A Lost 1996 Interview with David Foster Wallace
medium.com
medium.com
I love David Foster Wallace because he is one of those people who have a knack for summarizing and articulating huge concepts that have great relevancy to me. This quote stood out to me especially as a source of personal sadness and a sadly still-relevant commentary on our culture.
That quote that stood out to you is the myopic and uneducated opinion of a depressed person. At least with my depression I don't go around like a lunatic defending there must be a power giant to steal more of people's money and give it to the poor, as if that ever worked. A true Utopia that this planet has never seen. I have seen pictures and videos of those citizen movements in India and that is not Utopia but real life. Alas, not good enough for DFW. It seems every depressed person hates this world and wishes for a better one, but with all his reading and writing, his opinion never matured beyond that of current high-schoolers.
I'd like to think that HN can do better and actually examine ideas, and not dismiss them because of hypocrisy. Your second paragraph is much, much better in this regard.
To tackle a problem like world hunger and homelessness takes an incredible amount of effort across a huge number of domains by an enormous amount of people. DFW was obviously not someone best suited to go e.g. repair "pissing corners and walls", and we should not expect him to be. Instead, he did many things to inspire many people to lead more altruistic and less self-centered lives. This was his talent, and it's probably done more good for the world than any amount manual labor he could have done in his lifetime. Ignoring this aspect of helping the afflicted is the same strain of myopia that thinks charities should give 100% of their fundraising to researchers/etc, as if raising awareness and paying competitive salaries were not the lifeblood of said charities[3].
I'll leave your rant about how "power giants stealing money have never helped the poor" alone, as your rhetoric and ignorance of evidence to the contrary clearly imply you're not about to have a rational discussion about it.
[1] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
[2] http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-ph...
[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...
I enjoyed the biography because it gave context to his interviews. He would say things in interviews that were clearly misleading because of certain things he had gone through in his past. The book highlights the reasons for why he would say these things. And if you go back and listen to his interviews you get a new take on things. It's as if you are hearing a new interview (after reading Ghost Story).
I would say that while his biography is worthwhile, it's obviously less worthwhile than his writing. And, in the end, I preferred the "Although Of Course" bio-book a bit more than Ghost Story.
I found I couldn't put ELSISAGS down -- I think it's because I so desperately want to get as complete a picture of DFW as possible and the book more than anything helped me understand what DFW was really up against w/r/t his depression and its presence throughout his life. If anything, I found that ELSISAGS demystified DFW to some extent, though maybe part of that is my getting older, too.
I think people tend to focus too much on the "gen X" factor when they put on their DFW hats, as if he were a precocious but emotionally fragile teenager who missed some key lessons in life. I think there was more vigor to DFW's vision of the world than that. He called it an "extrapolation" but it's an extrapolation that carries a lot of insight about the thing it's extrapolating from. Also he had too much humor, wit, and insight to be "gen-X" in the sense it's used in this interview. DFW was a once-in-a-generation writer. Maybe once in a lifetime. I would've loved to have seen what he could've produced by the time he turned 50.
Is there a lifetime ahead for a 34 year old writer who’s just delivered a thousand page bomb on us?
David Foster Wallace:
I think assuming I drive carefully, sure.
Christopher Lydon:
Please do.
>The idea, though, that improved technology is going to solve the problems that the technology has caused seems to me to be a bit quixotic. I understand that there’s a certain amount of hope about the Internet democratizing people and activating them. The fact of the matter is that it seems to me if you’ve still got a nation of people sitting in front of screens interacting with images rather than each other, feeling lonely and so needing more and more images, you’re going to have the same basic problem. And the better the images get, the more tempting it’s going to be to interact with images rather than other people, and I think the emptier it’s going to get. That’s just a suspicion and just my own opinion.
One bit I don't quite get is the sadness/lost/loneliness that he posits plagues Generation X (in response to the first caller at around the 19:00 mark).
At least among the people in my circles, everyone seems grateful for how good we have it compared to past generations. Are there problems and iniquities that need to be addressed? Of course. But from where we stand, looking back, we've come a long way.
I'll admit that's a bit of a truism, as DFW would say, but I certainly don't think "sadness" characterizes the zeitgeist of Gen X.
Give them to me.
Now.
I need them.