Chris’s Comments (group member since Sep 14, 2008)

Chris’s comments from the David Foster Wallace group.

I think this is a good opportunity for fans to share their thoughts.

I know you've contacted a lot of users individually, but now that you've posted on the board everyone can see it.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, essays.

That really made me laugh, Rustam.

Thanks, Sophia.

I read your blog entry yesterday (linked from the Infinite Jest thread), and I thought it was really thoughtful, and really touching.

Marty,

That makes me sick, and it's clear in some of the other newspapers' send-offs as a well, like the critics feel the need to 'stick to their guns' about the petty differences they had about his work.

It's like they had saved a list of one-liners about Infinite Jest to slide into their review of DFW's next book. Because you can't review anything of Wallace's without mentioning IJ. Christ.

Daren,

I never met him, but in the back of my mind I always thought that I would. Like Karen, I'm just sad and a little weirded out by the people rushing to his stuff.

Also, it's just making it more expensive for me to buy the last few books of his I did not already have.

It's not comforting to me, either. I would have rather had his next novel win the Pulitzer, THEN had people rush to read everything else.

But what can you do...Here's a quote from Infinite Jest that a friend sent me (I guess these sorts of things are floating around):

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

I was surprised that there wasn't already a group on Goodreads when I looked for one.

I tend to think of Goodreads as a better place for people who like literary fiction than places like Shelfari, but I guess that impression could be wrong.

Are groups themselves not very popular?

I began with the essays, with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

Very bright mind, and a great observer of our culture.

All of the obituaries I've seen are just the journalist trying to prove that they're smart enough to have gotten his work, which is sort of irritating, but what can you do.

I don't want to see the word "postmodern" again today.