(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

• The only thing I really read by David Foster Wallace was a couple of articles.  But I was taken with a comment he made which is mentioned in several of the obits today, characterising his generation as being full of people like him - “successful, obscenely well-educated, and sort of adrift”.  For me he always symbolised a specific type - the kind

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I've always been out of touch with contemporary literature and didn't know Wallace, but I wish I knew this America where his and my generation (I'm 4or 5 years older) were successful and "obscenely well educated."

Yes it's tragic for his wife, but the poor guy had been depressed for decades, and it's sometimes easy to forget that that still takes lives, despite Prozac.

The economy is bad enough that it may be better not to think about it and just to pray to all the gods that the bastids in power here are forced to vacate at the end of the year. Then maybe something can start to be done :-(

The Jonas Brothers--had to wikipedia em. Who what where and why bother?

the elderly curmudgeon

[wwidsith]

Yes...I am not very good at understanding depression.. it has affected close friends of mine, one of whom killed himself, and I find it very difficult. i do try though, and I think I am usually pretty sympathetic.. up to the point of selfishness which is involved here.

[muckefuck]

See, I don't know that "selfishness" is really what's involved. Suicide isn't generally a decision which comes from a very rational place, so it's problematic to talk about it as if it were on a par with, say, cheating on your spouse or screwing your brother out of his inheritance. When Spaulding Gray killed himself, I read an angry rant about him not doing enough to prevent it. The only reason I thought that had any validity whatsoever is that his mother committed suicide and he, being an extremely self-aware monologuist, knew precisely how susceptible he was to falling prey to suicidal depression. In the same way that it doesn't make sense to blame someone for things they do when blind drunk, but it does to hold them responsible for starting to drink in the first place, it only really makes sense to blame someone for not doing more to prevent a slide into depression.

[wwidsith]

You're right of course... but I can't help it, I just think of what his wife is now having to cope with and it makes me upset more than his depression makes me sad.

[desayuno_ingles]

At least here in America, over a 20-year span, mutual funds have never lost money. That's what I keep telling myself as my two ROTH accounts dwindle.

[zenithblue]

I definitely recommend picking up Infinite Jest if you're at all inclined. I don't think its currency is too wasted by the waste of his death.

Wallace was more of a critic of that sad numbed life you describe than a genuine member of its ranks--though of course he was, to a certain effect, fighting his own demons (the bandanna and the grunge look a bit of a self-deprecating joke on his part, I've always suspected). I'm a little too sad right now to pay adequate homage to his work, but I will say that the central struggle of his writing is the attempt to discover/create true empathy and compassion in a world where communication has been boiled down to codified irony or mass-produced nonsense. He had a profound effect on my life, in any case--Infinite Jest is the book that has affected me the most deeply.

In any case, it's definitely worth looking closer at his work. I hope to god we don't all start perpetrating the Sylvia-Plath crime of reading all his words through his suicide from here on out.

[wwidsith]

That's so great...you know out of all the stuff I've read in the last couple of days, this little bit from you is what will make be go and buy a copy this week.