Comments on: David Foster Wallace: A Personal Tribute

By: Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:25:34 +0000

Where’s Wallace?…

“DFW was a favorite of mine, and often I turned to his brilliant work to recalibrate my sense of challenging……

By: Judith Fitzgerald

Judith Fitzgerald — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:07:55 +0000

This is so appropriately celebratory and stunningly executed, Ed, it’s the first piece that made me smile and think, Yes, no more tears, no more rents nor rifts in this beautiful guy’s heartbreaking sky. Thank you.

By: Him

Him — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:13:44 +0000

The first piece of his I read was the story about the LBJ staffer. It appeared in some very short-lived but very slick tabloid style magazine and it blew me away. I went out and bought TBOTS immediately. Again, zing. I know of two or three other writer/readers who have, like me, read Infinite Jest at least three times. It is a work of monstrous importance, and changed everything.

I had the weird experience of reading “Good Old Neon” right before seeing “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” And this is the wonderful thing about art. Those odd juxtapositions.

Yes, he got darker and more difficult in his last work. But I’d frankly trade one or two of his dead-on observations (Like one from the novella at the end of GWCH–[paraphrasing] “She had the slung-forward hips of someone standing at a urinal,” or, “This was the man who convinced people to worry about drain odor, who convinced people to pour baking soda down the drain.”

I mean, I never even knew tongue scrapers existed–I mean I thought he was kidding, and then I saw one in the grocery store. Nothing passed his eye without notice, and maybe that was a problem.

He was a gift. I am now almost glad I didn’t know him, because it sounds as though he was more generous in person than he was on the page.

By: links for 2008-09-15 | I Will Dare

links for 2008-09-15 | I Will Dare — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:01:53 +0000

[...] David Foster Wallace: A Personal Tribute : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits the footnotes in Ed Champion's tribute kind broke my heart (tags: davidfosterwallace edchampion tribute writers) [...]

By: eNotes Book Blog » Blog Archive » Huh, so David Foster Wallace Killed Himself…

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 02:51:14 +0000

[...] Kakutani The Elegant Variation’s link to Wallace on Charlie Rose Garth Risk Hallberg Ed Champion The Chicago Tribune The [...]

By: carolyn kellogg » Blog Archive » Bad news

carolyn kellogg » Blog Archive » Bad news — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:23:19 +0000

[...] can’t say much about him — others are far more qualified — but I liked what I read, I admired his work, have no animosity toward footnotes [...]

By: walter faure

walter faure — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:37:45 +0000

I was initially offput by DFW too, for years in fact, only to come around completely, to fall in love with his way of writing. (And that first footnote is worthy of the man himself.)

By: Flem

Flem — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:00:46 +0000

Looking for answers in shock and grief. It is now impossible to separate Ernest Feaster and James Incandenza from their creator, to dismiss passages like pages 692-698 of IJ as another annular postmodern riff. They were all too close, too deeply felt. We were fully inside and fighting these demons with this seemingly omniscient, but painfully human spirit, not cataloging them as some detached academic exercise. While cultural dust mite Balthazar Getty frolics in the Mediterranean with a British starlet, and the suicide of a cultural speed bump Cobain makes mass media headlines for weeks, cultural cordillera DFW, who spent nearly every semester of his final decade supervising children to pay the bills, passes far below the fold. So the artist who willfully repudiated “closure” in his work sadly decided on September 12th for a very definite closure in his life. It has been said that as a young man Bill Clinton had ambition to write a great novel, but instead went on to live one. Perhaps we have just read the end of Wallace’s third novel, one that will take years, decades, and tens of thousands of words of critical and biographical analysis, to begin to process, if never understand.

By: Night of the Lepus

Night of the Lepus — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:15:11 +0000

This is nice. Thanks.