OK.
I think we're ready to start again
and we figured, this time, it'd be a little bit more informal
and allow you guys to ask questions.
Jamison Crabtree, who is the other editor-in-chief of Sonora
Review, is going to be bringing around a microphone
whenever you raise your hand with your questions.
Without any further ado from me, I think you guys can probably,
if you have a question--
oh, yeah, to really quickly reintroduce,
for anyone who's new to the panel,
this is Bonnie Nadell from the Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell
literary agency, who represented Wallace for 23 years.
This is Greg Carlisle, author of Elegant Complexity--
A Study of Infinite Jest.
Glenn Kenny, who is a former film critic for Premier.
What is the name of your blog?
Oh right, I blog too.
It's Some Came Running at Typepad,
it's somecamerunning.typepad.com.
And Glenn also edited a couple of pieces-- three pieces,
total--
of David Foster Wallace's.
[INAUDIBLE]
And then Marshall Boswell, author
of Understanding David Foster Wallace;
Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children;
and Ken Kalfus at the far end, author of Thirst,
and most recently, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.
If anyone has a question, you can just raise your hand.
Or should we just start talking amongst ourselves
and then you all can answer--?
We could--
Well, the question that I had, I was thinking a little bit
about voice-- and I don't have a very articulate question
about this, necessarily.
But if you-- just throwing out another sort
of amorphous question, and whoever wants to field it.
What would you say about Wallace's concern for voice,
or the way in which he developed voice in his work?
Glenn talked about the erudition that you encounter
when you read Wallace.
And I think that's an important thing
to tap into, because I think it's
the source of the voice, for me, in a lot of ways.
That emergence of Wallace's fiction in the mid-'80s happens
amid the flowering of critical theory and post-structuralism.
And one of the things about Wallace's writerly identity
is that he's very well-versed in that material.
He knows deconstruction.
He knows Foucault. He's written about it.
You can see it in the work.
He's informed by it, but he was suspicious of it.
And I think what he found, in that sort
of deconstructionist model, is that it leaves
texts alienated from the world.
I think he understood how you get there, the idea in Derrida
of language being play.
And when you have that, there's no place
for the reader to do anything.
The language-- the play is the text,
and the world has been deferred out of the text.
And I think Wallace's intervention
into that argument, by way of Wittgenstein, is important.
Because Wittgenstein's counterargument,
which precedes Derrida, is to conceive
of language not as words in a chain of signifiers,
but as a game--
as a language game played by players,
and that meaning is a product of agreement on the set of rules.
You can see that in Broom of the System,
where character-- they call telephones
magazines or something.
They come up with the other words
for natural objects as an experiment in Wittgenstein.
If everyone decides that this is called a cat,
and I say I read a cat last night,
we all know what that means.
That's how you get the word.
For Wallace, that's the intervention.
Because if language is really about a communal understanding,
a community of users, then I think
books can become directly communicative, again,
in a way that I think postmodernism had let go of.
The text becomes so involuted and self-reflexive
that the reader is left standing outside that fun house looking
at this giant edifice that you're supposed to admire,
but you don't feel anything for it.
So that intimacy of that voice comes out
of a philosophical grounding in language
as a communication between two people.
He's not there in these texts, but that language, that voice,
is the voice of Wallace in your head.
If you notice, at the end of Infinite Jest,
this wraith appears to Gately while he's
splayed out in the hospital.
And it talks to Gately in Gately's own voice.
And if you're paying attention, that wraith,
that ghost at the end of that book,
is ultimately Jim Incandenza's ghost.
But also, it's Wallace.
At one point, the wraith will push his glasses up.
There's the little details that suggests
that's Wallace in Gately's head.
But it's Wallace in your head when you're reading Wallace.
And that intimacy, I think, is something
he achieves deliberately through a kind of adaptation
of a Wittgensteinian model of communication.
I don't want to sound too erudite,
but I think that's important.
And in that respect, what you're talking
about with the wraith in Infinite Jest,
he kind of out-Nabokovs Nabokov, who used a similar device
at the end of Bend Sinister, where Nabokov, the author,
reveals himself to the lead character, who
goes mad as a result, but is therefore sort of put out
of his misery in a way.
And I think what Dave does, actually--
it's almost sacrilegious to say this--
is, on a philosophical level, more sophisticated than what
Nabokov did.
He raises the game just a little bit,
just as with talking about what happens in the Eschaton thing.
It's not three-dimensional chess.
It's about 20-dimensional chess that's going on.
And one thing-- it was interesting
when Dave's book Everything and More came
out, his study of infinity.
And I think it's one of his most misunderstood books,
because all of the--
I'm not going to say the F-word.
No, no, but the Book Review editors all
gave it to, like, math experts, who said, well,
he's wrong here, which misses almost the entire point of what
he's doing in the book in relating math problems
and the Fermat's theorem to a philosophical perspective--
a Wittgensteinian philosophical perspective.
It's not strictly a math book.
And it was decided, I guess--
it wasn't really a conspiracy, but it was almost like, oh,
Dave Wallace is--
David Foster Wallace is writing a math book,
but we'll show him.
And everybody just did not get it.
I mean, beyond the point of not getting it just technically,
but not getting it, you know?
But--
I'm just saying, in that book, there's a reason--
there's a reason they don't get it.
Because that book is--
that book is a hard book.
That is not a-- because you can read it.
[INAUDIBLE] I never got past page [INAUDIBLE]..
Look, that's--
[INAUDIBLE]
Hey, we took high school math.
We don't understand what you're talking about.
And he said-- he says, in the first 10, 20 pages,
you only need high school math.
But he doesn't say--
he doesn't say that--
yeah, he doesn't say that the high school is the fucking--
you know?
Yeah, at the MIT, the children of the brains of whatever.
It's crazy.
But that's not fair.
Oh, blah, blah, blah, it was misunderstood.
Well, you know what?
Who can get through it?
[INAUDIBLE] math professor [INAUDIBLE]..
Whatever it is, it's unreadable.
No, it's not.
Well, you're smarter than I am, so good for you.
No, I'm not.
I would say this, just to go somewhere else with voice,
is, I think his big influence with a lot--
his magazine work.
