tarigwaemir

Durant Avenue on the Feast of St. Andrew Kim Daegeon and companions

Last weekend, David Foster Wallace passed away, most likely in an act of suicide. It startled me to realize how much the news saddened me. I know almost nothing about Wallace as a person, but it was reading his short story "Octet" (part of the anthology, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) in English class my junior year of high school that introduced me to the world of literary postmodernism. Prior to that point, I had avoided reading authors who were still alive unless they wrote science fiction or fantasy.

I spent last summer reading Infinite Jest, I've reread Brief Interviews about twice, but I still haven't finished Everything and More (his nonfiction book about Cantor and the mathematics of infinity) nor have I looked at any of his other fiction. Still, I count him among one of my favorite authors.

Conversational Reading links to a Youtube video of David Foster Wallace's interview with Charlie Rose. Almost every literary blog I subscribe to wrote a tribute: here's a collection of links here. And

ldmoonflower linked to the commencement speech he gave at Kenyon here.

Hearing about his death reminded me of another author whom I discovered at about the same time: Helen DeWitt. Who had also attempted suicide a few years ago but thankfully did not succeed. Her debut novel, The Last Samurai--not to be confused with the movie of the same name--is one of my favorite books, which I think I've reread about four times now. I looked back at her website again and discovered that she has a blog! I suspect that the only other person who will be as thrilled about this discovery as I am is

fable, but I think all of you should take a look: Paperpools.

For one, she includes in her list of links:

An introduction to yakuza Japanese.

Two websites for Arabic typography.

Oral recordings of ancient Greek.

Gallery of user-generated R graphs.*

* R being an open-source statistical programming language. Our lab does everything in R.

She also makes some of her recent writing available on her website:

Letter to a Yale Undergraduate, for the Yale Review of Books

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Also, you can purchase her newest book, Your Name Here, for $8 through PayPal, as well as two short stories, "In Which Nick Buys a Harley for 16K Having Once Been Young" and "The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto" (excerpts here), for $5. I promptly bought both and am making my way through Your Name Here in PDF form.

So far, I think it's a little too ironically self-conscious--and self-conscious about being ironically self-conscious--and it hasn't quite hit the same point that made The Last Samurai really resonate for me, but DeWitt seems to have somewhat different goals in writing this novel. It's less controlled, more experimental and fragmented--as if she let herself go loose, to a certain extent. Still, I'm enjoying the book, and at the very least, I really am picking up the Arabic alphabet by reading it.

What appeals to me about DeWitt--and about Wallace--is not their intellectualism (or even the air of inherent elitism that they try very hard to dispel) but the omnivorous nature of their interests. They are curious and do not try to contain their curiosity in specialties. I know many, many intelligent people who are simply not interested in certain disciplines and make no attempt at even a passing acquaintance; I must confess that I often slip into this rut myself. But I really do think there's something wrong with that approach. Of course one doesn't want to be a dilettante, but one should aspire to the Renaissance ideal, not for bragging rights or dinner conversation topics, but because there genuinely is that much beauty in all knowledge, no matter how abstruse or inaccessible. It's what makes life worth living. I really do believe that, and I'm ashamed to say that I haven't always professed it publicly when I should.

Yours &c.

Post-script: In other news,