The essays as IJ's theory in the wild — addiction as a lattice for American material, advertising as seduction, the…
echoes
From: Bookworm: David Foster Wallace on A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again — KCRW (May 15, 1997)
- Early text:
[scene] Answering the addictiveness-quotient question,
he dates the oldest essay to about 1990, his first stab at Infinite Jest;
the AA meetings and addictionology reading became a model or lattice
through which American material gets seen; advertising is seduction; no
demand is more inelastic than an addict's — a gift to commercial
interests; and the essays kept turning out to be about kinds of
seduction — promising more than you can deliver — which strikes him as
particularly American [pt2 00:00–00:26]. He adds that it is unsurprising
that a fair amount of the theory behind IJ comes out in the essays, since
he did not know how to write nonfiction and simply went around
attending as closely as he could manage [pt2 01:05]
- IJ echo: the essay-to-novel program the archive tracks under this crux — malignantly addictive entertainment as commerce's limit case; the
Entertainment as seduction perfected; Marathe on choosing what to give
yourself away to
- Weight: shared-preoccupation