wallace-l: DFW suicide?

[Ravi]

I'm finding solace in knowing that I will never be as smart as DFW, nor as
tormented.   The solace of the mediocre.

To those reading who do not find themselves in the same boat, my sympathies.

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Scott O. Handy <scottohandy at yahoo.com>wrote:

>   I had a cousin commit suicide in 1991, I was 23, he was 25. He blew his
> own head off with a double-barrel shotgun. That's a lie. Or, well it's an
> unknown, but the fact that I state it as a fact is a lie. I don't know if he
> really used a double-barrel shotgun. It may've been a regular single-barrel
> one, I don't know. What I do know is that it was a Sunday morning and he was
> alone in the house where he lived with his four siblings and two parents.
> And I know that my aunt and uncle were in Syracuse visiting my other cousin,
> who was a student there. And my other cousin came home from somewhere and
> poked his head into his older brother's bedroom and found ... what? Brains
> and blood and scalp and hair plastered on the wall beside his bed? I do know
> that this was a very small town in upstate New York, the kind of place where
> everyone knew everyone, including the paramedics who answered the 911 call.
> They were throwing up as they rushed to clean the walls of my cousin's room
> before his parents could get back home from Syracuse.
> David Foster Wallace brings all this back to me, now, 17 years later. David
> Foster Wallace's suicide is in some ways worse. The grief isn't as great,
> granted, because I did not "know" DFW. I only knew his writing -- and if by
> "knew" we imply "understood" then I admit I didn't know more than maybe half
> of it. But ... DFW was a hero of mine. Maybe my only hero as an adult. He
> was someone who'd gone through depressions and addictions and who knew that
> his intelligence was not a weapon to be used against his demons but was
> actually used by his demons against himself. Imagine that, if you will. The
> very gift he relied on to see him through the day-to-day struggles of his
> life -- school, teaching, writing -- was the very same weapon his demons
> used to destroy him. What does that say about the world we live in? What
> does that say about any quote-unquote 'God'?
>
> All I keep wondering is: Now what?
>
> If David Foster Wallace couldn't deal with this world, what chance do the
> rest of us have? And, if DFW's own intelligence was not just insufficient as
> a defense against the world and his own dark impulses, but was also an
> accomplice to the act of his suicide, what use is intelligence to the rest
> of us, to you, to me? Why strive to be smart if smart kills you?
>
> I am totally flummoxed.
>
> I am going to the gym and then the batting cages and I will lift weights
> and I will hit a baseball from a mechanical pitcher and I will try not to
> think about this shitty occurrence. And I will avert my eyes from the three
> versions of Infinite Jest on my bookshelves, and the one Oblivion and the
> one A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again and the one Brief
> Interviews with Hideous Men and the one Consider the Lobster and the one
> Girl with Curious Hair and the one Broom of the System.
>
> Fuck. This sucks.
>
> Scott O. Handy
> scottohandy at yahoo.com
>
> --- On *Sun, 9/14/08, Dan Scharf <DScharf at henson.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Dan Scharf <DScharf at henson.com>
> Subject: Re: wallace-l: DFW suicide?
> To: "wallace-l at waste.org" <wallace-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, September 14, 2008, 1:31 PM
>
>
>  As it sinks in a bit this morning - the first loss I can't get around is
> that what we have from him is it -- no more words, no more observations, no
> more stories.  This great social commentator won't be around to observe and
> put into words the things about our lives and culture that I somehow knew
> too but could never pinpoint and express in the way he could.
>
> And I think the other thing that strikes me is that you feel you've gotten
> to know people who publicly express themselves, esp when their stories seem
> to contain and relate to the truly personal, but the reality is I didn't
> know DFW at all.  Like others here, I read his stories and essays as
> pointing toward if not 'kicking depression's ass', at least figuring out a
> personal philosophy that got him through, that found the humor and the joy
> in this flawed world, and I guess in that, I was completely wrong.  Wish I'd
> gotten to take his class, that would have truly been a privilege.
>
> Someone else on here mentioned kurt cobain, and i thought of that too, as i
> remember well when he killed himself, and I was truly sad then too --
> mostly for the lost music he would never write -- but this one is
> different.  Wallace was a thinker, smarter than I no doubt, and someone who
> clearly pondered the biggest themes in life, and to think that this is the
> conclusion he was unable to escape from, has me something like numb today.
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* wallace-l-bounces at waste.org [wallace-l-bounces at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Matt M. [bizarrosanta at yahoo.com]
> *Sent:* Saturday, September 13, 2008 11:36 PM
> *To:* wallace-l at waste.org; srhodes at well.com
> *Subject:* Re: wallace-l: DFW suicide?
>
>    Like a lot of other people here, I've been reading this list for at
> least 5 years now, and never have actually contributed to it.  It's sad that
> this should be my first post, but I don't personally know a lot of people
> who have been deeply affected by DFW's work like a lot of us have, and I
> wanted to get a little of this off my chest to people in the know.
>
> Anyway, I was a student of Wallace's while he was teaching at ISU.  I
> hadn't even heard of him before signing up for the class, and I was
> enthralled from the first day.  I still remember being surprised that the
> guy in corduroy shirts, an old faded Nirvana t-shirt and bandana was
> teaching my creative writing class while chewing tobacco.  Well into the
> semester he pulled me aside and told me I wasn't wasting my time pursuing
> the trade.  That kind of fucking validation is something I'll probably never
> deserve, and sometimes curse, and can't believe and love and think about
> often.  I read Infinite Jest the summer after that class, and, well,
> needless to say...
>
> He's really the only person I've ever known who was able to thoughtfully
