Your correspondent is sad.philip_tallonSeptember 14 2008, 03:39:46 UTC
Whoa.
This was not a headline I expected to read tonight. Very unexpected. But also, in accordance with the rules of poetic excellence, perfectly comprehensible in retrospect.
I just watched DFW on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago (though the interview was 5 years old), and saw in the writer a real struggle with the expectations of him. He seemed kind of like a version of Kurt Cobain: super self-aware and agonized over his own failure to transcend his persona.
Though this will sound incredibly mocking, I'm sure that a small part of his pre-suicide misery was a knowledge that his actions were so cliche.
Anyway, A, I know this DFW was a big figure in your lit. world, and I think you said it well: "And DFW, man... I don't know him at all. But he had the words, you know?"
I linked to his his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College before. A choice excerpt:...here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. I'd start with his non-fiction, the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again in particular. If you cotton to that, you can dip into and/or attempt to tackle his 1,000+-page novel Infinite Jest, which took me the better part of 5 years, on and
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This was not a headline I expected to read tonight. Very unexpected. But also, in accordance with the rules of poetic excellence, perfectly comprehensible in retrospect.
I just watched DFW on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago (though the interview was 5 years old), and saw in the writer a real struggle with the expectations of him. He seemed kind of like a version of Kurt Cobain: super self-aware and agonized over his own failure to transcend his persona.
Though this will sound incredibly mocking, I'm sure that a small part of his pre-suicide misery was a knowledge that his actions were so cliche.
Anyway, A, I know this DFW was a big figure in your lit. world, and I think you said it well: "And DFW, man... I don't know him at all. But he had the words, you know?"
This should be on his tombstone.
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I'd start with his non-fiction, the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again in particular. If you cotton to that, you can dip into and/or attempt to tackle his 1,000+-page novel Infinite Jest, which took me the better part of 5 years, on and ( ... )
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Why selfish?
The world can't possibly be a better place without him in it.
From what I've read about people who come to suicide, my guess is that he didn't feel that...or couldn't.
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