tribute to dfw

This post doesn't have anything to do with computers, but it's a good way to break the inertia of this blog and get the thing officially off the ground, where it has sat for far too long...

It's with great sadness that I pass along the news of the death of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. For those curious, there's a good obit on the NPR site.

And, if you are familiar with the work of dfw, you likely already know why I have called the blog section of theanswerhub 'Notes and errata.' It's a feeble homage to the author who has influenced my writing more than any other. 'Notes and errata' is the title of the 100-pg-or-so endnotes section of dfw's signature work, Infinite Jest.

If this blog post inspres you to check out IJ, - use two bookmarks. If, on the other hand, you want to introduce yourself to Wallace's writing in a bit more digestable manner, let me highly suggest one of these two items:

1. The title essay of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again," which covers a vacation week spent aboard a cruise ship. It's quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever read.
2. The title essay to "Consider the Lobster," which I read aloud to my (then) 7-year old son, who loved it as much as I did. Consider the Lobster does just that: it ponders the fate of lobsters during the annual Maine Lobster Festival.

I've had the good fortune to have publishers glue together and print about 2500 pages of my writing over the last ten years. And even though I write mostly books about computers, Wallace's work has influenced every one of those 2500 pages. When writing, I often make conscious effort not to just directly ape dfw style of writing,1 but I suppose there are worse sins that a writer can commit than slipping into rote emulation of his favorite author.2

He's also done some great work about John McCain, about talk radio, about Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and - although writing about tennis and the 100th-ranked player in the world - about the grind of all professional sports for those not at the very top of the pile.

Thanks, David. Your obervations about the sublime and the banal will be missed.

1 - As further proof of how a) postmodern, b) self-aware, and c) heavily influenced I am by dfw's work, I submit the following: I can even recall with some clarity one of IJ's endnotes on the whole originality subject by memory. It goes something like this: "Has Hal Incandenza ever written a single original thought his entire life?"
2- like I'm doing now, badly.