I wish I could still love DFW's work the way I used to, but it's colored by [allegations of significant relational abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_...).
> Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends...
>...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.
> It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.
That this was a predictable facet of DFW's character doesn't make his purported actions less saddening and hurtful.
It's okay--expected!--to struggle. It's common--awful, but repairable!--to hurt others in the process. The open question is whether that repair would have ever been available had he lived.
This is new to me -- anyone have an example?
That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing who the author was.
On the politics of language:
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...
I totally care about those other factors. And I am acutely aware of the effect that physical abuse has on real, actual people. It's unavoidable that this would effect my reading of someone's work.
That the writers of the Constitution were morally fallible means they weren't the final authority, and we should be willing to grow. They had wisdom; we should take what we can of it, and take a nuanced view. This is no different from my take on DFW: there's art and learning to be had, but it's no longer the pure and innocent enjoyment I would have had prior to knowing how personally hurtful he could be.
The MLK stuff is uncertain as yet; the FBI was clearly trying to blackmail him, but the records remain sealed. We'll know more in a couple years: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/e...
All you crave is ignorance. The reality is that everyone has personal failings of some kind. All the bridges, all the books, all the artworks were made by imperfect people that were sometimes assholes.
The good he did is enough. One doesn’t have to be perfect for one's works to be good.