It's "Let's Insult the Newly Dead", live on DICK FM, with your host, John Ziegler!

Back in the day, David Foster Wallace wrote an epic and tremendously good 24-page article called "Host" on the apoplectic fury of American right-wing talk radio. The article, in addition to being collected in Consider the Lobster, is now online in full (you have to click the coloured boxes to get the full effect). Now John Ziegler, the talk-show host that Wallace covered in the piece has responded to Wallace's death in an editorial. And he's being a bit of a dick about it:

I was neither as surprised, nor as upset by this tragedy as the many in the elite realm of reputable literature seemed to be.

(...)

I also believe that there is an equally fine line between real genius and just plain weirdness. In my experience, Wallace had very little of the former, so he exaggerated the latter.

I particularly like how he stressed that the literary world is an "elite realm". For more, we now go live to Scott Eric Kaufman at Edge of the American West. Scott?

an excellent servant but a terrible master

Metafilter reminds me of this quote, from David Foster Wallace's commencement adress at Kenyon University:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

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. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

Oh, no

Writer David Foster Wallace hanged himself Friday night.

That's just incredibly sad. He was one of the greatest American writers of his generation, and one of the ones that I loved the most.

With acute, embarassing self-awareness of the risk of seeming pathetic¹, the kind of state Wallace described better than anyone, Shakespeare springs to mind (Wallace's magnum opus was a book called Infinite Jest):

"I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"

I was just reading a long interview with him yesterday, done just before the publication of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I feel like the guy I was talking to yesterday died during the night.

Update: here is an old post of mine which contains links to some of Wallace's wonderfully intricate, deeply insightful and break-a-rib-funny essays. And here is Scott Eric Kaufman's reaction to the news over at Edge of the American West. I thought of "Good Old Neon" when I heard the news, too.

1. Thereby robbing the gesture of much of its intended effect. But fuck it: I really, really mean this.

DFW & no more paper

David Foster Wallace keeps popping up in blogs and magazines I read these days.

First, there's a new sort-of essay online here. It's the introduction to a volume of American essays he has edited (or as he puts it, Deciderized) for Houghton Mifflin.

He also has a huge essay online over here I should read soon.

So I went looking in the Wikipedia article, and hey, look, there's the title essay to his latest collection of essays. I swear: who even bothers with paper these days?

Og for de norskspråklige: Preben Jordal gir en introduksjon til DFWs essayistikk i siste Vagant. Jordal har også oversatt novellesamlingen Oblivion av ham. Special Bonus: Han klarer å presse inn et stikk til bloggere i artikkelen.