Oh, hi.
Well, I woke up today and it was a kind of a white--
I was both a little happy that it was our David Foster Wallace
tribute, and also a little melancholy
that this day had come to pass.
Today we're going to enjoy some of the thoughts and ruminations
of our six panelists, here.
And I'd like to start by thanking them
all for joining us today, and coming from far
flung parts of the country.
As many of you already know, David Foster Wallace
was an alumnus of the University of Arizona MFA program.
He graduated in 1987.
Because of this and also, of course,
because of his staggering, inspiring, and sometimes
controversial legacy, as a writer
of fiction and nonfiction, we wanted
to invite a conversation about the experience of reading
his work, as well as the artistic choices he
made as a stylist, and as an observer
of the project of being human.
This afternoon, we will present two panels,
with a break in the middle for caffeine, and lemon bars,
and possibly water if you're feeling dehydrated,
and a chance to look over some of the books that are
available from UA bookstores.
We have, I think, Wallace's full oeuvre, as well as
the new Sonora Review issue, which
has a David Foster Wallace tribute in the very middle.
The first panel will begin with the panelists
reading from their tribute pieces,
and reflecting on their interactions
with Wallace and his work.
Then we're going to have that little break.
The second panel will continue where the first left off,
possibly inviting thoughts on Wallace's
influence on American letters.
We'll take questions from the audience at that time as well.
So I hope that you can join us for the full,
fat two hours of talk.
Both panels will be moderated by Michael Sheehan,
one of the current co-editors of the Sonora Review.
So thank you all for coming.
Thanks to the Poetry Center, as always,
for hosting us, and creating such a place for literature
to live forever.
And I'll just turn it over to Michael.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you Aurelie.
Thanks, everyone, for coming out.
So I am Michael Sheehan, co-editor of Sonora Review.
And I was just going to briefly introduce the panelists,
and then we're going to go along, as Aurelie said,
and everyone's just going to read a little bit
from the tribute, maybe with one exception,
and then speak a little bit about their relationship
with Wallace and his work.
So we have Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's literary agent
for his whole career--
23 years.
Greg Carslile, author of Elegant Complexity,
a study of Infinite Jest.
Glenn Kenny, who was a film critic,
formerly editor at Premiere, who edited Wallace's work
while there.
Marshall Boswell, who's the author of Understanding David
Foster Wallace.
I can't see-- Charles Bock, the author of Beautiful Children,
the novel.
And Ken Kalfus, most recently author
of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country-- particular, peculiar?
OK.
So I'm just going to pass the microphone along
and everyone, with the exception of Bonnie,
is going to read just a short piece from the tribute.
I think Bonnie might read something else
from David Foster Wallace.
Or speak as you wish.
Right.
Actually, so maybe we could start with Ken, if you'd like?
We have a microphone on that end too.
[INAUDIBLE]
Testing-- one.
OK, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here, though it's not
the best of circumstances.
I would've rather been here in another circumstance.
I'll read my, read my piece that-- how are we going
to do it and just move on?
My connection to David was almost entirely literary.
By 1985, I sent one of my short stories, "The Joy
and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz" to the Sonora Review
where David was an editor.
A week later, through my mail slot,
flew the rarest of birds--
an acceptance letter, and an encouragement
to send more stories.
The Review would eventually publish three of them,
while David and I continued intimate correspondence
over the years.
1998-- this is 13 years later--
my first book of short stories was published, including
the Sonora Review contributions, including the title story
Thirst.
And on the back cover, David's gracious endorsement.
This blurb, by the way, is always
employed by publishers of my books' foreign editions.
Despite our warm contacts, David and I met only once--
the year after that--
upon publication of my second book, where
he invited me to read from it at Illinois State University,
where he was teaching.
He arranged a big turnout for me that night,
mostly students eager to follow the labyrinthine idiosyncratic
trails of his literary interests.
Since then David's work has been a reminder, an inspiration
that anything, really anything, is
possible in the book universe.
More than two decades after we first
corresponded, 10 years after my first collection was published,
his support continues to cast a warm glow over my writing life.
Anyway, that's-- I didn't really know David very well.
But I think for a lot of us a lot
of us readers, and for a lot of us people who aspire to write,
he--
I just want to elaborate that--
I think every-- I think every great--
I think every great writer shows us
something that can be done with language, that hasn't been done
before, that we wouldn't have thought of
was possible to have been done.
And David repeatedly showed us, particularly in matters
about the convolutions of human thinking,
that there are ways of approaching
that had hadn't been done.
And that, I think, was always an inspiration to me as a reader
and also as a writer.
And I thought it was one of the great contributions he
made to American literature.
So that's all I want to say for now.
Hey, that was really good.
[LAUGHS] I'm going to read, I think, about three paragraphs.
Where David Foster Wallace became singular,
in my opinion, where David Foster Wallace transcended
all the postmodern games and became flat out heroic--
that was the point where he took these structures
and took all those superb toys from his playground
and applied them to nothing less than the singular struggle
to manage the doubts, and voices, and fears,
and weaknesses inside your head, and just fucking live.
