wallace-l: Thank You

[Audrey Ference]

Hi--another long time lurker ('99?) who wants to say thanks for making me
feel okay for feeling so upset. I pretty much lost it Saturday night when I
found out, and the office watery eyes are tough to explain, you know?

I have loved reading this list for such a long time, and didn't realize what
a short time we had with our man. What keeps getting me is that I've been
doing so much re-reading and thinking about his ideas and finding out for
the first time about his life that I get these happy little moments of wow,
DFW (I feel too intimate calling him David, somehow) was so awesomely smart
and *right* and brilliant and funny and kind and righteous and just gets to
the meat of existence and I'm so glad he's around, only to re-remember that
the reason I've been doing all of this thinking and reading is because he's
*not* around anymore, and then feel socked by the whole thing all over
again.

Anyway, glad to know that I'm in a boat with such nice people. I never knew
that I could not meet someone ever but still miss him so much. Truly, he was
a force for good in this world.
Audrey

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 4:40 PM, adrienne <arcw at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> i'd like to chime in with my thanks to everyone on this list, too; i knew
> you all were awesome, but wow, you really are all awesome.
>
> you've articulately exteriorized my interior, just like dfw has always been
> able to do.
>
> i'm 100% in for a group read, i joined the list at the end of the last one
> and was sad to have missed out.
>
> thanks, and keep it up; you're all being heard.
>
> love,
> adrienne
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 7:44 PM, George Carr <georgecarr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have been frankly surprised that DFW's work was so emotionally
>> affecting to so many.  I suppose I was subconsciously aware that his
>> books did well commercially, but it never occurred to me that all of
>> those hundreds of thousands of readers -- not to mention the dozens of
>> writers, columnists, and bloggers whose commentary I've read in just
>> the past two days -- had reactions to DFW's work very similar to mine.
>>  Reading a book is solitary work in the first place, and discussing it
>> with a group of friends or colleagues can reveal similarities in
>> reaction by readers of very different backgrounds.  But reading how so
>> many people cried at work over the death of someone they never met,
>> how so many people felt that DFW was reaching directly into THEIR
>> souls and speaking in the language they spoke to themselves, how so
>> many people felt uplifted and honored by Dave's big project to make
>> fiction writing a source of honesty and compassion and relevance ...
>> it's kind of startling to me.  So for me, it's kind of simultaneously
>> uplifting and disappointing at the same time, that my particular form
>> of grief is so widely shared.  Which, as one might expect, was already
>> prefigured by DFW, who thought very hard and wrote very well about the
>> peculiar sensations associated with discovering that one is not nearly
>> as unique, in background or experience, as one previously thought.
>>
>> George
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Prabhakar Ragde <plragde at uwaterloo.ca>
>> wrote:
>> > Jon May wrote:
>> >
>> >> So how dare I? Who am I to
>> >> get upset? I'm just some fanboy
>> >
>> > The phenomenon I'm trying to analyze renders me somewhat incapable of
>> > analysis. I had thought it was my long involvement with wallace-l and
>> > the friends I have made through it, but I have been reading of similar
>> > reactions in people who have never heard of wallace-l. There may be a
>> > parallel in what DFW said about AA in IJ and elsewhere, what he said in
>> > the Kenyon address, and his general feeling that there could be too much
>> > irony and too much distance, even as he sought to wield those tools in
>> > moderation.
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>
>
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