People read his magazine work, and people
love his magazine work.
And it's deservedly so.
It's just the best candy ever, and it's also nourishing.
His fiction, he pulled no punches at anything.
And he did it--
I think he was in a contest with himself, to entertain himself
and to move himself.
And he raised the bar.
And it's much harder for people to follow along.
And I think the last 10 years, especially
with the rise of one particular critic, a lot of his fiction--
and because he hadn't published another novel,
and he concentrated on short, the short fiction.
His fictional reputation, it didn't stay where it was.
I think everyone knows he's a genius,
and everyone looked for-- each book was an event.
But there's readers I know who are in tribute to David Foster
Wallace, and who were very vocal about what the loss was,
who didn't read his short fiction of the last book.
And I just-- I want to throw that out there.
Because I think that that's part of the legacy,
is that you have someone who's uncompromising at the work that
meant the most to him.
And I think he wanted to be read.
He very much wanted to be read.
And he will be read, now, because he's going
to be a cult legend forever.
But I don't think that it was the same, the last five years.
That's just my--
Wasn't one critic [INAUDIBLE]?
One particular critic who spent years and years, in every essay
he wrote, taking a shot at David Foster Wallace.
It was James Woods.
Yeah.
I loved him in Casino.
That's why I mentioned his name [INAUDIBLE]..
He was great in Cop.
That was fantastic work.
Don't confuse them.
I kid, I kid.
Well, it's funny, because when I read Brief Interviews
with Hideous Men for the first time--
and then this gets into some of the stuff that's part
of the tragedy, why we're here.
When I read Brief Interviews for the first time,
I was actually worried about it.
Because I was like, whoa.
Because it was such an immersion into this place
of dark anxiety.
And then he came to New York to read from it.
And he read what I thought were some of the--
was one of the most harrowing portions
of the book, the part about the amputee who called--
not the amputee, the thalidomide guy
who calls his shriveled up arm "the asset," then segueing
into the guy who cleans bathrooms in this long, almost
unbearable treatment of the olfactory sensations of doing
this.
And he read it in such a way that, all of a sudden,
you realize this was some of the funniest stuff in the book.
And then I thought, oh, OK, it's fine.
But that ability to be both absolutely hellishly
harrowing and hysterically funny at the same exact time-- not,
like, an alternating thing.
Not like, this is dark, and now I'm going to give you a joke
and lighten it with humor.
The humor was just as dark, but the humor
was still so funny, so laugh out loud funny.
And he had this shyness to him.
And with sometimes, this lack of--
very, very low comfort level with crowds.
But by the same token, anybody who saw him read
knew that when he got in the zone,
and he knew exactly what he was doing in terms of reading,
he was the best reader of his own work,
because he put that forward in such a way.
And people are sitting--
like, rolling in the aisles.
And he's not even breaking a smile,
but he knows how he's getting across.
Well, that was the thing about Broom of the System,
also, when it came out.
It had all of these-- it was a clear announcement of that he
was the new kid on the block, but it was also
an announcement of what neighborhood
he wanted to live in.
And it was a neighborhood, as I say, in disrepute.
I mean, there was the Pynchon.
There was Barth.
There was the Gaddis.
There was even the character there in that novel
from Shillington, Pennsylvania.
And the only reason anyone knows about Shillington,
Pennsylvania, is John Updike's from there.
But these weren't clumsy attempts not to--
this wasn't a failure to hide his influence.
They were announcements of his influence.
But what was different about his use of those modes
was how fun the book was.
The book was a blast.
And one of the things that you read,
through all of his criticism, is a fascination
with entertainment.
Fun is one of his themes.
And I think he began to think about-- this is maybe
his function as a Gen X writer.
He began to think about the idea of text as entertainment.
He felt like it was a job of books to give pleasure, again,
in the way that TV does.
I don't think that's a crass thing to say.
But he's very-- if you chart this--
and I'll pass the microphone on.
But if you chart--
I can show you this in the book, Understanding David Foster
Wallace, out in paperback coming out.
But there's three different formulations of the same idea.
It's in E Unibus Pluram.
It's in Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.
And he says it again.
Hal says it somewhere in the deep grottoes of Infinite Jest.
The formulation is that cynicism and naivete are not
mutually exclusive.
This was his intervention, more than anything else.
Cynicism I consider the kind of self-consciousness,
the self-awareness, the understanding of conventions
and hollowness of various kinds of fictional forms,
which his book exemplifies.
But he's trying to do that while also reintroducing
a kind of naivete and openness to what he calls
single entendre in principles--
honor, goodness, empathy, these things
that he wants to remove the quotation marks around
and reaffirm.
The difficulty of the fiction also,
often, is that he doesn't want to do it directly.
The affirmation happens sort of off the page.
And I think that's what people respond to,
that sense that something ethical is going on
in these texts.
But it's something that the texts produce in the reader.
And I mean, I can talk for hours about how they do that.
But they do do that in a way that, I think,
his imitators have been trying to get.
And it's that tone of cynicism and naivete
that Wallace invents, and that I think
his followers have tried, with varying degrees of success,
to manage.
I was going to say, both Adam Gopnik
and A.O. Scott have separately said
that when they read Infinite Jest,
they heard the voice inside their own head.
And I've always thought, yeah, in your dreams.
Like, they're flattering themselves
by thinking that that's the voice inside their own head.
But for 10 years, there have been writers like--
Tom Bissell is not here.
Heidi Julavits isn't here, Colson Whitehead.
You can read parts of these people's books
and know what books of Dave's they were reading.
And I'm not saying that to rip on them.
You could do that with parts of--
Chapter 2.1 of Beautiful Children.
You could see-- it's just there--
that he set the pace for a lot of us.
And at the same time, both n+1 and McSweeney's are separate
outgrowths of the work of David Foster Wallace.
Well, Dave Eggers.
Dave Eggers, who had not heard of him until he
asked him to submit something.
And then his whole extreme--
whatever-- Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Yeah.
That's Wallace lite.
And I'm not saying anything shocking or revelatory here,
I don't think, for a lot of us.
And the same thing with Kunkel--
Ben Kunkel and the little one, Gessen.
