That’s not good for me, but is a pretty compelling example of the power of art.

Ridiculously, I am always somehow disappointed when people don’t like what I like, especially if I really like it, as with IJ. I initially want to marshal all my arguments about how said person should revise their viewpoint so that they can be just like me and love what I love, that they have missed something crucial and I will explain it to them. Ha! I suppose the psychology of this is fairly obvious. I struggled with IJ, certainly, but not surprisingly it was the struggle that I ended up enjoying (and just wait ’til you get to the end). I find this to be true of most of the art/writing that I enjoy–there is the initial struggle, sometimes bafflement, and then the work becomes this amazing presence in my life, seemingly ever after. I wonder if it just doesn’t come down to aesthetics and brain chemistry. That in a sense we are hardwired to appreciate certain things and not others. I literally hung on Hal’s every word. I couldn’t get enough of Hal and Pemulis. Gately, too, and of course Mario and JVD and JOI. IJ, for me, had this incredible intimacy that I’d never experienced before in a work of art. And that was the thing for me and IJ, this feat that DFW accomplishes. Amazing, nothing else has quite worked like this. It was almost uncanny, but then I myself was a big jock as a kid, followed tennis, devoured Thomas Harris novels, work with drug addiction, etc, so, my hardwiring is like synced up. I suspect that DFW’s IJ terrain is not your terrain and it never will be. Which is just how it is, though kind of a bummer for you. But you still will have accomplished reading this important book, which I think is valuable whether you like it or not.

brent

Lots of people have noted this, but DFW’s suicide really does alter the experience of reading it (or parts of it, in my case) again.

I’m starting to think of it as highly autobiographical, with heavy doses of the author’s imagination included. All the things that Wallace loved and hated and found interesting (considering his body of work) are awfully deeply explored; his wonkish love of math and formal logic, tennis, pharmacology, the intersection of meta-viewing and culture, and of course depression and *gulp* suicide, wrapped in this wildly complex and funny and smart monstrosity of a book. I see a lot of Wallace (in suicidal retrospect) in Gately, Kate Gompert, Hal, and Mario, who is not getting enough play on this blog, IMO. Mario being perhaps the novel’s one pure soul, the simple-is-better, trusting, unconditionally loving part of DFW, DFW knowing if he could just see the world more like Mario…

Sometimes I wonder if he just sat down and decided to give us the most thorough peek into a person’s own personal mind I can ever recall reading, and damn the torpedos and people who find it to be “work.” I look into my own mind, and I, too, find it infinitely jestful, and trying to pour everything bouncing around in there into a book would require a thousand pages, at least. And probably a lot of endnotes.

The man had an bizarrely large, completely functional empathy gland, that much is clear, to at least one rapt reader.

And let me reassure you Ralph, after trying to quit a dirty drug which prevented severe depression over 22 years only to find that the drug does not help anymore when the depression returns with a vengeance, it is unlikely that special something you’d have said or done could have made him stay around. At that regrettable moment in time, he just could not bear life-with-an-exploding-head any longer. R.I.P. Dave