“A paean of love” — he was writing to a girlfriend
American gangster movies and British war films
Noise within silence

“Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other”
“Such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea"
Written out of “very cold anger"

The adjective Pinteresque
as a byword for strong and unspecified menace

Realist
Between “primitive rage” and “liberal generosity"
All studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love

“I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,'"

For inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies
To share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian
Political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating Weapon or a form of cover-up

A stage version of his film script for “Remembrance of Things Past”

“The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”

Timothy McSweeney is devastated and lost

David Foster Wallace memories above

and below a postscript in the New Yorker.

Some Pomona friends have commented on the McSweeney's site. I don't remember him well. I tried to take a contemporary fiction class with him his first year at Pomona, my last, but it filled up. I went to his office hours to try to get in. He told me I could sit in the interrogation chair or the tippy chair. I sat in one. The class didn't have room. That was fair. I worked in the English department office, library, etc. I ran into Wallace at night in Crookshank Hall. He would be using the office, putting things in mailboxes, taking things from mailboxes. He often wore shorts.

But it's not him I remember (or don't) as well I as I remember the experience of his brain on the page. I remember the companionship, talkiness, the hallways, the drone. I read Infinite Jest throughout a semester abroad in Madrid. I read it after lunches, after napping after lunches in my tiny floral room, after staring at canvases, after staying out 'til morning and waking in the afternoon, after reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

I don't know what to say. I'm trying not to delete my recollections. Read the books? Read DeLillo.

I thought saw a scene from White Noise today on the highway. The kind of rubbernecking where your head bends down.

I'm also thinking of you, English department, and I hope you are alright.

Michiko Kakutani on David Foster Wallace (Dave Wallace).

Reginald Shepherd's Obituary link

It's been a bad year for life.

David Foster Wallace, Writer, Is Dead at 46

Awful awful.

He did wonderful things for a lot of people I know.

And today, Antonioni. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Ingmar Bergman dies. He was 89.
A scene from Winter Light. Gunnar Bjornstrand had the flu the whole time they were filming.

Laszlo Kovacs