Vasily Aksyonov, Giant of Russian Literature, Dies at 76

I first heard the news of David Foster Wallace's death the morning after my wedding. I was walking around the small downtown that hosted the weekend's festivities and ran into a couple, friends of the bride. They had left the wedding the night before with my college roommates, the group steaming back to a rented house to continue the good feeling of the night. One friend opened a bottle of scotch, another a laptop, and that is when the news broke. The feeling of celebration fell like a curtain descending a window. Retelling the story the next morning, neither among the couple could remember the dead author's name. "William Chester, Franklin Wright, something with three names," they said. It took me half a minute to figure out who they were talking about.Mourning the death of an artist I didn't know is not something I've ever done before. I thought of it as an emotion only teenagers felt, and mostly in movies. And when David Foster Wallace died it didn't register like the loss of someone I knew or like the loss of someone I didn't. It was more descriptive. His suicide, like his work, added texture to the world, or revealed it, and even if the resulting picture was not any clearer, at least it was more honest and likely also more true. His death felt to me most directly like the settling of rubble.I expected a string of emails among my friends about DFW's death. For the last two years we've participated in a Google Group with a steady daily volume of posts. Many of the threads are combative, filled with faux-disputes that make it easier to pass the workday and serve as a proxy for hanging out on weekends, which we cant do as much now that many of us live in different cities. One thing everyone agreed on though is that DFW was the Real McCoy. Soon after news of his death there was a simple post, titled "RIP" that stated matter-of-factly what had happened. After that a few people added links to blog posts and remembrances. I commented after listening to him read from "Up, Simba" on an archived This American Life episode, that I'd never heard his voice before. Our discussion was part the idle chatter of a funeral, and part a notation of the kinds of inconsequential details that are insulating in times of grief. DFW liked The Wire as it turned out, and to be able to say so out loud is almost proof that his death was not so severe.But the primary sound after his death was silence. We've had people write 1,000-word posts on football players' names, and threads about the US Open that stretched past the horizon, but on an occasion of significance to everyone in the group, very little has been said. It is, I think, an appropriate response. In his writing, and maybe in his head too, DFW battled the cacophonous echo chamber of modern life. In our little corner of the online world, it felt fitting to let the only reverberations be his own.

Studs Terkel died at 96 on Friday. In Chicago, Terkel's adopted home, he was regarded as a local treasure. Terkel had a long radio career hosting shows on which he conducted wide-ranging interviews, but he was perhaps best known for his series of oral histories.The genre is now quite popular, encompassing topics from punk rock to Saturday Night Live to George Plimpton, but Terkel was, if not its inventor, then its popularizer and most accomplished practitioner. He used his oral histories not to get the inside dirt on celebrities, but as a way to illuminate the lives of everyday people. Terkel's best known books include Working, in which he found the everyday dramas in the working lives of dozens of Americans, and The Good War, a Pulitzer winning oral history of World War II. More recently, Terkel's Hope Dies Last was published. The book is a study of a subject at the core of Terkel's efforts in preserving the voices of the 20th century, America's collective loss of hope and the decline in social activism that has accompanied it.Bonus Link: The Chicago Tribune tells us "Why Studs Terkel Mattered".