
David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview - fogus
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/david_foster_wallace_the_big_uncut_interview_2003.html
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Estragon
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>

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

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Estragon
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.

~~~
achompas
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).

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StinkyJay
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.

~~~
zmmz
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>

~~~
ncarroll
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?

~~~
a1k0n
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.

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dtf
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".

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platz
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!

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garret
Today would have been his 50th birthday.

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pron
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...](http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-
private-self-help-library)

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angusiguess
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)

~~~
jonnathanson
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.

~~~
angusiguess
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.

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the_cat_kittles
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.

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ppod
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.

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djtriptych
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>

