[37] David Lipsky's great sad biographical piece about DFW, the most thorough so far, is now online.

Sorry, it's still going on: Here's a memorial song. Pretty. Here's a lovely memorial tattoo. Here's a report on the memorial service, beginning with Jonathan Franzen in tears.

Today's footnote: Wallace is hard to review, because the books are complicated, and because their self-consciousness tends to swallow attempts to conceive them. (There was a Don Martin cartoon that scared me as a child, in which for four panels a spider weaves a web between two branches, until in the final panel the camera pulls back and the branches are revealed to be the sticklike legs of a giant fly, licking his chops; Wallace's fiction is to criticism as the fly is to the spider.)

Wyatt Mason, writing about Oblivion in the LRB in 2004, maybe doesn't trap the fly, but at least he's weaving his web in the right place: he successfully articulates the difficulty of the late stories, and some of the functions and effects of that difficulty. (Helen Dewitt, whose The Last Samurai is recommended to DFW fans, doesn't find Oblivion difficult. Good for you, Helen!)

Your DFW footnotes of the day: A. O. Scott moves the canonization along:

“Infinite Jest” is a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric. The other big books published since by members of Mr. Wallace’s age cohort — “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon — are more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to. They are family chronicles, congenial hybrids of domestic melodrama, immigrant chronicle, magic realism as well as the more traditional kind. Not easy books, necessarily, but not aggressively difficult, either.
In their different ways, though, these novels and their authors — along with other itchy late- and post-boomer white guys like Richard Powers, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers — stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow. Not because his version of their generational crisis was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous.

Fascinating personal reminiscence of the day:

We bonded over our depression. We shared war stories, the way patients on psych wards do. “I’ve eaten tapioca pudding on the fifth floor, too,” he told me. It wasn’t something you would know about him. Though when you read him, you knew that he thought about things in the way that gets you to that fifth floor. We were both taking Nardil; we bonded over this, too. It is one of the MAOI class of anti-depressants that went out of favor long ago, after the new SSRIs came to the scene. But he and I had no luck with other drugs; Nardil was the only thing that did it for us.

More footnotes:

• An incredible letter, apparently from DFW, describing his own experience at an addiction recovery house much like Ennet House.
  
• James Wood corrects the record (more here, scroll down): "An untruthful reviewer of my book, How Fiction Works, claimed that David Foster Wallace was its 'aesthetic villain.' That is not true."
• In, say, twenty years, John Ziegler's career as a radio talk-show host will be over. In thirty years, no one who never met Ziegler personally will remember him. But for years after that, people will still know his name, thanks to DFW's "Host," collected in Consider the Lobster. Maybe that's why he wrote this, or maybe he's just an asshole.
• "Just to satisfy some people’s curiosity about Dave the player – who once underrated himself as a 3.0, an intermediate in tennis terms – he had a complete game, the kind that comes from years of obsessing over stroke technique and ball location. If there was one sign that he was more than an above-par recreational player, it was the fact that he would employ a relatively advanced tactic, what tennis geeks call “taking the ball off the rise.” It requires sharp reflexes and timing. He did it repeatedly that summer afternoon in 2005."

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

From Infinite Jest

Footnotes: Salon's Laura Miller: "He was my favorite living writer, and I know I have plenty of company in that." New York's Sam Anderson: "He was my favorite living writer, and the contest wasn't particularly close." It's interesting that people talk about DFW in terms of personal affection, rather than "greatness": I haven't seen anyone yet call him the greatest of his generation, although next to him the accomplishments of most of his peers look a little thin.

Personal remembrances are collected on the McSweeney's site. Zadie Smith, as usual, gets straight to the point:

He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers.... In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things. The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential.

KCRW's awesome Bookworm had a discussion today, which I haven't heard yet; you can listen to that and to the show's archive of excellent Wallace interviews here. Harper's compiles Wallace's writing for the magazine, some of it uncollected. Another uncollected piece, the Roger Federer profile from the NYT's Play magazine, is here; it makes a fine partner for the Michael Joyce piece from Supposedly Fun Thing, which piece might be my favorite of his nonfiction.

Christopher Beam was wondering the same thing I was regarding what Wallace thought of the 2008-model John McCain. After he posted, someone apparently pointed him to this WSJ interview, in which Wallace says:

McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course—he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing.

Neighborhoodies has already commoditized our grief with these handsome Enfield Tennis Academy T-shirts.

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

It seemed worthwhile to write something about David Foster Wallace, but it also seemed difficult, since everyone else would be writing something about David Foster Wallace. Then it occurred to me that this is the kind of problem -- genuinely thinking about something that has already been densely and unproductively mediated -- that Wallace excelled at.