It's unbearably difficult to read
writing that makes you more connected to yourself,
and the universe, and all the wonders and disappointments
and tiny desires for decency that come with being alive,
and to also know that the person who wrote these words
hung himself.
The easy and natural guess is that Wallace
was able to portray the loneliness, and sadness,
and struggle, so well because he was so deeply enmeshed
in this struggle every single day of his life.
Enmeshed to the point where maybe he related to
and saw the struggle more clearly
as a mechanism of coping with his depression,
to the point where maybe his writing about these things
was one of his only releases from what
was going on inside his head.
Where maybe even the struggle and joy
of expressing all this so clearly
was also its own pressure, and caused its own anxiety,
and depression, and problems.
The hard, cold fact is, for a period of almost 20 years,
David Foster Wallace was able to focus
all of his considerable writing gifts and powers of observation
on the struggle of fighting with yourself to stay
alert and alive.
And he was able with, more clarity, and acuity,
and brainpower, and charm, and humor,
and insight, than anyone else of our time,
to express what it was to be completely
and utterly locked in this fight.
I think that influence on me--
we'll talk about his influence on a generation of writers.
And I really do believe that he's
going to be our Kerouac or our Twain of this era,
in this time.
And I could already talk about how many writers
he's influenced, but that he raised the bar in all ways.
That structurally, he went places--
he took postmodernism and ran with it.
Language wise, he was able to deal with what it is to think.
When he did nonfiction-- or even his fiction--
he wouldn't blink.
He would take something to the end of it, always.
And that instead-- and he wanted readers to come with him,
that the challenge was to lift a reader up
to be able to match the how dense the writing was,
and how much you had to know about language, and all that.
And to make it so good, and so entertaining,
that you would come with.
And he was the shit.
He just was-- in all ways, shapes, and forms.
And I'm going to stop talking now OK.
Thank you, Charles.
When I got the invitation to do this,
I was very honored to have been asked.
And when I saw the company of people I was going to be in,
and I was quite intimidated.
I also was-- the original email listed what each person was
going to talk about.
And one of the things that--
the one area that was missing was the early work,
which gets forgotten sometimes, because of,
just, the massive achievement of Infinite Jest.
But for those of us who were--
I'm 44, I'm only a couple of years younger than Wallace
and the way people get about bands,
you got their first album before they got big.
I was-- I had his first book when it first came out,
and I felt like I had discovered something.
And there was a lot of us out there
that felt like they had discovered something.
And it was a seismic shift in the way literature was going,
at that moment when Wallace emerged,
and Infinite Jest was the payoff for what we hoped for him.
And so I thought I would write something about Girl
with Curious Hair, his second book, his first short story
collection, which kind of gets lost in the shuffle
sometimes in the critical attention.
But it's important to a great many of us
who read it at the time, and it was important to me.
I think it's important to a lot of people.
So I wanted to write about that arrival of that book.
It was written here.
And it was written here.
And that I did not know, I would come here and actually be--
Every word.
Every word of it, right.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes, and I mentioned that, although I didn't know that.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Graduation.
Though some of it admittedly seems dated now,
David Foster Wallace's first story collection,
Girl with Curious Hair, remains a signature book
for many of us lucky enough to have first
encountered it afresh, in 1989.
More so than any other book of its era,
this early collection leveled a decisive death blow
to the dreary 1980s--
the decade that Gordon Lish built.
And the small coterie of devoted David Foster Wallace obsessives
from that period breathed a grateful sigh of relief.
Quite self-consciously, the book took deadly aim at dirty
realism, or truckstop minimalism, or neorealism--
whatever you want to call it-- while also signaling
the emergence of a vital new sensibility that reflected,
for the first time in my experience, anyway,
something decisive and distinctive about--
and there's just no other way to say this-- my own generation.
Which cultural sociologists now sandwiched between the baby
boomers and Generation X. And which, it still
stuns me to realize, recently accomplished
something I never would have thought possible--
produced a president.
In American letters, the 1990s begin right here.
I am reminded of the book's timeliness every time
I teach it to 21st century undergraduates.
Though they are properly dazzled by its mixture
of high-tech literariness, pop-culture savvy,
and storytelling brio, they are frankly bewildered
by the book's urgency and sense of mission.
Wallace's authorial adversaries are as obscure to them
as Kierkegaard's battle with Danish Hegelians
are to the rest of us.
For them, the 1980s is a comical decade
of bouffant hairdos, pastel suit jackets,
and conspicuous consumption.
Hence it takes some doing to convey to them how
diametrically opposed to all of that
was the era's prevailing literary ethos, which,
in violent counter-reaction to the fabulous excesses
of the '60s and '70's, embraced austerity
and restraint, concreteness and cynicism, brevity and banality.
Writers like Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason,
and, most importantly, Raymond Carver reclaimed realism from
the bad rap it had gotten from Barth and Barthelme,
and the glowing guild of grad-school fiction writers
quickly followed suit--
and who could blame them?
After all, the Dirty Realist story,
with its emotional obliqueness and less-is-more ethos,
was tailor-made for the graduate workshop, not to mention
the university-sponsored literary magazine.
Minimalism ruled, and Carver was king.
By 1989, the rot had set in.
