"Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles,
and Miscellany"
"Whad'ya Know?" with Michael Feldman
Wisconsin Public Radio
April 5, 1997
MICHAEL FELDMAN: You know, there's a book just out now called "A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." The author is probably talked
about more than any young author in the country right now actually -- David
Foster Wallace, who is probably best known for this...book...here, "Infinite
Jest," which is called in the business a ten-pounder. It's a good one.
I've gotten about an inch into it. I have read the other one, "A Supposedly
Fun Thing." It's a collection of essays done mostly I think for Harper's.
Would you welcome please on the telephone with us from Bloomington, Illinois
-- David Foster Wallace. [Applause] What a polite crowd. Isn't that nice.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: There are people actually there with you?
MF: No, actually these are all sound effects. [Loud applause] This is all
digitalized, basically. I'm sitting here alone in my room.
DFW: My nervousness has just tripled.
MF: Oh has it? Don't worry about it. They're all from around here. And you're
from around here. You're Midwestern, aren't you?
DFW: Yeah. I think Illinoisans try to draw a rather sharp distinction between
ourselves and Wisconsin people.
MF: Yeah. We do too. We feel the same way from the other side.
DFW: [Laughs] Well, we'll get along fine.
MF: Did you go to school at Northern?
DFW: No, I went to school out of state. I grew up in Champaign, which is
where the U of I is.
MF: Yeah. Urbana-Champaign they call it now. When did they change it from
Champaign-Urbana? I was shocked to hear about that.
DFW: I don't know. We've always called it Champaign-Urbana. But then on
the rare times when the U of I would get televised in sports, they'd call
it Urbana-Champaign. I think it scans poetically better if you put Urbana
first or something.
MF: It does? To you? I mean, you're the author. You're the poet --
DFW: Yeah. I don't write a whole lot of poetry, but --
MF: Yeah, but you know words. To me, Champaign should be before Urbana.
Let's take just a quick one [addressing audience]. Champaign-Urbana or Urbana-Champaign?
Champaign-Urbana? [Applause] And how many of you say Neenah-Menasha? Get
out of here, you're on the wrong show...
DFW: Well, clearly you've got this crowd behind you.
MF: Yeah, they're behind me --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: The sooner they're behind me the better, given the monologue and everything.
How are you, David?
DFW: Uh. Well.
MF: How are you dealing with all the fame, though? You're in everybody's
literary list, these days.
DFW: I think the amount of people whose lists, you know, talk about literary
stuff is small enough that I think it's sort of like being -- it's the amount
of fame equivalent to being a small-market TV weatherman. [Audience laughter]
But I think I'm bearing up surprisingly well.
MF: But the people who talk about you, write about you, too. So, I mean,
you do get a lot of press and so forth. Do you get tired of being the representative
of one generation or another?
DFW: Well, it's -- the nice thing about it, there's a silliness about the
whole thing that keeps one from taking it seriously. I get called a Gen-X
writer, but I was born in 1962, so demographically I'm a baby-boomer.
MF: You're a late-boomer.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: Yeah.
DFW: That's very witty of you. [Audience laughter]
MF: Yeah. Thank you. Uh, because I'm, well, I'm an early-boomer. I'm 49
--
DFW: There's medication for that, you know.
MF: There's what?
DFW: Nothing.
MF: I'm taking it -- Claritin. But it's not enough. It really doesn't go
to the root.
DFW: It was a premature ejaculation pun.
MF: Oh, oh. I'm sorry I missed that.
DFW: No, that's fine. I was trying to get in on the witty repartee --
MF: Who told you about that? I was tired, though, you know. The whole boomer
thing is ridiculous because -- I mean, why -- did they call Mark Twain representative
of his generation, you know, when he wrote? Doesn't it seem like a modern
preoccupation, like you've gotta represent your entire demographic if you
do something?
DFW: Do you want a joke, or do you want the serious thing?
MF: Either one. Go ahead. Give me either one, I don't care.
DFW: [Laughs] My guess is -- it just seems -- I think things are so confusing
now, and there's so much information, and we're so awash in the stuff, that
we look for ways to pigeonhole and categorize stuff. Including ourselves.
