David Foster Wallace died a year ago today. I cannot think of a “celebrity” death that has bummed (and continues to bum) me out as much as his has, especially over the latter third of this year. I spent a particularly emotional two months of the year reading Infinite Jest (monogamously, I should add), and though it’s been a couple of months since I finished it, little pieces of that book continue to shake me, brutally and on an almost daily basis. I am planning on writing a longer post about the whole experience sometime soon, but today all I can think to say is that, even with the countless essays I had to read as an undergraduate about the Intentional Fallacy and Reader Response and the Death of the Author ceaselessly in mind, I have found it impossible to shake a very pointed feeling of sadness at the fact that David Foster Wallace, the person, is dead.
If you have some free time and are unfamiliar with Wallace’s work (or also if you are), then today is an absolutely perfect day to do one of two things. First, you could read one of his essays or short stories which Harper’s has kindly made available for free online here (of this grouping, my favorites that I’ve read are “Tense Present,” “Shipping Out” and “The Depressed Person”). Or, you could listen to this KCRW podcast of an interview with Wallace on the program Bookworm. This podcast is fantastic and I will admit to listening to it in its entirety at least a few times as I was nearing the end of Infinite Jest. Over the past year, the internet response to Wallace’s death has been both overwhelming and fascinating. I noticed today that a lot of people are putting a particularly apt quote from Infinite Jest protagonist Mario Incandenza in their Twitter feeds: “It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.” Weird indeed.
