Nowhere Band News

So, David Foster Wallace. Wow, that was tough; I’ve rearranged a whole lot of my mental furniture in response to stuff he wrote. His story “Good Old Neon” fundamentally changed the way I think about depression.  Disturbingly, “Good Old Neon” is all about the suicide urge and how depression is really a weird sort of intense internal war, devastating to the person it’s internal to and generally kind of opaque and impenetrable to people on the outside. It’s a little disconcerting when the man whose opinion you respect the most on these matters dies by suicide.

I want to be clear: I don’t judge. I’m just sad the dude’s gone. I liked living in a world where his articles came forth periodically, and where there was always hope of another novel as ambitious but maybe more focussed and less reader-hostile than Infinite Jest. For my own narrow, selfish reasons, this sucks. I want more.

To me, the strangest thing about his suicide is this: even though I know from endless counterexamples that it’s not true, it seems to me that being prodigiously talented and succesful at something– especially if it’s something one cares about greatly– should be enough for at automatic happiness at at least a baseline level (sure, you have bad stretches, who doesn’t, but your standard outlook’s pretty rosy). Wallace clearly cared a hell of a lot about words and the use of them; and you’d have to work pretty hard to find someone better at it than he was. And yet, it’s pretty glaringly obvious that talent and success didn’t bring him happiness.

I’m in the middle of rereading Infinite Jest (I’d bet a stack of AIG shares that more people are reading that book now than at any point in history), and it shocks me how much of the preceeding paragraph applies to that book. I’d almost go so far as to say that talent being a curse, not a gift, could well be the entire point. The vast majority of the characters are prodigies in some field (language, tennis, math, punting, optics, filmmaking, burglary, raw beauty), and to a one, everyone who’s naturally great at something suffers because of it. And, in most cases, turns to some sort of substance to deal with the pressures of living up to their talent. The only two happy characters I can think of are Mario Incandenza and Teddy Schacht; one was born severely deformed, so nobody expects anything of him. The other was a tennis prodigy until knee injuries and Crohn’s Disease took him down, excusing him from performance pressure. There’s too much of this front and center for it not to have been intentional.

Losing Hunter Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut and (hopping artforms) Johnny Cash was bad, but those guys had at least lived out their lives. And (getting selfish again) they’d all pretty much quit working. Wallace was so damned young; he deserved a couple of decades of elder-statesman status. And the rest of us, well, it’s not that we deserved a few more decades of work from him, but we sure would’ve enjoyed it.

BONUS MATERIALS
The MetaFilter Thread about Wallace is full of interesting and touching comments (FWIW, I post there as COBRA!).

I actually wrote a Wallace cameo into my America’s Next Top Novelist comic a couple of years ago (he appears on pages 4 and 5).

Finally, at some point I discovered someone else’s attempt at a comic adaptation of part of “Up, Simba,” Wallace’s essay about John McCain’s 2000 campaign.