And I think it's one reason. The whole Gen-X thing, I think, you know --
"Infinite Jest" -- I got some caller on a radio show asking if
I was the voice of a generation, and, you know, Generation-X is defined
as not having a voice, you know --
MF: Right.
DFW: -- as having no unity. So, the whole thing is just very strange.
MF: Yeah, it is pretty strange. And I certainly don't represent anything
except, you know, early middle-age onset. [Wallace laughs here] Actually,
it's not early at this point, it's, you know, but demographically I guess
--
DFW: Uh-huh.
MF: And, uh, "A Supposedly Fun Thing" -- now they sent you, for
example, Harper's -- are most of these written for Harper's?
DFW: Yeah, most of them were written for Harper's. And then because of the
Harper's pieces I got sweet little assignments from a couple other magazines,
but, yeah --
MF: So like when they send you to the Illinois State Fair, are you supposed
to come back with a witty, ironic thing that Eastern readers can relate
to about Midwestern yokels?
DFW: [laughs] Well, that was kind of, that was the stance adopted in the
piece, although I don't think that "yokels" is really -- I don't
think it was particularly mean to the Midwest. Harper's is actually fiendishly
clever. What they do is they give you really no instructions at all. They
send you there and say do the best you can, and you end up being -- getting
really anxious -- and I guess the anxiety translates into a certain amount
of wit. Like, for instance, uh, "early boomer" --
MF: Yeah, a certain amount. [Audience laughter] A modest amount. Well, you
know, it's like monkeys and typewriters. I don't mean your writing.
DFW: Uh-huh.
MF: But --
DFW: Well, the comparison's been made.
MF: No, I don't think so. It's just the footnotes. Now let me ask you something.
You write a book that's 700-some pages -- why do you need footnotes at that
point? Couldn't you cram all that in there without the footnotes?
DFW: Well, um, there are certain, there are certain reasons for -- they're
actually endnotes, not footnotes, and uh --
MF: Oh, I'm sorry.
DFW: -- you know, other than throwing a lot of French literary terms at
you and sounding really absurd and pretentious, I'll just go ahead and let
you have made your shot. I think there's a fairly good reason for them.
The problem is they get kind of addictive, and you can see in the book of
essays -- the ones that were written before I started "Infinite Jest"
don't have footnotes, and then the footnotes get kind of more and more extreme
as the book goes on.
MF: Well, do you ever throw anything away?
DFW: I'm sorry?
MF: Do you ever throw anything away when you write, or do you just put it
into a footnote?
DFW: You're being, you're being obliquely mean here I think --
MF: I'm not, I'm really not -- I'm just -- no, you're an excellent writer.
I enjoy your writing. And actually your footnotes are interesting, too.
But I'm wondering, you know, if it was a footnote, couldn't you have just
crumpled that one and --
DFW: [Laughs] Um, all right. One of the advantages -- I personally now have
declared a footnote ban, so I'm not using them anymore, but that's nothing
against footnotes -- um, I just lost control of them. I think a footnote
-- at least, for me -- I rarely, like, for instance --
MF: These are endnotes, actually, by the way, but that's a small point --
DFW: No, when this interview is done, the second voice in my head will take
over, and I will begin thinking of all the stuff I should have said, and,
you know, witty sallies that I should have --
MF: Me too. I do that, too --
DFW: I mean, most of my consciousness is sort of doubled, and one of the
neat things about having a footnote is its a way to get kind of a double
consciousness, or a sort of call-and-response on the page. The irritation
quotient is fairly low, and so I think you've got to be fairly careful how
much of that you make the readers slog through. Some people have suggested
I sort of overshot the mark. Um, I think there are reasons for it other
than just -- I do actually throw a surprising amount of stuff away -- there's
reasons for it other than just to sort of record every thought that shoots
across my consciousness.
