{"id":417,"date":"2008-09-13T23:13:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T03:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/?p=417"},"modified":"2008-09-13T23:13:03","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T03:13:03","slug":"david-foster-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/2008\/09\/david-foster-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"David Foster Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Evidently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/books\/AP-Obit-Wallace.html\">David Foster Wallace committed suicide<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I mourn his passing.<\/p>\n<p>When I read <em>Infinite Jest<\/em>, it was a revelation in reading. I hadn&#8217;t read a book that stretched my brain like that since. . .\u00c2\u00a0 learning to read.\u00c2\u00a0 His development, plot, imagery, sentence construction, thought patterns, characters, and vocabulary stretched me and challenged me.\u00c2\u00a0 Just the vocabulary! I hadn&#8217;t needed a dictionary to read a book since I was 10, and there he was, making me reach for the shelf more than once per chapter.\u00c2\u00a0 I convinced several friends to read it and it was the source of months of discussions.<\/p>\n<p>I went back through <em>Broom in the System<\/em> and thought it was OK.\u00c2\u00a0 <em>Oblivion <\/em>also gets an OK. The short stories in <em>Girl with the Curious Hair<\/em> and <em>Brief Interviews<\/em> are more on par with <em>Infinite Jest<\/em> &#8211; mind-altering books that leave you wondering how much different you are from the stranger who started reading the book.<\/p>\n<p>There are a few other fiction writers that I really have loved, including Frank Herbert and Greg Egan.\u00c2\u00a0 Foster&#8217;s writing was on a different plane. I guess he&#8217;s another example of genius being crazy, and crazy being genius.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be nice if a few more of the crazy geniuses would stick around longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Evidently David Foster Wallace committed suicide.\u00c2\u00a0 I mourn his passing. When I read Infinite Jest, it was a revelation in reading. I hadn&#8217;t read a book that stretched my brain like that since. . .\u00c2\u00a0 learning to read.\u00c2\u00a0 His development, plot, imagery, sentence construction, thought patterns, characters, and vocabulary stretched me and challenged me.\u00c2\u00a0 Just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}