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

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: 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: "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: "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: 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: "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: 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: "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: "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: "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 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: (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: 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: [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: 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: "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: [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 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: "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: 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: [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: "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: "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: 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: 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: 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: "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: 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: 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: 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: 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 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: "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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: [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.)