MF: Yeah, you're not like the guy who keeps a diary of everything he does
during the day, and it's like for the past forty years --
DFW: That diary is actually supposed to be kind of cool. Mine wouldn't be,
I don't think, so --
MF: Yeah. Well, he records his stools and everything -- we had the guy on,
actually -- [Wallace laughs] you know, the quality of them, and the quantity
and so forth --
DFW: Actually, stools would constitute some of the more interesting parts
of my day. [Audience laughter] It's just that not much of my day could be
given over to the -- No, I mean, both of those books, you know, at least
20% was cut by me and the editor of both of those books, so I get irked
when reviewers suggest that it's, like, padded or, you know, first draft
and stuff like that.
MF: No, I don't think it is at all.
DFW: I wasn't suggesting you were one of the people.
MF: I know, but you accused me of being some kind of mean before, but I
--
DFW: Now we'll lapse into this sort of politeness roulette.
MF: No, I love your work. I really do. And I know you love mine, too.
DFW: Yeah. [Audience laughter] Well, I've actually listened to your show,
although I got very anxious because I know there's a quiz element and I
thought I was going to be quized.
MF: No, you're not on the quiz.
DFW: I was reassured about that. Yeah.
MF: You know what I liked in the State Fair piece -- the thing about the
baton twirlers was funny -- I mean, all the damage that gets done during
one of those exhibitions.
DFW: None of that was made up.
MF: Yeah.
DFW: This is non-fiction.
MF: You had a guy that caught one in the groin, in the audience.
DFW: Oh, yeah. No, the really bad ones were when people in the top rows
would take one and then fall over on people in the lower rows. [Audience
laughter]
MF: And we've all seen this at the State Fair. But was that the highlight
for you at the Fair, or was it when they dangled the guy from the crane
-- that was kind of a nice scene, too.
DFW: The Sky Coaster was probably the highlight, although, you know, the
"high" would be -- you'd have to. Um, probably the highlight for
me was the thing called clogging, which I'd always thought was like a kind
of Jed Clampett, you know, goony people in boots, real slow -- and it turns
out it much more like this thing "Riverdance," which is now sort
of ubiquitous on PBS --
MF: Yeah, it's driving me nuts --
DFW: -- very fast and very cool, and there's no kind of hideous Michael
Flatley sort of ego person at the front of it, and uh --
MF: I think it needs that, though.
DFW: Is there clogging in Wisconsin?
MF: We have clogging in Wisconsin, don't we? Do we have audience cloggers?
Where are your clogs? They were here earlier, but they're off now.
DFW: I see.
MF: They clicked their way out of the room. Some do wear wooden shoes, but
I think it's pretty, uh --
DFW: Well, no, I mean it just turns out it's sort of like country tap-dancing
on methamphetamine --
MF: Right.
DFW: -- and I thought it was very, very cool. That was probably the highlight
for me.
MF: Yeah. I liked the part where they got this guy from the East and they
put him up on a crane and dangled him from his feet and swung him.
DFW: This was this thing called the Sky Coaster, which as far as I could
see was supposed to mimic, you know, kind of a near-death experience.
MF: I'm having that now.
DFW: I don't think they knew he was from the East Coast. He was wearing
aviator glasses and Banfi loafers --
MF: Right.
DFW: -- which for me suggest that he was either, you know, from Wisconsin
or from the East Coast. [Audience laughter and groans]
MF: Or from the East Coast of Wisconsin --
DFW: Exactly.
MF: -- the hip region there right along the lake. It's hip for a mile inland,
it's the lake effect.
DFW: Sort of Greenwich Village with a lot of snow.
MF: Well, not exactly. But we do have pollen and allergies there, I'll tell
you that. Yeah, it was cool -- it was like they picked this guy out of the
crowd because he looked wrong and they dangled him from his feet above the
crowd. I thought that was --
DFW: And swung him back and forth at a height of about a hundred feet.
MF: Yeah.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: And, you know, what's interesting -- kind of -- these Fairs and things
-- you do have the two crowds. You have the husbandry crowd --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: -- the people who are there with the animals, for the animals, and so
the animals shall not perish from the earth. And then you have the city
folk out there for the Midway stuff.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: And they don't mix.
DFW: Well, and then you've got a whole third venue, which is the people
who go to the Expo.
