David Foster Wallace, Once a Day

Listening to this really great David Foster Wallace interview from 1999

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:52:55 -0400

Listening to this really great David Foster Wallace interview from 1999:

He’s so well-spoken. It takes a few minutes in the beginning for he and the interviewer to get accostomed to each other, but after that it’s solid gold.

"An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only..."

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (via writtenininvisibleink)

David Foster Wallace, reading “B.I. #40” from Brief...

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:55:59 -0400

David Foster Wallace, reading “B.I. #40” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Yr correspondent guarantees that this reading is miles and miles above Jon f’ing Krasinski’s (which is borderline offensive, in this correspondent’s humble but terribly emphatic opinion).

Some wisdom before school starts

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

nickzed:

Q:

“How do you remember Amherst? What are the experiences—in and out of the classroom—that shape those memories? Similarly, what aspects of your Amherst education served you best? And what are the things about Amherst that, in hindsight, disappoint you?”

A:

“I don’t know that many would remember me at all… I was cripplingly shy at Amherst. I wasn’t in a fraternity and didn’t go to parties and didn’t have much to do with the life of the College. I had a few very close friends and that was it. I studied all the time. I mean literally all the time…

So ‘the things about Amherst that, in hindsight, disappoint [me]’ are things not about Amherst but about who I was when I was there. I let almost no one know me, and I lost the chance to know and learn from most of my peers. It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”

— David Foster Wallace interviewed by Amherst magazine

Posted this quote by DFW earlier, but it bears repeating!

David Foster Wallace, wearing the signature bandana.

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:16:41 -0400

David Foster Wallace, wearing the signature bandana.

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote..."

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:14:15 -0400

““The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.””

- David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) (via astronauts)

This audio file is an interview with David Foster Wallace on...

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:03:00 -0400

This audio file is an interview with David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” program. It was recorded in 1996. Many thanks to James for the tip!

A correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo in 1995

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:59:00 -0400

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.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

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..."

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:00:09 -0400

“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..."

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

“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...

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:12:58 -0400

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...

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:06:36 -0400

Click through for more of Steve Rhodes’ amazing David Foster Wallace photography.

David Foster Wallace on 6 December 2000 in Santa Fe, New...

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:01:27 -0400

David Foster Wallace on 6 December 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Click through for credit.

DFW on essays as a way of living

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:21:46 -0400

kellyfoster:

“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

"It has been often said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. I believe that is..."

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

“It has been often said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. I believe that is indeed true. But I also believe that there is an equally fine line between real genius and just plain weirdness. In my experience, Wallace had very little of the former, so he exaggerated the latter. In fact, his only real genius may have been his ability to understand that if the right people want to think that you are a genius, they will give you the benefit of the doubt when deciding on which side of that line you fall. It is therefore far better to be weird and thought, at worst, to be “too smart for the room,” than to play it straight and be revealed as a “one hit wonder” or even a total fraud.”

- -John Ziegler, via Dave Weigel in his broader critique of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (and his long-form fiction in general). Is it possible that Wallace didn’t have that much to say? (via conservativeradical)

I don’t feel particularly compelled to argue against this point. Everyone responds to DFW differently, and those opinions are valid, despite how vehemently I disagree.

nickdouglas: Infinite Jest’s Mario Incandenza, by Tim Kreider,...

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:59:00 -0400

nickdouglas:

Infinite Jest’s Mario Incandenza, by Tim Kreider, who had some contact with David Foster Wallace

IS THIS TRUE

"If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried..."

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:42:48 -0400

“If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried about whether you like me.”

- David Foster Wallace (via reintegrating)

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you..."

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:59:22 -0400

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

- David Foster Wallace (via nevercapitalize)

David Foster Wallace, reading “Forever Overhead” (part III of...

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:44:06 -0400

David Foster Wallace, reading “Forever Overhead” (part III of III).