Category Archives: Writing

Wyatt Mason, over at the book blog of Harper's magazine, does a close, literary reading of a few sentences of a writer struggling with the impossibility of saying anything new about 9/11. The sentences and analysis are a pleasure to read. It's also a pleasure to discover the name of the author under the microscope, a man you've undoubtedly heard of. Writerly types should check it out.

It’s been almost a month since noted writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide. Here is the reflection I wrote the night I learned of his death and another post I did with links to remembrances and my analysis of his Kenyon College speech. My delicious page has a full listing of links.

A few days ago Pomona College hosted a memorial service for Wallace. Jonathan Franzen, himself one of the great American writers working today and a close friend of Wallace, relayed a tragic dialogue. LA Times reports:

"Tell me a story about how things will get better," David Foster Wallace asked his friend Jonathan Franzen last summer. It was a particularly dark summer for Wallace, mired in a depression that ended, on Sept. 12, in suicide….

"He was in a terrible and dangerous place as a man and a writer," Franzen told the writer’s friends and family, colleagues and students. "I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. He said, ‘Tell me another one.’ "

A month’s time has turned raw sadness into more varied emotions. I’m wondering whether, as one friend put it to me, a brilliant mind knows that suicide is actually a rational option under certain circumstances. I’m wondering why his anti-depressants stopped working and about the pharmaceutical role in dealing with depression more generally. I’m wondering whether the death of a hero of sorts (I don’t have many) has contributed to my own periodic light funks — I have always had a high set point of happiness but the past few months have also included occasional dips that come and go but regardless are new for me.

Most of all, I have a big regret. The one class of his that I attended ended almost an hour early. A few students milled around to chat with him; most of us left. I left, thinking I’d have opportunities to chat with him more in the future one-on-one. Of course, that future is gone and I should have seized the opportunity when it was in front of me.

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I’m reading McCain’s Promise — the expanded version of the DFW essay on McCain from 2000 that appeared in Rolling Stone and Consider the Lobster. Will report more once I finish. It’s obviously a pretty timely read.

More literary reflections on David Wallace’s life and contributions to the American scene are starting to roll in. I’ve linked to and excerpted a few below. Here is my spur of the moment reflection at 1 AM last night.

If you haven’t read Wallace I would recommend not starting with Infinite Jest, but one of his non-fiction essay collections such as Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again. Here some favorite nuggets of mine from Infinite Jest. Here’s my post on his Best Essays introduction.

Also, many of remembrances reference his 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College. It is indeed worth reading. Below the fold on this blog post I include portions of an essay I wrote a few months ago on the speech, summarizing and analyzing it.

To the remembrances….

Here’s Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times:

For that matter, much of Mr. Wallace’s work…felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads — and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Möbius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides.

Here’s David Gates in Newsweek who spends a little more time on the suicide references in DFW’s later writings. Elsewhere Gates writes:

True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we’re all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant.

Here’s Laura Miller in Salon who says Wallace made us feel a little less alone:

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers — and I have no doubt that he was one — have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace’s particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become — not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?

Here’s Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

Wallace’s project, which he lays out pretty clearly in this 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, was empathy. And as a hyper-brilliant mind, the path he took towards it, in his writing, was to use his raw intellectual horsepower to achieve a kind of moral enlightenment. There was, in this way, a merging of form and content: his writing worked because he was able to achieve this kind of brilliant, self-conscious, painfully self-aware, but nonetheless robust and heart-breaking empathy for his characters and subjects. And as a reader, the prose itself made one feel a similar kind of soul connection to both the writer and the people the writer described. He felt close. His characters felt close. And reading him I found that the prison bars of my own embedded subjectivity, my own selfish "default setting" was shaken, bent, expanded just enough to be able to glimpse something eternally, capital-T True. Something sublime.

Speaking of that speech, below the fold, a summary and analysis.

Continue reading “DFW Tributes and My Essay on His Kenyon Speech”

The world has lost a spectacular writer. Already it seems as if some special portal of human intelligence has been closed off. — John Seery, colleague and friend in HuffPost remembrance

David Foster Wallace, one of my heroes and inspirations, hanged himself Friday night here in Claremont. Considered among the greatest writers of his generation, and certainly a jewel on the Pomona faculty, I’ve been reading and following his work for years. His loss is crushing.

Virtually every time I read Wallace I feel inspired to want to be smarter. He inspires me with his range — from the meaning of number zero to esoteric literary theory to talk radio to tennis to politics. He inspires me with his style — surely not everyone’s taste, but even his critics admire his courage to re-define his genre and challenge convention. He inspires me with his relentless humor — even if his ideas were baseless (they’re not) he would still be recognized as a world class humorist. He inspires me with his raw thought process — how he arranged his verbs and nouns to produce an argument that was accessible and rational and entertaining all at once.

Wallace’s suicide raises for me the question about the correlation between enlightenment and depression. How much truth is there to the phrase "ignorance is bliss"? How unbearable is genius?

It was not a question I discussed with his other readers. When marveling at Wallace’s output, we always talked about its brio but we never seriously pondered whether the author was a happy man.