They're both, in different directions,
taking different parts of his work.
And one deals with a certain kind of sincerity
that you're talking about, and the other one
deals with critical faculty, and being doubting, and casting
a certain kind of eye.
So you have just this shadow that the man's cast, I think.
Yeah.
It's funny you mention A.O. Scott,
because I happened to read that last night on a plane.
And it's actually-- it's one of The New York Review of Books.
And I suspect, when people say that, the way I take
it is that you read a really great writer
with a great voice, and it becomes part of your brain,
that you start thinking--
this is definitely a feeling I get reading Wallace.
For the next couple of days, I'm going to think like him.
And I'm going to have that kind of--
the language gives you all--
unfortunately, it doesn't last very long.
But you have that acuity.
And you develop-- and a great writer will do that.
And I didn't read the--
who's the other critic?
[INAUDIBLE]
Adam Gopnik.
Well, I didn't read--
I'd already met-- but I suspect--
I've had that feeling too.
And it's not that I can write like that,
but I do feel I've been sort of given the gift of this acuity
for a couple of days, at least.
Right.
[INAUDIBLE] what you all were saying--
Here, pass her the microphone.
It is true that, for David, writing the nonfiction
was way easier than writing fiction.
And the fiction came hard.
And the nonfiction, for him, it was sort of like, look, Ma,
no hands!
Like any kid on a bicycle.
And those were the easiest things
to sell and there was a point where--
I mean, David started doing magazine work for money,
the way most writers do.
Because it was a long time between books, and he
was working on Infinite Jest.
And the advance for Infinite Jest
was not large, and certainly small increments.
And so it was a matter of, how can I make $5,000?
And Glenn will tell you that buying David-- well, paying
$5,000 for David Wallace, you're essentially paying a penny
a word at a certain point.
I mean, because I was like, could you
not make it 15,000 words so they have to cut down?
[INAUDIBLE] had this conversation.
[? Apparently ?] knew how to make it work against him.
Right.
And I mean, he'd be like, you're going to be mad at me again,
aren't you?
And I was just like, why did you-- you know.
But it's true--
And at the time--
I don't mean to interrupt, but just
to demonstrate that, we were in Las Vegas January 8, he left.
The Big Red Son manuscript showed up at my office
around Valentine's Day.
So it's pretty fast.
In answer-- in what Charles was saying,
about sort of a fiction versus the nonfiction,
I mean, as one of the two people who
has read this unfinished novel, it's about boredom.
I mean, who writes a book about IRS agents and boredom,
and how bored you can get looking at numbers?
I mean, it's like taking the hardest thing you can possibly
ever do and then doing it.
And it's amazing.
I mean, it sounds--
as trite as it sounds, but it really is an amazing book.
And he--
[INAUDIBLE]
In its way.
And I mean, he also--
he took tax courses for, like, three years so
that he could learn all of the tax things.
And I have tax books that, you were like,
who has sent away for tax books so that you
can learn all about taxes in order
to write a book about IRS agents and taxes?
And it's funny, and it's smart, and it's heartbreaking,
and it's all of those things.
[INAUDIBLE]
What?
What kind of shape is it in?
Parts of it are near-- are perfect.
I mean, the first parts are incredibly clean.
I mean, the parts-- there were two sections
that were in The New Yorker, one small section that
was in Harper's, which are just a few
of the characters who are in this book.
I mean, because it's a whole group of IRS agents
who live in the Midwest.
Since, for David-- I mean, every writer has sort of their place
which is their place that they write about.
I mean, he was a Midwest boy through and through,
that no matter where he lived, whether it
was Tucson or Boston, the Midwest is
what had the resonance for him.
And he kept going back to it.
It's the Midwest in the mid-'80s, which wasn't pretty
for anybody.
I mean, it's driving Pintos.
Do you remember Pintos, any of you?
Yeah.
Not a good car.
And when he wanted to write about something,
he wanted to know everything about it.
So when he did the AVN piece-- this was brilliant.
The AVN, the Adult Video News awards,
they nominate literally hundreds of films every year.
And he watched most of them.
And they nominate--
So did I.
--in different categories-- best facial, best
oral sex scene, best threesome, best group sex.
And he had this idea.
He wanted to see everything that was nominated.
And then he figured out that it was mathematically
impossible for one person to watch everything that
was nominated, so we figured we would
go with just a cross-section of nominees.
The thing is, he was living in Normal at the time.
He was living in a town called Normal, Indiana.
Right.
Illinois.
Illinois, sorry.
I always get those two states mixed up.
And not a lot of access to porn.
So our thing would be, at Premiere,
me and a couple of my buddies who were fact-checkers there--
lunch breaks.
Random lunch breaks, we'd go-- this was around the time
where 8th Avenue was still a great place to buy porno.
And we'd go on our Q for P, quest for porn.
And we'd go and stock up on a bunch of videotapes--
Stephanie Swift, gangbang angel, da, da, da.
That's the one where she gets spit in the face 13 times
by 13 guys--
Jasmin St. Clair.
And we'd send them to Dave.
He would watch and take notes.
Then he'd send them back to the office,
because he didn't want-- having watched them and taken notes,
he did not want them in this house anymore.
And we ended up getting so many videotapes-- porn videotapes.
I left my office in a fairly quick manner
when I left premiere.com.
And I can only imagine the riches
that some of the facilities guys yielded in terms of what
is now vintage pornography.
But yeah, he wanted to know everything.
And if he could have watched all of those nominees,
he would have.
Absolutely.
Yuck.
Yeah, we have a question, finally--
yay!
I had a question for the academics.
Well, it's a rare thing, right, that writing about someone--
an academic work about someone who's still living,
which he was at the time.
And I was just wondering about whether you
had gleaned any sort of reaction to that work, or--
Glean.
Do you mean--
Like, whether or not, directly or indirectly,
you heard anything about sort of Wallace's reaction
to your work, or reaction of his acolytes or whatever.
Never did.
The one story I came prepared to tell was--
I never met David Foster Wallace.
But when I was writing the book, I
had reached a point where I had a load of unanswered questions,
including questions about his biography,
but also questions about details in Infinite Jest.
