there's our catastrophe

felixsalmon:

According to something he says in the story about Super Bowl XLV, Franzen was on Robinson Crusoe Island on February 3, 2011. Which means he was there less than a year after Robinson Crusoe Island was all but destroyed by the tsunami which followed massive Chilean earthquake of 2010…Sixteen people died; the entire economy of the island was wiped out. If you’re interested in helping, or finding out more, there are good resources here.

It’s into the aftermath of this disaster that Franzen wanders, thinking in his Important Novelist way about how selfish David Foster Wallace turns out to have been. He reaches the island, and he sees the damage wrought — by blackberries. He sees the islanders trying to recover some semblance of their former lives, and sneers at the “sad travesty” of their ritual. He moans about how “nondescript” his food is and how “skeletal” the cattle are, while somehow failing to notice that the reason is that the islanders, recovering from a terrible natural disaster, have nothing left.

Franzen attacks Wallace in this essay, criticizing “the extremes of his own narcissism” and his self-deception. Ha! The extremes of narcissism and self-deception needed to visit Robinson Crusoe Island 11 months after the tsunami and not even notice what had happened make Wallace look like an amateur in such fields. (And if Franzen did notice, but decided to ignore it, that’s even worse.)

oh geez

caitlinate:

ourcatastrophe:

early David Foster Wallace short story about depression. 

Have you read that piece - The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace. A friend of his wrote it, I think quite soon after he died, and it details a lot of the struggle he went through with depression and medication and surviving. It’s totally devastating.

Also, one of the things that really got me with ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ is how DFW could tell these hilarious stories about people and events on the boat yet still show you how gut-wrenchingly and deeply sad he was. He was very good at writing about depression.

I haven’t read either that piece or “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”, although I plan to!  (Anybody got a link for The Lost Years?  I’m having trouble finding it online. edit — thanks CF!) the first DFW I ever read was the first third of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men at Max’s house but I wasn’t allowed to take it with me because he was reading it at the time.  boo.  anyway the third I managed to read contained the story “the depressed person” which is pretty much the best description of serious depression I have ever read in any format — brutally honest, achingly sad, and fucking hilarious.  it’s about a woman’s desperate back and forth on the phone trying to find someone to listen, desperately needing to unload her feelings even though she knows it never works and that there is no catharsis, and knows that she is alienating and misusing all her friends, and knows that her fear that she is unbearable and unloveable is making itself come true, and yet is in such unceasing pain that she can’t stop herself… I dunno, depression is really recursive like that, and nothing else I’ve read has ever captured that quicksand, treadmill, mirrors-facing-mirrors feeling quite so well. 

(via rebelsea)

early David Foster Wallace short story about depression.