March 13, 2009

J. Robert Lennon on David Foster Wallace

Great post from J. Robert Lennon on the death of DFW: "The lesson to take away from this, for all of us who write fiction, is to stop being such wimp-assed pencil pushers and get out of our comfort zones once and for all. Wallace isn't going to cover us anymore. If contemporary literature is going to be taken seriously, we're going to have to make literature worth taking seriously, even if it fails, as so much of Wallace's brilliantest stuff did. Otherwise we'll be relegated to the cultural footnote the film industry has been stuffing us into for years. Fiction writing should not be an amusing affectation. It should be the ultimate expression of being human, as Wallace thought it should be. Try harder. That's what we all have to do."
Read the whole thing plus much more at the blog he shares with Rhian Ellis and Ed Skoog, Ward Six.

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