The questions people asked David Foster Wallace — and how he answered

DFW: Maybe I need to be engaged in writing as a "secret" activity, and conceivably the imagination is even fueled by a vaguely "illicit" setting: "It's totally neurotic".

DFW: "These are writers I admire but the five-year-old in me pushes out its lower lip and says, 'Well, no, I'm a person, too. I do my own work.'" Meanwhile the influence that has gone totally unnoticed: The Broom of the System's chapters of uninterrupted dialogue are indebted to Manuel Puig.

DFW: A broom is what you'd sweep the floor or break a window with, depending on which end you favor — and it's also what my mother, a community-college teacher, calls roughage: dietary fiber.

DFW: "Writing fiction takes me out of time" — "I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get. I'm scared of sounding pretentious because anyone who writes fiction is saying, 'Look at this thing I've written.'"

DFW: "I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass."

DFW: "there are a few books I have read that I've never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We're all terribly, terribly lonely." And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world.

DFW: Irony like that hadn't been seen since the pre-Romantics: "It performs a really useful function by getting rid of a lot of platitudes and myths in America which were no longer serviceable, but it also hasn't left anything to rebuild with besides this ethos of jaded irony and self-aware nihilism and acquisitivism." And television has swallowed the era's rebel metatechniques whole: "Now you've got season episodes of Moonlighting ending with the set breaking down."

DFW: "Fiction's job used to be to make the strange familiar, to take you somewhere and let you feel that this was familiar to you. It seems that one of the things about living now is that everything presents itself as familiar, so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it's strange."

DFW: "one of the things I was doing in Girl with Curious Hair was to write a very traditionally moral book. This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it's our job to make them up, and we're not doing it."

DFW: "I'd agree with Gardner to the extent that he has the sense to be parroting Tolstoy" — minus the heavenly Christian stuff. "I'm the only 'postmodernist' you'll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy."

DFW: TV's job is to be liked; it supplies "the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship" — an "anesthesia of form" that helps us deny we're lonely. Real art fiction does the opposite: it aggravates the sense of self-entrapment so it can be countenanced rather than numbed.

DFW: TV lets us deny we're lonely and offers a relationship-facsimile without the work; serious fiction instead gives a reader marooned in her own skull imaginative access to other selves, so "we become less alone inside."

DFW: More Western-industrial than American, I think: other cultures treat pain as a healthy signal that something's wrong, while we show an almost compulsive tendency to "regard pain itself as the problem," so pleasure becomes "a teleological end in itself" (see utilitarianism). It's shortsighted to blame TV, which is simply another symptom — it didn't invent our aesthetic childishness, just intensified the consequences.

DFW: [he declines to answer and turns it back:] "I guess I'd need to ask you what kind of cruelty you thought the narrator meant there."

DFW: [he bristles:] besides the question of where the fuck artists get off deciding for readers what they need to be prepared for, the drill-sergeant idea "sounds pretty Aristotelian" — and I'll bounce it back: is fiction's purpose for you essentially mimetic, or therapeutic in an Aristotelian sense?

DFW: "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being": half its job is to dramatize what makes the contemporary U.S. hard to be human in, the other half to dramatize that we still can be. IJ's difficulty (flash-cuts, withheld connections, endnotes) forces the reader to do her share of the linguistic work, so reading becomes a real relationship rather than passive spectation.

DFW: As a "look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate-you" dynamic I admit in myself — gags, data-bludgeoning, setting up expectations in order to disappoint them.

DFW: No — that's nihilist mimesis. "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness."

DFW: No — not "conventionally political or social action-type solutions"; that's not what fiction's about. Half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes the contemporary U.S. hard to be human in, the other half that we still are, or can be, human — the artistically real question being how, granting a grotesquely materialistic present, we still have the "capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price," and whether those capacities can be made to thrive.

DFW: The change is that irony curdled: postmodern irony was liberating for debunking 50s-60s hypocrisy but has become an end in itself — "Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving," "the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage." And metafictional recursion "gets empty and solipsistic real fast," so it's no simple liberation.

DFW: The MTV/ad versions are "exploitations": "They're not trying to break us free of anything" — they lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption, so the very form of artistic rebellion becomes another commodity.

DFW: [he teases McCaffery's lit-speak, then flips the premise:] the co-optation "might actually be a good thing" if it stops younger writers treating mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself — MTV-type co-optation could be "a great prophylactic against cleveritis," the grad-school look-how-clever syndrome. Vollmann is precious precisely because his abundant formal innovation rarely exists for its own sake.

DFW: Yes — this accelerates "the metastasis from genuine envelope puncturing to just another fifteen-minute form," which traps the envelope-puncturing artist in an insatiable hunger for the mere appearance of novelty; "Once the first-person pronoun creeps into your agenda you're dead, art-wise," which is why fiction-writing's loneliness is really estrangement from yourself.

DFW: Serious fiction lets us imaginatively identify with a character's pain and so conceive of others identifying with ours — "we become less alone inside"; and real art's job is to aggravate the dread of self-entrapment so it can be faced, not soothed.

DFW: That humanistic magnificence is the click, and "you can't pass the click from one generation to another like a baton" — what actually got handed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, manic ennui, and ironic diagnosis without ambition to redeem, until "Postmodern irony's become our environment." As for mass culture: pop references in serious fiction aren't an avant-garde stratagem, they're inescapable — avoiding them would mean being retrograde about what's permissible or writing about some other world.

DFW: "Shock stops being a byproduct of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it's bullshit. Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn't divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption." Then some genuine titans came along and asked what would happen if you came as close to dividing by zero as you could — and the purely theoretical construct "wound up yielding incredible practical results." Formally innovative fiction needs that kind of real motive, not rebellion-for-show.

DFW: People more or less like myself — twenties and thirties, educated or experienced enough to know serious fiction's hard work sometimes has a payoff, raised on and fascinated by U.S. commercial culture but "still hungry for something commercial art can't provide": "Yuppies, I guess, and younger intellectuals" — the same audience the younger writers I admire (Leyner, Vollmann, Daitch, Moore, Powers, Franzen) are writing for.

DFW: Yes — and the purely theoretical construct yielded incredibly practical results, but only because Leibniz and Newton's rule-breaking was "in the service of something"; had they divided by zero just to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were it would never have happened, because the math world's shock was "a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself."

DFW: The analogy breaks down because "math and hard science are pyramidical" — each generation builds off the last like a cathedral — whereas each piece of art is ideally its own unique object whose "evaluation's always present-tense"; the appeal to future vindication could justify the worst experimental horseshit, and the beret-wearing artistes I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace.

DFW: In a sense yes — "metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon"; Westward was my attempt to detonate metafiction and, out of the rubble, reaffirm the idea of art as a living transaction between humans.

DFW: Nabokov and Coover were "real geniuses" who weathered real shock inventing the stuff; the trouble is that "after the pioneers always come the crank turners," the little gray people who turn the machine until metafiction is a hollow institution of fashion — academia and commercial culture now commodify even radical advances, so prescient art dies by acceptance rather than neglect.

DFW: Maybe, "but it's developed in an awful clunky way" — Broom's popularity mystifies me, written at a young twenty-two. The mature version: redemptive fiction must at once let the reader escape self through identification with another psyche and antagonize her intuition that she is a self, alone and going to die alone; "This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical," mediated by language being in itself redeeming.

DFW: My aim is art as a living transaction between humans, the reverse of the narcissism I attack; unchecked metafictional recursion "gets empty and solipsistic real fast," whereas the point is to reaffirm art as a human-to-human exchange.

DFW: [he answers by autobiography:] at Amherst I was a hard-core "syntax wienie" — a philosophy major in math and logic chasing what one teacher called mathematical experiences, an aesthetic epiphany I call the click ("the click of a well-made box"); when that emptied out of math logic around age twenty, a mid-life-crisis term at home revealed I could get the click from fiction (first in Barthelme's "The Balloon"), and hearing the click is still how I recognize the writers I love.

DFW: Depends on little-r vs. big-R: I'm clearly not in the Howells/Wharton/Updike school, but the realistic-vs-unrealistic binary is "a canonical distinction set up by people with a vested interest in the big-R tradition" — a way to marginalize what isn't soothing. Any avant-garde agenda with integrity is trying to countenance and "render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art"; "realistic" has no univocal definition.

DFW: That reads as deconstruction's original program — waking people from "some sort of metaphysical anesthesia," which is literally aggravating — and defamiliarization in your sense is "part of what getting the click right is for me"; it's also part of why finishing anything takes me five to eight total rewrites.

DFW: The mediated world has inverted fiction's old function of presenting distant cultures (Kipling bringing India to Bumfuck, Iowa): now the whole global village presents itself as electronically familiar, so the job flips — "no longer making the strange familiar but making the familiar strange again," since most familiarity is mediated and delusive.

DFW: The move is to take something almost "narcotizingly banal" — nothing more banal than a U.S. game show, banality being one of TV's great hooks — and reconfigure it so it "reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is"; the scrambled flash-cut form was probably unsubtle and clumsy, but it clicked in a way the straight version hadn't.

DFW: In the novella the show's events have repercussions in everyone's outside lives — "The valence is always distributive." Serious science accepts that subject and object can't be separated (observing a quantum phenomenon alters it) while fiction ignores the implication that the reader's life outside the story changes the story; this is where post-structuralism helped me most: once I'm done, the text lives through the reader — "The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes."

DFW: Yes, that's the trap: recursion "gets empty and solipsistic real fast." The worthwhile move is to detonate it and reaffirm art as a living transaction between humans, not a closed game.

DFW: It's a trap because the recursion "gets empty and solipsistic real fast"; Westward aimed to blow metafiction up ("metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon") precisely to get past that, not to nest another level.

DFW: [he reframes it as coded autobiography:] the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP whose crisis shifted his dread from being a 98.6 calculating machine to being "nothing but a linguistic construct" — hence Lenore, a character terribly afraid she's nothing more than a character in a story — a funny post-structural gag under which I got to write my "sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman" while every review praised the book for not being one.

DFW: The Investigations is "the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that's ever been made": language is possible only as a function of relationships between persons, so it is not a closed solipsistic loop but inherently relational — which is exactly why fiction can be a real transaction between selves.

DFW: I was talking about minimalists, not Carver: "Carver was an artist, not a minimalist" — "The founder of a movement is never part of the movement." Carver used the minimalist techniques in the service of an original vision, blew them off whenever a story was better served by expansion (as with "The Bath"), and just chased the click; the danger is that his bled-over techniques look easy to imitate, and you can — but not well.

DFW: "About the only way music informs my work is in terms of rhythm"; rock itself bores me, though its phenomenon interests me — it helped shift America's fundamental splits from geographical to generational. What drew me and Costello to rap was "the nasty spin it puts on the whole historical us-vs.-them aspect of postmodern pop": anti-corporate rebellion signed to white-owned labels and celebrating the deal, a delicious contradiction showing rebellion-as-commodity is now not just impossible but incoherent.

DFW: "It's not play anymore in the sense of laughs and yucks and non-stop thrills" — trying to be liked doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you over the long haul. The tricky discipline is playing without vanity or insecurity: the distinction between good and so-so art lies in "the art's heart's purpose" — writing out of the part of you that loves rather than the part that wants to be loved, giving the reader something so she walks away fuller, being willing to sort of die to move her — a courage I admit I don't have yet.

DFW: Probably right: the sixties proved you can break every rule, but also showed the toxicity of anarchy for its own sake, so it's just as "valuable and brave to see what can be done within a set of rules" — my touchstone is Hopkins, who invented his own formal constraints and blew everyone's footwear off from inside them; "free play within an ordered and disciplined structure" resonates, complete caprice deadens.

DFW: [he answers with the parents-out-of-town party analogy:] the postmodern revel was great and freeing, but now "it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes" and everyone's wishing the revel would end; the founders' patricide produced literary orphans who uneasily wish some parents would come back — and the uneasiest realization is that the parents never will, so my generation is "going to have to be the parents."

DFW: "That incident really happened to me. I went up on a diving board, and I changed my mind at the top, but there were all these people behind me so there I was. I've always felt it's a failed story, maybe because that memory, that moment of great fear, is intensely shameful to me. Talking about it like this is interesting, because I may be wrong when I think it's a failed story."

DFW: "I took this workshop from Alan Lelchuk." "And Lelchuk thought that I was insane. Lelchuk thought that the stuff I was doing was pretentious, and wordy, and unnecessarily abstract. Nine times out of ten he was right, but every once in a while I would feel a click. But when I did the stuff that he wanted me to, I never heard the click" — so I'd do it my own way, and then, wanting at least an A-, transform it into what he wanted.

DFW: Writers like that will show you that consciousness is more dislocated and jumbled than novelists usually let on. But "a whole lot of what I'm trying to do in my writing — and I don't know whether this is good or bad — is my desire to make something pretty. And for me, a lot of prettiness in written art has to do with sound and tempo — which is why I read a lot more poetry than I do fiction."

DFW: "I wanted to write about addiction from the beginning, but I had a lot of doubts and fears about why I am doing this, so I waited until the late eighties, early nineties. I was haunted by the idea that I was a sham and a whore and a fraud. January 1992 was the real start of the book. Within a couple of months I had a plan that was real abstract and real structural. I finally delivered the manuscript in the summer of 1994. So it was two and a half years of sixteen-hour days."

DFW: "We kept cutting and cutting. I wish we hadn't. But they said we need to keep the price down, which meant keeping the pages down. I didn't take it well. The book business is already a pathetic tentacle of the movie business, and once they start dictating length of novel based on suggested retail price we may as well write grosses, sequels, and personal trainers into our contracts."

DFW: No — now "it seems to be a pretty tight ship. I don't want to lose another word."

DFW: You know the original meaning of the word addict? It's from the Latin addicere — "to apprentice, to devote yourself to something. The idea of addiction, of finding meaning in your life by giving yourself wholly away to something — if there's something sad going on in America now, it's that. Addiction is a mode of existence for everyone, whether approved culturally or not."

DFW: "People are going to worship something. If you take away one god, they're going to worship something else. Pleasure, for example." [The worship thesis he gave German television and the Kenyon graduates nearly a decade later, already whole in 1995.]

DFW: "I don't want to give the impression the book has too much to do with autobiography, because it isn't one. But I was on suicide watch in October and November of 1988. I came close to blowing my brains out in my mid-twenties."

DFW: "Self-portrait."

DFW: "In a way it also killed me. For a while I was afraid I loved it, loved writing, because I wanted articles to be written about me, which was hideous. After sitting in a cave and hurting for a while, I realized that wasn't true. Writing is the first thing I've found that I really loved and given myself away to that hasn't killed me."

DFW: "I have three friends who killed themselves. I'm not sure why they have and I haven't. I just really needed to love something, to be dedicating myself to it."

DFW: My apartment was so small I worked on the bed, and to sleep I had to move everything — all the books, all the notes, all the paper — off it. "It was like two years in a submarine. Mary was my snorkel to the atmosphere."

