Throwback Thursday: Three David Foster Wallace Blog Posts, an Essay and Four Quotes

The very talented DFW. (Photo: Creative Commons 2.0)

In 2016 I got into a Davd Foster Wallace groove after being inspired by his superb Roger Federer essay. Here are three blog posts from 2016, plus a few extras which I will label as icing on the cake. If you don't much care for cake, then call it cheese. 

Thoughts about DFW's last interview, captured in Quack This Way 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/11/quack-this-way-dialogue-on-language-and.html

David Foster Wallace Skewers the Current State of American Literature 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/09/david-foster-wallace-skewers-current.html

 

Magical and the Marvelous: DF Wallace's Roger Federer Essay

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-magical-and-marvelous-df-wallaces.html
The original essay that got me jazzed about DFW: Roger Federer as Religious Experience

DFW QUOTES

The Role of Fiction
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
--From an Interview by Larry McCaffery

On Psychic Pain
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Thinking
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being "an excellent servant but a terrible master."
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Despair
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
--From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again