Zadie Smith, author of the acclaimed Changing My Mind, writing about David Foster Wallace in the Five Dials tribute to the late author:

In a culture that depletes you daily of your capacity for imagination, for language, for autonomous thought, complexity like Dave's is a gift.  He recursive, labyrinthine sentences demand second readings.  Like the boy waiting to dive, their resistance 'breaks the rhythm that exclues thinking'.  Every word looks up, every winding footnote followed, every heart- and brain-stretching concept, they all help break the rhythm of thoughtlessless -- your gifts are being returned to you.

If you don't have the Five Dials celebration of David Foster Wallace, get it here [PDF].  It's free and delivers thousands of dollars worth of emotion and power and literary awe directly into your spinal column.

One tip: don't read on a computer.  Go old school and print this out and read it off the reconstituted pulp of felled trees.  Trust me.

Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli
dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like – i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left – and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad. — from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

One of the most beautiful sentences DFW ever put to paper.

The best college commencement speech ever written:

I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Such an amazing speech in its entirety, but very sad in that some parts inform Wallace's suicide in 2008.

Kevin Guilfoile blogging for Infinite Summer, wonders if anyone will be reading IJ 100 years from now, or if the book’s sheer attention and effort requirements – coupled with timestamped pop-culture references – will doom the work to literary extinction.

I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now understand it.

One day, I’ll actually sit down and read the copy I’ve had on my shelf for over seven years.  One of my best friends tells me every chance he gets that it’s the best book he’s ever read, and I remember when he read it he devoured it with a cultish obsession.

I have a feeling I’m missing something big.

Inspired by Rolling Stone’s transcendent piece The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, I stumbled across this on YouTube.  It’s interesting to see DFW live; I never have before now. 

And it makes me even sadder that he’s no longer with us.

This winter, I will read Infinite Jest cover to cover.  That’s a promise.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVzhhvCRTCo]

CLAREMONT, Calif. - David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46. Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

One of my very favorite authors speaks about his 2000 essay (that eventually became a book) regarding John McCain and whether or not what he wrote back then is still applicable today.  Great Q&A with one of the sharpest literary minds out there.

On whether Wallace has changed his mind since the book was published:

In the best political tradition, I reject the premise of your question. The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course—he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there's an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win.

On the parallels between the 2000 McCain and the 2008 Obama:

There are some similarities—the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing—a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who's not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs.

On the Bush administration and what it has done to the Republican party and its plausibility in trying to create a populist image:

The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

On the youth vote:

If nothing else, the previous seven years and four months have helped make it clear that it actually matters a whole, whole lot who gets elected president. A whole lot. There's also the fact that there are now certain really urgent, galvanizing problems—price of oil, carbon emissions, Iraq—that are apt to get more voters of all ages and education-levels to the polls. For more interested or sophisticated young voters, there are also the matters of the staggering rise in national debt and off-the-books war-funding, the collapse of the dollar, and the grievous damage that's been done to all manner of consensuses about Constitutional protections, separation of powers, and U.S. obligations under international treaties.

On the Infinite Jest smiley faces, which were a (really great) idea in the book's marketing strategy:

One prong of the Buzz plan [for "Infinite Jest"] involved sending out a great many signed first editions—or maybe reader copies—to people who might generate Buzz. What they did was mail me a huge box of trade-paperback-size sheets of paper, which I was to sign; they would then somehow stitch them in to these "special" books. I basically spent an entire weekend signing these pages. You've probably had the weird epileptoid experience of saying a word over and over until it ceases to denote and becomes very strange and arbitrary and odd-feeling—imagine that happening with your own name. That's what happened. Plus it was boring. So boring, that I started doing all kinds of weird little graphic things to try to stay alert and engaged.

Link

(via kottke)