David Foster Wallace

Being out of touch (or maybe it was just reported), I just found out this morning that David Foster Wallace killed himself. For those of you don't know, he was a brilliant author who wrote some short story collections (the eclectic Girl with Curious Hair), a tome of a novel (Infinite Jest, a book with 125 pages of footnotes), and essentially reinvented the essay as a mode of writing, at least with my generation. In the latter category was the really funny and insightful "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again", which had some great writing, both funny and insightful, and funny, and also funny.

But what I really admired about him was his ability to write, and sometimes to write sentences just because he could. That may seem odd, but consider this sentence, toward the beginning of Infinite Jest:

"He reached up to his chin, where there was a wen." This sentence added nothing to the narrative. Really, nothing. The only reason it was there was because 1) He wanted to show off that he knew the vocabulary word "wen" - a small facial cyst; and 2) More importantly, read that phrase again "where there was a wen." Brilliant. So brilliant that when I read Infinite Jest, 11 years ago during a period I was unemployed, I was awed to the point that I kind of wanted to be an author to create a sentence like that. Honestly, if I could write 5 sentences that good in my life, I would feel like I could call myself a writer.

RIP DFW. Perhaps you couldn't generate any more of those perfect phrases.