Mark Helprin took his shot at the prevailing sameness
of the Lish school, in his cranky introduction
to the 1989 edition of Best American Short Stories
which, tellingly, included Raymond Carver's moving
homage to Chekhov, "Errand," thus reminding
us not to confuse the master with his minions.
While Madison Smartt Bell, anticipating Helprin
by two years, took similar umbrage
in the pages of Harper's with his essay quote "Less is Less--
The Diminishing American Short Story."
Wallace's intervention into this fray
was all the more conspicuous for the fact
that it happened in the fiction itself.
What's more, unlike other critics of the Lish school,
he did not call for a return to Barthian postmodernism,
or to pre-'80s lyricism, or to journalistic naturalism,
or what have you.
Rather, Wallace sought, quite audaciously
for so young a writer, to point the way forward.
All the preceding hopefully provides a context
in which to read the varied, if also somewhat uneven, stories
that make up this fascinating first collection, which
he drafted while pursuing his MFA
at the University of Arizona.
Throughout the collection, Wallace gives free rein
to his vaunted verbal adeptness and comic exuberance.
No less-is-more for this young aspirant.
While the book boasts several pieces that remain stunning
in the freshness of their formal innovations, nevertheless
many of the stories are so embedded
in the culture reality of the 1980s
that they seem bewildering now.
So a little bit of explanation is in order.
I'm going to read just a little bit more.
For example-- whereas, at the time, the collection's
first story "Little Expressionless Animals,"
seemed audacious and groundbreaking, with its cut
up chronology, its commingling of fictional characters and TV
personalities, and most importantly,
its DeLillo-esque theorizing about the intersection
between interiority and televisual hyper reality,
it now could seem curiously lightweight without some memory
of the late 80s preoccupation with Vanna White
and other dinner hour game show celebrities.
Incidentally, the story's basic premise,
which concerns a young woman's three year winning streak
on Jeopardy, anticipates by 15 years Ken Jennings' 74 game
reign on the same.
Similarly, the title story-- in which an emotionless right wing
yuppie named Sick Puppy describes,
with zombie-like detachment, a violent evening at a Keith
Jarrett concert--
makes little sense now, unless read
in the context of Bret Easton Ellis' then popular novels
about coke snorting yuppies, which body of work
the story skewers.
Once again, the piece was eerily prescient,
as Wallace's Sick Puppy lists the brand
names of his expensive designer clothes
with the same degree of cold exactitude
with which he describes his peculiar fetish for burning
the nipples of women who fellate him,
thereby parodying, in advance, Ellis's American Psycho, which
did not appear until 1991.
Amid all this literary jousting, however, two stories
stood out, even then, as particularly forward thinking.
One is "My Appearance," about David Letterman,
and another one is the novella which
I'm going to read from later, so I'm
going to stop there and pass it.
Thank you.
Hi.
I have predictably mixed feelings about being here,
but I do want to thank Michael and Aurelie and everybody
for putting this together.
It's really fantastic.
The piece I wrote for the Sonora Review was done in the modular,
"I remember" format that was invented by Joe Brainard,
and later used by Georges Perec, and later still
by Harry Matthews writing about Georges Perec,
because I'm pretentious like that.
Actually one of my--
I considered it a moral victory when I got Dave conv--
goaded Dave into reading Georges Perec.
He was very distrustful of the Oulipo writers,
because he felt that they were, possibly, mere formalists.
But I think, after he read W, or the Memory of Childhood,
he said, OK, there's something there.
So this is a three page piece, and I'm just
going to read selected modules.
It's called "I remember David Foster Wallace."
I remember the first time I heard Dave get angry.
It was several months after "David Lynch Keeps His Head"
appeared in Premiere, and he was re-revising
the piece for inclusion in "A Supposedly Fun
Thing I'll Never Do Again."
He had been calling our LA office,
trying to get a notebook back from a fact checker,
but to no avail.
So he called me in New York, and asked
if I could please get on the back of quote,
"that asshole fuck-wad douchebag name redacted," unquote,
and compel him to return said notebook to Dave, which I did.
For the rest of his tenure at Premiere,
said fact checker was only ever referred
to in the New York office as quote,
"that asshole fuck-wad douchebag name redacted," unquote.
I remember having breakfast with Dave, Hustler's Evan
Wright, and Nathaniel Welsh, Premiere's photographer
for the AVN awards piece and, coincidentally,
a close friend of Evans--
they had driven to Nevada from LA
together-- on our first day in Vegas.
The conversation turned to smoking,
and someone remarked on the lung searing qualities
of menthol cigarettes.
As opposed to regular cigarettes, Dave said,
which leave your lungs as pink and clean as a baby's.
I remember Dave saying to me, at that same breakfast,
I figured out what I'm going to call you in the article--
Dick Filth.
I remember not quite knowing how to take that.
I remember explaining to the Hachette legal department that,
no, Harold Hecuba and Richard "Dick" Filth,
characters in Dave's AVN piece-- which appears in "Consider
the Lobster" in its unbowdlerized form under its
original title, "Big Red Son,"--
were not real people.
