Comments on: John Warner: My Own Infinite Summer

By: naptimewriting

naptimewriting — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:07:45 +0000

Lovely post. I can’t bear to talk about his death, so I’ll sidestep the elephant in the room this week.
“Reading David Foster Wallace showed me what was possible.”
Yes. On so, so many levels.
“Twice in my life, when I had no one, David Foster Wallace was there for me.”
Yes. Twice when I had no one to understand me and no one whom I understood.
“…the book demonstrates that if you want to write something at all compelling you’ve got to bore in on what interests you and just work that shit until the goods come out the other side.”
Yes. How very sausage-process evoking.
[And I have to agree with the commenters who adored grad school. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. And may again, soon.]

By: Matt Evans

Matt Evans — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:58:07 +0000

I can totally relate to this. Elliott Smith and DFW kind of look alike, too. They also killed themselves in strangely self-violent ways, too (out of general decency I’ll avoid elaborating this point)(and yes, suicide is patently self-violent, but I was referring to the element of sad and shocking savagery in their respective felos de se).

And their art affected me similarly, too, in that E.S.’s songs and D.F.W.’s writing puts me in touch with a sense of almost primordial, childhood loss that still affects now and then. My first memory is of a group of us gathered around a sewer looking down at a small, red, plastic boot that had fallen off my friend’s Superman doll. E.S.’s song “Clementine” is that memory’s soundtrack and D.F.W.’s descriptions of the Black Sail seem to speak to that lost boot.

Not that anyone gives a long, segmented shit about my childhood memories, but I’m trying to elucidate by way of one, personal memory what both E.S. and DFW’s art does for me.

I came to both DFW and Elliott Smith about the exact same time, January 2006, and I have a memory of looping “Either/Or,” and specifically the song, “2:45 AM,” while reading “Consider the Lobster.”

I’ve had the same thought you had about wishing I would have/could have reached out before either artist killed himself.

By: John Warner

John Warner — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:42:02 +0000

It’s in the 3rd edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly if you can track one down. I forgot until I just looked at it again that the story also has a story by DFW printed on the spine, “Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders.”

By: Matt Sokol

Matt Sokol — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:17:58 +0000

David Foster Wallace is kinda like Elliott Smith for me. I got into Elliott Smith just a year or two after he died, and was really sad to hear that – his music is wonderful, and it sucked to think that I couldn’t have gotten to ever look forward to hoping for new albums or ever actually meeting the guy. Fast-forward to 2009, and here I am having just finished Infinite Jest, DFW having died not even a year ago.

It’s sad, and the feeling I get from it is weird – it’s like, in a way that makes no sense, “if only I had been a fan before he killed himself, maybe I could have done something”. Even though I wouldn’t have.

Oh well.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:15:00 +0000

I’d be interested to read that story!

By: sue

sue — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:59:31 +0000

Oh I so agree with you – it is with such a bittersweet wonder that I am reading his works now. There just has to be some kind of humankind wake up message in it all but I’m sure still grappling for it

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:12:53 +0000

I think Sam Anderson put the grief so many of us feel quite brilliantly in his remembrance for Wallace. He said, simply, “I didn’t realize, until he was gone, how much emotional energy I’d invested in the fact that he was actually a living human being.”

By: John Warner

John Warner — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:42:47 +0000

To be fair, I have no lasting regrets about grad school and I’ve always seen it as a necessary step on my own personal path. I developed the discipline to write without deadline. I spent three years thinking/talking/writing about reading and writing. I started teaching, which is something I love and continue to do. I was never personally unhappy while in school. I just recognized that my own work wasn’t anywhere near what I hoped for myself and had a hard time wrestling with that.

Really, though, that’s the endless struggle. The work is never going to be what I hope for it. Without some struggles, I don’t think I would’ve come out the other side of that particular problem.

By: Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:48:27 +0000

It gave me such pleasure to read these accounts, and to learn that things were different and better than I thought, at least for some. Thank you so much.

By: Infinite Tasks

Infinite Tasks — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:35:56 +0000

I absolutely loved grad school. It was non-stop magnificent and inspiring. More folks should try philosophy, and I think there’d be less griping.