DFW: "I was hard to edit and had lots of reasons why the ending of that novel had to be that way. But it shouldn't have, which is probably why you shouldn't let 23-year-olds do it." The ending was a deliberate experiment in technical semantics — the relationship between form and context — with the last paragraph missing the word "word" as an attempt to bridge both the formal and the reference; I now judge it missed on both counts.

DFW: On teaching: I am on a tenure track at an Illinois college, I call myself the Switzerland of the department, I am brutal with the students I think are talented, and I make them write stories about when their hamster died so they get over the phobia of looking unhip; teaching is what made the IJ cuts possible — "If I hadn't been teaching, I don't think I would have made the cuts." On the new normality / attention: "I had an advantage in that I got a taste of fame early on. Everything about it makes me really self-conscious. I need to be on the sidelines, to watch, so I can tell the stories. I am not the story." On Generation X: the cultural diagnosis — a hunger for narrative left unfed by a convoluted, self-satisfied avant-garde, the right-wing resurgence read as symptom of a void, and belief framed as survival: "If you're about 30, believing in something bigger than you is not a choice. You either do or you're a walking dead man, just going through the motions."

DFW: "My ideal reader would be twenty-seven, look eerily like Melanie Griffith, think every line of the book was the best thing since sliced bread, and hope for nothing so fondly as to support me in all physical and emotional ways so I could write more books just like it."

DFW: "There is something about being an American at the turn of the millennium that is deeply sad. And it seems to me significant that the American experience has gotten even sadder — more lost, more afraid, more empty — as our Cold War enemies have surrendered and our economy is shifting successfully from a manufacturing to an informational base and medicine has gotten more sophisticated and they've even found a way to make chocolate fat-free. It's a great mystery, and one that's going to deepen for our children."

DFW: The idea that families are to blame for anything is part of our culture's fetish for diagnosis. "Families and culture are the same thing, really — or rather what a family is is a tiny lab receptacle, a culture placed in a small space under terrific compression and heat. Families show what people who love one another can do to each other — they literally make and break you." Think about our terms for describing families — nuclear, blood, relations. "The language is always smarter than we are."

DFW: "I'm pretty lonely most of the time, and fiction's one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved." Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — "all these chase loneliness away by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. In lots of ways it's all there is."

DFW: My heroes are the writers who seem to have persevered and kept working; among the younger Americans I like Denis Johnson, Rick Powers, A. M. Homes, a guy named George Saunders whose stuff has started showing up — and "I think Powers and [William] Vollmann are pretty much the twin towers of this generation" — whatever generation, or for that matter peer, means.

DFW: Deliberate map-tampering. I used to live in Brighton and wanted something about America, but real places overwhelm me, so I like to mess with maps a little, and part of the book is about messing with maps; I reconfigured the Allston/Brighton/Newton area and inserted a town whose name I took from a real town near my college that was inundated for a reservoir.

DFW: It used to be longer; I got lucky with an editor who did not just buy it but edited it with me, and it is about 400 or 500 pages shorter than before; I wanted many characters and thematics and hope the final version is long but fairly tight.

DFW: There are two traditions: an avant-garde that is rich but often not fun, and a commercial-entertainment tradition that is fun but panders; I wanted the book to be hard but also fun enough that the reader cannot help herself, and wrote for readers I could seduce into doing more work than usual without the work being odious.

DFW: [he declines to spout French names at the theoretical level:] the structure is built to seduce the reader into extra work that ties in with what the book is about, and what interests me more is whether people find it fun.

DFW: [He obliges and reads the crocodiles passage aloud on air, first checking that Lydon will make a chopping motion if he gets boring.]

DFW: Subsidized time is not a joke to me: given an electorate that punishes tax-raisers while demanding a balanced budget, and bowl games that stay solvent by stacking seven or eight sponsors' names, at some point we will sell our time.

DFW: [he deflects demographically:] I do not know many people under 40 who have not had periods of heavy drug use, and I am under 40. On alcohol, the research side: Boston AA is unusual in holding open speaker meetings, and licensed halfway houses would more or less let a non-member walk in and lurk; I concede some experience with the material, but it is hardly an autobiographical book.

DFW: The only idea I started with was to do something about America that was sad without just making fun of it; my bright, privileged, well-educated friends are sad on some level, and I think it comes down to loneliness — a culture that teaches acquisition and pleasure as the point of living, with happiness implicitly promised; I am childless but obsessed with what my children will think of what we did with what we were given.

DFW: The sadness is not in seeing deprivation; it is in realizing at 27 or 28 how phenomenally lucky I had been — never hungry, never cold, educated, in the most materially blessed country in history — and miserable anyway.

DFW: I do not know: when you do something long you carry a whole tapestry of other stuff in your head, and Hamlet was one thread; there is a fair amount of Hamlet material, and the title has about 170 dimensions for me.

DFW: It fits only to an extent; the book is strategically set in the future as an extrapolation on trends rather than a reflection of the present (not Gilliam's Brazil), but HDTV, then virtual reality, then things like virtual-reality porn are coming, and we will have to reach an understanding with ourselves about how much we allow, because it will probably get more fun than real life.

DFW: The idea that improved technology solves technology's problems is quixotic: a nation sitting in front of screens interacting with images rather than each other stays lonely, so it needs more images, and the better the images get the more tempting and the emptier it all becomes.

DFW: The title has about 170 dimensions; the book was sort of written for a relative of mine who died, whom I knew well and no longer know; one character runs Poor Yorick Entertainment, and to the extent my generation is one, I think it is a Hamlet-ish one.

DFW: The Entertainment is my borrowed MacGuffin: a film so good that once you watch it you want only to watch it over and over; its maker kills himself and it is called lethal, but the lethality is softened — viewers stop being interested in anything else, their spiritual energies depleted, some willing to cut off digits to see it again, and a Canadian plan aims to disseminate it so the U.S. kills itself like choking on candy.

DFW: Central Illinois, academic parents, read a lot and watched a lot of TV; I wanted to be a pro tennis player until puberty; at Amherst I was a math-and-philosophy major who fell in with humor-magazine friends and did a double thesis whose English half was an early Broom draft; brief fiction grad school in Arizona; I came to Boston in the late 80s for a philosophy PhD, lasted about a semester, found I was too old for school, drifted and taught part-time at Emerson.

DFW: Encouragement came less from teachers than from peers; my best friend at Amherst, Mark Costello (now a DA), was writing first and brought me along; the first thing that made me want to write fiction was Barthelme's The Balloon; in Boston my crowd was a Cambridge poetry mafia (Tom Lux, Mary Karr, Marie Howe, and others).

DFW: A certain amount of it parallels my own experience: I got real lucky early in my 20s, had career success, got a lot of the stuff I thought would make me all right, and discovered it did not; raised academic and middle-class, I had never emotionally understood deprivation until Boston.

DFW: Assuming I drive carefully, sure — and I am reading this evening at what used to be the BU Bookstore at 7 o'clock.

DFW: I want a cogent explanation of what Generation X even means; I read Pynchon as a quintessentially 60s writer out of the late Beats, and what my own generation misses is that era's sense of unity and community — I see atomism, anomie, and a generation essentially lost and very lonely.

DFW: My editor Colin Harrison has figured out that the right assignments make me just short of suicidal, and the more miserable I am the funnier the essay; I probably will not do another (he did). I left the East Coast because I am not wired for it — the noise, being snarled at in convenience stores — while the Midwest people smile and use their turn signals, and I need a lot of quiet.

DFW: It has gone in and out of print; I expect Little, Brown to reissue it on IJ's momentum in six to nine months.

DFW: The NYT reviewer and others called Broom a ripoff of The Crying of Lot 49, which I had not read at the time; parts were instead a ripoff of Manuel Puig, whose work is largely dialogue, and I was excited by straight unattributed dialogue where the reader identifies speakers by cadence. On the ending, my joke is that you do not want to hear my explanation. [The show moves on.]

DFW: I and most of my friends are pretty neurotic about achievement; the unhappiness is not the work but the attitude toward it — not enjoyment of the thing itself but how it stacks against other people's work, the pay, and the boss's opinion.

DFW: "I wanted to do a book that was sad": "That was really the only idea that was in my head." When I began writing I didn't realize how large its scope would be.

DFW: "It seemed to me that there was something sort of sad about the country" — that "at a time when our lives are more comfortable and more full probably of pleasure, sheer pleasure, than any other time in history, that people were essentially miserable". Myself included, near the top of the list.

DFW: I observed open AA meetings in Boston, and the research paid personal dividends: "If I hadn't gone to a bunch of AA meetings, I wouldn't have gotten rid of my TV, because I started to realize the TV didn't make me happy, but I couldn't stop watching it".

DFW: "The image in my mind — and I actually had dreams about it all the time — was that this book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the twentieth story of a building."

DFW: "If you're trying to be a writer in a culture where one of our big religions is celebrity — and there's all kinds of very weird emotional and spiritual and philosophical stuff going on about watching and being watched and celebrity and image — then you really need to be outside it a bit." "To the extent that you are watched, I think you're compromised. You now have access to that world in a way that the ordinary reader doesn't. You can't speak for that reader anymore."

DFW: My generation was raised to view television as more or less its main artistic snorkel to the universe; commercial entertainment's sheer ability to deliver pleasure in large doses changes people's relationship to art, and changes us in deeper ways, which is exactly what serious fiction ought to be doing now. TV also occupies the subject matter: I basically won't write about a precinct house because I have seen so many done so slickly on TV that they are in my head and my reader's head whether I want them there or not.

DFW: I wanted to do something complicated and hard and weird, but also seductive enough that the reader is willing to do the work; my joke on the panel: I am Franzen and Leyner put in a blender.

DFW: More than delight — there is a part that makes you feel full, that is redemptive and instructive, where reading something makes you think, my God, that's me, I'm not alone in the world; fiction is a kind of exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we normally can't talk about.

DFW: Serious fiction ought to be doing to us what commercial entertainment does — changing us in deeper ways; the trouble is that avant-garde fiction has relinquished the field, leaving art fiction that is hellaciously un-fun.

DFW: I am catching up on what I should have read when I was getting high and screwing around, and I am finished with that now; on current literary fiction, the avant-garde has relinquished the field — art fiction now is hellaciously un-fun, academic and cloistered, basically written for critics, college teachers, and PhD students, and I feel a lot more strongly about that than I do about TV.

DFW: I concede it may look somewhat like one, but the book isn't plotted the way many other books are; pretty much everything that looks like it's one thing is really also four or five other things. Early lines are planted to pay off hundreds of pages later by design, not retrofitted.

DFW: I resent comparisons generally, and I hadn't read Pynchon in eight years. The writers on my mind while working were DeLillo, Gaddis, Ozick, Manuel Puig, and Richard Powers; DeLillo is the best fiction writer alive, and the comparison is really unfair to DeLillo.

DFW: Part of the book is about a culture of attention, hype, and image, so there are a number of complicated ironies in a book about hype being promoted by hype. I avoid reviews because reviews aren't for the writer; reading them is like eavesdropping on two people talking about you.

DFW: A regional junior — ranked seventeenth in the USTA Western section at fourteen, which was probably around four-thousandth in the nation. Serious players devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do.

DFW: I sold it unfinished on the first 250-300 pages because I basically needed to buy groceries — the only thing I'd ever sold before it was done. Pietsch and I agreed beforehand the delivered draft would be longer than would really be felicitous and would need help becoming more accessible; the summer-1994 manuscript was several hundred pages longer. It was line-edited twice, and I'm proud that no line was unconsidered and no fact unresearched.

DFW: "I wanted to do something sad," with no single main character — "something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium."

DFW: A specifically American "stomach-level sadness," "a kind of lostness" that afflicts the privileged and well-educated; my friends played it out as drugs, workaholism, singles bars — "20 different ways, but it's the same thing."

DFW: I didn't set out to write AA, but I attended meetings with friends and found them "tremendously powerful"; the Ennet House material is "supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't."

DFW: Educated characters (and I myself) feel "real repulsion" at slogans like "One Day at a Time," yet "something as banal and reductive... enabled these people to walk through hell" — banal truths can be nourishing "in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't," which is something our generation needs to feel.

DFW: "I've always thought of myself as a realist"; pop saturation and 250 ads a day are simply "the texture of the world I live in," the modern equivalent of trees and rivers — not decoration, just the real environment.

DFW: The delivered manuscript ran 1,700 pages with close to 500 cut and two line-edits by Pietsch: "If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that's in there is in there on purpose." I made a good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting "on a page-by-page level."

DFW: "I wanted to do something with sport and the idea of dedication to a pursuit being kind of like an addiction" — competitive achievement as "a very American illness," giving yourself away to a goal that's really about how others feel about you; the academy and the halfway house are two faces of the same thing.

DFW: That's the point of the tennis-as-addiction frame: dedication becomes giving yourself away to a goal that's really about others' regard — "a very American illness."

DFW: "Personally, I think it's a really neat time." I reject the pity-party that blames a stupid audience — "If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people." — and contempt breeds twin pitfalls: avant-garde writing aimed only at other writers, and crass formulaic fiction that's essentially television on the page; the worthwhile project is work with avant-garde richness and difficulty that is nonetheless pleasurable to read, in an era of entertainment so good and slick that this is probably the best time to be a writer, if not the easiest.

DFW: Against a baseline of existential loneliness, great fiction gives "brief flashes" of recognition — the sense that someone at least for a moment feels or sees the way you do — so that "I feel human and unalone," in a deep conversation with another consciousness in a way other art doesn't give me.

DFW: These are "stars you steer by," not peers. The canon: Socrates' funeral oration, Donne, Crashaw, occasional Shakespeare, Keats's shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Kant, William James, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Joyce's Portrait, the italicized Hemingway of In Our Time, O'Connor, McCarthy, DeLillo, Byatt, Ozick's stories, Pynchon about 25 percent of the time, Barthelme's "The Balloon" ("the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer"), Wolff, Carver's famous best, Steinbeck when he's not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, Moby-Dick, and Gatsby — plus, in poetry, Larkin above all, Glück, and Auden.

DFW: [joking:] there is the "great white male" deal — "about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses": Powers, Vollman, Franzen, Antrim, Eugenides, Moody — but George Saunders (Civilwarland in Bad Decline) is the person I'm highest on right now, plus A.M. Homes, Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr (whom I rate the best female poet under 50), Cris Mazza, Rikki Ducornet, and Carole Maso, whose Ava a friend said gave him "an erection of the heart."

DFW: "I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don't like to teach." — there are only about two weeks of teachable material before it becomes managing egos — so I prefer freshman lit at ISU, where rural, under-read students arrive thinking literature means "dry, irrelevant, unfun stuff, like cod liver oil"; I hook them with A.M. Homes's "A Real Doll" and find watching them wake up to what literary reading can give them extremely cool.