That, in fact, they were fictional and interchangeable
composites of myself and Evan Wright, and maybe Nat Welsh,
rather thoroughly mutated by Dave's imagination.
And, no, that, while it was Evan Wright
who was assaulted by porn star Jasmin St. Clair at a party
some months prior to the AVN Awards,
Evan did/does not wear quote, "special auto-tinted
trifocals," unquote.
And that, no, St. Clair's semi-assault on Evan did not
send said non-existent special auto-tint trifocals flying
quote, "in an arc across the room and into the forbidding
decolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered--
the glasses--
or even seen ever again," unquote.
I remember the legal department being entirely nonplussed.
I remember, rather than trying to mollify the legal department
with some elaborate citing of literary theory
or such, I told them that it would
be OK to let such things stand, because Evan and I weren't
going to sue the magazine, Jasmin St. Clair had, in fact,
semi-assaulted Evan under circumstances at least
similar to the ones described and, finally,
that the author of the piece was a really big deal.
I remember Dave calling me one day,
around 2003, totally out of the blue, and saying,
I was wondering if you had any idea of what the hell happened
to Mickey Rourke's face?
I remember, in our last half dozen or so
phone conversations, Dave and I mostly talked
about how great our wives were.
I remember my very last phone conversation with Dave,
shortly after I got canned from the Premiere website in May
of '08.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I always
thought you were too good for them anyway--
typical Dave-- then we talked about how great our wives were.
I remember coming out of the screening of the film,
The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, and his face,
and thinking, shit, I gotta call Dave and tell him about this
movie, and then remembering-- it was like a stab--
that there was no more Dave.
Thank you.
All right, y'all came up.
Can I borrow you?
[LAUGHTER]
What are you talking about--
You're never going to--
No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
They have too many.
A little bit further the other way.
Yep, with--
Let's do something Oulipian, pick a page at random.
OK.
Hi, I'm Greg Carslile.
The book that I wrote about Infinite Jest, Elegant
Complexity, I wanted to kind of keep
exploring the structure of this book.
I sense a structure there-- everyone
says that it's unstructured, but I know there's one there.
And so I wanted to explore that, that's what that was about.
And so I keep thinking about how are things structured.
My favorite part of--
one of the million things that are your favorite parts
about Wallace's fiction--
is that how he leaves things unresolved in a moment
of extreme tension.
It's just extraordinary.
And so I came up with a little mathematical model
for that, which we can talk more about later.
But here's an example of how he, instead
of the traditional resolution of a story,
it just kind of keeps going up to infinity without resolving.
And so, here's an example of that.
One of the most delightful episodes of Infinite Jest
is the Eschaton section, where 12 to 15-year-olds
play a nuclear conflagration game, with 400 tennis balls,
on four tennis courts that serve as a world map.
This sequence appears to follow a traditional narrative
structure but, as we approach the climax, the details
of the narrative increase without bound,
and must be truncated if we are to continue the novel.
Over the first five pages, and a two page endnote,
we are given dense exposition about the rules
of the slow paced Eschaton game, and the care
taken to make the game approximate real world
conditions.
The next five pages document the current Eschaton game,
introduce the four upperclassman spectators
whose mentoring responsibilities are being compromised
by their use of illicit substances,
and reveal a spy observing the game from a nearby car.
Over the next five pages, tension
builds when one player suggests that the snow that
has begun falling will affect the conditions of the game.
One of the upperclassmen is infuriated,
and chastises the player for confusing
the map, the courts they are on, with the territory,
the real world the courts represent.
But the confusion of boundaries prompts a second player
to hit a third player with a tennis ball,
breaching quote "the one ground rule boundary that
keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos"
Players are part of the map, not the territory,
and are therefore exempt as targets.
In the final sequence, the map of an imagined conflict
becomes the territory of an actual conflict.
However, instead of moving through a crisis moment
to resolution as the narrative progresses,
Wallace fires a relentless barrage of details--
concerning both on and off court activities--
that intensify the narrative but keep us
from reaching a climax, setting up a condition
of quote "chaotic stasis," which, presumably, would
go on indefinitely, if the narrative did not
jump from on court fighting, off court angst,
and the repetitive sounds of a whistle and a siren
on page 342, to a new section on page 343.
Interestingly, the Eschaton section
is an unbound narrative about the confusion, or breaking,
of boundaries.
What I'd like to do is read you all, actually, from a letter
that David sent me in--
it's dated 2/11, from 1986.
Which is when he was in Tucson, and which
I thought would amuse all of you,
if only because it's a writer in an MFA program,
trying to get stories sold, and trying to get stories out.
And I had been his agent--
I had already sold Broom of the System,
and been his agent at that point for about four months.
And so I just thought parts of it
would amuse you, particularly as students in an MFA program,
thinking of where you can send stories
and how it would possibly work, and knowing
how David Wallace has looked at now versus how he felt
as a 25-year-old, trying to get stories, that were not
like other stories, sold to people.
"Dear Bonnie, greetings from witch's
left tit freezing Tucson, where pipes are freezing,
noses are running, and most brass monkeys are in ICU units.
I've been looking over the stories I've sent you so far.
