
A Lost 1996 Interview with David Foster Wallace - benbreen
https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-david-foster-wallace-63987d93c2c
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great_kraken
_I guess what makes me sad is that I would like my generation to realize that
it would be way better for us, like inside, in our stomachs, to be willing to
pay higher taxes to be able to shelter and feed poor people, not for their
sake but for ours, so that we would be the sort of culture that doesn’t let
people die. And instead we’re all so worried about an extra 4% off our monthly
paycheck that we get all exercised about it. And I see you looking at me… I
know this sounds all pious and weird and it’s got nothing to do with the book,
but doing this book was hard for me because it was about why exactly are we so
sad and how have we become so unbelievably selfish, like lethally selfish and
self-indulgent._

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.

~~~
innguest
What a hypocrite. He wishes so dearly that everyone have the same opinion he
does so as to willingly work more to pay for other people's shelter and food.
He can be the change he wants to see - all he has to do is take care that the
poor people around him have shelter and food. Aren't we seeing something
similar in India, with neighborhoods getting together without help from any
organization and fixing their death traps and beautifying their pissing
corners and walls? DFW could have done that, but instead he was an armchair
idealist who one day wished some centralized power would take a lot more money
from a lot more willing people so that they alone could solve the problems of
the world. How convenient.

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.

~~~
stephencanon
Accusing someone of hypocrisy is not a refutation of their idea. It's base
rhetoric, used when one can't address the actual argument being put forward.
The fact that someone does not devote their life to a goal they put forward in
no way makes the goal wrong. If a smoker tells you to not to smoke, is he a
hypocrite? Sure. Does that mean that he's wrong and you should smoke? No.

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.

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RV86
Pleasantly surprised to see this on HN. I've read all of DFW's work and he's
such an interesting writer/human being. The biography "Every Love Story is a
Ghost Story" is a must-read for anyone who's interested. My favorite lines he
wrote are in IJ: "you'll worry a lot less about what other people think of you
when you realize how seldom they do."

~~~
johnloeber
Interesting -- I've also read (nearly) all of DFW's work, but I've held out on
ELSISAGS due to unflattering reviews. Why is ELSISAGS a must-read for you, and
what do you say to reviewers who call it an insubstantial pop biography?

~~~
softdev12
i've read all his work, too.

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.

------
codingthebeach
Grew up in Boston and spent more nights in the stacks at the BU bookstore than
I can remember (third floor). I never met him and wouldn't have recognized him
if I had but I stumbled across IJ years later.

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.

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npkarnik
One of my favorite David Foster Wallace essays is this Esquire piece on an
obscure but top 100 tennis player named Michael Joyce (who later coached
Sharapova for a while) [http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-
theory-079...](http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-0796)

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josephpmay
The ending of the interview is really disturbing:

 _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._

~~~
hellodevnull
Listen to the end of the Charlie Rose interview. Last words something about
not jumping off a building any time soon.

~~~
innguest
Nothing disturbing about these things. Depressed people think about that a lot
and blurt it out on occasion.

------
iskander
This bit stands out to me as prescient:

>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.

------
maroonblazer
What a great find! Like reading his work, listening to him talk is both
entertaining and thought-provoking.

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.

~~~
wldcordeiro
He was speaking in 1996 and characterizing Generation X at that time. What
you're comparing to seems to be Generation X now.

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slashnull
I am profoundly scandalized that they edited 500 pages out of this monument.

Give them to me.

Now.

I need them.

~~~
e3xu
Agreed. And I wonder what the Pale King would have looked like if he had
gotten the chance to defend it from cuts.

~~~
jahmed
Im working on The Pale King right now and fuck its a hard read. Infinite Jest
is next on the list when I work up the courage.

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blackaspen
Really happy to have seen this pop up. I'm a huge DFW fan. This is a stellar
listen.

