r.i.p. dave.

i'm not sure how the news escaped me. one of my favorite authors, david foster wallace, committed suicide on my bday, september 12. he was 46.

wallace was one of the characters whose writing fed my perpetual love of language and word-play. he studied philosophy and english, the same double major as yours truly, and seemed to enjoy disrupting linear thinking just for the sake of proving an argument. postmodern and analytical never came so neatly packed.

fully finishing his second novel, infinite jest, has been (and probably will be) an unattainable and continuous goal in my life, and despite being only a partial read the book remains one of my favorites - a ridiculous achievement for a book and something of an embarrassment for anyone claiming to read books, not cliff's notes, but oddly comprehensible to those who have actually picked up the book with its bible thin 900 pages of 10px font and 30 or so pages of footnotes, endless acronyms and temporal displacement. it is a work of fiction which simultaneously provides a continual headache and intense pleasure.

there aren't many authors i could say i'd mourn. dave would be one of them.

here's a relatively short and a pretty damn funny reading from harper's 150th anniversary.