DFW: "It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess": "A lot of work went into making it look like that. That might sound like a pathetic lie, but it's not. Now, as you can see, my dander's getting up."

DFW: "It's really designed more like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back. And there's all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not."

DFW: The tasks: "keeping track of enormous amounts of information"; "being required to pay attention to some of the strategies that regular entertainment uses"; and "having certain formulaic expectations that go along with reading commercial stuff fucked with. Not just disdained. Fucked with."

DFW: "I think that some of that commercial stuff evidences a real contempt for the reader, by having such a reductive idea of what the reader wants. Like they're children and have to have their fantasies enabled and have a happy ending". "Plot-wise, the book doesn't come to a resolution. But if the readers perceive it as me giving them the finger, then I haven't done my job. On the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right."

DFW: "The less I'm being watched, the more I can watch, and the better it is for me and for my work": "If people really want to know what I ate for lunch, I guess that's okay. But it's kind of toxic."

DFW: Terrifying — beforehand, "Somebody took my saliva, because I don't have it." And the whole thing feels hollow: "I keep getting the feeling that all of this is about some initial surge of excitement, and now it's created excitement about the excitement."

DFW: "When I won't do things like appear on network television, it's not because I have a lot of integrity." "I feel I'm going to turn off exactly the people whose approval I'm most hungry for." I'm not greedy about money, but "I'm real greedy about respect."

No DFW answer on the record here — this is Bruni's reporting of the publisher's length-as-importance account (an early, marketing-side sighting of the cut figure).

DFW: "There are very complicated esthetic reasons why I watch it" — but really, "it was soothing, like a narcotic. You knew all problems would be resolved in 15 minutes and many lush platitudes would be exchanged."

DFW: Somewhere else entirely: "I have actually gotten to revisit, in my head, all the museums I've ever gone to."

DFW: Yes — the draft I delivered to Pietsch was actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, a very primitive pyramidical fractal; after the mercy cuts it is probably a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But the structure wasn't a priori: Pietsch had described the first 400 pages as a piece of glass dropped from a great height, and the shape mimics how the world hit my nerve endings, a bunch of discrete random bits with non-obvious connections.

DFW: Yes — most of the stuff in my own life that is interesting and true involves double binds; e.g. achieving something while retaining a self apart from the achievement. I put it as the culture being some Zen teacher whacking us no matter what we do.

DFW: "I wouldn't know how to be clear about it. I wanted to do something sad. I think it's a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It's not TV's fault, it's not Hollywood's fault, and it's not the net's fault. It's our fault. We're choosing this." And: "I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won't be quite that glittery but cold."

DFW: Some of our primary ways of relating to the culture and to other people were shaped by it: "I don't know about you but I had seen maybe 100,000 kisses before I ever kissed a girl. Every time I kiss a girl I have to like...it has to stack up. We are oddly but emptily educated."

DFW: That is exactly the idea that frustrates me. "What they fail to understand is that people can't receive it all — their heads will bleed, right? So people are going to need help choosing. The places they go to for that help will have the power." Online we simply get the same elitism: net magazines that act as filters and exert editorial control. [The novel's InterLace dissemination model, offered as a real-world forecast.]

DFW: "But some of the references are real and some of them aren't." "In the first draft, which was longer, I tried to create something that would feel the way the culture would feel, which was a sort of tsunami of information. Most of the cuts were in the end notes; there used to be almost four hundred pages of endnotes, now there are one hundred. I wanted there to be this enormous amount of information, some of which meant something, some of which didn't."

DFW: "If you chew tobacco, you get real interested in tooth brushing. My grandfather was a dentist. There was a lot more dental trivia in the first draft of the book. My editor pointed out that the stereochemistry of the bicuspid root was probably not of compelling interest to most readers."

DFW: "My mother's father, who died before I was born."

DFW: You can just sit around such places — "the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of place, the more it looks like you belong there." And the residents love to talk: "nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away. They are eager to tell you their life."

DFW: "There was some fiction in that essay." The names I used "were names that were already in my head because I was starting to think about the book." As for Antitoi: "There was no such person. I needed a fake name for this poor guy."

DFW: "I enjoy TV, but I always feel lonelier after I've watched four hours of it. I feel like I've pretended to be with people but I really haven't. In fiction you both feel like the writer is talking to you and that you are intimate with people in a book; you can be inside their heads; you can hear their brains' voices. I'll never be that intimate with anyone in person."

DFW: "I have read the OED, but I have a vastly abridged version of the OED. I wouldn't say that I've read it all. When I was thirteen I decided to try to get through it all and I got continuously up through K and then I began to skim. Unlike Hal, I do not remember it all, nor could I spout etymologies."

DFW: "Well, Marisa & Keats, it's in there because that's the kind of films that the Dad makes."

No answer on the record — joshua S. asks twice (once mid-chat, once late, hooked to the carbuncle riff) but DFW never responds to either posting; his replies in those stretches go to other questioners.

DFW: "Maybe nothing. I fear it's not for me to decide."

DFW: "Dostovski meant 'redemption' in a pretty specific Christian way. I don't think we now can use the word the same way."

No answer on the record — dFW never answers the question; his only reply to raining sheep in that stretch is a counter-question about the screen name ("is your cyber-name an oblique intertextual reference to something?").

DFW: "I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

DFW: "The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion. 'IJ' is at least SUPPOSED to be both funny and very sad."

DFW: [he deflects with a one-line Pynchon joke on the questioner's handle:] "Tristero: ask your local potsmaster."

DFW: "irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian, I think -- so yes. And that's paradoxical, since hip irony gained much of its cultural momentum through being an engine of rebellion."

DFW: On self-flattering advertising's power: "advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively)." (The statue-of-liberty follow-up is not separately answered here.)

DFW: "there is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you."

DFW: No impetus given — [played as news to him:] "Isn't there a real Enfield? No wonder people always looked at me funny in Boston when I asked for directions."

DFW: [he won't accept the terms as given:] "it would depend what you meant by 'hero.' Furilloesque hero, or McGarretesque hero, or cat.her., or what?" — and to the real-people-or-movie press, only "you'd have to be more explicit about 'live with...head' and 'watch...movie.'" [He never does name a closest character.]

DFW: Two words: "Keats -- Hal."

No answer on the record — the question (posted by Marisa in the raw) is never answered; DFW's only egolessness material is an earlier Zen joke to her — "Become like the surface of a pond. Clap with only one hand." — that predates the question.

DFW: "OK. I have no opinion on decriminalization. Given the tobacco thing now, it hasn't got a snowball's chance." — [delivered in his sign-off message as his cybertime ran out.]

No answer on the record — posted in the final minute; the modem cutoff arrives first and DFW never responds (Joshua S. himself shrugs "Pretty dissatisfying, but that fits.").

No answer on the record — asked twice in the closing rush and never answered before the modem cutoff.

DFW: [the thesis, restated live:] "I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

DFW: [after objecting to the nickname Fosty ("It makes me do a full-body wince"):] "Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to."

No answer on the record — marisa files it as "a question for later, when we're done with irony" and it is never picked back up; DFW does not address it anywhere in the chat.

DFW: "I don't think one has to 'mine' the culture anymore. It's what we breathe. It's all around us."

DFW: Bluntly: "I thought that book sucked canal-water, Jay" — but "There ARE some affinities with 'Lookout Cartridge,' though."

DFW: "I like The Recognitions very, very much. I haven't yet got all the way through 'Frolic...Own' yet."

DFW: [only the lightbulb (Byron the Bulb) half gets a reply, and it's a pointer rather than a reading:] "harold bloom has a real famous exgesis of Byron -- I forget which of Bloom's books it's in" (typo as-written); [Avrill's song question is never answered.]

No answer on the record — tristero asks and then follows up himself (calling it "a potential irony-fest"), but DFW never responds to either message.

DFW: To the party question: "koleko -- define 'party.' I never have understood the word as a verb."; [the execution/final-wish question was posted after DFW's modem cut him off and goes unanswered.]

DFW: "My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me."

DFW: Deadpan: "I listen almost exclusively to the Archies. It's an Inner Child thing."

No answer on the record — billygoat1's follow-up lands in the closing crush and DFW never responds; his remaining messages go to DaleK, valmar, and the decriminalization question before the modem cutoff.

DFW: The list: "DeLillo, Ozick, R. Powers, AM Homes, Denis Johnson, David Markson, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich."; on Gates, "Gates's habit of using the Royal We irks me a bit, but overall his taste in fiction is hard to impugn."; [the Vollman/McGuane/Chabon follow-ups arrive at the cutoff and go unanswered.]

No answer on the record — asked in the final minute; DFW's last message is about WORD's modem timer cutting him off mid-sentence, and no recommendation ever comes.

DFW: "I wanted the book to sound intimate and conversational, as if somebody was talking right to you." So "there was a kind of ghost reader for me all the way along."

DFW: "basically a narcissist, I imagine my reader as being somewhat like me" — "somebody probably between 25 and 45, with too much education, who's sort of puzzled and confused and overwhelmed," someone who "has a pretty good antenna for a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the culture but not really much training in how to derive any sort of meaning out of it."

DFW: Barely: "All you need is an antenna and a modem, and you're pretty much in the mainstream." Where I live runs "three or four years behind the East Coast curve in terms of what's hip and what's cool," but "it's just as much in the thrall of hipness hipness and coolness" (doubled word in the original). "People here spend as much time worrying about what attitude they project and being nervous about getting laid."

DFW: In the book, yes, but perhaps only in a starker way; the book's addiction is a probably parodic exaggeration of people's present relationship to entertainment that is nonetheless not all that different from it.

DFW: The problem with the movie is that it is lethally entertaining: watching it is so much more fun than doing anything else that a one-time viewer is left with roughly the spiritual energies of a moth and wants only to rewatch it again and again until dying, probably of dehydration.

DFW: [he pivots to the government subplot:] part of the book is a US PR campaign meant to be scary enough to deter viewing but not so scary it advertises the film — the same dynamic that sends high-schoolers rushing after whatever drug is rumored to be ecstatically brain-destroying.

DFW: The V-chip's egg timer is already running; I give it maybe a year.

DFW: Much of the book's intrigue comes down to the government not being able to do much, because decisions about fun, entertainment, and sports are personal and private, between a person and their heart; that leaves high comedy in the official hand-wringing, and what actually happens is the decisions get made inside individuals, about what to give ourselves away to.

DFW: The pressure is on the networks too: they have discovered entertaining news is vastly more profitable because audiences vote for it with their wallets, so the needed change is in individual taste, not laws about content. The next 15 or 20 years will be scary and exciting as entertainment gets ever better and higher-pressure.

DFW: This goes back thousands of years, to Plato's arguments over which pleasures are worthwhile; I admit that when tired or in pain I want infantile pleasures, to sit and receive without giving or doing anything. The candy analogy: fine as a couple of pieces a day, sickening as a diet, and the candy keeps getting better — and the culture has grown afraid to teach that pleasure is dangerous and graded. I stress I am not anti-TV or anti-entertainment.

DFW: [the same candy-diet point again:] infantile pleasures are fine in small amounts but sickening as a diet, and being human means deciding how actively to participate in one's own life rather than passively receiving.

DFW: The incentive is everywhere — teen suicide as a leading cause of death, epidemic drug, sexual, and gambling addiction, a sky-high divorce rate; people are lost and wandering, looking to give themselves away to something that will maybe love them back. The real question is individual: what level of pain must be reached before someone will undertake the work of reevaluation.

DFW: The Christian right wants to take the power of choice away from people and make their decisions for them; as the culture grows more decadent and more unhappy, people will become desperate enough to want to be told what to do, and the fascism traveling under the name of the Christian right will look viable to many, which I find pretty scary. (I am not a member of any 12-step program; they interest me because they involve people who bottomed out on the American way of life and must remake some force to give themselves away to.)

DFW: I was born in 1962 and grew up with television the way I grew up with trees, parks, and books; I consider myself a realist, and much of what reads as strange or avant-garde in the book is an attempt to be mimetic about how the world feels against our nerve endings right now.

DFW: Yes — this was one of the razor edges I walked: a very long, fairly difficult book that I did not want to be a standard avant-garde book (most of which I admire but find not much fun to read), but that I wanted fun enough that the reader would not throw it at the wall on page 100 — and I register the ironies that sets up, since the book itself is about entertainment.

DFW: I was so relentlessly bombarded by the attentions of people whose high-paid job was to make sure I was having fun that saying whether it was fun or not ends up becoming meaningless — it was Fun with a capital F, in italics, with quotes around it. Managed pleasure utterly infantilizes you: you don't even get to think about a problem, because the minute it occurs to you it's been solved by somebody making fifty cents an hour.

DFW: Never again, on principle. Anytime somebody blows the whistle that we're now having fun, some little-kid part of me sticks out its lower lip and says no. The venues where I have fun are the ones where I'm not supposed to have fun, so I'm going to avoid all venues where fun is part of the contract.

DFW: I adopt Lewis Hyde's figure of "irony after a while becoming the sound of prisoners who enjoy their confinement. The song of a bird who enjoys being in the cage." But irony is not the enemy in itself: "Irony itself is fantastic. It's one of the primary rhetorical modes. It's been around forever. It's intensely powerful. There's nothing wrong with it." The toxicity is the cultural use to which it is put and how pervasive it is.

DFW: Satire at least carries an implicit reform agenda — "I ridicule this to show that it's totally grotesque and unacceptable, therefore motivating people to change stuff." — even if the change never actually happens; "But when satire and irony get divorced from that project, they just become a kind of mode of discourse in and of themselves. Then I think that things get kind of dark."

DFW: I wrote the essay in "summer and fall of 1990," it's "a bit dated," but the thesis is "roughly the same."

DFW: I agree, and generalize: once you notice you're making fun of what you're part of, you can either change the situation or "ironically genuflect" it, which is "a very easy excuse to perpetuate the deal" — and the deeper toxicity is that when ridicule becomes cultural currency, earnestness is the one thing that opens you to attack. And I disclaim any program: "What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be thirty-four in this country."

DFW: I own a VCR that gets no TV and only watch a few shows at friends' houses, yet I judge that "the average quality of TV is better than it was seven years ago. I mean the writing's better. It's smarter. It's funnier." I credit Boomer maturation and demographics — "TV's not a moral entity. It feels the pulse, and it delivers what it thinks the pulse wants." — and, on the third question, the rise of TV auteurs (Bochco, Bloodworth-Thomason, the Seinfeld creators) plus cable/Fox competition jacking the stakes up, not writers lacking other work.

DFW: The usurping happened long ago and I'm at peace with it: "I think TV and movies as narrative systems or as deliverers of narrative and pleasure supplanted novelists and short-story writers and poets a long time ago. I think we exist on the margins of culture in a way that novelists didn't a hundred years ago." Rock-star treatment would warp writers' capacity for standing aside and watching, and reading is still nutritionally better — "wheat germ is better for us than Snickers bars, and I eat Snickers bars all the time, because they're yummy."

