A look at the David Foster Wallace archives. On a related note, I finished a quarter of Gravity's Rainbow over the last two weeks.

Readings...

Now that it is commencement season and speeches are all the rage, it was good to read David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.

... But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

David Foster Wallace - tributes

Memories and tributes to DFW here. Reproduced below is Mr K. B. Dixon's revealing memory.

I had a chance to see David Foster Wallace onstage at a Portland Arts and Lectures event about 10 years ago. He appeared with Sherman Alexie, Gish Jen, and Cristina García as part of a panel discussion on what it meant to be a young writer in America. The event was a large one—probably 1,500 people. It was held in one of those elaborately refurbished downtown movie palaces. Everyone onstage and in the audience was, to some degree, gussied up for the occasion—everyone except Dave, that is. He arrived wearing a pair of big blond work boots, ratty jeans, and some sort of long-sleeve, waffle-weave undershirt. He looked like a down-on-his-luck logger.
There was little reading that night; it was mostly a Q&A. Something Dave said about his nervousness and the peculiarity of the affair made me think of an old Kurt Vonnegut anecdote. Vonnegut was giving a speech he was nervous about. He didn't think it was any good. He mentioned this sotto voce to the eminence sitting on the dais beside him and this man told him, by way of reassurance, that he, KV, shouldn't worry about it—nobody really cared anything about what he had to say; they were just there because they wanted to see if he was an honest man.
When I got home, I wrote Dave a note, passing this little story on. I introduced myself and explained that I had just seen him "flamboyantly underdressed" at the Arts and Lectures event in Portland. A few weeks later, Dave wrote back. He used a small thank-you card (Expressions from Hallmark). He said he understood Vonnegut's unease. "These 'writerly' forums are a priori impossible to be honest at." In a postscript, he replied good-naturedly to my comment about his appearance. He wrote, "I was not underdressed. The lady said casual—the other three were overdressed."
Given the demands on his time and for his attention, this thoughtful, funny little note to a complete stranger struck me as a surprising and generous thing. From reading these posts, it is obvious that it was not unusual.

DFW - a life

A mini biography of one of my favorite authors David Foster Wallace. A great read. I feel that until such time an authoritative biography of DFW comes out, this will be the one.

An excerpt from his unfinished novel exploring boredom through the work of IRS employee Lane Dean (called a “wiggler” in slang — the first people to go over returns arriving at the agency).

Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connect to nothing he’ll ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never goes down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices. Tell him to pucker his butt and think beach when he starts to get antsy—and that would be just the word they’d use, antsy, like his mother. Let him find out in time’s fullness what a joke the word was, how it didn’t come anyplace close. He’d already dusted the desk with his cuff, moved his infant son’s photo in its rattly little frame where the front glass slid a bit if you shook it. He’d already tried switching the green rubber over and doing the adding machine with his left hand, pretending he’d had a stroke and was bravely soldiering on. The rubber made the pinkie’s tip all damp and pale beneath it. The beach now had solid cement instead of sand and the water was gray and barely moved, just quivered a little, like Jell-O that’s almost set. Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O. Lane Dean tried to control the rate of his heartbeat. He wondered if, with enough practice and concentration, you could stop your heart at will, the same way you hold your breath—like this right here. His heart rate felt dangerously slow and he became scared and tried to keep his head inclined by rolling his eyes way up and compared the rate to the clock’s second hand, but the second hand seemed impossibly slow.

A great collection of essays by DFW here.

In memoriam

Some works online by David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008).

Some more from Harper's here.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" - David Foster Wallace at the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005