MF: Oh, yeah.
DFW: I don't know if the Wisconsin Fair has an Expo --
MF: You betcha.
DFW: -- but these are the people who, you know, have toilet paper with jokes
on them, and, you know, T-shirts that, like -- "I go from zero to horny
in 2.5 beers." [Audience laughter]
MF: Right.
DFW: And if any of the people are wearing that T-shirt in the audience I
hasten to apologize, but it just -- [audience laughter and groans]
MF: This is a public radio audience.
DFW: The weird thing is the three different crowds seem to have very little
to do with each other.
MF: Yeah.
DFW: I mean, you never saw the Midway people at the agriculture stuff, and
you never saw the Expo people on the Midway. It was interesting.
MF: Every bad bumper-sticker comes from those things.
DFW: Yeah. It was fascinating because I'd wondered, you know, where this
stuff comes from, you know. Um, and it comes from State Fair Expos.
MF: Yeah. But, you know, there are those kids who come there with their
-- you know, I always wondered about the farm kids, like 4H kids who come
there with their little heifer, you know, and they sleep with that -- I
mean those kids like sleep with it. I don't mean sleep with it, I mean they
nest there with it, they sleep there with it in the barn, and see that nothing
happens to it --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: -- and they brush it, you know. And the thing's immaculate for a heifer.
It's a clean heifer.
DFW: Now, here was the horrible thing -- because it's really kind of sweet,
I mean, these kids -- they do sleep with their animals, and they sleep with
their animals because they have to get up at like 4, you know, to start
the training. The horrible thing was these sweet little freckled-faced gap-toothed
kids trying terribly hard to win ribbons, and on the judges' rostrum are
sitting three guys in string-ties and it turns out they are from meat companies
[Feldman and audience laugh] -- which, you know, buy the winners. And it
wasn't at all clear from the kids' faces that they knew, you know, what
was going on, you know -- "Congratulations! You get a thousand dollars,"
and, you know, Daisy's gonna be chopped up for hamburger.
MF: Yeah. "There's a man here from Armour Star wants to talk with you
and give you a little ribbon."
DFW: Yeah. That was what lent kind of the tragic air to the whole thing.
MF: Yeah. Then there's the carnies. I mean, there's a book -- has someone
done the book on carnies yet? I suppose someone has.
DFW: Harry Crews has a thing in a book called "Biography of a Place,"
about sort of his relationship with carnies. But I don't think so. I just
thought they were scary.
MF: And they're the same guys who -- they come up here to Wisconsin, I don't
know, before or after Illinois --
DFW: Yeah. Wisconsin is right after Illinois. So they're pretty well hungover,
I betcha, by the time they get up to you. [Audience laughs]
MF: They're in some continuous state.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: I can't figure out what it is. I never really talked to one of the guys.
Did you get to know any carnies while doing this piece?
DFW: I actually for a couple of days went with a old girlfriend -- who turned
out to be really pretty -- and she was able to talk to the carnies. The
problem was that they were not terribly interested in me, brandishing my
press credentials at them and asking them, you know, deep questions and
stuff.
MF: That's good. And I guess the one thing you couldn't do was the chicken
house, the chicken barn --
DFW: I have chicken issues.
MF: Yeah. Chicken issues. You were pecked?
DFW: I was pecked.
MF: All right.
DFW: I was pecked. I really don't even think I can talk about it without
a support person here.
MF: Yeah. And we don't really have one at the moment.
DFW: This I can tell.
MF: Jim's the closest we've got, and he hasn't been a lot of help to me.
DFW: Chickens are scary. It's actually now -- I live near a slaughter house
and, uh, my second date with my current girlfriend we went to watch a cow
get slaughtered.
MF: Uh-huh.
DFW: Don't ask. I can't eat red meat anymore. I can, however, briefly eat
chicken.
MF: Yeah. And are you going out with her?
DFW: Uh, yeah, we're actually still together. The quality of the dates,
I think, has increased. She sort of pointed out to me that this was probably
not a good early date.
MF: Yeah. Her suggestion or yours?