I'd like to start things by asking
you to send a packet of two, "Solomon Silverfish" and "Order
and Flux in Northampton," both to Esquire
and a really good literary periodical called
Ploughshares"--
as though I didn't know where Ploughshares was--
"You may have doubts about these pieces lengthwise,
but I've been over their drafts closely,
and they're already cut, dried, and shaped about how I'd like.
That they're a little long and involved is obvious,
but nothing in either is there without a reason,
and I think they're good, though somewhat off the beaten path.
I'll ask you as a favor to send the two story packets out.
Remind you that spring is a far, far better season
to submit stuff to magazines than is summer"--
because, of course, he knows that all the students
read in the spring--
"and that it's in all our interests
to try and get a few of the better stories
into print before '87.
And I'm only sending you the things
I consider the very best I do, and that you
did agree to handle some short things for me
too, as part of our grant agreement."
And then it goes on to, "I'm hoping you have the Esquire
memo, I sent you a copy of it.
It has the name and exact address of the fiction editor
there who expressed interest.
The address for Ploughshares is,"
and he gives me the address for Ploughshares.
Right, so, "What I'd like to just try to do
is send out some of the stuff to a few places at a time.
If after three or four rounds of sending out,
there's nary a nibble, I'll reconsider your advice
about serious editing on some of the longer material.
I know our tastes on short material
are not always congruent.
I guess I'm just asking you to humor me
a bit here at the beginning.
Both magazines require an SASE.
I'm enclosing a $5 check to help cover mailing
and whatever copying costs you incur with these two packets."
And then it says, "I should fairly soon
have three more stories for you," and goes on from that.
"hopefully with your letterhead, and mention
of the impending novel, I can at least
skip one level of slush pile."
It's good to know that even David in those days,
it was about being in the slush pile.
And I have probably five years of letters
from magazines saying-- gee, no thanks, gee,
not our cup of tea, ah, just not right for us, and over and over
again.
And so it's interesting to hear you talk about Girl
with Curious Hair because, of course,
those stories were very hard to sell,
because they weren't what everyone else was doing.
And one of my favorite stories in that collection
is called "Lyndon," where he-- which is
written in the voice of Lyndon Johnson.
And the only place I could get to publish that story
was a magazine, in Berkeley, called
Arrival, which was run by a friend of mine,
who I befriended to actually sort of--
I became his friend because I knew he would get this,
and that he would publish the story.
And then, of course, the magazine went out of business.
But that was the first place it was.
And I sent copies to editors in New York
who I knew would like it, including Michael Pietsch
who, of course, became David's long term editor at Little
Brown, and is now editing this unfinished novel called
The Pale King.
So, oh I--
OK, never mind.
Thank you.
I think there are, probably, a lot of questions
that you guys would all like to ask,
and that I would like to ask.
First, it occurred to me I maybe didn't
do a very good job of contextualizing the Sonora
Review tribute feature that we're talking about.
So in case anyone is unaware-- and I didn't maybe
explain that very well.
We've just published two double issues that are bound
together-- they're outside--
in the middle of which is--
well, a double with two total--
in the middle of which is about a 100 page tribute
feature to the work of David Foster Wallace
that all of our panelists have contributed to.
With the exception of Bonnie, who actually gave us--
she did contribute, but she gave us "Solomon Silverfish,"
the story that she was just reading about,
which is reprinted in the tribute as well.
So, in case I didn't explain that very well.
I was thinking, maybe, if we could even just,
sort of, go in order again-- or whoever wants to respond--
since we were talking about reading David Foster
Wallace in this panel.
I was wondering if each of you could
respond to the importance of reading David Foster Wallace,
either for you personally or, as Charles sort of alluded
to, the importance, obviously, for many writers that
have followed.
But if you could respond to that somewhat formless question.
Any of you?
You could start down at that end, or--
OK.
OK, I guess we'll going in order again.
For me, as I began to say before, it was just,
say, oh yeah, a guy can do something.
Someone once said to me that you can't really
get away with too much in fiction, which isn't true.
In fact, you can get away with anything,
if it's right, if it works, if it's good.
And David's stories said, oh, yeah,
you could write about this kind of thinking,
or this kind of doubts--
of doubt, or this kind of situation,
and make it work sufficiently.
So it gave me that encouragement, not only as
a writer, that I could try different things myself,
but as a reader, to open my open my mind to what else
what else I would enjoy as a reader.
And that was pretty important for me.
Can you say, Ken, just out of curiosity,
had you already read any of Wallace's work?
Or were you aware of him at all when you--
When I first got
--were in contact with him?
No, as I mentioned I--
actually I'm not sure, but I think not.
Because I had just sent--
I was sending stories out then, and I sent Sonora Review,
but why did I send it to Sonora Review?
Actually, that's a good question.
I don't know, Sorry.
It was a long time-- it was a long time ago.
Was Broom of the System the first thing of his read, then?
Yeah, I think--
Or did you--
Yeah, I think so.
Now you've asked that question directly, I'm not sure, sorry.
I'll think about it over coffee.
Yeah.
"Lyndon."
You cannot fuck with "Lyndon".
It's unbelievable, that story.