What happens, how, at the end?
What happens to Madame Psychosis?
I mean just questions that just seemed impossible to resolve.
And I thought I'd ask him.
So I sent an email--
I sent a letter to him saying, I'm Marshall Boswell.
I'm writing this book.
I have some questions.
Would you be willing to answer them?
Months passed without any response,
because he was moving to Pomona.
The letter finally came back.
What he did was, he sent my letter back to me,
with his answers in red felt tip footnotes on the letter--
which, when my house burns down, I'm
grabbing my kids and that letter.
Hi, Marshall Boswell.
There's a 1.
You flip it over, and he just writes "hi" and a smiley face.
You flip it back.
It's just a cherished thing.
And so I wrote him a list of these questions,
and he responded.
He responded.
He said I could never tell anyone
that he did this, because he didn't
want people bothering him.
That was-- but I think I can tell you now.
And he wrote back eight pages of single-spaced, legal pad,
handwritten responses.
And they're just fascinating.
He didn't answer a lot of the questions I asked.
He was very slippery.
But some of them, he did.
And then I sent him the book when
it was over, and waited and waited and waited,
and I never heard back from him, which is just as well.
I knew, from posts on the internet,
that when a student at Pomona would bring it up,
he would get angry.
And so I've never even thought--
I just assumed it would never be on his radar,
a book about Infinite Jest, because he didn't
like to talk about that work.
So I never even thought to try to--
just from what I'd--
I didn't want to make him angry.
So that was--
Why did he get angry [INAUDIBLE]??
I assume it-- well, any other--
I know some writers that don't like to talk about that.
You talk about-- an academic talking to a writer, it's like,
don't try to piece out my work.
It's like, that's the academic's job,
to comment, to comment, to comment on it.
And it's not-- it's just two different things.
I think in that--
I actually think it's because--
--particular context--
--he was shy.
Yeah.
I think it actually is--
And he also didn't want his classes--
--he was really shy.
--to be about him.
Yeah.
I mean, he was a really shy person.
And he's not somebody who lived in the middle of New
York, or LA, or any big city.
He lived in Normal, Illinois, and Pomona and Claremont,
California.
These are not the red-hot center of anything,
though they're very nice places.
Actually, I'm not sure Normal is a nice place.
But I think it actually has to do with, his classes were
really for his students.
And I think he just--
he didn't want to appear to be a star or a celebrity,
or be, like, the star writer who came in.
So I don't actually think it was, oh,
I'm not going to comment to an academic.
He's the child of academics.
His parents were both academics.
I don't think it's that.
I think it really was like, read the book.
Figure it out for yourselves, for his students.
I don't think was meant as anything more than that.
Two other things.
In Westward the Course of Empire Takes
its Way, this character Mark Nechtr,
who was David Foster Wallace--
I think we're supposed to understand that-- is anxious,
in that novel--
novella-- about inheriting the languages, inheriting
Dr. Ambrose's scepter, as an academic writer.
And he's worried about it.
Because John Barth is the Ambrose figure in that story.
And Barth is a dissertationist's dream.
They're made for academics.
And I think he was anxious about that.
But I also think it's like the scene in Annie Hall, when
the guy's going on about Marshall McLuhan.
And Marshall McLuhan walks up and says,
you have no idea what you're talking about.
And the guy says, who are you?
I'm Marshall McLuhan.
And the critic still doesn't get it.
He still thinks he knows what he's talking about.
And Dave's shyness was genuine.
And when I was at Premiere, I obviously
met and dealt with a lot of people who are celebrities,
and who relish being celebrities.
And there's some of them who will put on this air of,
well, that's all well and good, but I'm not really
such a big deal.
But no, Dave--
I mean, Dave, it's strange.
Because there were these two things that co-existed in his
mind, the sort of negative capability, where he knew--
there was a certain level, he knew he was the shit.
But on a personal kind of level of interacting with people,
he never wanted to give anybody the impression
that he was better than them or that he
felt he was better than them.
As I'd write-- in, I think, the first three conversations
we had, he called me Mr. Kenny.
I actually had to talk him out of doing that.
And he wasn't doing it out of affectation or anything
other than having what he thought were good manners.
And for him, manners were absolutely
inextricable from a much larger moral and ethical perspective
that he tried very, very hard, all through his life,
to maintain, because it was the right thing to do.
I'm just going to--
however shy he may have been, there is also a part of him
that--
you don't write like that and be a complete, utter wallflower.
It's just impossible.
You can't.
I mean, socially and however, his interactions with people,
there was also something there.
And this is in this is in E Pluribus Unum about the US
American fiction writer.
And I think it's in another interview he did,
where he talks about that you're divided, because part of you
wants to sit in the library and write your fiction,
and then another part of you wants
to dance on top of the table and say, look at me, look at me.
The stylistic virtuosity of that early work
and what it coalesces into, he knew it.
I mean, he knew what he had.
But he also wanted other people to know what he had.
And I don't think that's the same thing as being a Hollywood
star with an, oh, I'm not such a-- false humility.
I think-- you were talking about something separate.
And it is.
And maybe part of it is a reaction
to the stripped-down Carver stuff.
And part of it also is that you have this bursting mind that's
processing everything, and that's creating everything,
and that's in love with language,
and it's in love with form.
And I think that's pretty cool.
I think our culture is the better for having those people,
and that ambition, and that desire to take it all on.
Are there any questions from the audience?
[INAUDIBLE]
My question.
Goes a little bit off of what's been talked about already.
But the trend in his recent work,
away from what the persona of David Foster Wallace
became with earlier work, as in, the writing
seems to have changed a little bit with what was in Oblivion.
And certainly, with the two excerpts,
that as much as we saw the sincerity of the things before,
it just felt a little more apparent and a little more
on the page, at least in "Good People," and things
in Oblivion.
So I sort of talk about this.
And you mentioned James Wood, or the man who will go unnamed.
And Wood, afterwards, wrote a thing
that he thought the place Wallace was going
was interesting.
Where he thought--
In 2007, James Wood, after his first novel came out-- or maybe
a little earlier than that-- and he got creamed,
and he finally learned what it was to have someone tear you
apart, James Wood underwent a sea change as a reviewer,
and I think, feels a certain level
of remorse for some of the things he's written.