Discovering that somebody vigorously read (or tried to read!) Wallace became for me another one of those litmus tests when deciding whether to spend time with a person. To me it didn’t matter so much that people liked him or agreed with him, but rather that they were disposed to be tickled by his intellect.

•••

There is sure to be a deluge of remembrances and obituaries about Wallace’s life in the coming days. I thought I could contribute my part to this collection by relaying a quick story about meeting Wallace here in Claremont.

Since 2002 Wallace had taught a class a semester at Pomona College. His reputation as a teacher matched his reputation in the literary world. Students loved him. Far from adopting the pose of "famous professor who doesn’t have time for his students," Wallace was known to offer excruciatingly detailed and personal critiques of students’ work. (He also didn’t need the money of an endowed professorship — see his MacArthur genius grant, for example.)

When I arrived in Claremont in fall 2007, one of my goals was to take his class. As a student at Claremont McKenna, part of the consortium of colleges here which permit cross registration, it was going to be possible but difficult since for popular classes preference is given to seniors at the home college.

I looked up Wallace’s course this past spring at Pomona and saw he was teaching "The Literary Essay," which was about the art of the imaginative non-fiction essay, a skill for which Wallace can comfortably claim expertise, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to register for it.

I showed up to his class anyway. At the least I just wanted to see him in person. I was terrified.

After going down the list of twelve and taking note of each student’s name, major, and hometown, Wallace looked around to see if he missed anybody. Me. He asked who I was. I said I was a student who hoped to enroll in his class. He said it was full and there was a waiting list. I said I understood. He said I was welcome to leave. I asked if he wanted me to leave. He said it was going to be a boring day of reviewing the syllabus and he wouldn’t want me to suffer through it if I were not going to actually be in the class. David Foster Wallace reviewing a syllabus on writing? People would pay money to be witness to that. I said I’d prefer to stay since I had walked all the way over, and he agreed.

His syllabus was wonderful — and yes, it had footnotes. He seemed to be chewing tobacco and spitting it into a mug as he talked about why this was going to be a class where we as writers improve our ability to engage a reader who has zero interest in our opinions or emotions. He wore big black shoes, the laces seemed undone, and had a bandanna on his head.

To round out the syllabus, Wallace asked some kids to volunteer to turn in essays on certain days for group workshopping. No one volunteered. I looked around, incredulous. David Foster Wallace just asked for volunteers, and no one is volunteering?!?! He announced there would be a bathroom break and when class re-convened, somebody had better be ready to sign up.

Outside, in the bathroom, I smiled awkwardly to him and told him I was a huge fan of his work. I felt like just another fanboy. Even though this famous writer has heard much higher praise, he still smiled genuinely and thanked me for the kind words.

Using the email address he listed on the syllabus, I emailed Wallace after class to ask if I could meet with him one on one. To my astonishment he replied a few hours later and said I could come to his office hours and we’d chat. In his reply he also "beseeched" me not to share his email address with anyone. (He was notoriously difficult to access; he did not maintain a Pomona email address; phone calls to the English Dept were directed to his agent; he did very few interviews / media appearances for his books.)

A week later I went to his office hours. I showed up 20 minutes early and paced around the building, going over what I would ask him. I walked in right at 6pm, and saw him in the hallway. He gently remembered who I was, pointed to his office, and said he’d be in in a minute. I stood around in his large office alone, admiring the books lining the shelves and soaking up the reality of the situation.

We ended up talking for about 25 minutes before another student showed up. I asked him about editing the Best American Essays of 2007. I asked him how he crafts such vivid descriptions in his writing (his response was that good writers slave over their work and the brilliant description doesn’t happen on the first try). I asked about the value of an education. He was gracious, kind, and interested.

This all happened just a few months ago. I must admit I harbored some fantasy of meeting him again, taking a full class, getting some tips, learning more about the man behind the prose. That possibility, no matter how remote, is now gone. All I have is the memory of sitting in his office.

More important, the world has lost one of its most distinctive and illuminating voices. A sad night.

Judith Shulevitz at Slate reviews and summarizes James Wood’s book How Fiction Works. Wood is the most influential book critic today. Some of his very easy-to-understand do’s and dont’s for writers:

• Writers should treat their fictions with the deference due something real; or, if they don’t, they should show that they understand the consequences of not doing so.
• They should grant characters their measure of "metaphysical presence," not move them around like pawns in "metafictional games."
• Authors should be "gravely affirmative" before they give themselves license to be "gravely skeptical."
• They should "inhabit" their stories, rather than play with them.
• Details should be sprinkled with a light but deliberate touch (tact, of course, comes from the Latin for touch) and imbued with the weight of what the medieval theologian Duns Scotus called "thisness": "By thisness," Wood writes, "I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability."
• Dialogue should hold back as much as, if not more than, it says.
• A good metaphor does not just conform to a character’s worldview; it "hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character’s world."

Thisness? Gravely affirmative? Metaphysical presence? Deference due something real?

I guess this is why I’m a mere blogger and at times a wannabe non-fiction writer, not someone deep into the world of fiction and serious criticism.