David Foster Wallace, a brilliant writer and thoughtful educator who was found hanged on Friday in an apparent suicide, devoted his essay “Big Red Son” to the 1997 AVN Expo.
Ms Jasmin St Claire allows butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch for Cream Productions’ 1998 Blow it Out Your Ass.’
While the heavily-footnoted article was not received well by the adult industry (Wallace poked fun at everything from AVN’s awards-voting system – back when there were only 108 categories – frequent misspellings of words like “irresistible,” and said the magazine’s articles were more like “infomercials”), it did provide a comprehensive if intellectually condescending first-time view of an event that to the newcomer is often overwhelming and hard to process.
AVN’s response to the original article (“Neither Adult Nor Entertainment” was first printed in the magazine Premiere in 1998) can be found here. It quotes publisher Paul Fishbein and senior editor Mark Kernes as well as former associate editor Rebecca Gray. While the responses often prove Wallace’s point, they do mount a serious counterattack on both Wallace’s journalism in particular and mainstream impressions of an industry that feels unjustly burdened to prove that it should be taken seriously.
Wallace spent the last several years as a professor at California’s Pomona College and is remembered by his colleagues and students as rigorous, caring, and unaffected by the raves he received for works like his thousand-page “Infinite Jest” and his first book, “Broom of the System.”
Wallace also authored several collections of essays (“Big Red Son” is from “Consider the Lobster“) and released a book of short stories called “Girl with Curious Hair” which, though less ambitious than his other works, is both smart and accessible, revealing without hyperbole what a great writer he was.
Wallace was 46.
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Previously: AVN 2008: Reliving the dream
See also: David Foster Wallace,
Dude, sloppiness is one thing, but he didn’t even have the awards occurring in the right casino.
It’s also worth mentioning… AVN – still publishing. Premiere? David Foster Wallace? Glenn Kenny? Notsomuch.
I’d like to think that this hanging was an act of autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong, but I doubt DFW could look down on himself long enough to actually masturbate.
Perhaps this was simply a valiant effort to save the English-speaking world from Infinite Jest II: More Infiniter!
That’s true. David Foster Wallace is no longer publishing because he’s dead and, as you and I both know, there are reasons that have nothing to do with journalistic excellence why AVN is still publishing.
That said, every thoughtful person currently working in the adult biz has been guilty of writing that same DFW article either before or after – making the easy joke is often “irresistable.”
The man was a brilliant writer, and will be missed.