DFW, Karen Green and MZD

I just found this in a Newsweek article considering the David Foster Wallace archive at the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas:

After his suicide, Nadell drove out to join Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, who was eager to move out of a haunted house.

What struck me immediately upon reading Infinite Jest (upon a myriad of other things) - I had read House of Leaves before that - was the connection between Wallace's superdrug DMZ and Danielewski's initials MZD. Infinite Jest is, through its footnotes, framed inside a network of drugs. House of Leaves - through Johnny's introduction - also dives right into it. The other thing is the Karen Green connection.

Does anyone know more about if Wallace and Danielewski knew each other or what each other's work meant to them? Did Karen and Dave already know each other before House of Leaves was published? This Guardian article about Karen gives at least the hint that they first met after he published "The Depressed Person" in Harper's Magazine in 1998, which would later become part of his short story collection "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". With House of Leaves being first published in 2000 this gives definitely time for character name corrections on MZD's account.
In that article is something else, very remarkable I think, in it:

Green became an amateur expert on the diagrammatic language of psychiatric records: "That's a depressed person's brain," she says of a little grouping of Technicolor splashes. "It's coded differently."

And it reminds me of how DFW always used to speak and write about the hardwiredness of clinical depression and addiction. Karen Green also says this, which I will leave without a comment (although, isn't the bare fact that I say I will give no comment, a very strong comment in itself? Whatever, the autopsy report is right here):

"What do you do when your husband's autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?"

Regarding publishing of the unfinished The Pale King, she remarks:

"The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything."

and also:

One of Green's many fears for the publication of The Pale King is that it will be read as an extended suicide note, as an explanation for the ending that Wallace gave himself.

The cre(m)ation of Dave Eggers and Bret Easton Ellis

The little m devours everything in flames. Both are highly energetic processes and thus Dave Eggers seems to be burning on both ends in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He uses the cremation of his parents to fuel his life and writing process, infused with their ashes. And what he does seems a pretty good waste of my time. I don't find this work heartbreaking at all but often emotionally true in it's plain and accurate descriptions of Eggers's cognitive processes. And there, what many seem to recognize as his genius, is the place where his meta-meta-reflections tell us about the feedback and repercussions between his heart and brain which are so good because everyone can easily relate to them. But it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The effect of his paranoid episodes - both with the worst and best outcomes -, while true and thus amusing and comforting, easily wears off after a couple of hundred pages and leaves little more than the stale aftertaste of show-offy writing techniques. But nevertheless this is a pretty good read.

Back to the ashes: Bret Easton Ellis did a similar thing with his own memoir, which is what I like to call Lunar Park. It is all about rising from the ashes of his father and creating his beautiful art out of the remains of this cremation. The next to last paragraph of Lunar Park is all about the ashes and how they form and seep into his life, his childhood memories, his anxieties, his desires, moods and, of course, his writing. The ashes going through the very pages of this book, creating new words and thus worlds and his life, which is, after all, a literary one.

I wonder if there's any other book or work of art that deals that explicitly with the process of its creation through the process of cremation of life. I mean literally. Because it's a nice and beautiful image that the ashes fall onto the white (or black) page and produce the letters which constitute its texture and meaning.

Time, what a tricky little beeping fucker...

While contemplating what to do with my life, I saw several options. First, I could turn that darn cellphone off, that's been beeping at regular intervalls in my pocket for a while because it's low on battery. I choose to ignore that option and let it beep. It comes with a soft buzzing, you know, vibrating a little. Second... Ah, I'm ignoring that one, too. Actually, I ignore all the good and just mental impulses that promise a better future, a better present, past, and a better me, for that matter. I mean, the past is long gone, right? The present, shortly gone, but gone nonetheless. Present became past even before you finished reading this sentence. And the future? Never going to happen. But I digress.

Instead of going through all this mental garbage in my head, alone, and - here comes the point - again and again, I decided to just throw it out at whichever monkeys might be interested in it. That's where you come into play. FYI: If you don't prefer to be called monkeys from time to time, this blog is not for you (or is it even more so?).

So, what can you expect from this other than being mistreated? I don't know. Really, I don't. Expect nothing (else) therefore.