DFW: I distinguish the writers who engage the televisual culture — DeLillo, Gaddis, Vollmann, Powers — from those who do not, such as Updike and late Pynchon.

DFW: They could still write about the family, but a family now pre-processed into Oprah/Montel "dysfunctional family" cliches they'd have to take account of; "Kafka would not have to sit down and channel-surf in order to write about what it's like to live in a televisual culture, because it's oxygen. It's the atmosphere." My guess: a superstar culture of people prettier and suaver than the rest of us would have had "an enormous effect" on Kafka's sense of the human as loathsome.

DFW: It's fiction treating pop culture "not just as a system of reference, but as a subject" — using the screen's shallow archetypes as characters to remind the reader they're artifice with real worlds behind them; my touchstones are Max Apple's "The Oranging of America" and Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist ("these sort of hallucinatory references to pop culture"). [And, somewhat embarrassed:] I now read little contemporary fiction — for pure pleasure, only poetry.

DFW: "Well, it's supposed to be a long encomium to the dead father. But part of the book is about a culture deciding that the meaning of life consists in experiencing as much pleasure as much of the time as possible … So it's multivalent, but it's not particularly profound. I'm not very good at titles."

DFW: Really serious art takes hard work: "That stuff's not fun in the way commercial entertainment is fun. I mean fun--like eating a Twinkie. It's like slipping into a warm bath after a hard day … The danger comes when the escape becomes the overriding purpose." And: "serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult … if we get conditioned to confront less and less and experience more and more pleasure, the commercial stuff's gonna win out."

DFW: I modeled its lethality on Larry Niven's wire-heads — direct pleasure-center stimulation that makes the viewer stop eating and drinking: "wire-heads die. Because they don't eat or drink or anything. I mean it's like sustained orgasm." A lot of this explanatory material was cut out of the novel.

DFW: "I don't think that I would do it, but I think what I would do is I would arrange to have a lot of friends around me who would keep me from doing it."

DFW: No — "Well, Jethro Bodine is from The Beverly Hillbillies. That's not a Pig Bodine thing." I concede exactly one outright Gravity's Rainbow allusion, the Steeply/Marathe cliffside shadow-play with its word Brockengespenst, but I insist "I'm not trying to lace the book with allusions to other texts." — I just thought the shadow effect (which really works in Tucson) was cool.

DFW: I half-grant the guess — "It sounds to me like you like to read too much" — then set the joys of learning, knowing other people, and religion against what I think marks my and Wiley's generations as against their grandparents': "an immense, gnawing, craving hunger for pleasure, and a real feeling of deprivation when we're not experiencing it"; my own answer remains the plan (quoted above) to have friends around who would keep me from watching.

DFW: "DeLillo and Pynchon and Gaddis and a lot of those guys I think called the situation a long time ago." — what's ironic [he laughs ironically] is that the situation persists while "we've taken the technique or the surface of what it is they're talking about, but we haven't listened to what the message is."

DFW: Among those engaging the culture: DeLillo, Gaddis, Vollmann, and Powers, against Updike and late Pynchon.

DFW: On Pynchon: late Pynchon (Slow Learner, Vineland) is "the same tired jokes" and "kind of shallow," "for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me," and the pervasive Pynchon comparison reads to me as a sign that "I've failed." (Yoshimoto is not addressed here.)

DFW: The comparison reads as failure ("I've failed") and I do not enjoy it; on the origin of one such comparison: the NYT called Broom a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49 "like that I hadn't read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good."

DFW: Fiction must work "both ways" — neither pure recursion (Barth/Gass, "turning a crank on a certain kind of mechanism") nor naive realism ("Imagine, dear reader … and I don't believe that shit either").

DFW: [The record shows he voices appreciation for Ozick, but carries no substantive answer on her or on "Levitation."]

DFW: (The IJ reading here is Laskin's, not Wallace's — Laskin has him "gazing with fascination at America's love affair with corporate hype," and says A Supposedly Fun Thing bites down on "the determined pursuit of pleasure.") Wallace's own nearest gloss is about the State Fair: "God, what idiots we all are when we decide to have fun with a capital F."

DFW: "What's weird is that anything mean or funny in 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' is absolutely true." But the responsibility is mine, not theirs: "But then you know deep down that you are because you're the one doing the writing, and they didn't mean it for public consumption."

DFW: The intent was never condescension — "It's more like: God, what idiots we all are when we decide to have fun with a capital F." But the charge — "this elitest butthead goes off to this Eastern school and then comes back and makes fun of the people he grew up with" — "That really hurt. If that's true, then I did a poor job."

DFW: No; I really don't have the stomach for nonfiction, and with a recent grant I hope to get back to fiction full-time after the tour. (Laskin doubts the retreat is sincere: "The guy's too good at nailing the culture to the wall.")

DFW: "It takes a strange temperament to be a writer." "You stay cooped up by yourself for years while you work on a book and, then, you reappear for a few weeks," stay in hotels with executive floors and try to be gregarious. "Then you disappear again."

DFW: Probably not. "If you are going to write accurately about an experience, you will portray people in a way that may hurt their feelings." "They were on the ship to engage in a fantasy vacation and I was there to write down what I saw and heard." So "I would rather write fiction where you can get at the truth but where you aren't writing about living people." (Wineke's own verdict runs the other way: "The essays are good because they are accurate.")

DFW: "Out here I enjoy not having to lock my doors." "I never have understood the logic of living in New York City" — "If you are a writer, you are basically living on a fixed income," and the city's cost of living makes no sense against that.

DFW: I told the publisher I wouldn't do a paperback tour, but "they suggested I do some readings from 'Infinite Jest,' too and that just happens to be coming out in paperback, so I think they got me." (This is the piece's only Infinite Jest mention — a tour/marketing grumble, not IJ-content; driver ruling 3 governs whether it moves to the IJ section.)

DFW: They are structural, not decorative: reality is fractured right now while text is very linear and unified, so I am constantly looking for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disorienting, with an interplay between how difficult I make it and how seductive it is. The endnotes were a useful compromise, and there were many more before Pietsch made me pare them down to the absolutely essential.

DFW: No, ambivalent: the attention arrived before anyone had time to read the book, and the positive reviews seemed to me to misunderstand it — I wanted it to be extraordinarily sad, not particularly postmodern or jumbled or fractured, and reviewers liked it for being funny, erudite, and fractured instead.

DFW: A long book does raise the burden of proof; but IJ did not start out to be this long — it began as a fractured, multiple narrative with a number of main characters, and the length emerged, perhaps through denial.

DFW: Postmodernism mattered once as the first highly self-conscious text, a real beaker of acid in the face of the culture; but the schticks of postmodernism — irony, cynicism, irreverence — are now part of what is enervating in the culture itself, to the point where Burger King sells hamburgers with a break-the-rules slogan.

DFW: [he deflates it:] I got some attention for work that didn't really deserve it, at an age when I had a hard time handling it — a library weenie from Amherst who learned the brass ring does not make everything okay. It's like a cost accountant making partner at 50 and going into depression; [he insists:] what it is is very, very average — and I now have no brass ring and am open to suggestions.

DFW: In spring 1986, mid-grad-school misery, Blue Velvet showed me that what the really great artists do is be entirely themselves — their own way of fracturing reality that, if authentic and true, you feel in your nerve endings; Lynch snapped me out of an adolescent delusion about what avant-garde art could be. Lynchian — the gloss the record keeps returning to — is the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal (the Jif-vs-Skippy domestic-murder scenario).

DFW: [playing the amateur card:] I think of myself as a fiction writer, not an experienced journalist, so the collection's schtick is the non-journalist sent out to do journalistic things; the pieces people like best are the sensuous, experiential ones — essentially an enormous eyeball floating around something and reporting what it sees — as against the belles-lettres argument mode, of which the book has maybe one real example (the television essay from six or seven years back), a mode I gave up because making such an argument truly persuasive would take five or six hundred pages nobody wants to read. You can almost chart the essays' dates by when the footnotes start appearing.

DFW: There is a teaching-vs-research schizophrenia in academia; I have plateaued after four years and fear repeating myself.

DFW: [rather than gloss the character, he pivots to the book's genesis:] I was about 30, my friends were about 30, all grotesquely overeducated and privileged, better off than our parents, and all extraordinarily sad.

DFW: It is sort of the book's MacGuffin: an art-film director eventually makes a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it never wants to do anything else; the interesting question the book then works is whether, if such a thing existed, you would avail yourself of it.

DFW: The book's people mostly share my own predicament — vaguely unhappy, sensing an incongruity about why, beginning to question the values making them unhappy, then facing that the culture offers little to replace those values.

DFW: The unquestioned cultural assumption that the purpose of life is to be happy — the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering — which a couple of generations ago would have marked you as a freak and an Epicurean. [He is visibly uncomfortable saying so, fearing he sounds like Bill Bennett.]

DFW: The tools of 60s literary fiction (self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, shock) were used to debunk the culture's hypocritical Ward-Cleaver self-image; now that televisual values rule, TV deploys those same techniques for its own agenda — creating an ethos, pleasing people, selling products — which leaves the would-be rebel with no rules left to break.

DFW: [he demonstrates it live:] answering value questions, I perspire in terror of sounding like Bill Bennett, the Church Lady, or Stuart Smalley. The ruling sin has inverted — where it was once obscenity, now it is appearing naive or old-fashioned, policed by the cool arch smile and the one crafted line that punctures you.

DFW: Yes: straight heartfelt sentiment in fiction reads as not only silly but unrealistic, since the characters live in this culture too. Writers are tired of the hip, slick, dark routine, but the available counter-moves risk turning into Bridges of Madison County gooeyness.

DFW: Irony and sarcasm are terrific for exploding hypocrisy and exposing what's wrong in existing values, but notably worse at erecting replacement values or getting closer to the truth — a tool the culture is still running 35 or 40 years past its real use (my exhibit: Letterman drawing himself up to announce what a fine crowd).

DFW: I don't own a TV — but not because it's TV's fault; if I owned one I would watch it and the neighbors would find me by the smell two months later, so I have agreements with friends to watch shows at their houses.

DFW: What I took for my parents being mean turned out to be them being smart: I will sit a foot from the screen and keep watching past the point of enjoyment, because guilt at being unproductive makes me anxious and the anxiety wants soothing by more watching — it is my own relationship to TV that depresses me, not TV as such.

DFW: I do own a VCR — it isn't as though I never watch a cathode-ray screen.

DFW: Sick in bed, I listed everything it would be neat or necessary to read and panicked by page 12; about a month later I admitted that reading with the TV on is a farce I play on myself, and concluded I simply had too much to read to own a TV.

DFW: [he interrupts:] I steadfastly deny that I was a champion — I don't want anyone from my hometown to hear me use that word; I played regional junior competitive tennis and was decent by competitive standards, roughly ages 12 to 15.

DFW: Much of what a luxury cruise sells, beyond the facilities, is a battalion of professional fun managers whose job is to keep assuring you that you are having a good time — high-watt smiles, near-evangelical testimony solicited at the microphone.

DFW: I recognize the sadness from my own life: whenever there is hard stuff I am not dealing with, I jack into fifth gear to drown it out — old-fashioned whistling in the graveyard — and the strange thing about a cruise is that you don't even do the work yourself; you pay for a week of having your consciousness obliterated except for pleasurably stimulated nerve endings.

DFW: I'd wanted to follow cruisers home and report the week after: the mythology says you return refreshed, but the cruise was so infantilizing that a supermarket checkout line felt unendurable afterward — vacation is set up as task-then-reward, floating one week a year in an amnion of pure pleasure, which was never my experience.

DFW: Measured against our parents by the culture's own criteria for a happy life, I and my friends were doing better and were more miserable; my amateur sense is that my generation and the one after are an extremely sad, lost generation — not razor blades or constant clinical depression, but strangely sad against their comforts and freedoms.

DFW: A certain neurological makeup goes with being a writer — a hypervigilance that makes several writers in a room wearing to be around; turned back on yourself (the pimple on your nose) it gets depressing, and self-consciousness of self-consciousness of self-consciousness is an infalling trap nobody wants to read.

DFW: Yes — I lacked the muscle great athletes have for cutting off the what-if-I-double-fault thinking; my coach told me at 13 that I had a bad head, and I would choke, spiraling through don't-think-about-it and drooling on the baseline while the other guy briskly won.

DFW: No; the great mystery of athletes is exactly that muscle that cuts off the paralyzing thinking (the bunny in the headlights) — hanging out with a pro for the tennis essay taught me the thoughts do occur to them, they just have the ability to shut them down, which I didn't.

DFW: There is a distinction between the hardheaded analytic philosophy mostly studied in America and the existentialists (who really get into that register), though I grant philosophy is a meta-discipline — stepping up a level and picking apart something's axioms, which is neat up to a point and then leaves you staring straight ahead with your lower lip trembling for long stretches; I had a bad head for that too.

DFW: "The biggest problem I have is converting them from 'expressive writing' to communicative writing" — convincing them that the fact that something is their opinion doesn't automatically make it interesting to a reader.

DFW: About five years ago — right as Infinite Jest was taking shape.

DFW: The number of people whose lips discuss literary stuff is small enough that my fame is roughly equivalent to a small-market TV weatherman's, so I'm bearing up surprisingly well.

DFW: Endnotes, actually — [he corrects him twice] — and there are fairly good reasons beyond sounding pretentious: after this interview a second voice in my head will start listing what I should have said — most of my consciousness is doubled like that, and a footnote is a way to get that call-and-response onto the page, though I've now declared a personal footnote ban after losing control of the device.

DFW: I protest: I throw a surprising amount away — at least 20 percent of both books was cut by me and my editor — and I get irked when reviewers suggest the work is padded or first-draft.

DFW: [His entire response is a deflecting counter-question — pointing out that Feldman is about to ask him a deeply ironic question about irony — at which Feldman retracts the whole thing and changes the subject.]

DFW: That one is my own question, about the studio audience; when Feldman jokes the crowd is digitized sound effects, my nervousness has now tripled.

DFW: I grew up in Champaign and went to school out of state.

DFW: I hold for the older Champaign-Urbana against the newer Urbana-Champaign ordering, which I suspect won out on poetic scansion.

DFW: The Gen-X label is silly on its face — born in 1962, I'm demographically a baby boomer; besides, Generation X is defined as having no voice and no unity, so the whole thing is strange — and, joking: I represent nothing except early-middle-aged onset.

DFW: [the guess offered, attribution loose in the crosstalk:] Maybe it's that we're flooded with so much information that we categorize everything, including ourselves.

DFW: Most of the essays were for Harper's, which is fiendishly clever in giving no instructions at all — just go do your best — so I get really anxious, and the anxiety translates into a certain amount of wit.

DFW: That was kind of the stance adopted in the piece, I'll concede — but it wasn't particularly mean to the Midwest.

DFW: No — I throw a surprising amount away; at least 20 percent of both books was cut by me and the editor, and I bristle at the padded/first-draft charge.

