Getting into, or revisiting someone’s work when they die is a strange habit, and I’m not really sure whether it’s respectful or cruel. I suppose if you’re already familiar with the body of work, revisiting it as a tribute of sorts is understandable. If you’ve never tried it, though, it seems a little crass, as if you needed an extra-special something to find the impetus required to go through the work, and it just happened to be death.

I’m going to go read and re-read some J.D. Salinger now.

There’s something about David Foster Wallace where the sporadic good parts are so good that I’m willing to forgive how absurdly long everything that surrounds those good parts is. I’ve been going through Infinite Jest for what feels like an eternity now, and there’s really a lot of segments that are just a chore to read through, but every once in a while he’ll try and explain something about a small aspect of life and it’ll be so engaging that you wonder just why he had to surround it with these endless descriptions and a narrative that goes nowhere for hundreds of pages. It really defies my understanding of what “good” and “bad” writing is and it’s infuriating but odly compelling.

I saw the film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men some time ago and it suffers from the same issue, perhaps more justifiably since it’s an adaptation of a short story collection. It’s not really a ‘good’ film. It’s not even really much of a film. It’s just a collection of scenes so loosely connected that perhaps it would have been better to simply present them as shorts. They’re not entirely consistent and only a few are one hundred percent successful, but the good scenes are so compelling, the monologues so interesting and revealing, that you end up concluding that it’s worth watching even though it’s not good, perhaps even because it’s not “good” it can achieve this different kind of success.

One of the things I really enjoy about his writing is that he never really presented himself as a disembodied ‘expert’ on anything; even when he’s writing about something where he clearly has much more knowledge than the average person, he doesn’t explain in a didactic, non-personalized way. It’s always clear that it’s David Wallace, A Guy, telling you what he thinks (which, depending on the subject, might be unarguable), and not simply an academic-styled screed. He had a real sense of humility and used it well in his fiction. It’s something I’ve found impressive, since the most traditional issue I have with anything that I might write is whether it seems honest about who the writer is.

Now, I can’t lie and say that I wish his writing hadn’t been edited down to a truly manageable length (almost one hundred pages for a chronic about going on a cruise ship goes far beyond ‘pushing it’), that might have made it lose the charm. Reading some of his writing as presented in magazines suggests it would.