"Lyndon" and "Girl with the Curious Hair"--
if you're a writer of my age, or in that ballpark,
you had to read those stories.
There's just no way around it, everyone read those stories.
Infinite Jest comes out, and it's Sven Birkerts--
who actually was a teacher at the grad school I went
to, and who contributes in this issue--
the month before it came out, he asked
if I knew about the generation buster that was going to come,
that was about to come out.
And I didn't, because I'm a student.
I don't know anything until it shows up in the bookstore.
And he says who it's by, and I almost did a dance.
It's like-- the god that you've actually
been praying to, he fucking shows up, like, there it is.
And pardon my French I'm sorry, I'll
try and keep the act for the kids.
And I think this one thing is that,
because now his voice is so imitated--
in any alt-weekly you have writers trying to write like
David Foster Wallace--
that there's so much that's been kind of diluted,
that every writer has tried tricks that Dave adopted.
But the one thing that I had to grow into, and stop, maybe,
trying to write like him, and trying
to write like Rick Moody, and kind of grow into, and learn
about was, what's my voice?
And that it's OK to be whatever freak I am,
or whatever freaky stories I have,
or whatever I need to get out there and say,
that it's fine to not be--
to absorb a little bit, but to find my path.
And I think reading him, for any young writer, that's a lesson.
Because you're not going to have as good a vocabulary as David
Foster Wallace.
[LAUGHTER]
The dude was on the OED board, you know?
So don't try that.
Anyway, that would be my little spiel for that.
Can we pause real quick?
You want to know where they came from?
[INAUDIBLE]
"Lyndon".
Girl with Curious Hair.
Oh, right here.
Everything else.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't even understand the question.
Sure, sure, I do want to know.
Yeah.
Gardner was popular.
[INAUDIBLE] they forgot all the wonder of Gardner,
and looking at [INAUDIBLE] on, you know, fiction.
On Moral Fiction, on the other hand was [INAUDIBLE] You know--
Mhm.
[INAUDIBLE] And when you get this part right,
take [INAUDIBLE] Dave was young.
And we were discussing these things
because-- well, many reasons, but mostly
because of what a strange place [INAUDIBLE] back home.
The farm [INAUDIBLE] and Dave was not a [INAUDIBLE] --but he
was the golden boy [INAUDIBLE] Have you ever seen [INAUDIBLE]
movie, [INAUDIBLE] Tim Robbins--
Field of-- oh, Bull Durham.
Bull Durham.
Thanks.
[INAUDIBLE] And strangely enough, my father
would film [INAUDIBLE] And we began
talking about movies [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]
and the [INAUDIBLE]
That's right, because the narrative of that
is as a gay man.
Of course.
Yeah
Mhm.
And it was Dave's moment.
1986.
Yeah.
Girl with Curious Hair is hard to explain.
One of the first times Dave and I met, he
was saying that [INAUDIBLE] And I was playing king [INAUDIBLE]
and telling him about me about going
to see the Grateful Dead in San Francisco [INAUDIBLE]
punk rock [INAUDIBLE] punk rock.
And two days later, Dave walks up to me, and he says,
[INAUDIBLE] and he danced with a girl with the curious hair.
And I said, Dave, hey, that's not my story.
[INAUDIBLE] Because Dave felt that, if he wrote about Dave,
[INAUDIBLE] sat in the smoking lounge [INAUDIBLE]
intensely considering the next moment.
And then he'd repeat it.
[INAUDIBLE]
And that would be [INAUDIBLE] South Americans, [INAUDIBLE]
There was an attempt to start non-fiction writing
program here that was squashed, and there was a great rebellion
in the writing program.
It caused a lot of heartache and problems
[INAUDIBLE] Dave split away, because he was better published
than the professors already.
Dave would workshop [INAUDIBLE]
Well, workshops are actually in that book, "Girl with Curious
Hair," as you know.
The novella?
Yeah.
That came afterwards.
He wrote that mostly in [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
But if you looked at-- oh, I'm sorry.
That's all right.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
Well, that was--
[LAUGHS]
No problem.
You're welcome.
[INAUDIBLE]
No.
Well, my--
Far better than not.
My--
[INAUDIBLE] value.
My encounter with that first book, Girl with Curious H--
"Broom of the System" came from my younger brother,
whose name is Robert Boswell.
And he picked up the book because it was dedicated-- it--
Robert Boswell was acknowledged on the acknowledgments page.
And he said, I just bought this book because my name was in it,
and you would like it.
He called me while I was in college.
And I was in college at the time, and as I was saying,
and here, I was trying to write, and I
was reading a lot of Carver.
I was reading what was popular at the time,
but I was also secretly reading Barth and Pynchon,
at that time.
And I was also taking a course in critical theory,
but at the same time that I was reading Derrida on one class,
I had a philosopher teaching me Wittgenstein,
who was telling me, Derrida was wrong, read Wittgenstein.
And at once, this novel landed on my lap
that is this homage to Pynchon and Barth,
and an elaborate inquiry into language
by way of Wittgenstein.
It felt like this novel built out
of coordinate points that was the interior of my head,
and that was the first thing I grafted onto.
