Repost from some guy I’ve never heard of (1). I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, how tumblr knew to have this come up as something I’d be interested in, and there’s something a little sinister about it. But Hamish Hamilton have put the speeches from David Foster Wallace’s memorial service and I was reading these at work the other day and pretty much started crying and had to hide in the bathroom for a while.

David Foster Wallace was, I think, pretty much the best writer America had going for it, the last 50 years. He killed himself in 2008. Afterwards a lot of words went on the effect that he’d been on antidepressants more or less his entire adult life, and how he’d developed complications, and decided overall the best thing was to stop taking them, and then found he couldn’t write, and then couldn’t teach either, and then, well.

In addition to the Five Dials thing here’s also this — http://paulhabeeb.tumblr.com/post/61955887/the-planet-trillaphon-as-it-stands-in-relation-to-the — a short story by Wallace, ‘The Planet Trillaphon as it stands in relation to The Bad Thing’, written in his junior year, and the nearest, I guess, he got to writing fiction that informed by his own experience. It ends with more or less the same trick as his first novel, The Broom of the System (2). Tin House republished it last year. It’s kind of terrifying, given his end, that this last thing of his published fails/refuses to end the way it

(1) peterwknox:

Nine peers pay tribute with a talk or essay. Strong suggestion.

(2) Which I guess you’d have to read it.