And I think everything he's done since then,
he goes out of his way to bend over
backwards for all kinds of different books, some of which
may or may not deserve bending over backwards for.
Although his reconsideration certainly falls
into the venerated [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
What I sort of mean to say is that what
I think he's pointing at is, I feel, close to accurate
with regards to Wallace's writing changing.
So then I sort of want to know what people's opinions-- that
would be mostly from Oblivion since,
and what we've seen since then.
I just want-- the title story of Oblivion is narrated--
it seems to be narrated by the--
I want to make sure--
by one character.
And it's actually narrated by the partner,
who is dreaming in the mind of another character.
And the formalist tricks are deeper,
and they're more sophisticated, and they're not as flashy,
but the structure of that is quite something.
I guess, with regards to this question,
I thought that part of the philosophic math underpinning
"Good Old Neon," which was the first thing I
read of his where--
I mean, just to begin with, you have, holy shit,
like, the guy--
for me personally, at least-- seems
like he's been reading my psychic [INAUDIBLE]..
That sense that it's almost--
at some point of intelligence, it's
almost physically impossible to have just an original moment.
Everything has to be kind of sifted
out as to how it's going to be perceived, and all of that.
And then below that, like the conversation
with the psychologist, where he's like, well,
if you know that you're a fraud, how can you actually
be a fraud?
And the way in which--
I don't know.
If y'all could speak to that-- like,
it's intelligence intensified.
I read Infinite Jest after that.
I found it unbelievably-- but there was this depth
and subtlety to the stuff that was in Oblivion,
where it was just--
I mean, all of his work is masterwork,
but it was really interesting to watch how he [INAUDIBLE]..
I've thought, since I read Oblivion,
something is going on here that it's
going to take us a while to figure out.
You read it, and it's like, wow, how do you explain it?
On my second reading, part of what I thought
is, each of these stories seem to have some kind of nested--
you were just talking about one.
And it happens, there's some kind of nested thing.
There's that-- you also have the sense, if you're talking about,
that compassion or humanity is on the page a little more.
And I think-- I'm inspired by that.
I started thinking, like you were again after that DT Max
article came out.
Like, OK, what is this thing that's going on?
And I'm trying to formulate a theory.
I don't know if it's right.
We'll find out as I keep thinking about it.
Infinite Jest showed us the American problem,
and there's a picture of it, and we can identify with it.
Oblivion, because it's short stories,
takes a sharper look at that and tries
to get underneath why we are that way.
And according to what the people that
have read-- what the DT Max article
said about The Pale King.
It's almost like that's going to try to help us get through it.
Now, I'm not going to report about it
or see what's underneath it.
We're going to try to get through it with Pale King.
And it seems like--
although when I read Infinite Jest,
I think everybody's a tennis player, and an addict,
and a spy, and it's like, everybody's like that.
But apparently, it seemed--
I'm guessing he thought it was still too wild,
and we're going to get--
these problems these people are experiencing
are not just for tennis players at a high school
or people in a halfway house.
I need to write about the people in Oblivion,
and it gets a little closer to home.
And now, I need to write about these tax collectors, so
your IRS people, so that this really is me and you.
I thought that, reading Infinite Jest.
I see this as a natural progression, too,
of what he was doing.
I mean, I think you can make the argument--
I do-- again, in Understanding David Foster Wallace.
But it's a formulation I came up with, and I'm sticking with it.
The early fiction, what it does to metafiction
is, it performs a meta fictional critique of meta fiction.
It's a double negative.
The actual formulation of the cynicism and naivete
is always-- couches a negative.
He says he's under the delusion that they are incompatible.
And you have to think about that, because it's--
so they are compatible, but he doesn't say they're compatible.
He says it's a delusion to think they're incompatible.
It's the same way, if you take two mirrors
and you point them at each other,
then you have a space between it, which is the world.
And that's where his texts are trying to take us.
That's why I think, if you read Greg's book,
the narratives always point out.
They don't resolve.
They head into infinity, in a way, outside that text.
I think if you read Oblivion, it's
the natural progression of that, because it
doubles the involution.
You begin to see it in that story "Octet," which does this.
"Octet" is about a writer trying to write
a story called "Octet."
And it's three levels of self-awareness.
And then you get to the--
[INAUDIBLE]
That's the Brief Interviews.
And then you see it in the press person, which
I think is almost like the--
it's the orphan that belongs in Oblivion,
in a way, because it anticipates that mode of,
the soul is not a smithy.
And I love your word "nesting."
I mean, if the early fiction casts a self-reflection
on self-reflection in order to sort of break out of irony,
then these other texts are even more sophisticated in the way
that they perform a triple involution.
The Old Neon guy is self-aware about the fact
that he's self-aware that he's a fraud.
And he can't get to the place where
he can feel a genuine emotion because every genuine emotion
is couched in the awareness that it's a genuine emotion,
and therefore, it's false.
And this is a problem with textuality itself--
that as soon as you were writing it,
you've taken it out of the world and you've
made it into a self-conscious literary thing.
And I think he was just pushing that beyond--
I don't know how far he could have gone with it.
But even in Oblivion, it seems to me,
it's three or four levels of involution
that, I think it's where he had to go.
And I think it's where he was taking us.
And I think you're right.
It's going to be a while before we can unpack it.
Well, if you look at someone [INAUDIBLE],,
one of the first things he wrote here.
He's doing it there.
Oh.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
[INAUDIBLE]
We can record this [INAUDIBLE].
Oh, well, I'm not going to go on [INAUDIBLE]..
Say too much.
I was talking with a writer friend
of his, one of his confidants, who
was saying that he was really trying to reinvent himself
stylistically.
And I think these are all--
these fine gentlemen have all pointed
that out, have shown how that's happening.
And there's some--
I think there's a level of paralysis and fear
that he's trying to work through.
And it's something that he's not just identified, maybe,
in the American condition, but also
in how hard it is to write.
That, when I read the opening pages, in The New Yorker,
of the excerpt, I felt like it was about how hard it is
to sit there and do your work.
