Here, he praises the AIDs epidemic as blessing in disguise.

LINK: http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Hail_the_Returning_Dragon.pdf

That’s the kind of talk I would expect from Pat Robertson.

In a novel that reflects so much on entertainment I think that it is not without a significant dose of irony that DFW uses a writing style that is indirect and detail oriented to describe the ultimate form of entertainment that is neither of those things. While I have yet to finish it, Infinite Jest the novel seems to be the anti-Infinite Jest the film so perhaps Wallace was trying to make a point about just getting to the point.

Also, on a personal note, I like the writing style. I think DFW described it as being a maximalist. One of the things I have enjoyed most about IJ is how the novel encourages/forces me to be self-reflective. When I read the novel it is like I am observing carefully selected moments of reality picked to highlight certain features of the human condition. I think it is for this reason that DFW describes everything in so much detail (and uses endnotes): he is attempting to mimic reality in both its incredible richness and non-linear nature. In this way, rather than simply get caught up in a story about a tennis academy, we see ourselves reflected in the tennis academy.

No, the line is addressed to Horatio. “I knew him, Horatio – a man of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy …”

Note too that several hundred pages in, DFW [filtered through Joelle] mocks the pretension of his own choice of title.

The endnotes are clever, but in the aggregate, they’re hedges. They’re the product of a writer who’s never sure if he’s said enough.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Ezra Klein is paid to talk about politics instead of art.

I often tell people to start with “A Supposedly Fun…” and just say, “It’s a primer. If you like the writing in that, you may like IJ.” And I often refer people to an essay within, E Pluribus Unum as the greatest examination of television’s influence (really, locked grip on our proverbial nuts) on society/culture ever written, meaning read by me, of course. Sure, it took three or four times through to reach that conclusion; as Wallace would say, I don’t have the firepower to comprehend it on a first pass.

For me, the pure genius in a unique mind was enough. His death shocked and saddened me to seriously abnormal degrees. But it didn’t surprise me. Afterwards, it wasn’t hard for me to see that his was a mind that needed to understand, above all, and the complexity of the human condition makes that a tall order, indeed. I think his mind was overloaded…read (another short one) Good Old Neon, from Oblivion, which so beautifully describes “mind time vs chronological time” and is about a suicide, but is mostly about how much passes through our heads in so brief a time and how little of who we are actually makes it out of our mouths and behaviors. Just…brilliant. Are we all frauds?

Also highly recommended and seldom mentioned, Everything and More: A Brief History of Infinity, a book he wrote as part of an educational series that is about great mathematicians’ grappling with infinity as a math construct.

Consider an acknowledgement in “A Supposedly Fun…”, attributed to Amy Wallace, I’m pretty sure his sister: “Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here Exactly?”

He didn’t care. He wrote for DFW, and hoped the rest of us liked it.

I miss him. He made me smarter.