People Who Died: David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

The film of Jim Carroll's autobiographical novel, The Basketball Diaries (1995), reintroduced the Jim Carroll Band's 1980 song, "People Who Died" to 90's kids. And so it goes with this feature which is obviously about people who are strongly associated with the 90's who have unfortunately kicked the bucket.



DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, 1962-2008

David Foster Wallace's recent suicide (he was found dead by hanging in his home in Claremont, CA on September 12, by his wife) kind of caught me off guard. At my small liberal arts college in New England, this postmodern author was a vaunted figure. We were all big fans of his writing, and girls were big fans of his decidedly rugged, decidedly unwriterly looks and persona. These things aside, I was mostly shaken because I also suffer from depression, and here was a guy I admired that lost his fight with it. Reading about his accomplishments in the requisite tribute articles that popped up immediately after the news broke, I wracked my brain trying to figure out why this happened. Then it came to me: it isn't for me, or anyone else, to figure out. He decided what he had to do and did it. Case closed. Here is a picture of David Foster Wallace smiling:



Instead of dwelling on the writing that accentuated his depressive tendencies, I'd like to highlight an essay about David Lynch that he wrote for the September 1996 issue of Premiere called "David Lynch Keeps His Head." Foster Wallace helped me to better understand a filmmaker that I also idolized (and still do--I choose my film school partly because Lynch is a graduate). He brought keen insight, wit and humor to this and every subject he wrote about. Please find a copy of his Lynch essay here.




No discussion of David Foster Wallace is complete without mention of his 1996 fictional novel, Infinite Jest. This tome is the Book-Most-Used-As-A-Drink-Coaster-In-Hipster-Small-Liberal-Arts-School-Graduate-Apartments. At 1088 pages, this thing is a mammoth that no one I know has ever finished. It is Pynchon on steroids. Unbelievable. I'm serious when I say that I have always been cowed by the impressive size of Infinite Jest. I will read it someday.



In the meantime, I am reading Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990), which was co-written by David Foster Wallace with Mark Costello. Check out an excerpt about rap's incredible rise to widespread popularity in the mainstream in the 90's:



David Foster Wallace was a great writer and a true individual. R.I.P.