DFW: Her suggestion. I got sick, and she's like, "Let's go get some
breakfast." So I ended up not eating the meal.
MF: Interesting girl, I must say. Or young woman. Excuse me. Uh, now this
other thing here, basically, though, I like your take sort of on this, what
we call the irony, this rampant irony that's sweeping over the country.
How's that for metaphors? I could write books like this, huh? And I'd footnote
that, explaining what I tried to say right there, and give you examples.
DFW: You're going to ask me a deeply ironic question about irony?
MF: Yeah, forget it. Let's skip the whole thing. Now this chicken house...
And then they sent you on a cruise, too, the same people. And the object
there was to see how much you could be pampered?
DFW: The object there was, you know, once again they give no instructions
--
MF: Yeah.
DFW: -- which I think they figured out works well for me because I get so
terrified that I'm not going to do a good piece that I end up paying really
close attention to everything. Uh, the object there, I think, was sort of
talk about what a cruise was like. And I guess because the cruise is sort
of the ultimate fantasy vacation, to talk a little bit about Americans'
relationship to pleasure. It sounds incredibly lame, you know, talking about
it this way, but --
MF: Okay, we can talk about something else.
DFW: No, no, no. I'm talking about my description, not your question.
MF: Oh, thank you. But it is, you know -- I live in dread of taking a cruise,
you know. I mean, there's a certain point in your life where you feel, you
know, it's appropriate that you take a cruise. But you eat twelve times
a day and you're on the ocean and you know what it does to your system.
DFW: Yes.
MF: I mean, you know, probably the third day out you're going to have a
movement, possibly.
DFW: It's, uh -- there's all sorts of problems. The biggest problem is --
I don't know if you're like me -- I have a really hard time having fun anytime
that somebody, like, gets in my face, grabs me by the labels and screams,
"We're having fun now!" You know? The cruise ship has all sort
of these Julie McCoy figures whose entire job it is to walk around with
high-watt smiles, sort of exhorting you about how much fun you're having.
MF: Right. And then they never come back.
DFW: And I just can't -- I stick my lower lip out then and decide I'm going
to show them that I'm not going to have fun.
MF: Well, what fun is there that you gotta dance -- there's like ballroom
dancing, isn't there? You got Arthur Murray-style ballroom dancing, -- is
that the thing? --
DFW: There was pretty much every kind of fun venue -- legal, you know, and
moral fun venue -- available. Some of it was a bit cheesy, you know, the
Electric [unintelligible] -- the kind of cheesy, Borscht Belt stand-up comedy.
Um, but a lot of it was fairly fun. I mean, there was fun Ping-Pong, there
was fun shuffle board. Um, there were impromptu sort of art sales. There
was [laughs] an entire art sale that consisted of an auction of Leroy Neiman
prints. Not original Leroy Neiman -- Leroy Neiman prints. And the bidding
was spirited --
MF: Sofa art. And you don't have your sofa there, so you don't know how
long the painting is supposed to be.
DFW: Exactly.
MF: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to -- you know, I have met David Lynch.
DFW: Have you?
MF: At a party.
DFW: Uh-huh.
MF: You know, he has a house here in Madison. No one knows where it is.
DFW: Really?
MF: Yeah. For some reason. We don't know why. But he has a house -- I don't
think he's ever in it. But I met him at a party, and I was so awe-struck
I couldn't say a word. It was one of my major great moments, because he
said something about English -- about chimneys in England or something --
DFW: Uh-huh.
MF: -- which was my lead in, and I was ready to say something, and then
I thought he'd say, "Oh, so you've been to England?" And then
I'd be stuck, you know -- one of those situations. So I said nothing, but
it -- is Lynch a hero of yours?
DFW: Uh, he's a hero in kind of a weird way. I don't like all of his films,
but the ones that I like I like a whole whole lot. The neat thing about
the Lynch piece -- I mean, I never had to talk to him. I sort of orbited
him, you know, and watched him from like ten feet away, but -- I wouldn't
-- you know, I would have immediatey wet myself, I think, if he'd come by
me --
MF: Yeah. I did that, too, but I left that out of the description --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: He said something about English people living in their fireplaces, or
something. And I thought, well there's a Lynchian -- I could see that, you
know --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: -- people coming out from the fireplace --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: -- like the radiator thing.
