Posts tagged David Foster Wallace
This is water.
In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.
We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested. However, we encourage everyone to seek out the full speech (because, in this case, the book is definitely better than the movie).(h/t machaffer.)
[Nice illustrative film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech titled This is Water.]
Infinite Jest Characters by ElDangerrible
For those of you out there chasing big dreams, here is a little wisdom from David Foster Wallace:
“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”
For more beautiful vintage animations, visit blankonblank.
Most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
Happy birthday, David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008).
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” ― David Foster Wallace, This is Water
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Death looks different when you see it in a parent or somebody of your parents’ age than when you see it in a contemporary or a dear friend who’s even a couple years younger. It was a limited closeness, but it was a very intense closeness we had as writer buddies, and it was played out mostly in biweekly telephone calls. And I had the sense that I could pick up the phone, call him, and anything I was feeling, however strange, that had to do with the writing life, or negotiating some position for one’s self in the culture, all I had to do was start a sentence and he would finish the sentence and say, yep. And I would do the same for him.
[W]e live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he “expresses himself” have been thrown into big time flux. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
DFW rarely elicits tepid reactions and because of that, because of his ability to lower our defenses and dance into the innermost abysses of our personalities, it should come as no surprise that people always treated DFW as a saint, not only in the sense of his morality, but in the way we interact with his works. Fantods, or just plain fans, always looked upon his repertoire the way zealots look upon a the religious canon of a rabbi, priest, imam, or monk: even the smallest utterances in a non-formal context take on importance to the worldview of DFW. We not only knew all of his writings, sometimes by heart, but we knew the legends, the stories, the tradition growing around his personality, his personal life. We gobbled up his interviews as if the sayings of a a founder of a new religion. (Part of what makes The Howling Fantods the most lovable, important website and resource on Wallace is its obsessiveness for all things Wallace. I feel at home there.) Consequently, the ferocity with which many of us now pursue his legacy is but a concretization and enlargement of a more limited phenomenon.
Joe Winkler reviews Both Flesh And Not by David Foster Wallace.
Young David Foster Wallace
“As his teammates sit back in relief,” that’s hilarious. Let DFW do all the work.
David Foster Wallace on the origin of his trademark bandana [sic]:
“I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it’s really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in ’87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who…said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? …. It’s a security blanket for me… . It makes me…feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It’s more just a foible, it’s the recognition of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried my head’s going to explode.”
This is a cool bit of trivia about why DFW wore bandannas.
We’re existentially alone on the planet. I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling. And the very best works construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness.
I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am […] self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I’m dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others…
- Page 1 of 5
- Next »
All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
__________
