Hard to tell if this is coincidence, but intentional or not, I can’t help but read this week’s New Yorker Caption Contest (image above) as slyly alluding to the sadly-departed David Foster Wallace by way of the title essay from his last non-fiction collection:
And on a related note, the Wallace fan-site Howling Fantods recently held a DFW Motivational Poster Competition which included this gem, now somehow tinged heavily with a deep sense of pathos for me:
If you’re unfamiliar with Wallace and are perhaps wondering what all the fuss has been about these past few days, you could do worse than start with his 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [“thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Comedian Patton Oswald just about captured my feelings about this piece and about DFW’s death in general on his website yesterday:
His commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 changed my life, as I wrote in an earlier SPEW. A day hasn’t gone by where I haven’t thought of some aspect of the speech.
Why the fuck would someone so in touch with camouflaged, mystic dimensions want to leave the feast? I’m not anti-suicide in general. But in specific cases — and specifically in the case of David Foster Wallace — I’m very anti-suicide. I demand that minds and souls like his stick around.
And finally, The Morning News just posted the best collection of links related to Wallace’s career and death currently available. A fine tribute.