DFW: None of it was made up (this is nonfiction): the really bad injuries came when top-row spectators caught a baton and fell onto the rows below. The highlight was actually the clogging.

DFW: I'd expected slow Jed Clampett stuff, but the clogging turned out very fast and very cool — like Riverdance without a hideous Michael Flatley ego figure out front, or country tap dancing on methamphetamine.

DFW: The rider looked picked out of the crowd for looking wrong — aviator glasses and loafers suggesting the East Coast — and was dangled by the feet and swung at about a hundred feet; the ride seemed designed to mimic a near-death experience.

DFW: The fair held three crowds that never mixed: the husbandry people, the midway people, and the expo people. The 4-H kids really do sleep with their animals in the barns and are up at four to train them; the horror was the string-tie judges from meat companies buying the winners, with no sign on the kids' faces that they knew — which gave the whole thing its tragic air.

DFW: The nearest thing I can cite is Harry Crews's Biography-of-a-Place material. For a couple of days I went around with an old girlfriend who was really pretty and could talk to the carnies with no problem; they weren't terribly interested in me, and I wasn't about to brandish press credentials.

DFW: I have chicken issues (I was pecked) and couldn't do the chicken barn — I can't even talk about it without a supportive person present.

DFW: We're still together, and the quality of the dates has improved. I live near a slaughterhouse; the second date was watching a cow get slaughtered, after which I got sick and she suggested breakfast — I can no longer eat red meat but gleefully eat chicken.

DFW: The object was to say what a cruise is like and, since the cruise is the ultimate fantasy vacation, to say something about Americans' relationship to pleasure — and that, I'll say right away, is an incredibly lame description. My personal problem: I can't have fun when someone grabs me by the lapels and screams that fun is being had, so I stick my lower lip out and resolve not to have fun to spite the Julie McCoy-style staff.

DFW: Every legal and moral fun venue was available — some cheesy (the electric slide, borscht-belt stand-up) and some genuinely fun; there was even an entire art auction of Leroy Neiman prints (prints, not originals), and the bidding was spirited.

DFW: A hero in kind of a weird way — I dislike some of the films, but the ones I like I like a whole lot; the neat thing about doing the piece was never having to talk to Lynch, whom I orbited from ten feet, sure I'd have wet myself had he approached.

DFW: Lynch is pretty completely unironic (keen is his highest praise), which makes it weird to set his manner against homicidal dwarves eviscerating people onscreen; there's a coldness and meanness in him that I both dislike and am fascinated by, because we like to watch sadism from a distance, and the films work on you the way dreams do, making you vulnerable without your knowing why.

DFW: My game isn't that strong — I got hurt in my late twenties and am less mobile than I'd like, but I still play for fun; learning the game in rural Illinois meant playing it as it lies, dealing with the cracks in the court and, above all, the wind.

DFW: A caller once asked me that apropos Infinite Jest — but since Generation X is defined as having no voice and no unity, the whole idea is strange — and, joking again: I represent nothing except early-middle-aged onset.

DFW: "With something set a little bit in the future, that has surreal elements, I'm especially looking for a way to fracture the narrative." The reader gets decisions: "Do you want to read the footnotes? All at the end? Do you want to flip back and forth? Do you use two bookmarks?" There are ways of playing with the reader that are benign — footnotes are like vaudevillian call-and-response, and a good vehicle for humor.

DFW: "I got to the point where I couldn't quit using them": "It got worse and worse." After the heavily footnoted David Lynch piece for Premiere, I went through footnote detox: "I'm just not allowed to use them anymore".

DFW: "ego is a tremendous force, and a big part of you dreams of a certain level of success, and I got some of that, and it didn't make me happy." I thought I was sophisticated about hype from TV, but it's entirely different: "The cliché that getting a lot of attention is not the same as getting a lot of affection takes on new dimensions when you learn it through experience."

DFW: "I'm in the odd position of having taken the money and hoping that it doesn't get made. And I'm feeling confident it won't, since the chances for eighteen-hour movies are small, unless they wanted to dispense catheters upon entering the theater."

DFW: "One place where I discovered stuff was being talked about was AA meetings. I'm not in AA, but I went to open meetings." There's a certain amount of goo there and a certain amount of the serious: "Like the fact that it takes enormous courage to appear weak. Hadn't heard that anywhere else. I was just starting to entertain the fact that that might be true."

DFW: Letterman is "the archangel" of contemporary irony. "The particular kind of irony I'm talking about" — "when Letterman comes out and says, 'What a fine crowd,' and everybody roars with laughter" — came about in the '60s, when it was still an appropriate response to the hypocrisies it punctured.

DFW: "I went into Newton-Wellesley [Hospital]. I was feeling so miserable and so angry at myself that I was afraid I was going to hurt myself, so I put myself in there so that I would stop worrying about it. I would not be talking with you about it if it hadn't slipped to the press last year. It's not really anyone's business." "It was embarrassing for me, but it was also a time when I gave up a lot of ideas about why I became a writer and what I wanted."

DFW: The teacherly self-mockery is one thing — "It's OK, it's hip and it's cool and it's the language we speak. And yet it's also terrifying to me that my students have no idea the extent to which they are tyrannized by corporate culture. They're so tyrannized they're not aware that they're tyrannized. It's like being subjects of fascism and believing that you're in a democracy."

DFW: [he half-resists the addiction framing — seduction is closer to it:] The oldest essay dates to about 1990 — my first stab at IJ; the AA meetings and addictionology reading became a lattice through which American material organizes itself; advertising is seduction, the addict is the ultimate inelastic demand (terrific for commercial interests), and the essays kept turning out to be about seduction — promising more than you can deliver — which strikes me as distinctly American.

DFW: [an appreciative deflection rather than a strong claim:] This is what is neat about coming on the show — being shown things about my own work I had not realized.

DFW: In the later essays (written while typing IJ) footnotes became addictive: a call-and-response in the head, a way to drop back a dimension or make a meta-comment; the compulsion is an anxiety that something is not quite clear dropped to the bottom of the page. There is a reader-cost (notes are more demanding than text and must be read the same way), Pietsch cut about a third, and — his claim on the day — I am now in cold turkey and done with footnotes.

DFW: Apologizing for being smart can become heading off criticism — getting to the self-judgment first so no one else can; it is manipulative, a tic of my own psychology, very American, and something my work would be better with less of. IJ was the first thing I wrote where the narrator is supposed to sound like it is talking to you.

DFW: In principle, yes — but the difference is really two kinds of self-consciousness: the Markson/Rilke/Kafka kind is deeper, wiser, autonomous, almost solipsistic (an involved acceptance of human limitation), where my own kind is consumed with others' perceptions. Marrying intelligence and sadness (as in Wittgenstein's Mistress) is my dream.

DFW: I hadn't thought of it that way, and I know little Thurber. My own account: starting with the state-fair essay I found a persona rooted in genuine terror (I knew fiction, nothing about nonfiction) and hit on candor as the tactic — announcing I am not a journalist and am petrified — producing a lovable schmuck; the Midwestern-naif is a useful tool, and the persona was partly built and deliberately retired with the collection.

DFW: My interest is pace, not style. Fast talkers on a roll stop breathing and stack conjunctions; on the page that is a clue the reader is more listening than reading, that the passage runs on sound, pace, and breath. Sparse punctuation and strategically ungrammatical syntax keep the reader's inner voice sounding like speech. [He neither claims invention nor denies deliberateness.]

DFW: I agree the condensed aphoristic register (Zarathustra, the Investigations, the Tao Te Ching, the end of the Tractatus) is the higher mode, but in nonfiction it would set the writer up as a teacher rather than a companion, and it is the work of a Mozart of living after decades — I am not there yet. On IJ, the thing I am proudest of is that for once I did not fight for every page: I allowed myself faith in a smart editor and cut some of it.

DFW: That would be an effaced narrator as fact rather than literary choice; I have seen it only in spiritual and religious writing. I grant my own companion/tour-guide stance defends a literature inferior to that mode, but insist it is not without value.

DFW: "I don't want to go down that path of trying to anticipate, like a chess player, every reader's reaction." The honest thing is that "the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest" and "you get sort of addicted to 'em" — a lot of the essays were written around the time I was working on the novel, and the notes are mimetic of "a kind of loopy way of thinking".

DFW: "I'm not a great journalist, and I can't interview anybody, but what I can do is kind of, I will slice open my head for you. And let you see a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person's head at this thing."

DFW: "you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment." Also, when people tell you stuff it very often comes out stilted if you write down exactly what they said, so you rewrite it until it sounds more out-loud. After the fact-check scare I started to take better notes and be willing to back stuff up.

DFW: "I mostly typewrite." Some of the magazine stuff went on disk, because magazines ask for the disk and then tell you "we'll just take the disk and massage it" — I still can't get them to be entirely clear what massage means. "I don't have a modem, I've never been on the Internet."

DFW: "Fiction can do what none of the other arts can do." "Fiction lets us pole vault over the walls of self there's something socially redemptive about that." (The reporters note he visibly wrestled with the part of himself that suspects writers are just entertainers and marketers.)

DFW: "This is fairly hard. The job of the book is to induce you to do the work [plowing through the 1,000-plus pages]." (bracket the reporters' insertion.) If you're fifty or a hundred pages in and it hasn't, "then it makes a great paperweight."

DFW: "the worst thing is that I'm alone with the one person who can drive me completely crazy."

DFW: I get a little depressed for a couple of months after finishing a project. "It's like a relative who dies, and you ask, 'So what are they doing now?'"

DFW: I don't claim to be a sociologist or a cultural critic, but "we as a culture have a relationship with pleasure that's unprecedented" — no earlier culture had the surplus for it, "except maybe for royalty in medieval times or in ancient Rome," because they were mostly just trying to get enough to eat. The danger is that "we can kill ourselves with pleasure in a way that other cultures haven't." What interests me is less drug addiction than free will: "whether really the point of life is to experience as much pleasure as possible," and "whether, in fact, America is under that assumption."

DFW: "The genesis of that book was people about age 30 who have been incredibly lucky career-wise" and unhappy anyway: "All of us having similar friends and all of us seeming to be unhappy when none of us had ever been hungry for a day, or cold." We've got "500 channels of television" and a standard of living of near-unprecedented excess, and that gap between the comfort and the sadness felt, to me, sad and true.

DFW: I'd rather not predict, but honestly, "I don't think anything that I've done will last."

DFW: Because art is one of those covers for the things that matter most: "all the really important stuff to talk about is stuff that can't be said- except indirectly." (hyphen spacing as printed)

DFW: "HBO optioned Infinite Jest for X amount of money, which I gleefully took in the full expectation that nothing would come of it." The screenplay is news to me — and anyway, "who wants to watch a movie of like mostly 1100 pages of people talking?"

DFW: Not really. Even without a set, "people tape episodes of Ally McBeal which I have an obsession with the show." (This confession was trimmed from the print issue but preserved in the full web transcript, per the interviewers' footnote 5.)

DFW: Literary notoriety is tiny — about as much attention as a "popular local TV weatherman." And the death-of-the-novel claim is a lie; believing it just shows how hypnotized you are by electronic media.

DFW: "That is the American character. There's this kind of odd combination of exhibitionism and weird self-conscious fear of other people's judgment."

DFW: Exactly: "One of the great puzzles I work with is I'm basically a nerd and everybody I know are nerds and how do you make nerds interesting."

DFW: It does — the writers "could also recreate the textures of blue collar Boston you know which I lived in for three years."

DFW: Among other things, the errors in Infinite Jest "to correct from the hardcover and then there was the copy editing for the essay book." (Wallace treats the hardcover errors as mistakes to correct — an [author] datapoint bearing on the intentional-errors question, but still Everything-else, not IJ-content.)

DFW: "it's advanced tax accounting, which is a long story and you probably don't want to know about it" — I call it "a Will Hunting class."

DFW: "and then there will descend a great silence" — and "the next book that I will finish will be a book of short stuff, some of which is very very very short."

DFW: [he counter-offers loneliness as the through-line:] The book is about a particular loneliness constituted out of situations that are supposed to involve love — sexual and parent-child — with the stories as facets of one jewel of darkness, differentiated mostly by voice. (The working title had been 24 Kinds of Loneliness, after Yates.)

DFW: That one is my deliberate attempt at an epiphany story, with the second half rendered only as an outline because I was too nervous to play the epiphany straight — it is too hard now to stand a character at a window and let realization break across her face without it reading as the thing SNL has parodied.

DFW: There is something to the detractors' heavily-stylized charge, I'll concede: part of the emphasis on style and the line-by-line light show is meant to draw attention away from, or compensate for, material that is almost sentimental (gooey, solar-plexus stuff) which I, raised on SNL, Letterman, and the black humorists, find hard to play straight.

DFW: The black humorists (Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Friedman, McGuane, early Harrison) were my father's writerly generation — the writers who most interested me as a reader, whose kind of work I do not want to do, but who I feel robbed me and other literary readers of an innocence that cannot be recaptured.

DFW: I admit I wince involuntarily at the S-word. Looking back at the story (one of the Devil Is a Busy Man pieces, about the impossibility of giving), I can tell I was so terrified of sentimentality that I loaded it with other business — the narrator's grammar mistakes, the stylistic surface — and the choices come out of a deep fear I do not think is mine alone.

DFW: All art is manipulative; the continuum runs from art whose manipulation you can feel (bad) downward. My workshop-era definition of sentimentality is Updike's — loving your characters more than God loves them — and, reader-side, being manipulated clumsily.

DFW: I am painting myself into a corner: the book is full of grotesquerie, and I sure hope it is not there to attenuate sentimentality — my interest in the grotesque runs on other, unspecified reasons.

DFW: I was 18–20 when SNL was at its zenith, and for me the one-two punch of SNL and Letterman did a number on the American psyche and sense of humor like nothing else — brilliant, exhilarating fun made of hypocrisy and quaintness which, like the sixties black humorists, introduced a carapace of irony into cultural discourse that I do not think the country has recovered from.

DFW: "I am a Five Draft man. I actually learned this at Amherst, in William Kennick's Philosophy 17 and 18, with their brutal paper-every-two-weeks schedules. I got down a little system of writing and two rewrites and two typed drafts. I've used it ever since. I like it. My problem with most interviews is that they're terribly first-draftish."

DFW: "I was cripplingly shy at Amherst. I wasn't in a fraternity and didn't go to parties and didn't have much to do with the life of the College. I had a few very close friends and that was it. I studied all the time. I mean literally all the time. I was one of those people they had to flicker the lights of Frost Library to get out of there on Friday nights who'd be out there right after brunch on Sunday waiting on the steps for them to open the doors. There were happy reasons for all this studying, and sad reasons."

DFW: The disappointments are about who I was when I was there, not about the college: "I let almost no one know me, and I lost the chance to know and learn from most of my peers. It took years after I'd graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I'd been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent."

