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| Hearsay: |
Part time ‘Ninja Sheila writes to say there’s a Toronto memorial for David Foster Wallace on Friday along Queen West.
“On Friday September 19th starting at 9 pm, we will spend an hour in silence to mourn the great writer, David Foster Wallace. This ceremony will occur in Trinity Bellwoods Park, in the big pit, on the hill. All are welcome.”
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September 16th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Diana-style vicarious grief-wank?
September 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Let it stand, you pitiful fucking troll.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Roland: Wow, that’s harsh. If you don’t like Wallace or the memorial, that’s one thing, but why the hate?
September 17th, 2008 at 4:55 am
I wish I could attend the memorial. DFW was a marvellous writer, and he had great empathy and compassion for his fellow human beings. I salute him.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:20 am
MC, My remark wasn’t directed at DFW at all, just at the creepy mass psychology of public grieving for famous strangers, the “I want a piece of this grief” mindset.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Roland, pissing on someone’s memorial is the height of callow. You’re a fucking douchebag.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:37 am
And Roland, who the hell are you to question the motivations of other people’s grief? Did it even occur to you that maybe among those mourners in Toronto this Friday, there will be people who actually knew Wallace and who grieve him not only as a favoured writer but also as a friend — people who can’t, for whatever reason, attend the official funeral, and so this is what they have instead, to share memories and sorrow with others in their community who appreciated him. Who the fuck are you to call that into question? Are you so petty and cynical and twisted that you begrudge other people their grief and assume it’s false? Go fuck yourself.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Thanks, Paul. If I was grieving for a friend, I would not want a bunch of strangers there by public invitation. It would make me angry, actually.
People will go there to worship their own idea of a person they did not know. They have been invited to do this. It is a form narcissism.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Poor Taste, is what I ought to said from the beginning.
September 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Weird, Rolly. I remember hearing this exact shit-for-brains argument one night from a freshman in res who got too high and started brandishing his copy of “Being and Nothingness.” Something about “The Man.” Or was it “The Masses?”
What school did you go to?
September 17th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Roland, I’m glad you’re here to tell us about poor taste.
September 17th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Cliche of the day: “howls of execration”.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I hope somebody takes a camera. It will be interesting to see how many people turn up.
Reporters for the Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, eye weekly and NOW: Are you reading?
September 17th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
i think you’re being too hard on Roland. If there are friends of DFW’s
there, they don’t want all those people to witness that.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Nah, Monica, Roland caught the morning train to Doucheville where he’s douching out like a total Douchebag, to borrow an epithet from above. And now he’s having a hard time admitting it. Hey, I’m not usually one to agree with Paul, but he’s right in his long winded way.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I also think that memorials open to the public are more about people wanting to have a public expression of grief, then people actually grieving. I think DFW was an amazing man, amazing writer, and the world is worse off for him not being around.But i didnt know him as a person. He’s not an acquaintance of mine. I don’t need to cry for him in public. I’ll read his stories, and reflect on that in private. I’ll miss him that way.
September 17th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
I can’t believe anyone would be “angry” to have other people mourning a PUBLIC (whether he liked it or not) figure–seriously though, get over yourselves.
And while I suspect there will be a healthy mix of both types there as there are at any funeral, (fuck, have you been to a small town teenagers’ funeral?) I’m really just here for the “fucking douchebag”. It is exhilarating isn’t it?
September 17th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I’m not angry, i just think its pathetic.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
You raise a good point, Monica. All kinds of people do grieve in their own ways. You have your way. Other people have theirs. And I maintain that it is petty, cynical and twisted to begrudge people their grief, and yes, even their expression of that grief, even if they choose to seek the comfort of others who share their sense of loss, even if they choose to do it in a park. That’s what memorials are for. The rituals with which we honour the dead are very much for the living. And look and us now, some “pitiful fucking troll” has got us arguing over whether not we should bother to respect other people’s mourning. How absolutely vile. So go ahead and judge people for their “pathetic” grief. I think it’s far more pathetic, reptilian even, to be so completely lacking in empathy that you would deride them for it.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I agree. Publicly mourning a stranger is in bad taste. And Pauly, I don’t know what dictionary you use, but in my books, publicly calling someone callow and a douchebag in the same breath is pretty rich. You should at least hide behind an alias, like dear ol’ Fish Fish, if you’re going to do something like that. George, how about some moderation around here, if only to protect from themselves those who fail to engage their brains before clicking “submit”?
