David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview | Hacker News Reader

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview

openculture.com

98 pointsfogus22 comments

My wife introduced me to Wallace around the time of his suicide. I read IJ in 2010, and have been hooked ever since. I watched this interview in its entirety about a month ago, and really enjoyed it. The wincing which the Open Culture post mentions was mostly induced by the camera man, who accused Wallace of "pontificating" early in the interview. After that, every time Wallace thinks he might be getting too heady, he looks worriedly in the camera man's direction. :-)

The part of the interview about liberal arts students going on to careers which have nothing to do with the emancipatory values they were taught in their degrees is reminiscent of the bitterness in some of the recent metafilter critiques of PG's essay "How To Do What You Love."

http://www.metafilter.com/113015/How-to-do-what-you-love

Bitter, maybe, but are the MeFi comments actually wrong?

I don't think bitter tone has any bearing on correctness. I think the thread is a mix of insightful observations and knee jerk emotional reactions, and sometimes a single comment has both.

Sorry, that's a fair distinction worth making. I was worried you were dismissing some very salient points against PG's essay (and PG's writing in general).

David Foster Wallace had an uncanny prophetic ability in Infinite Jest, he describes a company called Interlace which is essentially just Netflix. He also describes the failure of video-phoning because of social pressure

When I was reading the passages about new technology and the de-contextualation of media I was actually stuck by how the reality of media and communications landscape has eclipsed the novel in terms of absurdity. We now don't just phone instead of video-chat we text each other, now instead of physically owning entertainment cartridges we just receive a 30-day license that allows us to watch it. The truth as always has surpassed fiction.

I am a bit surprised by your and angusiguess's take-aways from DFW. For me, the technical details of IJ were absolutely uncritical parts of the story - I imagine that the setting could be changed if DFW wanted to. Much more interesting for me was the absurdity of the characters, the physical pain and nausea caused by reading the book, the mental strain, and the story itself. The most memorable things about IJ are the effects that reading the material had on me, not so much the contents of the material itself.

If anybody has not read What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest [1] by Aaron Swartz, you must.

[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

I don't know how it ends and I can't read the end. Every time I try, I have this strange feeling that as long as I don't read it, it can't happen; what ever it is; that the story, and the fate of all those strange and magical personalities hangs in limbo until I - specifically, I - finish reading, at which point the whole house of cards will simply spontaneously combust and leave me with a pile of ashes in my lap and smoke in my hair. I've never been involved with a book like IJ before.

Well now, that sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?

I really, truly love Infinite Jest.

The fate of all those strange and magical personalities hangs in limbo whether you stop reading close to the end or at the actual end. The last scene reveals one piece of the puzzle but it doesn't really conclude the story.

I don't think DFW set out purposefully to write a technically accurate prophetic piece of science-fiction in the way Clark or Asimov did, he wrote out of the typical literary author's urge to clear away an individual's crushing existential dread.

What's amazing is technology in American(or O.N.A.N) culture is presented as the cure for existential dread, so the technology itself is a like a literary character, it's almost the antagonist.

I should clarify that I don't see technological implications as central themes in IJ, but I do find it really intriguing that rather than excluding or hand-waving issues that have to do with technology he dives in and gives them what seems to me a great deal of good, hard thought.

The book hit me really hard emotionally as well, and for me a lot of the anxiety centered around how fragile our assumptions are with regards to communication. All of DFW's exhibits to me a neurotic fixation with the other person understanding exactly what you mean (compact history of Infinity especially, where the book reads differently depending on how comfortable you are with exploring some of the proofs and concepts involved, you could skip the I.Y.I's and still get a really strong and interesting book, but the experience would be different), and it is a lot of that anxiety that hit me hard.

It just seemed interesting to me that technology and media fit so well with that central emotional point. If we can't even communicate to people in writing or speech, mass communication could fare not better.

It's sort of like talking about all of the AA reference in the book. As a topic there are a lot of things you can say about addiction and rationalization and human ritual, but AA was just a handy analogy to talk about all of that stuff, and more importantly to evoke certain feelings in the reader.

It's easier to talk about the set pieces of the book than it is to try and clearly articulate how it makes me feel, is all.

Absolutely worth watching, every second of its uncut entirety. Despite his initially almost paralysing self-doubt, defensiveness about European views of America and distinct unease at the start of the interview, he gets himself ever so gradually disarmed by the German interviewer. Her English is pretty awkward, but she's actually incredibly genuine and she repeatedly charms DFW with sincerity, as he becomes increasingly fluid and open. It helps that the producer is an absolute dick, allowing for a kind of common enemy to pave the way of rebellion. If you have a bottle of tequila or some other hideous drink, you should definitely reach for it each time he mentions the word "paradox" or "irony".

So much has already been discussed about DFW. And still being written(for example: http://www.thepointmag.com/2012/essays/coming-to-terms). I must say I'm almost surprised to see Hacker News branching into literary subjects, but of course there are related topics concerning technology in his work. Next thing we know, we'll start seeing articles about philosophy and metaphysics!

Today would have been his 50th birthday.

And here's an intriguing article about DFW's fascination with self-help books: http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-p...

Probably one of the most unlikely guys to talk about some of the interesting/terrifying implications of technology on communication and interaction (among many other things)

I wouldn't necessarily call him "unlikely" to discuss those topics. While he wasn't a technologist, per se, he was certainly more inclined in that direction than most literary writers of his generation were.

In fact, he wrote an entire book on the history of transfinite set theory. (From a layman's perspective, sure, but how many other non-sci-fi writers claim to have such interests?)

For anyone unfamiliar with his work, I can't recommend him highly enough. Especially to the HN crowd. He's very discursive, and he rewards long attention spans. But he's worth it.

A Compact History of Infinity was pretty tremendous. And while it makes some amount of sense that he's be apt to deal with questions of metaphysics from a formal standpoint, there are some more unusual topics in there, like that bit from Infinite Jest about the evolution of videophones and the use of masks.

I think some of his best work centers on the ability (or even possibility) to communicate with other people, and how technology has a lot of potential to disrupt it.

He'd been doing it for a long time:

http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

The actual text he writes, like each sentence and phrase, is extremely well crafted syntactically, whatever style he is going for. In particular, I've noticed he is extremely aware of verbal ambiguity. His prose has coherence and obsessive detail that remind me of Bach's music. These things seem deeply intertwined with software dev, I'm surprised he doesn't show up on HN more.

There's an odd moment just at the end of part 1 and the start of part 2. The camera guy complains a little that Wallace is moving around a lot as he talks, and then he tells Wallace that he's 'pontificating'. It's a strange one, I think the cameraman is kind of being a dick, and you can see Wallace is bothered by it and not really sure how to react.

Quick script to download all videos locally (I have no faith these will stay up for posterity).

Requires the cclive command line tool. https://gist.github.com/1879275

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