And that's not all it's about, and maybe
that relates to how much I dislike some of the things
I'm working on at the moment.
But I, like, viscerally felt it.
And when I was talking about how brave of a writer he is--
or was-- I just, it can't be overstated enough.
And I think that that's one of the things that just separates
him from everyone around him, is that he
took on the mental challenges and the physical challenges
of moral questions and questions of life that are just--
I mean, we all have to do it, but like, that are just
the worst.
They're just the hardest.
And then he-- and he was and he was the best guy
in the room, the smartest guy in the room,
taking on the hardest fucking questions.
When does that happen?
Who can do that?
Or-- you know.
I've got to say something.
I'm listening.
Sorry.
[INAUDIBLE]
No, no, no.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--just sort of in this vein, I was
thinking it might be really interesting,
Bonnie, to ask you, both as one of the two people who've
read Pale King, and also the person who first found Broom
of the System, and then read Wallace's work all the way
from 1985 or whatever, when you first read it through.
If you could speak a little bit to this idea of the way
that he progressed is stylistic reinvention and sort
of the maturation or deepening of his work.
I think what you're all saying is true.
I mean, when David started, he was a virtuoso.
And it really was, I can do anything.
And look, I can talk in a woman's voice.
And I can talk in a man's voice.
And I can-- it is, I can do everything,
and I'm going to show you how I can do it.
But that's what a 23-year-old does.
It's like, if you're that good at anything,
whether it's skateboarding or painting or music or anything,
you're going to say, I'm going to show you everything.
And as he got older and changed, as we all do,
and got to middle age, the person he was at 46
is not the person he was at 23 when I first met him.
Because over the years, life hits everybody
with hard knocks.
And he got married, and he moved to the West Coast,
and sort of had a different view of the world.
And certainly, The Pale King and Oblivion--
because Oblivion really is the precursor to it--
is trying to go someplace else.
And it's trying to be-- it's trying to get rid
of the bells and whistles, and it was trying to reach people
in a different way.
And I think it does.
Because he disliked himself wanting
to do the bells and whistles more than any of you
could ever possibly.
And part of it is, in the nonfiction,
it sort of became shtick.
I mean, it's like anyone where-- you've got a comedian
and you've got a great line, and you just
keep using it over and over again.
And he didn't-- he was too good to actually sort of want
to rest on his laurels and do that over and over again,
which of course, is why he stopped writing these essays,
except for going to Wimbledon and writing about Federer--
which, to him, was like if I said,
would you like to see the face of God?
And The New York Times will pay for you
to go see the face of God.
You know?
I mean, he would have done it for free.
He would have done it for anything.
And loved it.
And I mean, it was the thing that
made him happiest of the essays towards the end,
because he loved tennis.
And he wrote about Federer in a way that I even--
I was like, wow, I watched these tennis matches.
I had no idea that this is what this guy is doing.
And it's amazing.
But he chose not to do nonfiction
because he didn't want to rely on the shtick.
And people would be like, why don't you go to the Amazon?
Why don't you go here?
Why don't you go to the Academy Awards?
Why don't you go pretty much anywhere?
And as someone who didn't have a passport until he
was about 40 years old, he didn't want
to go very much of anywhere.
He could see everything in Normal, Illinois,
that he needed to see-- or in Claremont.
And I think it really was sort of looking
for a bigger moral vision and sort
of how we live in the world.
He really was-- that was what the last one's about.
That moral vision-- I mean, Charles
is saying that questioning addiction is brave.
I think the thing that's consistent
about it, the answer to Wallace's [INAUDIBLE],,
they're embarrassing.
They are worried about how cynical they are.
I think a great example of how this works is the AA
sections in Infinite Jest.
Because you have all of these characters who
have lived inside their heads, and they
can't believe that what's going to save
them is a bunch of cliches.
Over and over again.
These are cliches.
I'm too sophisticated for cliches.
And the entire elaborate structure of Infinite Jest,
in a way, is designed to recover those cliches.
And you can't just send them in there,
because they're Hallmark cards.
It takes a lot of work to recover those simple ideas.
And I think he's worked--
I think the fact that he's writing a novel about boredom,
at the level of boredom, sitting still and affirming the moment
you're in, is a cliche.
And it's absolutely important to do.
And I think that work is--
that's the brave attempt, I think,
is to recover simple ideas like empathy, goodness,
Grace.
Grace, honor.
Honor is a word that keeps coming up
in Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.
Honor.
And he knows that they'd have quotation marks.
They've been discredited since Hemingway,
if you read Farewell to Arms.
But they're still there as important.
Even John McCain--
McCain.
And then McCain.
Then McCain is about that.
Something like duty.
Duty.
Right.
That's what the whole McCain piece
is about-- trying to figure out, if you peel it away,
here's a guy who suffered.
Can I affirm this at some level, or is he completely lost
to the machinery of spin?
And spin, of course, is a perfect example
of what Wallace's fiction does.
It spins.
I would just-- I'd quickly point out that, like,
the George Saunders a couple of years ago--
and it's in The Braindead Megaphone-- did an essay where
he goes to India.
And the Buddha Boy, the boy hasn't eaten or moved
in seven months.
And how hard-- and early, there's
that question of how hard it is to just stay still.
And there's someone who--
I think Saunders is one of the writers
that David particularly liked, and thought
was really good and funny, and vice versa.
And I think that there's just a lot of wonderful good things
that got spread into this world through his work,
and through other really brilliant writers who
have been able to take up the mantle and do good things.
And I discovered Ken's work because of Dave's blurb.
And
Dave was very-- Dave was very--
Dave was very generous in his reading and with the writers.
We all know that.
And I actually visited him in Normal.
First of all, I want to tell you--
I met him 15 years after he first
started publishing me here-- here at Sonora Review.
And I was old--
his involvement as a reader in contemporary fiction
was almost hard to even-- he read everything.
And he enjoyed so many different kinds
of books that weren't anything like what he was writing.
And he supported writers like that.
And the whole-- I was very impressed
with people at Normal-- the other writers there, too.
They all looked up to him for that.
And well, yeah.
A funny story about the Federer piece.
