Don't miss the lengthy article/review over at The Rumpus by Tye Pemberton, The Living Dead, about David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace:
Let’s be honest. What we’re talking about here is a person’s right to manipulate how others see them, something Wallace apparently struggled with every day of his life, if his writing and interviews are any indication. It’s an inalienable right, but one that depends entirely on our ability to outwit our audience—and so it’s a right that one inevitably loses in death. Death is nothing if not the ultimate loss of control. If it’s condescending for us to appoint ourselves the stewards of a dead man’s memory, it’s also kind of superstitious. It suggests that we believe the author can see us from his cloud somewhere, that he can disapprove of all the hideous things we’re attaching to his memory. Concerns about posthumously released work should center around the living—not the dead. And so rather than ask whether Wallace would have approved, a more important question we might ask, especially as more of his work comes to light, is: “Is this good for us?”
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