelsea...nice to "see" you back...if only to acknowledge for a moment, someone as talented and as complex as yourself - it is a kindness...on every level.

like attracts like, rumor has it...as magnets.

[Pete]

CG,
As a moth is drawn to the flame, I am drawn to check your blog even when I think there will be nothing pristine for me to absorb. Today I was pleasantly taken aback at a fresh post.
Glad to hear from you, even it is fleeting.
Pete

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I check back occcasionally, too...

[Sondra Morin]

I'm glad to see you posting, if briefly.

I hope you will continue.

-s

[Gabriel]

Nice to see you back.
Gabriel

[m]

I check back almost every day too. I miss this blog and knowing you through it. Life's almost not the same. Without exaggerating, it's like giving up chocolate or the taste of sweet. Reading has brought me such pure pleasure. It's also changed my life to read your thoughts. I hope you post again, even once in awhile.

[Tiltmom]

I never made it through _Infinite Jest_, but I enjoyed his commencement speech at Kenyon:

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

And if you find eating brussels sprouts a chore, you really need to hie thee to S'Nice on a day when one of their daily specials is Roasted Cauliflower and Brussels Sprouts.

[Donna]

This is selfish of me. I, too, am glad to see you back, even if it's one time only to memorialize DFW (as you did, beautifully).

What's selfish is this: since 29 August I have been desperately wanting to hear your opinion of Sarah Palin. Even though I suspect you will cut her more slack than I can/will, I feel like your explanation would help me to feel more kindly towards her, instead of hating her as intensely as I do.

Chelsea, how you've revealed yourself here you are fully a woman, in a way that makes me empathetic and proud to be one too. Palin, by comparison is not a woman at all. I despise everything about her and what has brought her to the role she is in right now.

I say it's selfish because I don't want you or this blog to have to relate to politics, especially the sham of a democracy we seem to be operating in right now. So I'm sorry to raise such pitiful issues on Pretty Dumb Things. But I still really, really want to hear your opinion, like I've wanted to hear the opinion of every woman in my life for the last three weeks.

Best to you, as always.

[badinfluencegirl]

donna: my father would tell you that you reveal more about yourself with your judgement of sarah palin than you affect her at all.

well he would say it better and using english as fine, in it's own way, as miss chelsea's.

what a treat to see you here, even if just to visit. i don't know why i come here when i know it's just an empty house but it still makes me happy to see a light on in the window :)

[Angellover7777]

Loved your desription of yourself, though, I'm not such a masochist.
Like vonnegut, all dreams will eventually cease.
Have fun, and a great day, and a better tomorrow.
JBG

[Val]

I finally broke down & ordered IJ from Amazon after fruitless weeks cruising my favorite used bookstores (no one wants to let go of it, I guess) - I am struggling through the beginning, but will soldier on after your great description...
Good to see you posting again.

[The Underblawger]

I read this when you first posted it and found it to be a wonderful and beautiful remembrance. I still think about it. I thought you'd like to know that there is an extended piece about Mr. Wallace in the New Yorker at present. Regards.

UB

[chelsea g.]

UB,

Yes, I saw that--and thank you to my readers who also sent it to me. I expected an upsurge in DFW lore, frankly, and I'm glad its appearing in all its digressive, messy and fractured glory. It's a pale shadow of having the man back among us, but I'll take it.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.