A correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo in 1995
- David Foster Wallace: “Because I tend both to think I’m uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire, I tend to imagine you never having had to struggle with any of this narcissism or indulgence stuff. [...] Maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit.
- Don DeLillo: “I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning. Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I’d get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. [...] We die indoors, and alone, and I don’t mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It’s not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.”
David Foster Wallace did not foresee Twitter, but was "on-the-money" with other predications.
“ As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head.
David Foster Wallace.
I was feeling exactly like this the entire afternoon.
(via teslerr)
Oh gosh. Am I ever on the same page.
“ Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.
David Foster Wallace via Jotter Notes, link thanks to Matthew Clayfield
(via somethingchanged)
I started my first day of post-collegiate work today at Johns Hopkins University. Here’s a photo from Pomona College’s Department of English, where David Foster Wallace worked as a professor. He was on leave for the semester at the time of his death.
Click through for more of Steve Rhodes’ amazing David Foster Wallace photography.
David Foster Wallace on 6 December 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Click through for credit.
DFW on essays as a way of living
“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it…That last one’s of especial value, I think. As exquisite verbal art, yes, but also as a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error. This is probably the sincerest, most biased account of ‘Best’ your Decider can give: these pieces are models—not templates, but models—of ways I wish I could think and live in what seems to me this world.”
—David Foster Wallace, Introduction to Best American Essays 2007
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