Large chunks of my brain are devoted to Wallace's thoughts about addiction, tennis, luxury, and a dozen other topics, but something similar is true of any writer one loves. There's another chunk, though, that contains a (limited and impoverished) version of Wallace himself in miniature, one that I've reverse-engineered from his writing and can now set to work on a certain class of problems that trouble me. It (the miniature David Foster Wallace in my head) is morally unflinching and intolerant of ethical or intellectual half-assery, but also sympathetic and devoid of cruelty. Of all the different kinds of conscience, it's a pretty good one to carry around with you.

Here are the thoughts that I can remember having about Wallace during the week before he died:

• I wonder if he's sad or just kind of resigned about what's happening with John McCain.
• The introduction he wrote for Best American Essays 2007 feels apposite right now, especially the part about a three-alarm cultural emergency, but suffers from a reflexive urge to force a rhetorical parallel from the blinkered worldviews of the U.S. political right- and left-wings, thus setting up a false moral equivalence. But is it possible to describe that three-alarm emergency without either (a) setting up a false moral equivalence, or (b) contributing to the conditions that you're trying to describe? Because I can't think of a way to do it.
• Wouldn't it be great if my novel had a MacGuffin like the videotape in Infinite Jest? But then maybe it does? Or no.
• It is odd that, of late, Infinite Jest has dropped off my mental or conversational lists of my favorite contemporary novels. This omission has the flavor of an oversight rather than a waning of affection; I think it's precipitated by the fact that Infinite Jest is worthless as a source of helpful guidance in writing your own novel.

Here are a couple of thoughts I have had in the past couple of hours:

• Wallace's biography was always peripheral to the way his work was received: he wasn't a famous recluse like Pynchon or a famous prodigy like Safran Foer or a famous stud like Philip Roth. He was just a famous writer. Now he'll be a famous suicide. This will not be good for the books, and I feel slightly sorry for anyone who hasn't read IJ yet, not that you should let that stop you.
• The passage in IJ about Kate Gompert's depression is probably the only piece of writing on the subject that's made me think, Yup. There's an analogy I'd like to quote, but I'm away from my copy right now. The gist is that a suicide is like a person who jumps from the top floor of a burning building: eventually the fear of the flames overtakes the fear of falling, but the flames haven't made the jump any less terrifying, i.e. the fear of falling is a constant.
• Besides IJ, which I'm guessing will be read 50 years from now, his most lasting work will probably be the essays. (Kakutani agrees, although she closes her piece with a tautology that Wallace would have made fun of.)
  
• Wallace's prose's tics and mannerisms probably distracted attention from how good he was, or at least limited it to an in-group of fans. If you haven't read IJ then all you know about it is that it's huge, it's set in the near-future, and it inspires cultlike devotion. If that was all I knew about it, I would think it was Not For Me. I have not yet found a way to communicate its massive, throbbing heart. I will say this, though: I have never read a writer who loves his characters more or better than David Foster Wallace did in that book, and I expect that I never will. And maybe love everyone as much and as well as you can is in fact helpful guidance for writing your own novel, and for much else besides.
  

First line of Gawker's Charlton Heston obit: "Well, you can have his gun now."

Talented comics people seem to be dying off faster than sympathetic corner boys on The Wire. Now comes word that Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died of leukemia, aged 52. Stevens was a craftsman of a kind they don't make much anymore: in love with his own idealized physical world and beautifully drawn line. As a teenage boy I had this poster up on my wall, for obvious reasons.

Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead. The obituaries seem to be identifying the game genre he invented as "a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry," as the NYT put it, and that may be right from a historical perspective, but I don't think it captures the man's achievement.

For non-initiates it's hard to see past the sword-and-sorcery surface, but at its core D&D and the other role-playing games that followed are vehicles for imaginative play. Kids make up stories together all the time. Thanks to Gygax, my friends and I did it into our teens. I miss it.

William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008

More strange new respect for Bill Buckley, this time from James Kirchick at the Plank. Kirchick cites Buckley's famous riposte to Gore Vidal -- "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” -- in order, rather oddly, to praise Buckley for refraining from personal insults except in that one uncharacteristic instance.

