LITERATURE IS DEAD

David Foster Wallace, a great writer, IS REALLY DEAD. He wrote several books which were highly acclaimed and was considered a prodigy of literary undertakings. He was 46, married and a college professor. And he hung himself in his house this past Friday.


Great writers are mentally effed. I'VE SAID THIS BEFORE, and by God, I'll probably be proven right many more times before somebody says it about me--if I'm not already too late for that. But the genius-creative personality has always been something I've been drawn towards. For some reason, I could sense, by watching the video above, from where Wallace was trying to come with his thoughts. To be honest, I felt sorry for the person behind the tortured, beady eyes. You could tell that something was bothering him at the very moment that the cameras were rolling. His face and body language were sort of silently screaming, "But I'm being serious, people!" And then he shrugged and sank back into himself, realizing that people don't understand truth as much as they laugh at it.


What does this have to do with Hip-Hop, you ask axe? Well, Wallace once said that rap music was "quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today," [*] and he wrote a non-fiction book called Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, which if you didn't know is a NOD to the original gangsta rap pioneer Schoolly D.





I can dig this Wallace guy, and not just because he's dead. Moreso because he seemed to be on the same wavelength as me and other writers I respect and found success. That is, of course, pertaining to his ability to express his views with words, and not in his ability to hang himself. Some things I'd rather not know if I can accomplish, and killing myself is in that number.


YOU CAN READ an article, masterfully written by Wallace and published by the New York Times, about tennis champ Roger Federer OR check out a tribute written about him and see that dude was pretty official. R.I.P. to another great writer of the world, and knock another nail in the coffin of current creativity in its fearless form.


It's strange how this is always the type of subject that brings me out of hiatus. Hey, somebody's got to pick up the torch, I guess...


*SOURCE QUOTE: AMAZON.COM