SotD 10-30

songs:

"Nowhere Near" by Yo La Tengo from a live performance in paris.� anybody got a date on this? Dom?

Download 09_nowhere_near.mp3

-or-

Download 02_like_dylan_in_the_movires.mp3

"Like Dylan In the Movies" by Belle & Sebastian from the BBC Sessions

meme (infinite rest):

Even
though you don't want it to be true, with twelve speakers at a famous
person's memorial service� there can be an underlying sense of
competition: who will best capture how he really was, or best
convey the sense of loss, or illuminate some unseen aspect of his work.
At yesterday's celebration of David Foster Wallace at NYU, most of the
speakers rose above that, simply groping for ways to do him justice.
The non-writers in particular showed great dignity as they shared the
stage with literary stars.

Amid incalculable esteem and love and
funny memories, apparently no topic was off-limits: his suicide, his
depression, his suicide attempt as a teen, the misery of the final
months, the speaker's anger at him, the speaker's own depression, the
speaker's own bouts with suicide. Dave would have wanted it honest,
they said. They unanimously praised his parents, his sister Amy, and
his wife Karen, all in attendance.

Photography prohibited.

4:09�Michael Pietsch, his editor, said the speakers would appear more or less chronologically, in the order they knew Dave.

4:11�Mark Costello,
novelist, roommate at Amherst and after. Whole class had "sick
hyper-awareness of everyone and everything... swimming in 100% pure,
unadulterated insecurity" and they all knew Dave was "smart," a word
that "obviously impoverishes him." Dave corrected the logic prof's
logic solution. Every night Dave did his "drag queen act" which meant
green hoodie, open robe, and Timberlands as he went to brush his teeth
each night at 11:45 for 45 minutes. Rituals, germs already key. "A mind
in splendid overdrive." Self-awareness to mask problems, if he can joke
about it then it's under control. The hoodie & boots guy was to
Dave what the Little Tramp was to Chaplin. "Very dark times after the
publication of Infinite Jest."

Unsuppressed math: He spoke for 21 minutes! If everyone does, that's 4 hours 12 minutes.

4:32�Amy Wallace Havens,
sister. Very moving family stories, and grief. Dave taught her how not
to throw like a girl and she still has a decent arm, though she
suspects, "I throw like a boy who would rather be reading Kafka."

4:40�Bonnie Nadell,
agent. Dave had never published a story outside of college, she had
never sold a book. Agent as buffer and protector. Argued that his first
novel needed a complete final sentence and period; lost argument, of
course.

4:46�Gerry Howard, editor of first two
books only. Dave miserable at Yaddo with "Jay McInerny, Mona Simpson,
David Leavitt" where it was all "Andrew this and Binky that" and hated
coming to NYC for a glossy magazine photo shoot with "Tama Janowitz and
Christopher Coe. Coe was this flamboyant gay novelist who was camping
it up." He's reading Our Mutual Friend"by Charles Dickens" and thinks Dickens was heavily influenced by Dave.

4:53�Colin Harrison, editor at Harper's Magazine. Dry, extra funny re-enactments, with perfect accents ("traish!"), of Dave's piece on the Illinois State Fair and his epic cruise ship essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

5:04�Michael Pietsch, editor of IJ and everything after. Read droll, perfectly chosen excerpts from Dave's letters protesting cuts to IJ
with "bared canines" and "teeth bared to second molars." Thought Dave
wanted to use every known word at least once in his books before he was
done. Like all the speakers, praised Dave's extreme kindness; everyone
wanted to meet DFW when he came to the office, and he agreed but
deflected attention, asked about the assistants, people's children. At
Michael's house he played tag with his daughter until "that grew dull
and they invented broom tag."

5:14�Don DeLillo. More a short piece of writing than spoken remarks. Ended: "Youth and loss. This is Dave's voice. American."

5:18�Zadie Smith. Beautifully done. Her favorite is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
Important word isn't irony but "gift." The footnotes and embellishments
are there to "break the rhythm of thoughtlessness." Dave suggested that
the "big distinction between good art and so-so art" was heart; to give
love, not just create from the part that wants to be loved. Dave and
Kierkegaard, BIWHM like Fear and Trembling; she
taught them together to college students. The "most impassioned book
recommendation Dave ever gave" her was for Brian Moore's novella Catholics.

5:25�Donald Antrim.
Dave called out of the blue to ask if he could give him advice when he
heard from a mutual friend of Antrim's difficulty. They had never
spoken intimately before. Antrim read powerfully from "Another Paradox"
about politicians and salesmen. "Not someone to believe but someone to
believe in."

5:37�George Saunders. Reading BIWHM
he found himself "agitated, flinchy, on the verge of tears," by this
completely new kind of experience in writing, especially Dave's"terrified tenderness" conveying "what a fix we're in on this Earth."
Dave's work is, "if it's not too corny to say so, sacramental."
Saunders, thinking about these remarks, heard his "internalized Dave"
saying "Don't look for consolation yet." It's too soon. "Now there's
only grief... Grief is the bill that comes due for love." Dave is first
among us, the best, the most talented. His legacy: "Mostly we're asleep
but we can wake up."

5:43� Jonathan Franzen.
Dave used "details as a way of letting out the bottled love in his
heart." Franzen, like Saunders and others, admitted to nervousness at
being found inadequate in Dave's presence. Twice Dave stood him up.
Their early meetings were "stressful, rushed, less intimate" than their
letters. They agreed "fiction is a way out of loneliness." Life got
better when Dave met Karen. Life got worse when he went off his meds of
twenty years. In August, asked Franzen to tell him a story about how
all of this would end fine. In September, stopped listening.

5:54�Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, read from "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," a poetic choice in part because at first it seemed an odd selection. Then not.