What can you say - he was a language dork.

...too soon. Show some class.

"...he had to eject, which ejection basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke..."

@7: Well, I guess because there's no grammatical reason to restate the subject of the clause there. But I'm not sure that he never did that; he just didn't do it there.

@2 - He wasn't looking for a word and settled on "which"; I guarantee you he knew exactly what he was doing. "Whose" would not have been the same either.

Annie, thanks for changing the title.

He knew.

Accepted by whom? Good question. Staler folks than DFW, apparently. Nothing wrong with stretching the language. That's what language dorks do. And stuff like that made his writing stand out.

P.S. For nerds only. Of which I am one.

How are her thoughts, publicly displayed, any more disrespectful than the people who've finally made it to the library or bookstore to finally read the David Foster Wallace book they've always intended to pick up?

Great for some, not for me.

David Foster Wallace is not a big deal.

His death is not a big deal, either.

And, unless you people have a personal relationship with him, I don't see how it's "too soon". That's ridiculous...

Thanks!

Bob, sign up at your local library for an Internet web browsing class so you don't end up reading the Slog when you really wanted The New York Review of Books.

Well done, bitch, well done. You win this year's award for Crass Bullshit LOOKITME Post of the Year.

When someone you love and revere dies tragically I'll do my best to be there to tell you their life's work was shit.

The point isn't that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything. It is that if you don't have anything to say, you shouldn't say anything.

Annie: It was still a bad post done in poor taste and without an ounce of compassion. But I don't know if you're a bitch or not so I take that back. Please accept my most, uh, tepid apologies.

From reading the comments, one would think that this gentleman who died (whose death is lamentable, to be sure, as is anyone else's) was some kind of untouchable literary demiurge. I, for one, hadn't heard of him until now, and I hold a PhD in Literature. I imagine he was some kind of cult figure among would-be litterateurs, much like the galling Slavoj Žižek is among would-be literary theorists, to which fact one is readily alerted by the use of his initials alone to reference him. This would be a pity, since there is no indication in anything I have read about him today to suggest that he himself was a hack. May he rest in peace, and may his hysterical groupies get over themselves!

So. I hope it's possible, without any implicit moral undertones whatsoever, to simply say that what's annoying about this post is the fact that it is, as @39 adeptly pointed out, so much more about the post-writer than the ostensible subject of the post.

Case in point: There are, roughly speaking, about 10 references that she makes to herself; there are about 3 references to David Foster Wallace.

This post would have been interesting two months ago, or five months from now. As it is, though, it was written a few days after his death, and its awkwardness resides in the fact is that it's so obviously so much more about Annie than anything else. (I tried to avoid using your name in order to avoid seeming attacking, but the whole "the writer" thing was creating my own kind of awkward)

Anyway. It's not a morality judgment; it's just kinda hard to watch.

You need to give your degree back, post haste.