It's short.
We had an art director at Premiere--
he won't mind me telling you this--
Dirk Barnett, who every now and then, when the subject came up,
he says, well, I'm glad Wallace won't write for us anymore,
because as an art director, I will not
staunch those damn footnotes.
He got a job at Play.
And the first issue has the Federer piece in it.
He staunched the footnotes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Do we have one other [INAUDIBLE]??
I wasn't actually raising my hand for a question.
We have time, maybe, for a couple more questions
if people have them, and if we have the microphone still
circulating.
Did you have one?
No.
I was just going to ask, [INAUDIBLE] these levels
of [INAUDIBLE]?
[INAUDIBLE]?
No.
John McPhee.
John McPhee
Levels of the Game.
It's about Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe.
It's a book-length description of one match.
Dave was very [? interested. ?]
I've read McPhee's [INAUDIBLE].
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Just from the tennis players' perspective.
Well, McPhee's another one for the minutiae of every subject.
He writes every aspect.
Just incredible.
Absolutely.
I have a question for Bonnie.
You read all of these things about how he's edited,
or how big Infinite Jest was when it came, and this back
and forth of pulling apart.
And I just wanted to know what your perspective--
I mean, what really happened, or what
your perspective is on that.
And were you involved in any of this, or mediating, or--
how do you deal with something that
obviously is brilliant, but maybe not publishable, or as--
Sure, of course.
The book was sold to Little Brown
and was supposed to be about, I think,
250,000 or 300,000 words-- certainly not the 600,000
words it wound up being.
And I mean, it came in at 1,600 pages.
And I read all 1,600 pages, as did
Michael Pietsch, his editor.
And I mean, even David, there are sections where it'd
be like, you don't need this.
And I was sort of a merciless cutter.
And I suppose, since I had been cutting
his work since the beginning, I didn't feel like, oh, my god,
I can't touch this.
I'd be like, this is boring.
You're like, I don't understand this.
But he was so smart, at that point,
he knew exactly what he was willing to cut and not.
And there are these very funny back-and-forth letters
between him and Michael Pietsch, where he got to the point
where it's like, well, if I change this on page 542,
then I have to change everything from page 800 on.
And we'd be like, oh, OK.
And he would-- one letter, he says,
I had to erase everything from my hard drive,
because otherwise, I go back and change it again.
He was not against cutting.
And he was not actually somebody who--
there are certainly writers who are like this.
Every word I write is perfect.
Don't change a single one.
Don't change a period.
He was never like that.
I mean, for someone that smart-- he was happy to be edited,
and happy to be cut.
And certainly, every magazine editor could cut him,
could change things, could edit him and say,
we don't need this, or we don't need that,
or this is too much, or whatever.
As his sister would be the first to say,
how much do you want to annoy the reader?
What is the level of reader annoyance--
That you're going for here?
So, yes, I mean, it was cut 400 pages?
Maybe 500 pages.
It's hard to know between the different drafts.
And he was-- there are certain things where
he was like, no, we can't ever possibly cut this.
But we didn't feel like, oh, we'd
better not cut a word of this because here's the great man.
I mean, unfortunately, the thing is, when you kill yourself,
then you become the great man and no one
wants to change a word.
That's what I was going to-- that was kind of my follow-up
in terms of the one that you're working on now,
and also This is Water, is that the--
This is Water.
Well, that was the Kenyon commencement address?
The Kenyon commencement address, which I haven't read yet,
but I read that they cut the bit about suicide.
No, this is the weird thing.
They didn't do that.
No.
OK, phew.
There was this bootleg version that was on the web
that someone had recorded the commencement address
and put on the web--
without our permission, without ever asking anything.
And there were all sorts of things that had been added.
And David had sent me a draft of this, because at one point,
there was an op editor at The New York Times
who wanted to try and do it the following years of graduation.
So I had this.
And we weren't going to do anything with it.
And I didn't actually sort of do take-down letters on the web
or do anything about stuff that appeared out there because it
didn't seem to--
quite frankly, it didn't seem to matter that much at the time.
And Tom Bissell's piece, he sort of
had seen the bootleg version.
And there are things in the bootleg version
which were not David's words.
And even Little Brown, when they first-- when
they decided to do this, and to do this as a little book,
they had a totally wrong version.
I'm like, where did you get this?
And someone had downloaded it off the web thinking it had
been the final version, and it wasn't.
And everything is, word for word, what was in the text.
And so that's what it wound up being.
I mean, we didn't change--
I think there's one comma that was added simply
for editing purposes.
But it was Michael, myself, and his long-time copy
editor who went over this.
And I mean, Michael, at this point,
is like, every word should be exactly his word.
We're not changing anything.
And I'm still like, oh, we could change this.
And it was like, no, we're not changing anything.
And also, it's 14 pages long.
You can go over word for word.
I mean, we can't do that with Infinite Jest,
but this you could say word for word for word.
So no.
I mean, that was what was weird.
And then someone asked for corrections
to the TBR, which was not Little Brown and not myself.
But someone wrote in and said, you
have this wrong, which is totally bizarre.
I mean, that's the thing, is with the internet,
there's all this, now, that's out there, which--
To clarify, did he say it in the speech
but it wasn't in his prepared notes?
We don't know.
OK.
I actually asked Kenyon--
I had done this thing with Kenyon where they were never
supposed to release the video, because at one point,
it had been on YouTube, and then I said, you can't do this.
So now I have to go back and say, I know I said this before,
but now give it to me.
And so they're sending it to me.
So I don't have it yet.
I don't know if it was in the actual address,
but it wasn't in the text that he had prepared.
So This is Water, as a text, is exactly what he had sort
of said it was going to be.
I hope that answers your question.
[INAUDIBLE] Infinite Jest starts--
when does it start [INAUDIBLE]?
When would you first [INAUDIBLE]??
Do you remember when--
It started in-- no, because I was pretty clear with Dan
on things.
I mean, I think it was, like, '91.
Because he wrote me.
He said it started in '86, '87, '89 [INAUDIBLE]..
That's what he wrote to me.
I don't know--
I mean, they are--
he was always writing.
I mean, Pale King, he'd been writing Pale King for 10 years.