> detail the dangers of a cynical mindset.  To illustrate how difficult it can
> be to live here, encircled by the abuse of genuine ideologies and still
> somehow manage to see the human behind the abuser.  There's really no way to
> accurately depict the effect he had on my way of thinking.
>
> The scary thing, and it must be so for some of the recovering addicts here,
> it's at least scary to me, is that I feel like if anyone was going to win
> the battle, it'd be someone who was almost bottomlessly sensitive and
> monsterously intelligent.  I understand here that it's a bit selfish to take
> this decision he's made and extrapolate it into some kind of universal
> condition to be applied to all those struggling, but it is at least in some
> ways difficult not to, because through his writing, we've many of us
> discovered how much his views about the world around resonate with us.  And
> for those views to terminate here is frightening.
>
> Of course, this is the night I found out about this, so it's effects are
> particularly acute right now, and I'll be glad to watch that fear recede
> when the wound starts closing up.  I'm not able right now to read some of
> the stuff people've been posting here, especially the stuff concerning
> Death, and I'm definitely not ready to wish him any peace in the matter,
> just yet.  I still feel like he had a responsibility to me, and to everyone
> else who's felt personally touched by his art to above all else, not do
> this.  And I'm not even a family member.  I can't imagine what they're going
> through.   Suicide is, as he's said himself, a supremely self-centered act,
> and that's whats so disappointing about it.
>
> But there's no grudge to hold.  I still love him.  Everything he's ever
> written is as valid now as it was before.  Just a little sadder.
>
> So, first post.  If you read this far, then it's a little like we've
> mourned together, even though I did all the talking.  But, thanks.  I hope
> everyone keeps writing.  I'm not going anywhere.
>
> --- On *Sat, 9/13/08, Steve Rhodes <srhodes at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Steve Rhodes <srhodes at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: wallace-l: DFW suicide?
> To: wallace-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, September 13, 2008, 9:52 PM
>
>
>  There is a lot from his RS McCain piece that people should read
>
>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18420304/the_weasel_twelve_monkeys_and_the_shrub
>
>
> but also from his intro to the 2007 (probably too much, but this is email &
> there
> is no news hold except your attention)
>
>
> http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=689794
>
> (Mark Danner's piece which he mentions is here
>
> http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/iraq_the_war_of_the_imagination  )
>
> Some of the book's essays are quite beautiful
> indeed, and most are extremely well written and/or show a masterly
> awareness of craft (whatever exactly that is). But others aren't, don't,
> especially — but they have other virtues that make them valuable. And I
> know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the
> pieces
> handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and
> perspective
> that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery,
> because of
> course any published essay is a burst of information and context that is by
>
> definition part of 2007's overall roar of info and context. But it is
> possible for
> something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning.
> Think, for instance, of the two distinct but related senses of
> 'informative.'
> Several of this year's most valuable essays are informative in both senses;
>
> they are at once informational and instructive. That is, they serve as
> models
> and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled,
> and
> arranged in meaningful ways — ways that yield and illuminate truth instead
> of
> just adding more noise to the overall roar.
>
>     That all may sound too abstract. Let's do a concrete example,
> which happens also to involve the term 'American' on the front cover. In
> your
> 2007 guest editor's opinion, we are in a state of three-alarm emergency —
>  'we' basically meaning America as a polity and culture. Only part of this
> emergency has to do with what is currently called partisan politics, but
> it's a
> significant part. Don't worry that I'm preparing to make any kind of
> specific
> argument about the Bush administration or the disastrous harm I believe
> it's
> done in almost every area of federal law, policy, and governance. Such an
> argument would be just noise here — redundant for those readers who feel
> and believe as I do, biased crap for those who believe differently. Who's
> right
> is not the point. The point is to try to explain part of what I mean
> by 'valuable.' It is totally possible that, prior to 2004 — when the
> reelection of
> George W. Bush rendered me, as part of the U.S. electorate, historically
> complicit in his administration's policies and conduct — this BAE Decider
> would have selected more memoirs or descriptive pieces on ferns and geese,
> some of which this year were quite lovely and fine. In the current
> emergency,
> though, such essays simply didn't seem as valuable to me as pieces like,
> say, Mark Danner's 'Iraq: The War of the Imagination' or Elaine
> Scarry's 'Rules of Engagement.'
>
>     Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004's
> reelection could have taken place — not to mention extraordinary
> renditions,
> legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military
> Commissions
> Act — if we had been paying attention and handling information in a
> competent grown-up way. 'We' meaning as a polity and culture. The premise
> does not entail specific blame — or rather the problems here are too
> entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for
> one
> example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow
> failing to make clear to us the moral and practical hazards of trashing the
>
> Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is highly attuned to what we want
> and the amount of detail we'll sit still for. And a ninety-second news
> piece on
> the question of whether and how the Geneva Conventions ought to apply in
> an era of asymmetrical warfare is not going to explain anything; the
> relevant
> questions are too numerous and complicated, too fraught with contexts in
