David Foster Wallace, dead at 46
Author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. Roughly two hours ago, his wife found him at home, an apparent suicide by hanging. According to the NY Review of Books, his works had given us “a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” –Infinite Jest
And, I think, his greatest contribution to the contemporary literary world was his palpable frustration and vehement rebuttals of our current writers’ (i.e. Dave Eggers, The Believer, David Sedaris, etc.) obsession with irony:
“[It] tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’” –E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
poor david foster wallace…so it goes. having contemplated in, around, under, through, and over suicide myself (which I am convinced thinking about might be more fun than actually killing yourself)…I cannot find any sympathy for this man. first, if you’re going to kill yourself, do something fucking original. stab yourself in the femoral artery or the eye or dick or whatever seems creative at the time. but hanging? boring fucking hanging? you pussy. you should be ashamed of yourself. and leaving your wife to find you…can we say already been done before ian curtis? of all the fun and exciting ways you could have gone out, you chose to leave like a criminal.
plus the older i get, and i’m still a twentysomething, the more i realize that there are a million billion fucking things to try out, experience, and enjoy. why cut it short? again i’ve dreamed my own death, planned my funeral, and cut my wrists…and the longer i go without killing myself, the more i realize that someday in some bullshit sacramental moment I get to die. so why rush? i definately, most surely, guaranteed, beyond any shadow of doubt get to fucking die. so why not experience as much as possible before that time? why not know what it feels like to jump off a cliff into water, see the pyramids, suffer through poverty, get rich quick, lose your high metabolism, get fat, diet, get skinny, get old shriveld balls, lose your motor faculties, depend on depends, seek out love beyond the storybooks, break someones heart, do everything you can to mend and win it back, have life get worse than it currently is, do backflips on snowskis, kill at tiger, save a polar bear, smack a cop, beat the shit out of a robber then pay for his medical bills. to know what it feels like to battle cancer. to live longer than everyone you ever knew well and go to all their funerals…
so Mr. D.F.W. you traded in your few more short decades of experience for what? better book sales? escape from dissallusionment? far enough down the line in the very very end, all the accomplishments that everyone has made, even smart guys like DaVinci, will be forgotten, lost and gone forever. instead your suicide is just another spilled drop out of a bucket before all the water was poured out.
the only true loss is your own.
~tragicjunkie007
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