I leave it to the reader to measure the distance between "you queer ... I'll sock you in your goddam face" and the remark I quoted yesterday: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

I'm sure Buckley was nice to black people too, even as he wrote things like this, in 1957:

The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Buckley later said he regretted opposing civil rights legislation, and supported the establishment of a national holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind, in other words, after the battle had been fought, with him on the wrong side, just in time to be in the right on a matter of pure symbolism. He was by all accounts a charming and generous man, and he propagated a worldview that consisted largely of sympathy for the overdog. He was certainly more amusing and less odious than Sean Hannity or Dick Cheney, but that's a judgment that leaves a lot of room for odium. Now he's dead, and his decency and fairness are gone with him. What survives is the movement he built, which reflects not his personal manner but the actions he took and the positions he chose, and which stands athwart America, shouting Fuck you, you queers and blacks and poors! in language that Buckley used only in occasional slips but that expresses his meaning more than adequately.

Various liberals (Hendrik Hertzberg, Joe Klein, James K. Galbraith) have nice things to say about the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was evidently generous, eloquent, cultivated, intellectually honest, and ecumenical in his friendships. In that spirit, let's take a moment to recall Buckley's comments on antiwar demonstrators in 1965: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"

Hertzberg writes that "he could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn." Maybe so. Perhaps Buckley disliked hearing Ann Coulter call John Edwards a faggot. But one suspects he opposed the syntax more than the sentiment.

Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown and writer of some awesome and weird Defenders comics, died on Sunday. Gerber is one of those figures who seem to have occurred at the wrong moment: in the fifties he could have worked with Harvey Kurtzman at EC and seen his stories illustrated by Bill Elder; in the eighties he could have helped draft the Creator's Bill of Rights with Scott McCloud and Dave Sim and published Howard the Duck with Eclipse or Aardvark-Vanaheim. Instead he was a 1970s fan-turned-pro, like Roy Thomas and John Byrne, and he worked for Marvel, and he probably had very little chance at happiness in that situation, but fortunately for us all he was too ornery to turn into a bitter old drunk and instead he fought. If he hadn't appeared, no one would have filled his strangely shaped spot, and comics today would be different and worse. Tom Spurgeon has a lovely obituary.

Altman redux

David Edelstein, maybe my favorite movie critic currently working, has this to say about Altman:

On the Internet last week, I read that Altman had changed American cinema, but I’ve always been saddened by how little influence his work actually had in an era of wall-to-wall storyboarding and computer-generated imagery.

This is true as far as it goes, although the current vogue for large-ensemble pileups like Crash and Babel certainly owes something to Nashville. But it may turn out that Altman's influence was most strongly felt on the small screen. Hill Street Blues, with its elaborate tracking shots and overlapping dialogue, was always described as "Altmanesque" (that's where I first heard the word). Add to that NYPD Blue, The West Wing, and most of all The Wire, which in its subtle sound mixing and its gyroscopic portrait of the connections between moments and systems is basically Altman filtered through a bunch of genius crime writers. (Altman would never have attempted The Wire's intricate and satisfying narrative setups and resolutions.) Plus remember that Tanner '88, the HBO series Altman made with Garry Trudeau, anticipated the look and feel of The Office and every other video-documentary-style sitcom. Altman left television in 1969 to make the remarkable and remarkably adult films that are his legacy. He may have done more than any other filmmaker to drag television into its adulthood too.

A Prairie Home Companion, Walter Reade Theater, 11/27/06

There's a moment in A Prairie Home Companion, the last movie Robert Altman made before he died last week, when someone says, 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy." When the movie was released last summer, before it was publicly known that Altman was dying of cancer, that was a bit of offhand philosophy. At last night's memorial screening it carried an extra charge: Hey -- he's talking to us! Altman got to speak at his own funeral.

At another point Meryl Streep says, "I just love a happy ending," and the line plays as irony, because the film makes clear that, if you keep the camera rolling long enough, there is no such thing as a happy ending. Altman was particularly good at strange, complicated endings -- A.O. Scott began his remembrance with a discussion of the shocking end of California Split, in which the mystical energy that has propelled the protagonists and powered the entire film suddenly and momentously dissipates, like the air whooshing out of a balloon, and then the credits roll.

Artists always struggle with endings, but they rarely get to struggle (in a conscious-artistic-intent way) with the ending of their careers. For some, death comes as a surprise; for others, the illness that makes it predictable also prevents them from making artistic use of it; others find their efforts thwarted by the waning of their artistic powers. Altman, it now turns out, is the rare exception; the only other serious example I can think of offhand is Shakespeare. For his last movie, Altman took a radio show whose appeal is its insistent timelessness, and he added the element of death and made it into a tragedy. At the end of the film, the show has been cancelled and the stars are sitting in a diner talking about a reunion tour the same way they sing about heaven: joyfully, sincerely, but not literally. It is, in a way, miraculous that a man who got to make so many movies and so few compromises should have been able to approach even his own ending this way: with a thorough understanding of his situation, with all his artistic faculties intact, and with a circle of brilliant collaborators to carry him out. It's almost a happy ending.