RIP David Foster Wallace

Sometimes I liked his stories a lot. Sometimes I wished he would use shorter paragraphs. But he was a truly original writer. I can't believe he is gone.

Here he talks about failure, in a funny, random way. My favorite line here is, "Everything that is a failure is always a victory." His readings were always completely full and seeing him speak here, I can see why. He's at some Italian writers conference.

Comments

[Don Gillies]

David Wallace was the funniest and most inventive writer I have ever known. We went through grade school and high school together, and were born in the same year (1962).

I remember in my 5th grade class, he wrote a very long (maybe 100 page) story about a bunch of buffalo on the great plains, and each person in our class was a buffalo, and all the buffalo interacted based on how our class interacted ... Others in the class wrote 15 or 20 pages, at most, but David wrote 5 times more, and couldn't stop writing.

When I was in french class in my junior year with him, we were asked to write a daily french journal. David wrote outrageous stories (as if true) about other classmates and their sexual escapades with each other. Our 45 year old burly female french teacher at times would comment about how salacious his stories were, and share hints with the class about what was contained within.

[Beebs]

I just wrote about this on my blog as well- that's funny because he died on Friday and I just read about it today. It is so so so sad- I wonder why this makes me feel worse than say a commuter train over turn. (that killed 23) How strange.

[hawaii helicopter rides]

He will be remembered forever.