But then, thinking about postmodernism
as a kind of retrograde movement in the '80s,
it had kind of fallen into disrepute.
The shift for me of--
in Girl with Curious Hair, what makes it so powerful,
why I think it's the great advance in Wallace's art is,
because the pop culture TV stuff in that book
anticipates what he talks about in that essay,
"E Unibus Pluram," which I think most of you
probably have encountered.
He performs it in "Girl with Curious Hair,"
before he describes what he's up to.
But what he analyzed, and I think what is so important
about him, was that the literary turn toward meta-fiction--
which happens in the '60s, a kind of reaction
to the exhaustion of modernism--
Wallace saw, as the air we were breathing,
the pop culture had caught up with self-reflexivity
of postmodernism, and now TV has done it.
And since we all breathe that air of self-conscious irony
and solipsism, he began to think--
I think those books start to chart
a way of using the exact techniques that
got us into that mess as a way of getting us out.
And when you read "Girl with Curious Hair,"
particularly if you read it in 1989,
it was hard to figure out why that was so liberating.
You felt a window was being opened
on a new way of thinking, and it was
hard to articulate until he articulated it
for us in those essays.
But I think--
I remember being very attentive to the possibilities that he
laid out in that second book, and it stuck with me.
That's when I started praying to that god,
and I want him to appear, and he did seven years later,
with Infinite Jest.
Yeah, I'd reiterate what Charles said.
The voice, you know.
At the time, I didn't really care
for much contemporary American fiction.
I didn't care much for Carver, I certainly
didn't care for Bret Easton Ellis,
I still don't care for Jay McInerney,
I didn't care for any of that stuff.
I liked Martin Amis, but he always brought me up short
in some fundamental way.
So I was reading what I read-- a lot of French stuff.
And I remember getting Infinite Jest,
and reading the first 20 pages, and just saying,
yes, this is the guy, I recognize this,
I understand this, I love this.
Reading 20 page footnote-laden description of Don Gately going
to the supermarket--
I want it to go on for 100 pages.
There was so much pleasure to it, and so sharp, so smart,
so fucking funny, oh god, I did it.
After you did it, I was going to--
I'm not going to do that, no, no.
And with a sincerity and an ethic--
a very profound philosophical ethic to it
that is just staggering.
And this was my guy, absolutely.
And then getting to edit him.
You know, wow.
Being part of shaping that voice, and doing these things,
trying to make these things work in the context of a mainstream
magazine, and becoming friends with him, and so on, and--
But always, always, always the voice,
always the virtuosity, always the mix
of incredibly acute perception and an inability
to lie, so that sometimes what he's telling you
looks like it's cruel, but it's right.
This is actually related to what I'm
going to read from "Big Red Son" tonight, but--
so please make sure you come for that.
And it's funny.
The erudition is very funny, and I have one kind of funny story
to tell.
Because erudition breeds erudition, in a way,
to the extent that you sort of can't tell certain things
from the other things--
allusions that are deliberate or not.
When we were in Vegas, and we were at the AVN Awards,
we were in the ballroom of Caesar's Palace--
a great spot, you should all visit it if you can--
and they had a lot of banners up for upcoming events.
And there was one upcoming event that was called Kontakte.
That was spelled in the German spelling with a K--
K,o, n,t, a,k, t,e.
And I said to Dave, I'm like, oh,
wow, look I didn't know they were booking like Schoenberg
pieces for Caesar's Palace.
And he says, I'm sorry--
Stockhausen-- Stockhausen pieces for Caesar's Palace.
He says, what do you mean?
I said well, Kontakte, that's a famous piano piece
by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer.
You dropped his name in Infinite Jest.
He said, yeah, I just kind of liked the name,
I don't really know who the guy is.
[LAUGHS] I'm like, you should check him out man.
[LAUGHTER]
It's interesting to think back--
I read Infinite Jest in 2001.
And you don't realize when you're reading it,
how it's going to become this thing that obsesses you
for the rest of your life.
But I remember being sick in January and thinking,
oh, I'm so glad I'm sick so I don't
have to work or teach today--
I can read 200 pages of this book.
And at the t-- knowing that I was drawn to it,
and not knowing why.
Wanting to-- I need to reread this, why am I drawn to this,
what is so--
you feel like you're in it.
Even when you're reading great, great fiction,
I have always got a little bit of a critical, oh,
that's so well worded, the phrasing is so good.
It doesn't get in the way of my reading,
but it kind of runs across my head.
With Wallace, you go on this 200 page flight,
and you had to stop and put it down a minute
to breathe, and think, now what was
critically interesting about--
It's like you can't--
that little voice in your head, it's just so honest,
and it draws you in so much, and I didn't.
As you study for years, and years, and years,
the compassion-- the way that he doesn't judge anyone
in Infinite Jest is such a remark--
the things that he talks about in "This Is Water," that
just came at that--
the extraordinary move from what Marshall was talking about,
from that breathing the air of cynicism into well,
that's the water that we're in, but now we
have to move on towards compassion--
just extraordinary.
And he's also led me to self educate myself.
I read a big 600 page anthology of postmodern philosophy.
I've read Gaddis and Pynchon-- things I never would have done
without--
I've read both of Wittgenstein's books of philosophy
just because of Wallace.