> everything from civil law and military history to ethics and game theory.
> One
> could spend a hard month just learning the history of the Conventions'
> translation into actual codes of conduct for the U.S. military . . . and
> that's
> not counting the dramatic changes in those codes since 2002, or the
> question of just what new practices violate (or don't) just which Geneva
> provisions, and according to whom. Or let's not even mention the amount of
> research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing
>
> required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional
>
> oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of
> presidential
> signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and
>
> corporatist laissez-faire . . . There's no way. You'd simply drown. We all
> would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this — about the
> fact
> that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed
> citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern
> degree
> of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'
> (8)
>      In the context of our Total Noise, a piece like Mark
> Danner's 'Iraq: . . . Imagination' exemplifies a special subgenre I've come
> to
> think of as the service essay, with 'service' here referring to both
> professionalism and virtue. In what is loosely framed as a group book
> review,
> Danner has processed and arranged an immense quantity of fact, opinion,
> confirmation, testimony, and on-site experience in order to offer an
> explanation of the Iraq debacle that is clear without being simplistic,
> comprehensive without being overwhelming, and critical without being
> shrill. It
> is a brilliant, disciplined, pricelessly informative piece.
>
>     There are several other such service essays among this year's
> proffered Best. Some, like Danner's, are literary journalism; others are
> more
> classically argumentative, or editorial, or personal. Some are quite short.
> All
> are smart and well written, but what renders them most valuable to me is a
> special kind of integrity in their handling of fact. An absence of dogmatic
>
> cant. Not that service essayists don't have opinions or make arguments. But
>
> you never sense, from this year's Best, that facts are being specially
> cherry-
> picked or arranged in order to advance a pre-set agenda. They are utterly
> different from the party-line pundits and propagandists who now are in such
>
> vogue, for whom writing is not thinking or service but more like the silky
> courtier's manipulation of an enfeebled king.
>
>     . . . In which scenario we, like diminished kings or rigidly insecure
> presidents, are reduced to being overwhelmed by info and interpretation, or
>
> else paralyzed by cynicism and anomie, or else — worst — seduced by
> some particular set of dogmatic talking-points, whether these be PC or NRA,
>
> rationalist or evangelical, 'Cut and Run' or 'No Blood for Oil.' The whole
> thing
> is (once again) way too complicated to do justice to in a guest intro, but
> one
> last, unabashed bias/preference in BAE '07 is for pieces that undercut
> reflexive dogma, that essay to do their own Decidering in good faith and
> full
> measure, that eschew the deletion of all parts of reality that do not fit
> the
> narrow aperture of, say for instance, those cretinous fundamentalists who
> insist that creationism should be taught alongside science in public
> schools,
> or those sneering materialists who insist that all serious Christians are
> as
> cretinous as the fundamentalists.
>
>     Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort of
> thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid
> filters,
> the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with
> massive,
> high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's
> continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In
> sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid
> nearly all
> the time, and to need help. That's about as clearly as I can put it. I'm
> aware
> that some of the collection's writers could spell all this out better and
> in
> much less space. At any rate, the service part of what I mean by 'value'
> refers to all this stuff, and extends as well to essays that have nothing
> to do
> with politics or wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what
> a
> first-rate artistic mind can make of particular factsets — whether these
> involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of
> movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and
> describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the
> revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be
> self-
> indulgent crap.
>
>     That last one's (9) of especial value, I think. As exquisite verbal
> art, yes, but also as a model for what free, informed adulthood might look
> like
> in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one's
> own
> error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on
> and
> out there from, bravely, toward the next revealed error. This is probably
> the
> sincerest, most biased account of 'Best' your Decider can give: these
> pieces
> are models — not templates, but models — of ways I wish I could think and
> live in what seems to me this world.
>
> (8) Hence, by the way, the seduction of partisan dogma. You can drown in
> dogmatism now, too — radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly
> print — but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard
> right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same.
> You
> don't have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don't even have
> to
> think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what
>
> you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence
> I'm talking about — or rather it's only the most extreme and frightened
> form
> of that dependence.
>
> (9) You probably know which essay I'm referring to, assuming you're reading
>
> this guest intro last as is SOP. If you're not, and so don't, then you have
> a
> brutal little treat in store.
>
>  That last essay in the collection is here
>
> http://sexandreligionnews.blogspot.com/2006/08/apocalypse-now.html
>
>
>
> http://flickr.com/photos/ari/ photos
>
>
> http://twitter.com/tigerbeat
>
> http://del.icio.us/tigerbeat interesting articles & sites
>
>
> http://ari.typepad.com
>
> http://tigerbeat.vox.com blogs
>
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>
>
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