DFW: It's tempting to — the way it's tempting to eavesdrop on people talking about you when they don't think you can hear. "It took me a while to figure out that reviews of my work are not for me. They're for potential book-buyers."

DFW: Bridges of Madison County on an airplane — "bawled my head off at the end, which was mortifying"; the Jimmy Stewart yelling-and-kissing-and-crying scene in It's a Wonderful Life; "I find the end of Lord of the Rings when Frodo says 'I have been too badly wounded, Sam' moving." And nothing has ever been as purely moving as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit the first time I read it.

DFW: "There really aren't any." The problem with interviews — even considerate ones that let me write the answers out — is that "no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered within the formal constraints" (magazine-space, radio-time, public decorum) "of an interview."

DFW: "one of the really neato-keano things about fiction is that its an artificial enabler of empathy" — in Vollmann's phrase, "It allows us to leap over the wall of self." The stakes are large as I see them: "How to be a real human being instead of just a very sophisticated animal."

DFW: "Fiction and poetry have always gone against the current, and right now the current is easy pleasure." So "Theres got to be some stuff that art-fiction and poetry and essays offer that The Matrix doesnt offer" — otherwise there's no reason for it to exist.

DFW: "I dont think this nonfiction is really as honest as people think it is." "A certain amount of it is spent developing a kind of persona or narrative voice" the reader will like — including "this kind of blushing, kicking the ground, gosh-golly I really dont want to say this but I really will." I don't know that it's dishonest; it's manipulative the same way constructing a first-person narrator is.

DFW: No, and it costs me with the avant-garde crowd, because "I buy more of Gardners premise than a lot of other people do," "particularly when there are venues of entertainment that are more powerful, and less work-intensive than fiction," "which means that fiction needs to carve out its niche."

DFW: "I dont consider myself doing meta-fiction." At Illinois State, home of Dalkey Archive, I'm almost the house realist; I feel biracial about it — the mainstream houses think I'm Mr. Weirdo, and "the true weirdoes know for a fact Im very white bread." "were kind of like indie bands that have been picked up by major studios."

DFW: "Boston has open AA meetings and these things are fascinating. You see for the most part privileged people who, through their own inability to preserve autonomy in the face of available pleasure, have ruined their lives and look like Dachau survivors. That is what Infinite Jest is about, in one sense, but at the same time I only came up with this afterwards, in interviews, when I was trying to construct some kind of halfway truthful narrative about why I wrote what I wrote."

DFW: "Much was made of Orin's sexual behavior, but in the novel it never coalesced. I remember making this connection and beginning to write more of the 'interviews' with that in mind. But it wasn't till I saw the galleys [for the new book] that I noticed how horrific this stuff was."

DFW: Infinite Jest was "a six-year novel that got written in three years". Michael Pietsch cut "two or three hundred pages" from it and shuttled diplomatically between me and the marketers worried over its size; my "big hope was that two or three thousand people would read the book."

DFW: "Novels are like marriages." You have to get into the mood to write them — not because of what writing them will be like, but because "it's so sad to end them. When I finished my first book, I really felt like I'd fallen in love with my main character and that she'd died."

DFW: Not really — "There are at least a dozen writers about my age who do the sort of stuff I do," and "I'm just lucky enough to get a major publishing house to pick up the stuff I do and plug it mercilessly." My readership is "almost all nerdy white males between 30 and 45."

DFW: Next to television, a book like that "was pimple on a flea"; "our standards of what an event is has been drastically altered by TV." "I never had a book that got that kind of attention before."

DFW: Because of what happened "after writer Frank Bruni peeked into his medicine cabinet and reported the contents in a New York Times Magazine piece." "I invited the guy over to my house to meet my dogs and stuff." "He asked to use the bathroom and I didn't think twice about it. It's just creepy."

DFW: Seeing them made me rethink a book made up almost entirely of interviews: "Some were repetitive and some just weren't very good. Others were too brutal," so "I ended up taking 10 or 11 of the interviews out and regarded it as a very helpful movie for me to see."

DFW: The unseen questioner — "She, to me, is the main character of the book."

DFW: I've mostly stopped reading reviews: "Michiko Kakutani stomped on it with golf shoes except I knew she was going to stomp on it with golf shoes."

DFW: "There's a certain amount of formal stunt pilotry in the book": "I as a reader don't like stunt pilotry if it doesn't have much of a reason. The big reason to have 'Adult World II' in outline form is that for myself as a reader I don't buy epiphanies done dramatically anymore. You know: 'She gazed out the window. Suddenly, the revelation hit her face.' I begin wincing when I'm reading shit like that. I don't think readers can buy epiphanies anymore". Some of the stories that look the weirdest were designed to try to access emotional stuff in a different way.

DFW: "Much of the attention was hype attention rather than literary attention, and so it didn't get to me all that much. The book is partly about hype and sort of the spiritual consequences of hype, and then the book itself became an object of hype. For a while I was amused by the irony, and then it just kind of made me feel empty." For the new book: "I kind of hope that this will just be a normal mid-list book" — "I don't know that I'm quite up for another circus."

DFW: "My parents are atheists of the '60s brand. You know, religion for them equals central suppression from authority. But their parents — so my grandparents — were very, very religious." "I think religion kind of skips a generation." And for myself: "I enjoy church and I enjoy being part of a larger thing."

DFW: "America is one big experiment in what happens when you're a wealthy, privileged culture that's pretty much lost religion or spirituality as a real informing presence. It's still a verbal presence — it's part of the etiquette that our leaders use, but it's not inside us anymore".

DFW: I don't think so. I used to plant reversible names in my early work but stopped doing it after a while, because it interested me more than it interested readers.

DFW: Those interpretations run close to what I want: my great fantasy wish is that inside layer upon layer of complication there is the possibility of profound emotional, spiritual, and existential affect — though I worry I am kidding myself and merely wedded to a style that flatters my skills.

DFW: Most voices, even the most misogynistic, carry fear, insecurity, and loneliness I identify with; a couple are close to things I have done and said. If the book works, the men are not freaks or monsters set up for author and reader to point at in shared relief — that move is dead. I recognize myself in almost every speaker.

DFW: Aside from liking the cover's color I had nothing to do with it. The book is titled after its largest mass, the interview sequences, which stitch the other pieces together; the woman conducting the interviews interested me most; and it is really about loneliness, which is what everything I write is about.

DFW: I resist attributing the book a psychology and deny it an ideology — something I have started to get nailed for in interviews.

DFW: My guess is that classic straight-male objectification is rooted almost entirely in fear — a weird fear of being perceived and judged by another subjectivity, existential and humanistic as much as sexual — which is why objectifying and withdrawing are tempting; being seen by another consciousness is horrifying.

DFW: All of this is post-game analysis prompted by good questions, not what was in my head while writing — what actually happened was that I heard these men through the sensibility of a particular woman who was very real to me but did not exist, whom I could neither see nor hear.

No answer on the record — Silverblatt's Church Not Made With Hands gloss runs 11:32–12:24 and Wallace's next turn (12:25) moves to a different topic; the archive's earlier "does not dispute" reading was an inference from his non-response, not a spoken reply.

DFW: The first story and the diving-board story are examples.

DFW: Your interpretations run close to what I want, but I admit I am not deep-down sure which reaction is right — the profound-affect reading or the cold-technician's-book reading; talking to readers beyond you worries me for that reason.

DFW: I deny the book an ideology but grant it is symptomatic of a pernicious complication: everything is rhetoricalized — carrying presentation, interpretation, and a sales pitch, a mental chess of scanning and triaging responses before speaking. Not since the Athenian sophists has a vibrant culture been so saturated in performance and mutual watching — a tremendous engine of loneliness. That was almost an earnest moral statement, and I feel better for having made it.

DFW: I get a little puzzled when people talk about IJ's difficulty; to the best of my recollection it is just not that complicated.

DFW: I would decline the word: once you have determined that something is irresolvable, you have really resolved it; what feels real is that in all kinds of situations most of the energy goes into deciding whether it is worth trying to resolve the thing at all. On the ending specifically: a couple of things toward the end can go one way or the other, and for the most part I just remember the book as kind of sad.

DFW: There's the Maugham Appointment in Samarra figure — fleeing death toward the city where death waits; such cosmic ironies carry a resonance that is not entirely intellectual — it just seems to be the way things are.

DFW: Drawing on Trow: for my generation (born 1962 and after) seamlessness reads as slickness and corporate product, while a certain awkwardness or lack of patrician refinement signals sincerity, being heartfelt, real, homemade. Gaddis's hard-to-read mess, matched to a subject of corporations and forgeries and the sleek lying styles we live inside, is my chief stylistic influence — more Gaddis than anything else.

DFW: I prefer cold and warm to your poles: the question is whether the fundamental transaction is artistic — which involves a gift — or economic, which I regard as cold. TV, commercial film, and top-40 music are very cold media even though they are nearly the last home of melodrama: none of it is for you; it exists to make you like it so rewards accrue to producers and sponsors. Alternative music, poetry slams, and makeshift park art feel warm because the transaction is between people, with economics not at the fundament.

DFW: The writers I respect hold a very high estimation of the reader and require genius as a criterion for good reading as well as good writing — the genius of negotiating the mess, putting things together, and deciding whether something resolves; required on both sides of the transaction.

DFW: "You don't mind weird stuff. So long as there is a neural event going on that placates your realism fears, you'll take it, because that seizure scene is extremely weird and consists mostly of hallucinations. I get very different responses from readers."

DFW: "I don't know where that came from, but I do know that I tried to read that out loud once and will never do it again."

DFW: I'll quote Franzen — there's the bullshit narrative overlay, but the truth is that there's nothing else I want to do. My own totem is the Oliver Sacks story of the Tourettic woman who absorbs passersby's faces and then expresses them all in an alley; I resonate with something about that. And there's the upholsterers anecdote — overhearing two men agonize about creativity and fear of firing who turn out to be furniture upholsterers — which argues that writing is not substantively different from most other jobs.

DFW: When the writing goes well it feels like I'm talking to somebody rather suspiciously like myself. I outsource audience judgment to three or four longtime readers (only one a relative) who've read for me for fifteen years and flag when irritation or gratuitousness thresholds are exceeded, which frees me not to think about audience while drafting.

DFW: No — I'm fairly disciplined as long as they stay in the organ. I'm not indifferent to them and find them extremely upsetting. A review is a special communication between the reviewer and potential book buyers, not one that includes the author; reading one is overhearing people talk about you (the men's-room anecdote from that afternoon).

DFW: God's honest truth, I've read a few and do not understand them; I cannot see in my version of the text any of the stuff they see.

DFW: There are many names for such people (language police, usage warriors); most snoots inherit their snootitude genetically; and SNOOT is my parents' in-house acronym gag, with one expansion for the sympathetic reading and a second for those who find snootishness silly — the gag is my parents', not mine.

DFW: I'm not crazy about impact used as a verb or about proactive; but my true nails-in-palms class is the Bush type — reaching for the big impressive word and getting it wrong while trying to sound authoritative.

DFW: Language is organic and changes through error; today's egregious error (personal used as an adverb) may be fully acceptable in a hundred years. What the two camps fight over are skunked terms — usages that get ratified by a weird plebiscite of usage and then codified by dictionaries after the fact; right and wrong are either the wrong terms entirely or highly time-specific.

DFW: The appearance of elitism is partly a function of the intro writers not being very good writers; I sit on the panel but do not write the intros. In my view hopefully is a fine sentence adverb, only somewhat skunked for really conservative people educated before 1960, and 99% of educated, SWE-fluent speakers have no problem with it.

DFW: Yes; SWE is only one dialect among many (a professional or public English), and very little of the usage debate countenances that fact. I am affecting it on air right now to communicate education and congeniality to the audience's values, and will drop it on the street back home in a rural Midwestern state.

DFW: Everyone makes these dialectal adjustments constantly, below the level of awareness; the nerdy kids who have only the one teacher-pleasing dialect pay heavily for it in the social and playground realms.

DFW: That is my true nails-in-palms error class — the Bush type, reaching for the big impressive word and getting it wrong while trying to sound authoritative.

DFW: SWE performance is self-presentation — education, sensitivity to the rules — and we do judge it in business, politics, and academia; but the twist is that on the street we judge each other just as much by fluency in slang and argot, we just never make that judging itself the object of discourse.

DFW: Yes, the split-infinitive rule is a Latin inheritance, but it is hard to name a social custom that is not arbitrary in that sense; at a given moment in linguistic history we form impressions of each other from semi-conscious cues, and SWE fluency is one of them.

DFW: I confess I feel more and more like the resident descriptivist here, and I won't rank offenders — what has really changed is the modes of linguistic dissemination: a brief slip by an announcer speaking under tremendous time pressure now goes out to a million or two million people at once, so errors drive street-level language change far faster than such change used to move, and it grates on the ears of conservatives like me who have cathected the standard rules they grew up with; no accident that the caller is upset at the media.

DFW: Sure — but that is not what bothers me. What bothers me, particularly about radio, is that it erases dialectal and regional difference: a bland media accent you can hear all the way from near El Paso to Presque Isle, Maine, flattening out the accent differences that make English delightful — though I grant the economics behind it are sound.

DFW: I reject the herd-instinct explanation: media speech is homogenized not by some unconscious social impulse but by demographic and economic studies showing dialectal difference alienates listeners — and language change driven by corporate and economic imperatives bothers me more than change driven by dialect or education.

DFW: You cannot treat all tomes as equivalent: a descriptive compendium of a forty-million-speaker blend is important work that ought to be done descriptively, and a different thing entirely from a usage dictionary that draws lines. I love Safire's column and the Joys-of-Yiddish genre and find Spanglish kind of delightful, though I allow that if Spanish were my main language I might feel differently.

DFW: No; being a snoot is a lonely, stressful way to be — like having a big red button that gets pushed all the time — and I would honestly prefer to be less snooty than I am. What I want is for students to be able to produce gorgeous, concise standard English when it counts — in writing, job interviews, professional venues — for the credibility and education it communicates.

DFW: It's a regional term, also known as a snuggie.

No answer on the record — the host puts the snoot question to Linda herself, and Garner fields the substance (relishing her self-abuse coinage with the old-euphemism pun); Wallace does not speak in the exchange.

No answer on the record — garner fields it: he trains lawyers, does not believe they keep the standards the caller imagines, and calls them the worst perpetrators of gobbledygook, adding the even-handed example of the Rhodes-Scholar president's Gore-and-I hypercorrection; Wallace's own response to the media-errors theme comes only when the host turns the worst-offenders question to him directly (above).

DFW: It turns out to be me, twice; I plead infection by my native dialect and argue that awkwardness is in the ear of the beholder, later adding that my spoken fudge carried tone quotes — it functioned as a single linguistic unit.

DFW: Bingo. My considered distinction: what I rail at my students about is writing, where intellectual and linguistic credibility matter far more; mangling public English is upsetting, but spoken language deserves latitude.