September 18th, 2008 at 1:03 am
ZW: What? You’re suggesting it’s okay to hide behind an alias to insult people?
September 18th, 2008 at 4:27 am
Dudes, I’m already moderating.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:47 am
It’s a good thing that we’re all allowed to think whatever we like.
Maybe, to me, grief is a private thing.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:10 am
“It’s a good thing that we’re all allowed to think whatever we like.”
Not for long….
September 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am
The only thing in bad taste around here is belittling people for they way they grieve. A person died. People had feelings for him. That’s all we need to know. If attending a vigil in a park isn’t your cup of tea, don’t go, but belittling those who do is just plain low, imho.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
is that in reference to your “moderating”, George?
October 5th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
“To the living one owes respect. To the dead one owes only truth.”—Voltaire
Before I first put a cat among the pigeons in Bookninja’s “David Foster Wallace memorial” thread a while back, I had been knee-deep in the subject of writers’ deaths, writers’ suicides, writers’ black moods. I had been reading Darkness Visible, William Styron’s long essay on depression, in which he describes his own near-suicidal despair being set off, at least in part, by the suicides of writers he knew. One does not, obviously, read Darkness Visible for entertainment. I was reading it because its subject has bearing on my own dreads and troubles.
And then, David Foster Wallace’s suicide. The familiar theme of the successful writer struck down by his own hand, death as the great leveller, and all that. It rankles most among young writers, of course, because they look at Wallace as someone who claimed life’s prize, and yet was insufficiently soothed by it. Such events bring to my mind the earnest young revolutionary in Chekhov’s Story of an Unknown Man:
“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another?”
And so, their pride and ambition a little wounded, some of Wallace’s admirers set out, innocently enough, to find a way to affirm the value of the writer’s work and life, and thereby, perhaps, of their own lives and aspirations.
And then I posted my cruel assessment, born of a dark, likely-to-say-something-not-tactful mood, and perhaps of an ungenerous wish to evoke a hysterical response for my own amusement: “Diana-style vicarious grief-wank?” Just a thought. An unkind, unsentimental, but still, I think, fairly accurate assessment of the futility and narcissism of their gesture.
My frame of mind at the time was arranged in this way: I had just returned from a summer in Iran, a country whose religious culture is positively rotten with public displays of phoney grief for a pantheon of imams, ayatollahs, mullahs, and martyrs—a cult which devalues the real griefs of Iranians, which are in no short supply. Still, after a significant amount of time abroad, I’m always ill-pleased to return to Toronto, a city of gray frivolities, of sheltered, narcissistic, incurious people.
So: “David Foster Wallace memorial, everyone invited”. I know there’s not much to do in Toronto, I thought, but really. Public grief is so clearly of a different species from private grief. Private grief hits one with a sickening percussion. One feels it in the gut. One knows what it is. There is no pleasure in it. Public grief, by contrast is not even real grief. It is psychosomatic. It is most often born of a dark little thrill, and becomes simply a social opportunity, a cheap opportunity to say something sentimental, a chance to “be a part of something,” or to claim to have had a piece of something. In Toronto or London, it becomes a place for modern western people to offload their useless detritus of post-Christian behaviours and sentiments.
All of this juxtaposed very unfavourably in my mind with William Styron’s sober account of creeping despair and suicidality.
Zach Wells was very astute to point out that my critics used the same complaint against me that the religious use against their detractors. However, I would say that if anything, the religious apologists make a slightly better case, since they at least sometimes defend the irrational means by which people cope with personal grief.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
That’s “personal” in italics.