DFW: Yeah. He's a man who's pretty completely un-ironic. I mean, if he said
that, I don't think he meant it as a joke.
MF: Yeah. Probably there are English people living in fireplaces.
DFW: He's a man for whom the adjective "keen" is sort of the highest
praise he can give something. And so it's very weird, you know, to hear
somebody speak that way and then to see, you know, homicidal dwarves, you
know --
MF: Yeah.
DFW: -- eviscerating people on the screen and stuff. His house, by the way,
in L.A. -- the house that's in, um, "Lost Highway," that's Bill
Pullman's and Patricia Arquette's house, is two houses down from his house.
It's weird. He got some neighbor to like move out and let him use his house.
MF: That's cool. And, uh, I haven't seen this latest movie, but you seem
pretty enthusiastic about it.
DFW: I was enthusiastic about the rough cut. I'm afraid the movie itself
is kind of a dink.
MF: Really?
DFW: Uh, I went and saw it a couple weeks ago.
MF: Yeah.
DFW: So I look a bit stupid in the essay.
MF: So the paperback will have a few more footnotes in it.
DFW: Yeah. Very kind of you.
MF: Yeah. Well, just the use of Richard Pryor, though, you talk about. The
problem I have with David Lynch is -- if he's not ironic -- I mean, the
things he portrays, what is the take on it -- the severed ear, the [garbled]
with the fly on it -- that was cool the first time you see it.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: But then you see, like in "Wild at Heart" or something --
you say where are the people of color in his movies -- there was a black
man in that movie got his head bashed in very graphically --
DFW: Yeah.
MF: You think: why is this happening and when's it going to stop? And then
there was a dog carrying someone's head around or something --
DFW: I believe it was an arm. Yeah, somebody gets their arm shot off with
a shotgun. Yeah. "Wild at Heart," I think, is probably his worst
movie.
MF: Yeah. So what are we supposed to think about all that? I mean, if we're
just -- he's looking at things as objects, right, basically?
DFW: I think in certain ways. Like in "Lost Highway" Richard Pryor's
got a cameo part and it's really disturbing because of course he's not the
Richard Pryor we remember, he's Richard Pryor, you know, with m.s., and
he's in a wheelchair and he looks like he weighs about 8 pounds. And the
movie itself is sort of about, you know, identity -- two people are actually
-- you know one person really changes into another. So, kind of theoretically
it's interesting to have Richard Pryor, you know -- he both is and isn't
the Richard Pryor we remember. But the big thing about it is it just seems
like it's mean, you know. I'll bet Richard Pryor didn't know that he was
on there to be some kind of weird image-to-object for theoretical scrutiny.
I mean, I'll bet he thought he was being hired to act, and so Lynch -- there's
a coldness and a meanness about Lynch that I don't like and that also kind
of fascinates me. You know, we like to watch sadism from a distance.
MF: Yeah. Plus, he's so good at it.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: There are things going on -- you don't know why they affect you the
way they do in his movies, but they do.
DFW: Yeah.
MF: There's some weird element there.
DFW: They're a lot like dreams, and they make us vulnerable sort of the
way dreams do.
MF: How's your tennis game, still good?
DFW: My tennis game is not all that strong. I got hurt in my late-twenties
and I'm not as mobile as I'd like to be. But I still play just for fun.
MF: Yeah. I actually loved your description of your tennis days, your Midwestern
tennis days where you play the wind and you play the cracks in the court,
right?
DFW: Yeah. Yeah. If you learn how to play in rural Illinois you play it
as it lies.
MF: Yeah. And wind is a big factor.
DFW: Big one.
MF: David, I want to thank you for taking time to talk with us.
DFW: Thank for taking time --
MF: I hope it hasn't been too painful.
DFW: No, it was fun.
MF: The book is called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
by David Foster Wallace. Thanks, David.
DFW: Okay.