David Foster Wallace has Died

My favorite author hanged himself on Friday. I don't even have a second-favorite.

I wrote a review of his book Infinite Jest, which is my favorite book, on my other, long-neglected blog. Excerpt from my review:

It's not a beautiful book; there are no lyric descriptions of love and beauty. It's about addiction and depression and the futility and inadequacy of intelligence and success. It takes place primarily in a tennis academy and a rehab clinic. It's also, in part, a retelling of Hamlet.

His writing was informed by his depression. Excerpt from an interview:

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

(I wrote about how Alcoholics Anonymous is NOT EFFECTIVE compared to many other forms of treatment here.)

DFW attended church, but his writing has a real atheistic feel to it. It's honest and real and unflinching while at the same time imaginative and playful. My guess is that he wanted to believe, that he saw that as perhaps a way out of depression, but that he couldn't really do it. From later in that same interview:

[Interviewer:] The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

[DFW:] It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

I think, and again, I'm guessing here, that DFW saw religion in much the same way -- that there's something real and helpful there and all this intelligence and education and ironical detachment gets in the way of that. I hope he didn't neglect what would most likely have helped -- professional psychological treatment -- for religion.

Religion is somewhat correlated with happiness and longevity, but I suspect that if you're an educated, intelligent depressed non-believer, psychological treatment is more likely to help than attempting to convince yourself to believe.

DFW's essays were perhaps even better than his novels. My favorite is "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness," collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. (His work sounds pretentious, but when you get to know it, you see that he's using literary playfulness as a tool. He's not just showing off.)

DFW was the editor of The Best American Essays 2007, and his introduction to that book is itself a brilliant essay. I was a little underwhelmed by Host, an essay about right-wing talk radio host John Ziegler, but it's worth a read. He also wrote an essay about John McCain in 2000 for Rolling Stone, which has now become a book. Here's an interview with the Wall Street Journal about the book.

Here is David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose. Skip to 23:15:

Fan site The Howling Fantods has everything you'd ever want to know about DFW.

(Public service announcement: If you are depressed or think you might be, please get yourself a good psychologist. It's not something you have to figure out on your own or trust your religious tradition to help you with. I see a psychologist myself. Feel free to email me.)

Update: According to the NY Times obit, Wallace was receiving medical care:

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst...

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Memorial Day 2008

Just one of thousands of American deaths from this war. There have been hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths as a result of this war. We still mourn the 60,000 Americans dead in Vietnam and we should mourn the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead as well.

This war is, like Vietnam was, a tragedy of proportions humans cannot understand. We can't comprehend hundreds of thousands of deaths. How many widows and widowers and fatherless or motherless children left behind, how many brothers and sisters one sibling short. How many loves not found and late-night conversations not had, how many meals not eaten and beers not drunk, how many afternoon walks not taken and laughs not shared. How many men in wheelchairs, how many homeless vets, how many damaged psyches.

I feel grief for the dead and anger towards those who started this war and hopelessness at our inability to stop this one or prevent the next one.

May we remember our dead by finding a way to prevent future deaths.

9/11

I wasn't able to write about 9/11 this morning for reasons I wasn't quite able to decipher. Then I read this piece by Ezra Klein:

I felt a bit conflicted about writing this post. What you want to do is remember an awful crime. What you end up doing is invoking a Republican talking point. That is all that remains of the term "9/11." As Gary Kamiya correctly points out, 9/11 need hardly be remembered: The President won't stop bringing it up. "President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq," writes Kamiya. "And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his 'war on terror.' He has incessantly linked the words 'al-Qaida' and 'Iraq,' a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' 'anxiously awaited' evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September."

9/11 has been robbed of its significance. It no longer lights up the neurons recalling an American tragedy, but instead activates that understand political strategy. I hate them for that. So this isn't a 9/11 remembrance. We've never been allowed to forget 9/11. Not for an instant. What we have been allowed to forget is 2,974 individuals who perished in that attack, who didn't die because they wanted to invade Iraq or because they thought Republicans were insufficiently competitive in elections, but because they were murdered. Remember them.

I remember talking to my father on 9/11, shell-shocked by what I had seen, but also worried by what I feared was coming. "I hope Saddam isn't behind this." That's what I said, because I knew that if he was, that if the atrocity were the doing of a country rather than a stateless terrorist organization, there was going to be a real war.

I guess I wasn't cynical enough, because it didn't occur to me that our government would use 9/11 to go to war with Saddam even if he had nothing to do with 9/11. I didn't realize that they would use 9/11 to stifle dissent. I didn't realize that six years later, Rudy Giuliani, who did nothing on 9/11 but run around aimlessly, would shamelessly attempt to cash in on it by mentioning it every ten seconds during a run for president. (President!)

Have they no decency?

I also didn't know that six years after 9/11, six years after discovering that it was Osama bin Laden and not Saddam Hussein who orchestrated the attacks, that the hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi and not Iraqi, that one third of all Americans and 40% of all Republicans would believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. (NY Times/CBS poll.)

Let us remember this tragedy for what it was, but also for what it was not. Let us stop allowing politicians to manipulate its memory for personal and political gain.

Today's Shooting and Gun Control

Would today's tragedy have been prevented or lessened if students and teachers were allowed to carry guns?

The right-wing blogs think so. And maybe they're right. Or maybe fifteen other students would have pulled guns and started mistaking each other for the first shooter and escalated the problem.

And maybe there would be a lot more suicides the 99.9999% of the time there is not a crazed gunman on campus. And more single and double homicides. And accidents.

Would today's tragedy have been prevented if guns were banned?

The left-wing blogs think so. And maybe they're right. Or maybe a war on guns would be as ineffective as the war on drugs, only less Constitutional. From some reports, at least one of the guns used today has already been banned.

Making policies based on exceptional circumstances is foolish.

There are about 400,000 crimes, more than 10,000 homicides, and more than 15,000 suicides committed with firearms every year in the United States. Almost none of them are school shootings in the manner of Virginia Tech or Columbine.

Policies must be targetted sensibly.

Our country seems particularly bad at this. We've banned knitting needles from planes but allow 16-year-olds to drive cars. Growing medical marijuana can land you in jail, but cigarettes are available at every 7-11.

How about we start basing some decisions on data? Focusing on mental health from a public policy perspective could probably save thousands of lives a year while debating the gun control issue will just waste a bunch of time and money. I can't tell you how many people I've known with clinical depression or anxiety that couldn't get (or at least thought they couldn't get) treatment because they didn't have sufficient insurance. How many veterans and ex-police officers are out there with untreated mental issues and the training to kill efficiently?

I don't know how we can get public debate to become more reasonable in the age of cable news and vacuous politics. I guess we can at least start with ourselves. Quit shouting slogans and start using reason. Stop focusing on anecdotes and start working with data.