fwiw: "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. "
Cheers to Kedrosky for saying "Dead" instead of "Passed' or something else equally infuriating or ambiguous.
Depression is a very serious problem and the US has one of the highest depression rates in the "first world." Rest in peace David Foster Wallace; I'm sad you weren't able to find it here.
If this isn't "Hacker News" to you, it will be soon: start with "Consider The Lobster" or "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", two amazing essay collections. The audiobook for "Lobster" is narrated by DFW and footnoted in the audio.
Here's a DFW piece on the McCain 2000 campaign for Rolling Stone, which is especially resonant this year:
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Feeling slightly ashamed that I haven't heard of him earlier, I have a question to the HN crowd: How did you hear of him before?
It's a shame to hear of someone people respect this much post-mortem. I wonder if you can infer a body of work that's important today and published recently from a group of similar-minded people like HN.
I had the great luck to be given Infinite Jest by a friend who had read it, and I cannot praise it enough. It is by far the most amazing book I have ever read, achieving a clear and full vision into the world of its characters' internal thought processes to a degree I had not known was possible.
After reading Infinite Jest, I have struggled to find any author to equal its vitality, and have been frequently disappointed by the flat hollow fakeness of most works I have read since it, by authors both new to me (Paul Auster) and old (William Gibson).
His use of language has a kind of magical... it is hard to get exactly how he does it but his writing brings his characters alive.
I am crushed and saddened by his death and the tragedy of its cause. Depression haunts the people in many of our lives. It is a terrible disease made worse by the mistaken notion that melancholy is somehow noble or simply a fact of creativity, an illness to be proud of. It is certainly not.
I found him because I was looking for an author who wrote postmodern, like Pynchon does, but an author with less of the bullshit that I've always felt Pynchon surrounds himself with.
I think his generation is pretty close to this current one. Infinite Jest was the 90s, right? (I've never read it, sadly.)
I feel like the novel is winding down, actually. There's no great proliferation of ideas any more. The last great author I can think of was Beckett; after him, everybody I've read really seems to be struggling to do something new. Even Murakami (who, not counting Wallace, I think is the greatest of the generation) is less innovative than the authors who preceded him.
Is it possible that a novel as a pure-prose medium can be exhausted in terms of ideas? Because I think (and I've written rather extensively about this) that for the novel to go on, it'll have to evolve to match current technology, in the way that Coupland and Danielewski do it. But that means a departure from pure literature, in a way.
And a great commencement speech from Kenyon U. three years ago: http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
fwiw: "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. "