All these things that he's led me to outside of just reading,
I don't know, so that's--
The thing about David is, he was the smartest person I ever
knew.
And I think he's probably the smartest person most of us
ever knew.
It's like the Enron movie, the smartest
guys who thought they were the smartest ones in the room.
And since his death, because I'm his literary executor and not
just the agent, we've actually been putting together
his archives, and going through all his papers,
and all his computer disks, and everything.
And even after all these years, it's
amazing to see what a careful writer he was.
There are drafts, and drafts, and drafts of everything.
There are drafts of letters.
Who drafts letters?
Come on, there are drafts of letters to his mother.
Where there's the typed work, and then there's,
of course, the blue pencil, then there's the red pencil,
then there's the green pencil.
And I actually-- the one thing I took out of the archives
was his punctuation cheat sheet, because he
knows punctuation better than anyone,
including the copy editors who edited him over the years.
And some of whom this was--
if you said, I'm going to, sort of, dip you in whipped cream
and let you do anything-- this was the greatest person
for them to copy edit in life.
For other copy editors it was the worst nightmare
ever because, of course, he knew more than they did,
and it became a misery.
And the Premiere pieces, for example--
David eviscerates Balthazar Getty in a footnote,
in a footnote.
I don't even-- if I saw Balthazar Getty out there,
I'm not even sure I would know what he looks like.
But it was just a footnote where he destroyed him, and--
The copy chief almost quit over the serial comma.
He almost quit.
Right, right, I mean--
Some of our longest conversations
were getting galleys back from copy editors,
and me and Dave either taking out or putting back in commas.
And these were guys who said, oh,
we're great fans of Dave Wallace, but they're--
copy editors are born, not made, so they can't help themselves.
[LAUGHTER]
And there are places--
David may be the only person who is, like, I'm never
working with The New York Times again,
because they didn't put commas where they were supposed to.
Now, as an agent you're, like, I'm
just going to shoot myself now.
You're not going to work with The New York Times?
No, because they did-- they put the wrong copy
editor on something.
The New York Observer-- they didn't do it right, and--
but the thing is, he knew exactly what it
was supposed to be.
And he knew exactly how he knew it was meant--
he understood things that the rest of us didn't understand.
And so I, of course, would have to go fight for these things
and be like, sorry, no we can't do this.
No, Jim Atlas, no, we're never doing another piece
for the magazine, just because.
His cordless phone would be dying, and he's like, OK,
put that comma [INAUDIBLE]
Right, and that's the way it worked.
And I knew all along that the whole thing was--
don't fuck with it, just figure out how to make it work.
Would have saved a lot of time.
Right, it's true.
And the Premiere piece, for example,
we wound up doing under a pseudonym,
because he just got really angry.
Actually the agreement was the agreement
was to do it under a pseudonym even before he wrote the piece.
No, but we changed it in the middle.
No, no, no, no, the agreement was always
to do it with a pseudonym.
He had been offered to it by Spin.
Spin said OK.
And the reason he wanted to do the pseudonym--
this is actually even funnier--
because he had said--
he was working on Brief Interviews.
Right.
Right, and he had told you, and every other editor who
we spoke to, that he wasn't going to do another magazine
piece for two years.
Now, he really wanted to write about AVN,
he really wanted to go out and do this thing.
But he knew that if he wrote a piece of this size
that it would end up on a magazine,
and the cover line would read inside the porno Oscars,
by David Foster Wallace.
And he said to me--
I remember this clear as a bell-- he said to me,
because I don't want to look like a douchebag,
for breaking my word and not doing a magazine piece.
So one of the conditions on doing the magazine piece,
I have to do it under a pseudonym.
The whole thing about what happened after that
is even worse, actually.
But because-- the irony is--
as though no one was going to figure it out?
That was the thing.
You're like, did you not think people were
going to recognize the voice?
No, he thought the clue that was going to give him away
in the AVN piece was the abbreviation, vz,
in a footnote.
I said, no, Dave, it's not just that.
[LAUGHTER]
He actually said that to me with a--
Totally straight face, totally straight face, right.
You know, this is the thing that's
really going to give it away.
Right.
Could be, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
So one of the things that a couple of you guys
have brought up was the aspect of voice.
And I think in a lot of Wallace's work
we see a really intense interest in voice.
We were talking about Girl with Curious Hair, which
sort of adopts voices, a lot of the stories in that collection,
as well as in Brief Interviews.
But also his own voice, as we brought up with Infinite
Jest-- the fact that it feels very much his,
and untouchably his.
So that was, maybe, one of the things
I was thinking we could come back and talk about,
after we get a little coffee.
But also just the response to the influences a couple of you
guys also brought up--
Barth and Gaddis and some of the people
that Wallace has sort of responded to, but also
maybe kind of advanced a little bit.
But so maybe right now is a good time
to get some lemon bars and coffee,
and then we'll be back in about a half an hour.
We should reassure all these nice people
that will be taking questions.
And, yeah, then we'll be having questions and discussion.
[APPLAUSE]
We should make it so they're not just talk.
[INAUDIBLE]