DFW: [after Garner names the fused participle, a pointed aside:] Under the rules of certain dialects — some forms of Black English — the fused participle is perfectly okay.

DFW: It grew from sadness: after a couple of people I knew, my own age though not close friends, had committed suicide, it became obvious something was going on — upper-middle-class material comfort coexisting with a great sadness and emptiness.

DFW: The English root of the word addict is the Latin addicere, meaning religious devotion; we all worship and all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something — pleasure, drugs, money, or the tennis academy's version, disciplined individual achievement.

DFW: Tennis is the one sport I knew well enough to say why it is beautiful; it involves two very bounded spaces and sending stuff back and forth between them, which connects to the book, along with chess-like thinking several moves ahead and a colder combat-at-a-distance quality. Schtitt is a vaguely Germanic-sounding name to Americans, and not the subtlest character in the book.

DFW: There is the line that irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage (Hyde, quoted in E Unibus Pluram): in US entertainment irony pretends to protest when it really is not, and it can be both a wake-up call and an anesthetic. This creates a double bind — you either direct the attack only at people willing to follow the complexity (not those enslaved by entertainment), or you make the attack on entertainment entertaining, in which case you have been captured by the very thing you are fighting.

DFW: There is a lot of narcissism in self-hatred; she is the rare protagonist I did not like. There's the wounded-inner-child paradox: the more we are taught to list and resent what we were deprived of as children, the more we remain children.

DFW: I am more scared of us than of anybody else; SUVs are the national response to fear; and people hate people, not freedom.

DFW: The people I know who rebel meaningfully do not buy a lot of stuff, do not get their view of the world from television, and will spend four or five hours researching an election; the forms of rebellion that end up changing anything here will be very quiet and very individual, and probably not that interesting to look at from the outside.

DFW: In reading I can jump over the wall of self and inhabit somebody else, discovering that what they think or feel is often much like my own and finding a tremendous reassurance in that communion and empathy; TV, though easier, is much lonelier, and books also give more mobility within directed time (you can reread a paragraph).

DFW: My generation still regards itself as children and simply won't grow up, and the culture deliberately feeds whatever in us stays infantile, selfish and greedy, because that is what keeps the consumer and entertainment economy running. (Die Welt prints: "Das Problem meiner Generation ist, dass wir uns immer noch selbst als Kinder betrachten"; "Wir wollen einfach nicht erwachsen werden.")

DFW: Being compelled to follow every impulse and satisfy every desire is really a kind of slavery, even though the culture dresses it up as freedom of choice and the right to consume. (Die Welt prints: "eine Art von Sklaverei"; "Freiheit der Wahl und Recht auf Konsum.")

DFW: That all that matters is what you yourself want — that is the American ethic, and in fact it's what the system says a thousand times a day. (Die Welt prints: "dass es nur darum geht, was man selbst will"; "Das ist die amerikanische Ethik"; "Aber de facto ist das, was unser System tausendmal am Tag sagt.")

DFW: No. If I did, it would run day and night and I'd be good for nothing else — I'm no different from most people, just as greedy for anything that tempts the eye. (That last German sentence carries no quotation here per the note's ASCII-only rule; paraphrased.)

DFW: No. "There's a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture," the harder it has to be marketed — "So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it." "A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking about." "Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product." (He waved the point off as almost too obvious to print.)

DFW: Jonathan is "one of my few writer friends," and I feel admiration mixed with a mild contempt for how savvy he got about handling it — the whole thing is enough that "the head just goes around and around and around."

DFW: Rigorous. Students face a small paper on each book, a ten-page midterm and a twenty-page final. "There's a weird kind of flabby mythos around creative writing," and "I'm sort of a fascist opponent to that pedagogy."

DFW: I'm finishing a nonfiction book on the inventor of set theory. When I write, "I'm poised, ready to write, 10 hours a day."

DFW: "for a long time there was no better airplane reading than Tom Clancy."

No answer on the record — the framing is Conan's scripted opening monologue, delivered before Wallace is brought in; Wallace's first turn is a bare thank-you, and his first substantive answer addresses the five-oranges question below.

DFW: Mathematics is concerned entirely with abstract stuff: the number five is five of anything in particular, no particular things, and that abstraction is exactly what makes math hard even for adults. Five oranges minus two is a particular case; five minus three equals two is a theorem true in all cases — and math cares almost exclusively about the latter, which is the genuinely weird thing.

DFW: Blame the Greeks, who drew little line between math and metaphysics; infinity first shows up metaphysically in Anaximander, and the Greek word for it also meant mess or disorder — I'd gloss it with Genesis: the universe before creation, without limit and form.

DFW: Zeno was a Parmenidean who held motion to be impossible and really was trying to mess with people's heads — to show you cannot leave the room. What he actually introduced was the tricky problem of handling infinite quantities, which Aristotle spends long stretches of the Metaphysics and Physics trying to defuse.

DFW: Right — there are small infinities in the form of infinitesimals (think one over infinity), used heavily in the early calculus of the 1600s; most people with math training will say Zeno's paradox is really about infinite series, which modern analysis knows can have finite sums, and proving that is part of what the book is about.

DFW: Eudoxus and Archimedes had the method of exhaustion, a workaround for a Greek mathematics that lacked zero and struggled with curves; it approximates a curve by coming arbitrarily close to an infinite-sided polygon — an early, early form of integral calculus, and a digression the book touches.

DFW: I'm no expert — I got into the book as an exercise in technical writing, making really abstract material clear and even pretty; the series came from the outfit behind Penguin Lives, whose idea was non-scientist authors who'd had a little of the material in their background, and I'd had some of this in college, though not in a distinguished way.

DFW: The D was something I'd told the producer — I didn't know it was going to be aired. [The host jokes about outing his grades.] [He says nothing about Infinite Jest, which the host name-checks in the sign-off.]

DFW: Thin in this record. [He engages the Boston-as-key framing and answers with a point about Boston dialect — but the substance of that dialect answer is the print-carried portion (pointed to Burn ch.17), not spelled out on the tape. The tape-only addition recorded here is that the friend was actually Alex Star, the Globe Ideas editor who assigned the piece and held the Boston-novel reading.]

DFW: The name Whitey was rare enough that I do not claim to have thought it through; Bulger was not yet nationally infamous when IJ was being written; and Sorkin was also the surname of an academic television critic, making the character name a private conflation gag gettable, by my own estimate, by exactly one person — myself.

DFW: That is interesting — and, prefacing that I do not remember IJ very well and am guessing: Gately is talking about certain spiritual realities and what you have to do to cultivate a relationship in a churchgoing or 12-step context; E&M's agenda is diametrically different, wanting more than a merely technical understanding of infinity.

DFW: Thin in this record. [The question's content does not survive on the tape; what survives is his delight at the homework — nobody coming to the hotel room usually knows Marlon Bain by name.]

DFW: IJ was the first book I did on a computer; on typewriters footnotes are an immense pain, so the computer is what made the apparatus a live option, and it became a neat way to have a schizoid second narrative voice (I rarely have just one voice in my head). The device is addictive and can mess with you as a storyteller; E&M is the final footnote-heavy book, and the new collection's near-footnotelessness is a point of pride. I had to be reminded of the word askesis — I like it enough that I will use it — and I have little sense of what my own work is like or how it changes.

DFW: The series came to me via a fax from my agent that reached me in Texas; the original plan I dickered over was a book on Gödel and the incompleteness theorems, which I abandoned as too heavy math-wise — set theory I had actually studied, whereas on Gödel I would have been faking expertise (the series gave Gödel to someone with a personal connection to it).

DFW: Yes — the 2000 review is when the first note-taking for E&M happened.

DFW: English/philosophy double major; the philosophy was mathematical logic and semantics, which carries the history of math without the calculus pyramid; one summer (1983, home in Illinois) I took an actual set-theory course at the University of Illinois toward my undergraduate thesis.

DFW: You found the shakiest section, I'll concede — the derived-sets / uniqueness-theorem stretch, which I had considered cutting — [he gives an impromptu set-theory tutorial re-deriving the null-set walkdown]. (A deeper admission, that this was the part of set theory he understood least well as a student, was marked off the record on the tape; Crain later published the full audio.)

DFW: In the anthropology of religion you build an idea of God by removing all the limitations and imperfections you see in the world, and infinity is the same move — everything is limited; imagine something without that. And I'll voice the deflationary counter myself: a Kroneckerian would say infinity and God are the same sort of thing, pie-in-the-sky dreams of people who have not adjusted to the ineluctability of limit — a unicorn made by gluing concepts together.

DFW: A composite of three real people, two of them math teachers I am still in touch with; none had read the book yet.

DFW: My editor Jesse Cohen gave me grief over it; I kept it because, relative to its coverage, the book really is a booklet, changed it only inconsistently, and the remaining usage is a mistake on my part.

DFW: Fall is an introductory workshop; spring is an advanced-composition essay class I planned to run experimentally, like a fiction workshop but for nonfiction; the one-class-a-semester load was a reason I took the Pomona job.

DFW: I had delivered the post-editing draft that morning; most pieces are novella-ish; publication is expected in about a year; it is roughly Brief Interviews length but pretty different (BI was more a cycle); at most one story carries a couple of asterisk footnotes — the footnote monkey is off my back, and it is not all under my own name.

DFW: [a deadpan Clinton-denial joke] — then, sincerely: please do not quote one word out of a sentence.

DFW: "As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it's supposed to be about." The writer filters all reality according to his own convictions and loyalties, and everybody's pissed off and impervious to argument from any other side.

DFW: "since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it's like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that's having the problems ours is."

DFW: "My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more."

DFW: Pieces either come alive to me or they don't, and well over half do not. "What anybody else ever gets to see of mine, writing-wise, is the product of a kind of Darwinian struggle in which only things that are emphatically alive to me are worth finishing, fixing, editing, copyediting, page-proof-tinkering, etc."

DFW: "Let's acknowledge first that this Q actually preceded the last one, and that you just inserted an artful little bridge-sentence in your question-text to suggest otherwise." "I have tried probably ten serious times to quit chewing tobacco in the last decade. I've never even made it a year." The hardest thing about quitting is that it "makes me stupid. Really stupid. As in walking into rooms and forgetting why I'm there, drifting off in the middle of sentences". "But I'd prefer to live past fifty. This is my Tobacco Story."

DFW: The symptoms and hospitalizations get lingered over with anecdotes and photos, but there's little actual argument for the connections: "the ∞-drove-Cantor-mad stuff was dreck, the very worst kind of appeal to a flabby, unconsidered pop version" of the mad-genius syndrome.

DFW: The old prediction even sounds dated to me now. The real war now is between the inner sap — the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff — and the part that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by them. I'd offer The Simpsons as important art that is also relentlessly corrosive to the soul, where everything is parodied and ridiculous. Today's artistic suffering is to be the battleground for that war, neither impulse being stupid or wrong.

DFW: The logic ends in celebrity autopsy, with childhood friends of the celebrity sitting around talking about whether the person was good while the organs are being excised. We lost that shame hobble; only time will tell how far we go.

DFW: In a country where we have it as easy as we do, one of our big dread vectors is boredom — little edges of despair and soul-level boredom. It's a hugely important problem and yet none of us talk about it. All jobs, including the writer's, are filled with horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anybody else about.

DFW: I'd disclaim the distinction — I don't know many writers who don't think of themselves as realists. Capital-R realism's idea that small banal details are somehow more real or authentic than large or strange ones always seemed to me a little bit crude; Smithy worked as an inverted Kafka, surreal frame with a banal climax.

DFW: If you could articulate well enough what something felt like to somebody, you'd have a fantastic template for how the world worked; language smuggles the inner/outer distinction into every conversation.

DFW: No — reading a review of your own stuff is like overhearing: "if you had a chance to overhear two people talking about you, right? You'd do it, but you wouldn't be glad you did it, because the conversation's not for you, and it always ends up making you crazy and hurting your feelings. So, after having been at this a while, I just no longer read them. I think book reviewing is a hard business."

DFW: "I don't know anything about the guy. I was on a panel with him once. I remember he wore leather pants and I found it unusual. And that was my one impression of Dale Peck. More power to him, as far as I'm concerned. I just feel like he and I are just not even in the same area code."

DFW: "Yeah, I got hate mail about that."

DFW: "I get worried when people draw attention to it, because I feel like if they're able to notice it, I'm not doing the job entirely well. I don't know that all of Infinite Jest is a support structure for the last sentence, but I, too, like the last sentence. And I didn't want to wrap various plots up neatly within the frame of the book, I think, largely because a lot of commercial entertainments that I grew up with use that and it's not entirely real. It's a kind of falsely satisfying way to wrap up various things that happen, and now I'm just maundering on."

DFW: "Well, I've got that wrapped up as a nice soundbyte answer because I've been asked a whole, whole lot why, after making the reader kind of climb this big hill does Infinite Jest not wrap up. That book, actually, for me does resolve, but it resolves sort of outside the right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens."

DFW: "to an extent I agree with you, and I think this is an interesting legacy of postmodern skepticism. The idea that everything is spin. That there is no truth. That you can derive one truth even about the day's events from, say, Fox News, and another from the great liberal conspiracy of the New York Times and CNN — is, I think, both liberating and exciting and also extremely scary."

DFW: "That is an uncomfortably good question. You're referring to a long essay I did about a cruise ship that was funny, and I rather liked it when I first did it. And now, about ten years later, particularly with respect to certain people I met on the cruise, when I read sections of it I wince because it seems cruel. I know I don't do as much nonfiction as I used to as a writer, and I think part of it is that I don't have the heart or stomach to say even truthful things that might hurt somebody's feelings."

DFW: I was interested in something more like two lines that were almost parallel but not parallel, which meet somewhere but not necessarily within the actual frame of the narrative. My hope was that a close, attentive reading would give a reasonably good idea of how the various plots were going to resolve.

DFW: There are between three and five possible explanations, if the book's set up right, any one of which is not implausible and not wholly uninteresting. I propose to end it without ending it right there.

DFW: I'd planned a whole cycle by that sort of pseudonymous author; the transparent disguise failed partly because I'm dumb and out of touch.

DFW: The mid-80s grad-school war: professors read brand names as affected tics, low culture rather than the high culture whose purpose was to redeem us from the crap, while for me brand names were simply the world I knew — the same way the Romantics wrote about babbling brooks. Both sides earnest, reading completely differently.

DFW: My Holy Trinity of American writers is Cynthia Ozick, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, with Denis Johnson coming up very, very hard as fourth.

DFW: It entered in a weird sideways way that mostly involved being really poor.

DFW: I'd praise Morris Kline's history of mathematical thought.

DFW: My nervous system isn't geared toward dense human populations.

DFW: Television acculturated me to identify the single main character as myself, with everyone else reduced to a figurant or a secondary [figurant is his own word]. I prefer, reading and writing, several things happening at once, with communities in the piece rather than one main character — I associate the binary version with Richard Powers. There is no aesthetic rationale to claim — it is a weird psychological thing; multi-strand narrative is simply more appetizing to me.

