wallace-l: Missing Mr. Wallace

[James Mason]

I never met David Foster Wallace, and I won't presume to say that I felt
that i knew the man through his writing, but he sure seemed to know me. The
wry observations of life and the people that live it in the late '90s and
early '00s, their foibles and petty triumphs, all were immediately
recognizable in both myself and in people around me. Wallace's gift is that
he was able to pick out the minutiae in people's mannerisms and extrapolate
them to a larger, more common condition that we all, knowingly and
unknowingly, labor under. I'm thinking here of his discussion of being a
tourist in his essay "Consider the Lobster" or what it was like to feel
slightly alienated from people feeling much stronger emotions than myself on
9/11 in "The View From Mrs. Thompson's."

I was very taken with the controlled rage he displayed in "How Tracy Austin
Broke My Heart". The piece starts as a dissection of the sports memoir, but
then moves into what it means to be able to verbally articulate one's
talent. The sense of disgust with the genre is palpable throughout the
essay, but the conclusion he reaches, that the very inability to
intellectualize about one's talent is the very essence of that talent,
opened a whole new method of thinking for me. As did his commencement speek
at Kenyon University, which, for me, boiled down to a simple plea for people
to treat each other as people and not be so quick to judge based on our
preconceptions of them.

I was more a fan of his non-fiction than his fiction, but I found equal
amounts of truth in both. He tempered his cynicism and his irony with a
sincere humanity that is largely lost in popular (and literary, I guess)
fiction. That's what I related to when I read his words, and what I admired
most. The courage that it takes to stand up and say "I don't like this
aspect of how our culture has progressed, and I don't know what to do about
it, but maybe acknowledging that this exists in myself may somehow make it
better or easier for all of us." I will truly miss that.


-- 
http://somuchmusicsolittletime.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/jerichomaxim
http://www.myspace.com/thecharleswhitmantrio

"We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned
from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests." - Henry Miller
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