I just know when it's sort of like, there's this novel.
Do you think we could get an advance on a partial novel?
And so I would say it was '91 sometime.
But I'd have to go back--
The tennis part of the novel was an earlier--
that was the immediate follow-up to Broom of the System
was a novel [INAUDIBLE].
About the tennis.
About the tennis camp.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, he had been a high school--
he'd been a junior tennis player and sort
of on the junior circuit.
I guess that's what it is.
So I'm sure.
I mean, these things were in his head for a long time.
But I think the actual starting was probably about '91.
Could we have one more question?
OK.
I had a question to follow-up [INAUDIBLE]..
What was the-- [INAUDIBLE].
What was the response at Gourmet magazine?
Gourmet Magazine, when he turned in a piece
about the Lobster Festival, raising
the question about whether it was moral to even eat
lobsters-- or in fact, any kind of animals--
and how they [INAUDIBLE] Gourmet.
He was very funny.
They sort of thought they were going to get, like,
the Illinois State Fair piece of like, this is so funny,
and you make fun of the natives, but you're
making fun of your New York Magazine editor
at the same time.
And so they thought they were going to get that.
And there was an editor who's no longer at Gourmet
named Jocelyn Zuckerman who had wanted
him to do a piece forever, and would come up with these ideas.
And he was going to Maine with his parents
and with his new wife, and was like,
oh, we can all go the Lobster Festival.
And of course, when they got an article which is, like, is it
moral to eat lobster at all?
I mean, this is a magazine that has pages and pages
from the beef industry, and pages and pages
from the fish industry.
They were not going to publish it.
I mean, it's that simple.
They were not going to publish it.
How did he get it published there?
Well, I mean, she--
Ruth Reichl or--
Ruth was not-- I mean, Ruth will tell you now,
she was a huge defender of it from the very beginning.
But we were this close to not having it run.
And this editor sort of put her job on the line at the time
and said, if you don't do this, I will quit.
And so they wound up running it, and of course got both--
like, huge amounts of accolades because they
were so brave to do it-- and also, a few people who
canceled their subscriptions saying, how dare you do this?
I eat my Lobster Newberg once a week.
That was the thing about the AVN piece, which ended up--
which went so well during the process of editing,
and then ended up being bowdlerized
because the editor-in-chief of Premiere
just had kind of a meltdown.
And the bowdlerization itself was not
greeted with such outrage by many readers,
but Dave was very upset about it-- and understandably so.
But it ended up running with all of the profanities hyphenated,
which we were asked to do two days before shipping.
We got quite punchy.
I was like, OK, so "cocktail."
Do we hyphenate it?
And I almost quit over that.
And Dave actually was very kind and called me up
he said, yeah, I am mad at Premiere.
Yeah, I don't like your boss.
And yeah, I'm never going to write for the magazine again.
But we're still friends, and you shouldn't
quit on this account, because you do good work there,
and da, da, da.
But at the time, I don't think I helped the case much,
because instead of actually putting the argument forward,
all I did was act out and be pouty a lot.
Like, you fucker, you're ruining this integrity--
and if I had actually said to my editor-in-chief at the time,
all right, you're really worried about some Chrysler ad falling
out, but you know what?
This is what's going to happen.
We do this thing.
We put it out as is.
And yeah, a couple of people get mad.
But you know what?
You'll probably get another goddamn ASME nomination.
David will be happy to have worked with us again,
even if it comes out that he's the writer of the piece, which
is going to come out anyway.
And whatever kerfuffle is going to happen,
you're still going to come off of it covered in glory.
And instead, I just sat there and said, you're a douche.
And it ran that way, and it was, as in the immortal words
of Tone Loc it was a big old mess.
But yeah, I mean, that's how you ought to look at it,
it's sort of like, OK, well, we may
have a little bit of trouble with this here,
but eventually, it's going to redound to our benefit.
And the other tragedy of that AVN piece was that it was--
the editing process up to that, and during it, was
so pleasurable.
And it was funny, because talking about cutting,
he was not averse to cutting.
I mean, he was averse to cutting without his consultation.
And he was kind of bemused, and that's
why Kristin van Ogtrop, who had the first stab at David Lynch
Keeps His Head, was nicknamed "the blunt machete."
But he was always willing to work with you.
And the weird thing about the AVN piece
is that we worked on that for a long time
doing all sorts of things-- cutting this, cutting
that, cutting that.
But except for the fact that the profanity was hyphenated,
the version that we both agreed on
was pretty close to what he originally
submitted, and not that much ended up
being cut out of it at all.
It's just weird.
Well, I mean the same thing happened with the one about
McCain that Rolling Stone had commissioned.
And it was right before Super Tuesday,
and McCain, as we all know, fell out then, because Bush,
for all his--
the Bush machine sort of went after him,
and McCain lost his temper.
And whatever one may think of McCain now,
McCain then was a rather noble guy.
And Rolling Stone almost pulled it.
I mean, Jann Wenner was like, well, let's not run this.
It's no longer newsworthy.
McCain's out of the race.
All of this stuff.
And they, of course, won a National Magazine Award for it.
And Jann Wenner, I think, went up to the podium
and was like, I always knew this was a good idea.
So I mean, we--
Same thing you can do with an editor is just--
and unfortunately, many of you undergraduates
will never get the opportunity to do this,
because there will be no magazines anymore.
But that's your argument in dealing with a case like this.
Just dangle that ASME award idea in front of them.
They love ASMEs-- for some weird reason.
It's not the design of the damn thing, is it?
You've seen those things that--
$2.
But they love them some ASMEs.
It's like, don't get nominated for an ASME,
and then they're like--
[SCRIBBLING]
Well, I wanted to say thank you to everyone.
We're a little bit over time.
So thank you to all of the panelists for both panel
one and panel two.
Thank you everyone for coming out.
And I want to remind everyone that we're
going to have readings starting at 8 o'clock
tonight, with all of our panelists
reading selections from David Foster Wallace's work.
We have programs that list what those selections will
be in a little bit more detail that will be over here right
now, and we'll also be handing them out later in case
you didn't already get one.
So please come back for later tonight.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]