Happy looking fellow he was not.
Posted on 09/14/2008 12:51:00 PM PDT by mojito
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Nonetheless, prayers for the family.
RIP
How sad.
I never herd of this guy.
Nevertheless, suicide is tough on the family. Prayers for them.
I, on the other hand, found him to be on of the finest, most insightful writers writing today. And the breadth of his work...
How sad.
Happy looking fellow he was not.
Oh well, some where, some place, a billion or so people that never even heard of him couldn't care less.
Prayers too to all those who find them thus. May God fill their hearts with his love and guide them to resources that can lead them to joy, support, and clarity of His purpose for their life.
Wallace covered McCain's 2000 campaign, and the article he wrote for Rolling Stone about his experience has been expanded and published as a book this year.
BTW, Thomas Disch, a controversial writer of all sorts of things, also committed suicide two months back.
“His wife found him dead when she came home on Friday. That can’t have been pleasant.”
It is said that suicide is often an act of vengeance. It’s an attempt to punish someone in addition to oneself.
Not familiar with his work, but it’s sad. I have been through two close suicides, and it’s very hard on the survivors.
find (them=themselves) thus. May God . . .
Hanging yourself is such an act of hate towards others. The person who finds you is effected for the rest of their life. I think that’s one of the reasons people do it..to punish the living. I don’t think suicide as a whole is an act to punish others, but hanging oneself is.
I have a HS friend whose husband hung himself, she was considered a suspect for months. It was pretty hard because she didn’t get to mourn, she had to fight for herself.
Hanging does have a certain shock value. A person could OD on pills and not leave such a violent image. I heard some people shoot themselves, but in the shower so not to mess up the house.
I'm convinced it's a pretty selfish act and the people are so selfish they won't even go and talk to someone about it. Kind of a selfish cycle.
Apparently he had alluded to severe depression after his first successful novel. He was having trouble coping with success itself. My feeling is that his problems had been going on for at least a decade.
Some people have big problems with success. They can’t figure out what it means and whether it diminishes them. Odd, but true.
*David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist*
Wow, some sense of humor...unless this is just another auto-erotic-asphyxiation gone awry.
“I’m convinced it’s a pretty selfish act and the people are so selfish they won’t even go and talk to someone about it. Kind of a selfish cycle.”
It is indeed selfish in the extreme.
That said, emotional or physical pain of the intensity that precipitates suicide focuses all attention inwards, which is the very definition of selfishness.
I have had several friends commit suicide: they just didn’t feel they could ever get any better. I suspect that a couple of them could have.
People that express ignorant opinions about the validity of antidepressant medications particularly annoy me. Though no doubt over prescribed, they do save lives.
“Personally, I was a big fan of Wallace — I’ve actually read his doorstop dystopian satire Infinite Jest twice. Jest is a brilliant meditation on technology and addiction that has transcended cult status to being one of the most important and influential novels of the last few decades. Which is not to say Wallace was universally admired — his predilection for footnotes and other over the top stylistic quirks were very off putting to some people, but even those who didn’t especially care for Wallace usually recognized him as an immense talent. His detractors also had to admit that for all his pretension, Wallace’s writing was frequently hilarious. And as talented a fiction writer as he was, it’s almost unfair that his forays into journalism — as collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster — were also dazzling.
I didn’t agree with Wallace’s liberal politics but I had a deep respect for him because his work was always genuinely and profoundly moral — a very rare thing among contemporary fiction writers. In that sense, perhaps the best introduction to Wallace is a commencement speech he gave to Kenyon College a few years back. The speech contains an unfortunate suicide reference that will no doubt be needlessly highlighted in the days to come. But it’s this paragraph from that speech that’s really worth remembering:
‘And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.’”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODI2Y2Q4YTQwZGUwMmUxMjc1YjViN2ZkMzY3ZDcwZTA=
I didn't know that Thomas Disch recently committed suicide. Besides being an excellent SF writer who crossed over into mainstream fiction, Disch considered himself a "right-winger".
I didn't know that Thomas Disch recently committed suicide. Besides being an excellent SF writer who crossed over into mainstream fiction, Disch considered himself a "right-winger".
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