infinite foster wallace

i saw this picture on the back of infinite jest and thought, "who is this guy?" i mean, the voluminous footnotes, the crazy-detailed observations about amateur tennis and i.v. drug use, and the very freakin' idea of selling time to ameliorate a budget deficit? now, the man who gave us the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is dead, apparently by his own hand.

twelve years ago, i saw an absurdly accomplished young dude in that picture, one whose best work was surely ahead of him. i'm always impressed by great writers, but dfw was the last to really make me jealous. he'd shift gears in mid-explanation, whether he was writing playfully about state fairs or addictive entertainments or cruise ships, move from the frontiers of knowledge in one subject to another at the speed of light, then burn a laser right through the new area of focus. his senior undergrad thesis was a fine novel, his non-fiction pieces were gorgeously written and as telling as the best sociology, and he pushed and experimented with little regard for writing conventions.

david foster wallace succeeded on a grand scale and, when he failed, he failed spectacularly. frankly, even die-hards like me just had to bag it halfway through some of his work, but i suspect he was fine with that. he probably wouldn't have been fine with the times headline, though: "Postmodern Writer is Found Dead at Home." the man who gave us the howling fantods and supposedly fun things we'll never do again would probably bristle at that "postmodern" modifier and the prosaic description, though i'd like to believe he'd appreciate the irony.

update: here's a bit from mr. foster wallace's 2005 commencement address at kenyon college:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. ...

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 and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. 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.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.