I learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide a few days ago when I saw his photo under the column heading "Memorable Deaths of 2008". It was in some online magazine, I don't remember which.
"Memorable" deaths.
I read "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and came away apalled and giddy--and thinking that DFW was one wonderfully, brilliantly fucked up dude. His writing is manic and plodding, smart, generous and self-indulgent, funny and humane and dizzy with annotations and footnotes, zoozoos, wham whams and arcane allusions like Tourette's outbursts that totally grooved my ADD brain.
But beauty is a burden that some people just cannot bear. The gift is too much. The psyche short circuits and you go crazy or die.
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