This excerpt from the article is relevant to your reaction:
In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.”
What I'm getting at is that there were certainly times when DFW did say some pretty wise things, not because he was a wise sage, but because I think he sat and thought about certain aspects of life deeply. So, I'm not sure why you would have a one-sided impression of him as an asshole. Similarly, he certainly did write things that sounded like he was on the verge of wanting to go off on people, not because he was an asshole, but because he was clinically depressed. Anyway, I guess you've chosen only to remember one side of his personality, so it sounds a bit disingenuous. I don't expect people, especially in fiction, to have a flat-line, monotonous personality. A story, after all, needs to make things interesting and the mechanics of it require some tension.
We can sit and judge his personality when giving interviews, where most of the time he appeared pretty calm, maybe due to the fact that he was medicated--I'm not sure--but it would be a pretty useless exercise that kind of reduces everything to gossip.
His political opinions don't make him a worse or better writer. I mean, do semi-popular writers or artists have to always have a hard-lined opinion on something? He seems pretty liberal and, at the very least, not a right-wing conservative nutcase in the 2003 German interview on ZDF, if that helps any.
The problem is that what passes for intellectual thought on the internet is pretty much just fashion. I think "hit pieces" and "edgy" are just hot now for whatever reason. Vice seems to have made a good go with "edgy" material and others have followed. I imagine DFW is an easy target for millennials not terribly impressed by the 90s or whatever Gen-X was supposed to be back then.
I'm surprised by the vitriol in this thread as well. DFW has always been kinda an interesting but somewhat boring smart guy and never this politicized character or self-help guru the article makes him or his legacy out to be.
I also think these calls for being a conservative really reflect the extremist leftist times we are in. DFW was something of a liberal moderate and sometimes played up the positive side of traditionalism. Nowadays, in the age of "trigger warnings", tumblr brigading, outrage politics, and mindless social media; being anything but a leftist revolutionary who hates everything is a liability. DFW never sought to toss the baby out with the bathwater and that's an unforgivable sin today it seems.
In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.”
What I'm getting at is that there were certainly times when DFW did say some pretty wise things, not because he was a wise sage, but because I think he sat and thought about certain aspects of life deeply. So, I'm not sure why you would have a one-sided impression of him as an asshole. Similarly, he certainly did write things that sounded like he was on the verge of wanting to go off on people, not because he was an asshole, but because he was clinically depressed. Anyway, I guess you've chosen only to remember one side of his personality, so it sounds a bit disingenuous. I don't expect people, especially in fiction, to have a flat-line, monotonous personality. A story, after all, needs to make things interesting and the mechanics of it require some tension.
We can sit and judge his personality when giving interviews, where most of the time he appeared pretty calm, maybe due to the fact that he was medicated--I'm not sure--but it would be a pretty useless exercise that kind of reduces everything to gossip.
His political opinions don't make him a worse or better writer. I mean, do semi-popular writers or artists have to always have a hard-lined opinion on something? He seems pretty liberal and, at the very least, not a right-wing conservative nutcase in the 2003 German interview on ZDF, if that helps any.