When my wife read me the headline this morning, I felt like I'd been suckerpunched.  The news is heartbreaking.  And I am heartbroken.  David Foster Wallace is no longer around: keenly observing, forging acronyms and re-animating lifeless OED entries and creating sentences that make us spit out our beer, sputtering as we re-read and shout to whomever's nearby: "You gotta listen to this!" 

There will be no more stammering at readings as he scrunches his brow and adjusts his glasses and waffles between how he really feels about an audience question.  Those things actually mattered to him, visibly so. There will be no new moments of shaking our heads at new DFW prose, no reading words so spot-on that we are changed, forever changed, by his insight, his way-of-seeing, his ability to make you cry and feel and beat your head against a wall and kick your sneakers at the heavens because how the fuck could one dude be so funny!  This happens when you first read DFW, you're moved by black print on white paper in a way you never have been before (a way you'd've scoffed at when you'd merely bought the book and not read it).  You're moved in a manner that you aren't likely to be again. It goes without saying that David Foster Wallace was the most awe-inspiring and accomplished writer of the last 50 years. 

As a 22 year-old college senior, my favorite literature professor introduced me to the cerebral, slackjaw-rendering word-suites of Richard Powers (Operation Wandering Soul) and Pynchon (Vineland) and Don DeLillo (White Noise).  But it wasn't until I landed my first post-collegiate gig, ringing up books and cleaning toilets at a corporate bookstore chain, that I felt what Dave Eggers calls "the top of my head lifting off," the feeling that my legs had been cut out from under me and my brain stretched in a good way and my heart polished off and re-calibrated. 

No words can even come close to how much DFW meant to me as a writer.  Suffice it to say that no author has ever made me want to read better, think harder, write more honestly, and treat people with increased kindness and dignity and the gift of time, than DFW.  Many people in this world are geniuses; few people temper their intellect with such real concern for others.

Three times I saw David Foster Wallace speak: once at the Hammer Museum with my friend Nathan (he had a big fat dip in his mouth and he was friendly and quiet and genuinely ambivalent about all the fuss of scrawling his name on people's books--more on this later), a second time back at the Hammer in conversation with Mona Simpson, and finally with my sister out at the Webb Schools in Claremont.  The event was a workshop for private school English teachers (I'd been one but was no longer one and yet I was certainly not going to miss a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear DFW speak to a small roomful of educators).  The program said that DFW's talk was to center around "Whatever the Hell He Wants to Talk About!" (No shit).

When I finally got up the nerve up to ask DFW a question, I felt red-faced and nervous and maybe like people have felt historically when they've had a chance to query Paul McCartney or Bono or Oprah.  But what I asked was--how could I as a writing teacher ever have any clout with my students, like why wasn't I out there being published and famous, rather than just giving them feedback and to what extent it mattered that when he (i.e. the David Foster Wallace) sat with his students, he could sort of hypothetically nod over his shoulder at the genre-shattering masterpieces he'd garnered so much fame and accolades for in order to get his aspiring writers to be like wow!  this guy's not fucking around!--a luxury the rest of us shlubs would never know.

And what he said to me that day has never left me.  It speaks volumes about who he was as a writer and a teacher and a person.  He answered that as teachers what matters is that we provide a generosity of comment and time, that we display to our students a commitment to their work.  And, sure, they're still gonna write a story about the boy with the backwards ball cap getting surly at the keg party, but maybe we can take them seriously and have them write a better, more lucid and honest, backwards-ballcap-boy-at-kegger saga. (No shit.  This is what he said.  My sister'll vouch for this).

So like everyone, I am saddened.  So very, very saddened.  And a bit lonely.  Strangely I feel a lot like I did as a 26 year-old, when I finally reached the end of Infinite Jest.  I was on a river-rafting trip with a bunch of dudes and I snuck out of my tent super-early, just before sunrise, to read the last three pages of the book before anyone awoke or could see my eyes filling with tears and before any sucker could ask me what in the hell I was doing toting around a 1000 + page tome on a bachelor party.  Those of us in the know, know. 

There's a part of me that's not certain I'll ever be to post another album review on iTunes under the nom-de-plume "Don Gately Loves Foamers."  So be it.  DFW was always more than a big brain.  He was a big heart, apparently hurting lots more than his fans knew, as well.  May God rest his soul.  Too good for this world, too strong to keep fighting the signs.  Per Ardua Ad Astra