DAVID FOSTER WALLACE COMMITS SUICIDE

AND THE MUTHAFUCKIN BAD NEWS JUST KEEPS ON ROLLIN' IN...TODAY I STUMBLE UPON THE DEATH OF ONE OF MY FAVORITE WRITERS BY HIS OWN HAND...I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO SAY...REST IN PEACE BRUTHA WALLACE




http://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace




Los Angeles Times

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead

By Claire Noland and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 14, 2008


David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.

"What was a party is now a wake," Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away.

"He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," Ulin said.

"He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late '80s and early 1990s," Ulin said. "And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything."

Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in "The Broom of the System," his 1987 debut novel; "Girl With Curious Hair," a 1989 collection of short stories, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with "Infinite Jest," a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.

Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.

In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, "Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone."

Other collections of fiction and nonfiction followed, including "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" (1999), "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity" (2003) and "Oblivion" (2004).

In June, to coincide with this fall's presidential election, he reworked a 2000 essay about Republican candidate John McCain for a paperback published as "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope."

Wallace was born Feb. 21, 1962, in Ithaca, N.Y., and raised in Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother taught English at a community college.

A talented tennis player as a youngster, Wallace attended Amherst College and majored in philosophy before switching his focus to writing fiction.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1985 and turned his senior thesis into the basis for "The Broom of the System."

After earning a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993.

In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College.

Gary Kates, the college's dean, called Wallace's death "an incredible loss."

"He was a fabulous teacher," Kates said Saturday. "He was hands-on with his students. He cared deeply about them. . . . He was a jewel on the faculty, and we deeply appreciated everything he gave to the college."

In addition to his wife, Karen Green, and his parents, Wallace is survived by a sister.
A memorial service is planned at Pomona College.




September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace commits suicide
James Bone in New York

The book world is reeling today from the apparent suicide of David Foster Wallace, one of America's brightest literary stars.

The author of the acclaimed "Infinite Jest" (1996), whose verbal pyrotechnics and mordant wit earned him a cult following, was found dead at his home in California. He was 46.

"Wallace's wife had called police saying she returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself," Claremont police said.

"At this point in the investigation there are no signs of foul play." In taking his own life, Wallace joins such American literary giants as Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Hunter Thompson.
Related Links

The son of a University of Illinois philosophy professor, he gained public attention at the age of 24 with his ambitious 1987 debut "The Broom of the System," which earned comparison to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.

But it was 1,079-page "Infinite Jest", complete with over 100 pages of footnotes, that made his reputation as one of America's greatest literary talents.

His magnum opus was set in a tennis academy and a nearby drug rehab centre in a parodic version of Organsation of North American Nations, or ONAN, where traditional calendar years were renamed after sponsoring companies to become "The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" and "The Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland." The novel centred on a lost film cartridge called "Infinite Jest" that is so entertaining that unwary viewers lost interest in everything else in life.

Wallace's latest book was a paperback version of his 2000 "Rolling Stone" magazine profile of Republican presidential contender John McCain, titled "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope." "McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now — for me, at least," he told the Wall Street Journal.

For the last six years, Wallace had combined his literary career with teaching creative writing at Pomona College on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he wore his signature bandana to class.

Although he only had a light schedule of classes, he had taken leave this term and had not been teaching since students returned this month.

John Seery, a politics professor at Pomona College who used to work out with Wallace, said in a blog on the Huffington Post that the novelist had not been coming to the gym recently.

"I wrote him a note inquiring into his whereabouts. He wrote back and said my note cheered him. My head swirls right now. He expanded our senses of infinity and oblivion and more, much more," Mr Seery wrote.

Wallace may have foreshadowed his own death in a 2005 speech to students at Kenyon College that spoke of the struggle with the mind.

"Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth," he said.

"It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.