The Philosophy of DFW: Context and ConversationWith the publication of David Foster Wallace's philosophy thesis quickly approaching, Columbia University Press have put up a mini-site, The Philosophy of David Foster Wallace: Context and Conversation, with additional material including an essay by Matt Bucher and a short interview with Steven Cahn. [Cheers, Matt] Add new comment
Transcript of 1998 Phone InterviewUPDATE: Parts 4 and 5 now posted. Tom Scocca interviewed David Foster Wallace by phone in February of 1998 and used the material for a Boston Phoenix article. Tom recently found the tape of the interview and has put part 1 of the transcript online over at The Slate - "I'm Not a Journalist, and I Don't Pretend To Be One": David Foster Wallace on Nonfiction, 1998, Part 1. Q: How do you handle being responsible for facts, writing nonfiction, after writing fiction? Coming to a genre where the things you say have to be on some level verifiably true? DFW: That's a real good question. And the first one of these that I did, in order, the first one I did was the very first one, about playing tennis as a Midwesterner. Where I had some shit that I just, that was likeimpressionistic, and I didn't know, and I'd never dealt with a fact-checkerbefore. And they're like, "We discovered there is no yacht and tennis club in Aurora, Illinois, what are we to do?" And I was like, oh, God.So after that I just started to take better notes and be willing to back stuff up. The thing is, really—between you and me and the Boston Phoenix's understanding readers—you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.Not to mention the fact that, like, when people tell you stuff, very often it comes out real stilted. If you just write down exactly what they said. And so you sort of have to rewrite it so it sounds more out-loud, which I think means putting in some "likes" or taking out some punctuation that the person might originally have said. And I don't really make any apologies for that. Q: How much gag writing do you do? To what extent when you're doing these things do you try to be deliberately humorous, and how much do comic effects just sort of arise from the thought processes? DFW: I'll tell you. I think another reason why I'm not doing any more of these for a while is, by the end, I think the last one I did was the Lynch thing, there really was kind of a shtick emerging. And the shtick was somewhat neurotic, hyper-conscious guy, like, showing you how weird this thing is that not everybody thinks is weird. I think it's more that kind of trying to—trying to notice stuff that everybody else notices but they don't really notice that they notice? Which I think a fair amount of good comedians do that, too. I don't think, I would never go, oh, it's time for a gag, and just stick in a gag or something.
Part 5 : Q: How much distance is there between David Foster Wallace—the narrator—and yourself? DFW: I don't understand the question? Q: How crafted is that persona? Because it has the appearance of course of, like, nakedness, and an actual opening up of the thought process. But at the same time, you said, like with the David Lynch thing, you felt it sort of turning into shtick. DFW: Yeeeah. Well. Huh. You know, I think sincerity can be a shtick. I know people, just in private life—you know the kind of person who takes great pride that they will never have an unuttered thought, and there will never be a truth, you know, they're like, "So how do I look in this?" "Wellll, I'd love to tell you you look good, but I've just gotta tell the truth, you look awful"—you know what I mean, those people? Q: Mm-hmm. DFW: And uh—[sighs]. The hard thing about any of this stuff is, after a while, almost anything becomes this kind of postmodern pose. And I think really the first four or five of those, particularly like through the cruise, I don't think there was really any persona there at all, except what emerged through the fact the thing was getting cut over and over again, and I'd cut out the lines that were clunky or whatever. I don't think anybody thinks entertainingly at all times.
Bloggingheads.tv Choire Sicha and Seth Colter WallsChoire Sicha (one of the editors of The Awl) and Seth Colter Walls (check out his DFW piece and the images in Newsweek if you haven't already) spend the first 15 minutes of this episode of Bloggingheads.tv discussing Seth's time at The Harry Ransom Centre's David Foster Wallace archive. They cram heaps of stuff into the early part of the conversation, but the best bits include Seth talking about David Foster Wallace's 'creative non-fiction' syllabus (including a definition of creative non-fiction by DFW), extended versions of his non-fiction, and previously unknown David Foster Wallace stories. 'The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer' (in container 27.9) which Seth reminds us is a title from The Broom of the System and discussed by characters as bad undergraduate fiction... and 'The Piano in the Pantechnicon' (from The Allegheny Review in 1984). Seth also mentions the possibility of an official publication of uncollected David Foster Wallace material (which I'd heard about in passing, so it's great to be able to mention it!). [Thanks, Aryeh]
I Just Read About That CDFW Essays 1-6Paul Debraski has posted a couple more pieces over at I Just Read About That... He writes about essays 1-3 and essays 4-6 in Consider David Foster Wallace (Preface and Intro previously). The Myth of the Human and Mister SquishyBlake Butler has posted an extensive article over at HTMLGIANT about David Foster Wallace's Mister Squishy (from Oblivion) The Myth of the Human w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy”: I can remember with unusual clarity the feeling in me the first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy.” It was published under the name Elizabeth Klemm in the 5th issue of McSweeney’s in 2000, but by the time the magazine reached my hands I’d already heard on the Wallace listserv that this rather lengthy piece of fiction could only ever be written by him; there could have been nobody else. I was already a rabid Wallace freak; I’d pretty much begun writing fiction as a direct byproduct of reading Infinite Jest, and since then become obsessed. I read this story, long as perhaps 3 normal stories, on a futon in a house in one sitting under a skylight with legs crossed, already ready to be lit. And yet, the particular instance of “Mister Squishy,” even having then been well versed in a way that somehow placed the author’s presence in my daily thoughts (which has not since then stopped), rendered in me that the first time something different even than what I’d been ready to expect: some odd confabulation of provocation, confusion, inundated awe; a feeling rare not only for any kind of language, but particularly for a shorter work. This was something singular beyond even the already neon body of Wallace’s work in constellation, and in particular, beyond the confines of what a story as a “story,” or a novel even, or text as text, traditionally operationally assists to construe.
Infinite Jest OuttakesCheck out Seth Colter Walls' great piece (and associated material) over at Newsweek about the David Foster Wallace archive, From the Mixed-Up Files of David Foster Wallace. There is also some exclusive material from the archive related to the article here. But the best bit is the release of some of the outtakes from Infinite Jest, What Didn’t Make It Into ‘Infinite Jest’. There's some seriously awesome stuff in here. I've just spent four hours of my Saturday morning in a meeting trying to read this stuff on my phone (and discovering a bug in the webkit browser that stopped me from being able to update the site from my phone. Arrgh.) Thanks, Seth!
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