DFW: At 42, aging feels autumnal — much of emotion's resonance comes from finitude and bittersweetness, which is actually quite beautiful — though the alternative I immediately float is that I am simply sick and need some medication, and that joy and lightheartedness are the real thing; I look forward to my 50s.

DFW: I reject the media-theory gloss as the sexy answer I could riff on but that is false to the primitive, by-ear, by-stomach way the writing actually happens. Laughter at my sentence length reads to me as evidence of failure — a rightly built long sentence should go unnoticed; my real concern with attention is structural, not at the sentence level.

DFW: A piece that is alive reveals, about two-thirds through, how it will end — in pitch, not just plot; lacking that, it is probably dead. The Freytag climax-and-denouement arc is prurient in shape, and the tight commercial arc has been ruined for me by a lifetime of televised, packaged narrative — though I concede this is recoil, not sophistication (I happily sit through formulaic movies as a passive viewer).

DFW: I cannot compare noticing machines but I know my wiring: strong on visual and sound, weak on taste and smell — people have pointed out only about three food mentions across my whole output. Nonfiction is hard for me precisely because reality over-supplies detail, where fiction lets you choose what exists.

DFW: Pretty good, not great, by my own rating; I learn more per class than the students, because articulating things to someone who does not yet get it is the best exercise there is. Teaching quality tracks how well you read people, not literature.

DFW: GWCH is literally juvenilia — I'd point newcomers instead to Little Expressionless Animals.

DFW: First draft longhand; second draft rewritten longhand on a clipboard; then typed; then retyped entirely from the top off hard copy (not computer-fiddled), with a one-to-two-week rest before redoing — trading drudgery for permission to be crummy in early drafts. I suspect computer-native writers cannot replicate it. I write without music but edit with it.

DFW: The book dates to roughly 1989 and a six-month immersion with my roommate in Public Enemy, N.W.A. and others; afterward I went back to the Carpenters. My editor had to explain what Dr. Dre became; someone finally played me an Eminem album and I was startled by how good it was; I essentially still listen to what I listened to in 1984.

DFW: Smart, reasonably happy, well-adjusted students with priorities in order and awareness of a world beyond Claremont — advantages I lacked at my own similar Massachusetts college — and I joke that I'm becoming a sweatshirt-wearing booster.

DFW: No — I am a private citizen, the cycle's journalism is savage on all sides, and my own state is so upset and negative that I would just be one more spittle-spewing person hopping up and down; I lack the balance the job would need.

DFW: Blurb-speak of that kind is literally meaningless advertorial hyperbole — though preferable to savage meaningless phrases.

DFW: The adolescent fantasy of growing up to be like the immortals gives way, when the comparison is actually posed, to wanting to throw up. I count myself a solid part of a community of young-to-middle-aged American writers doing fairly interesting stuff, and I'll state flatly that no current writer will approach the stature of Joyce, Mann, or Kafka because the period is not right for it.

DFW: People who want huge money or celebrity go into film, TV, pop music, or the Internet, and the situation has advantages: "Huge amounts of money and fame deform artists, deform art" — "the fact that there is no real money or fame in serious culture here helps keep these vocations purer, cleaner." In another respect, of course, it's sad and scary: "Serious art is where difficult, complex questions get made urgent and human and real".

DFW: Not techniques, not talents. "The abilities of writers like St. Paul, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Camus to render so fully, passionately, the spiritual urgencies they felt as, saw as reality continue to fill me with an awe that is almost despair: To be able to be such a person! But what are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings — capacities of spirit — rather than technical abilities or special talents."

DFW: Genteelisms are puff words: more syllables is just puffed up. Why say prior to rather than before, when everybody knows what before means? Same with utilize for use and individual for person. And there's a Latin-roots gotcha — if you say prior to and subsequent to, you're in a high-level way messing up grammatically, because it should logically be posterior to, which nobody would say. Once you notice this stuff (all the people who say at this time rather than now) you're permanently bugged, but you get to be more careful and attentive in your own writing, so you become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that's all around.

DFW: The long pieces do share a concern with ideology: my research reading split neatly into apologists and opponents, arguing past each other like an old married couple where everyone has a point but no real conversation happens. My own project was structural — rhetorically to produce at least the appearance of being more fair and broad-minded toward right-wing talk radio than it is toward its own opponents.

DFW: I dispute being a young writer at all and resist both labels: moral connotes self-righteousness and judgment to me, while post-moral sounds like amoral, and since roughly modernism literary art has become an almost exclusively aesthetic enterprise. I'd reframe it as two problems — the perennial one of what it is to be a human being, and a rhetorical/technical one barely discussed before the postmodern era: works of art are public documents designed to please and edify others, so the question is not only what is true for the writer but what will land on readers' nerve endings as true in a given year. That environment has grown so cynical and overhyped that my writing students now fear seeming sentimental more than seeming obscene, and genuine treatment of grief has been adulterated almost out of reach.

DFW: [he deflects the compliment rather than restate the conclusion on air:] You describe it better than I would. The construction instead: from a literary standpoint the book is a train wreck — banal, insipid, in places incoherent — and since that point plus examples fits in two paragraphs, the essay had to become about something else: why I expected it to be better, given my guilty addiction to sports memoirs and their reliably bitter disappointment for someone who played sports as a kid.

DFW: To build on it: Gourmet's subtitle, the magazine of good living, turns out interpretable in several directions, and three or four pieces in the book are nearly inexplicable unless the piece frequently acknowledges the organ it appears in (Rolling Stone and the McCain piece is my other example). The magazines that commissioned and chopped the pieces were somehow allergic to an article discussing its own venue and the demographic and rhetorical considerations that follow, so the book is the only place I had the space and permission for that — at which point, strangely, the piece is no longer in the organ it discusses.

DFW: The Dostoevsky piece is in the book partly because — as with my last four or five books — I have a really good editor, and the pieces are selected and ordered to establish connections that may be obvious to nobody but the two of us; I'd also reach for Stanley Cavell's idea of the conditions of an audience's willingness to be pleased. Words like moral and ethical connote the Dostoevsky/Romantic era of the artist as a solitary heroic figure, whereas I see the perennial what-is-it-to-be-human problem sitting alongside the rhetorical problem of art as public communication that must land as true for readers now.

DFW: My grandparents had seen roughly a hundred kisses before their first real one, my parents thousands via Hollywood, and before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses — so much of my thought the first time I kissed was whether I was doing it right, according to how I had seen it done. And it is beyond winning: I no longer believe it makes sense to talk about a battle, because the language in which we would describe the battle is already the language of images.

DFW: Fail is a very dangerous word: if I begin thinking in terms of failure I get really depressed and the game is over, because I have already decided. Most of what I start I don't finish, and what survives almost always changes sometime in the doing of it.

DFW: Many of the writers I admire are interested in using postmodern techniques and aesthetics to discuss or represent very old, traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality, emotion, and community — postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends; if there is such a group, that is the group I would want to belong to.

DFW: The American reflex is toward individual uniqueness — what makes David, David; but the struggle for those in America is to conceive of identity as part of something larger, for which there is very little cultural support, and without it the country splits apart, fragments, atomizes.

DFW: My editor took the comparison for a joke but I mean it seriously: watching tennis on TV, with slow-mo and multiple angles, is to seeing it live as watching video porn is to actual lovemaking — more clinical, and weirdly it makes the viewer feel so privileged that the loss goes unnoticed. What's lost is the sensuous physicality, above all the sheer pace and speed of the ball.

DFW: If it's apt, it's apt.

DFW: Businesslike — not cold or emotionless (he does sometimes betray emotion), but he doesn't get upset over little things the way McEnroe could and then raise his game off the anger. If you want human drama he might be a little dull, which for me is a feature: it puts more attention on the game itself.

DFW: A great competitor probably needs psychological acuity — an ability to empathize without sympathy with an opponent and what the opponent is thinking — and there's a certain way of moving in and out of yourself to win consistently that may be a little like writing fiction.

DFW: [his substantive answer runs into the corporate-power diagnosis rather than a discrete media-concept rebuttal:] Corporations have gained cultural and political power because it now takes large amounts of money to run for office, and "they have the legal status of a person, but they don't have a conscience or soul the way people do." (No separate quotable span survives for the consumerism-vs-media framing; the consumerism substance is carried as this corporate diagnosis.)

DFW: I endorse it: a cynical audience reads a virtuous hero's qualities as presentations by someone trying to get something rather than as real virtue; because everyone has seen so many performances, "we simply assume now that everything is a performance and it's strategic and it's tactical. It's a very sad situation." Nations pass through periods of great idealism and great cynicism, America and Western Europe now in the latter.

DFW: "I tend to start three or four things for every one thing that gets finished." And: "A lot of stuff that I write just goes in a big box in my office and no one else ever sees them." (He also disclaims detailed recall of IJ throughout the interview — a standing weighting caution.)

DFW: My warning: "there may be a backlash, a kind of spasmodic reaction against it," and the alternative to political counterbalance is a form of fascism — "what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state."

DFW: "I'm suspicious of the word" pure. My example is my wife, a painter who mainly makes paintings as gifts rather than chasing galleries. To extend it: "the only way in America to produce pure art would be to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce that art only as gifts, where there's no money involved" and no attempt at publicity — but if everyone did that there would be no public art, a paradox I have no answer to. (tape) Extending it further, there's Tolstoy's claim that art's one legitimate agenda is advancing Christian brotherhood — technically propaganda, but in Tolstoy's non-dogmatic version without propaganda's smell, and so idealistic a standard that almost nothing but a work like The Death of Ivan Ilyich could meet it.

DFW: [he ends bleakly:] "these are very bad times in America because the American electorate is simply not interested for the most part in much of this right now."

DFW: I know it only more or less.

DFW: MapQuest is my example of the internet drowning us in information — just another machine, like a dishwasher, doing a job: it will find any place you can name but never tell you whether the place is worth going to.

DFW: Nothing today is left to chance; the color of a dress in a TV ad has been focus-grouped by psychologists who want inside the consumer's mind, and that total control is itself what produces contemporary confusion.

DFW: Let me reframe it: the physical continent conquered, the American project has turned to conquering the psychological world — engineering certainty that what I say triggers exactly the reaction I intend. [Twice in the interview he undercuts the diagnostician role:] I do not really understand America that well.

DFW: Corporations courting identified demographics produce a strange new intimacy: they want to know everything about you while being interested in nothing about who you are; the big difference is between information and significance.

DFW: Mister Squishy began as an idea about a jury — twelve men who must reach agreement — but became a story about how it feels to be inside the huge market-research mechanism built to manipulate people, and how it feels to realize that you, the reader, are being manipulated.

DFW: We are drowning in information, opinions, and perspectives; I know my own opinion is only mine, I know the reasonable objections to the going schools of thought, and I know my own cognition is subjective and self-deceiving.

DFW: The brevity was not designed; it just happened that way. The story came to me third-hand, and what concerns me in it is that you hurt what you most love in the world.

DFW: The stories in the book are about a tenth of what I started in the period — ninety percent die when everything suddenly feels forced halfway through and I stop; survival has much to do with chance, and less with how a story starts than how it ends. If I knew why, I would write much faster and finally make decent money.

DFW: I work slowly, line by line, and want the result to sound more like somebody thinking than somebody talking — and I concede this can make the work hard to read and even harder to translate.

DFW: I do not understand realism that describes the world around a person without describing how that person perceives it; the big challenge for contemporary prose is that it should sound like the soul.

DFW: In Mann's day there was no TV or other media fixing your position as viewer and showing people from outside; for literature to stay aesthetically alive it must achieve more than movies and TV — for me, the interior register the screen cannot reach. I'd decline the Modernism/interior-monologue genealogy — I do not really understand my own method.

DFW: I'd deflect the label: one could equally say I deal with characters who struggle with intellectual questions.

DFW: The writer in perfect control is a popular myth: I draft by hand, draft after draft, type late, and by around the tenth draft am thinking only about single lines and how they sound (Mister Squishy's roughly eighty pages took about four months).

DFW: I spend hours on whether a comma belongs somewhere and whether a character would use a given word.

DFW: The design problem underneath is that if the fabric of the present is subjective interiors, showing a person thinking cannot be done the straight way; every interior is subjective and self-deceiving.

DFW: The music is a cacophony of thought; Oblivion is a very sad book because the characters think on and on and cannot stop — and I get hate letters from readers about exactly this.

DFW: I reject that framing: what I want is intimacy. Thomas Mann is not intimate; the literature I loved as a kid let me relate to a mind telling me a story, and I want the reader to recognize that this is how the reader's own mind sounds — and if that gets boring, so is thinking, and so is talking with people.

DFW: It was the most painful thing I ever wrote; it is about narcissism, which is part of depression; the character has traits of mine, and while writing it I lost friends, became ugly and unhappy, and yelled at people. Depression is a cruelly self-centered illness, and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground renders that self-centeredness well.

DFW: In the age of therapy, the story means to show how repellent a specifically modern spiritual pain — complete with all its psychological insight — makes a person.

DFW: You cannot live in the world without pain, spiritual and physical; we develop mechanisms to deal with it — therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success — and all of these can work, and can also become a problem themselves.

DFW: The pursuit of happiness was written into the American founding documents; today Americans are rich beyond need and enjoy liberties unknown before (though those liberties are endangered in the current political climate) and forget how wonderful that is — I reach for the proverb about giving a man enough rope to hang himself.

DFW: I'd decline that framing: corporations don't cheat people; they're just machines for making money. What is true is that Americans have granted these machines enormous influence over their lives, that corporations steer behavior, and that consumption is an ideology.

DFW: It is hard to arouse compassion for the white man because he is in charge; but maybe my books are about men trying to deal with being small and insignificant — the frontiersman myth promises an independent, self-sufficient man, while actual men live in cities and work for big companies in small interchangeable niches, and maybe that is one reason these men are so sad.

DFW: "What made the McCain idea interesting to me was that I'd seen a tape of his appearance on Charlie Rose at some point the previous year, in which he spoke so candidly and bluntly about stuff like campaign finance and partisan ickiness, stuff I'd not heard any national-level politician say. There was also the fact that my own politics were about 179 degrees from his, so there was no worry that I'd somehow get seduced into writing an infomercial."

DFW: "In the best political tradition, I reject the premise of your question. The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February 2000 and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq time-tables, etc., are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now — for me, at least."

DFW: The Buzz plan "involved sending out a great many signed first editions — or maybe reader copies — to people who might generate Buzz. What they did was mail me a huge box of trade-paperback-size sheets of paper, which I was to sign" — "I basically spent an entire weekend signing these pages." It got so boring "I started doing all kinds of weird little graphic things to try to stay alert and engaged." The smiley face "is a vestige of an amateur cartoon character I used to amuse myself with in grade school. It's physically fun to draw".