IJ study archive

Matt Bucher's wallace-l / fandom trilogy (Fantods; Twenty Years of wallace-l; wallace-l Interviews David Lipsky)

source

One note covering the three substantive IJ-related posts found on Matt Bucher's blog (mattbucher.com), archived as:

  • `[local source] — "Fantods: David Foster Wallace, wallace-l, and Literary Fandom Online" (24 Nov 2009; conference paper, Footnotes conference, CUNY Grad Center)
  • `[local source] — "Twenty Years of wallace-l" (29 Apr 2016)
  • `[local source] — "wallace-l Interviews David Lipsky" (2 Apr 2010; long group interview, the list questioning Lipsky about Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself)

His other IJ-tagged posts are link-stubs (skipped). His big IJ essays proper were published elsewhere and are already in the archive: the Infinite Summer guest posts (why-read + Anxiety of Influence) and Elegant Complexity (book).

TL;DR

Bucher — wallace-l admin since 2002, publisher of Carlisle's Elegant Complexity — is the institutional memory of online Wallace fandom. "Fantods" is the closest thing to a written history of the community this archive's other sources keep gesturing at (wallace-l, The Howling Fantods, the samizdat circulation of uncollected DFW); the 2016 post adds hard numbers; the Lipsky interview extracts primary biographical/compositional testimony not in the other interview sources.

Key claims

Fantods (2009)

  • wallace-l was born of a schism: pynchon-l members discussing IJ in Feb 1996 were told to get their own list; Dan Schmidt volunteered; April 1996 launch on waste.org (named for Lot 49's W.A.S.T.E.). pynchon-l stayed hostile — Wallace called an "unskilled imitator," "You're no Thomas Pynchon."
  • Most early Wallace scholars came through the list (Carlisle, Boswell, Hering, Jacobs); fans, not academics, drove discovery/publication of "The Planet Trillaphon" (found in Amherst archives by a fan in July 2008, takedown notice from Nadell, then published via a lister at Tin House, Fall 2009).
  • Pre-archive fandom ran on "USPS-delivered samizdat" — xeroxes of uncollected pieces mailed around, "a back-channel inter-library loan and sub rosa mail system"; translators of the Italian/Dutch/Spanish/German editions consulted the list's hive-mind on idiomatic passages.
  • Wallace refused to acknowledge the list. Asked in 2003 to sign a greeting to wallace-l: "You know, for emotional reasons and sanity, I have to pretend this doesn't exist."
  • Closes with Kinbote from Pale Fire: "for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word."

Twenty Years of wallace-l (2016)

  • 77,000 emails, 1400+ subscribers in 2016; top posters George Carr (3,707), Hillary Brown, Prabhakar Ragde, Maria Bustillos, Bucher himself.
  • Post-2008 the list's energy moved to Twitter/Facebook; Bucher defends email's "primitiveness, its text-only nature, and its anonymity."
  • waste.org has hosted it all for free for 20+ years, anonymously, asking that donations go to the EFF instead. George Carr's appended story documents the samizdat "DFW Reader" group effort.

wallace-l interviews Lipsky (2010)

  • Lipsky's theory of the suicide, stated plainly: "I don't think of it as an expression of his will... I think of it as a medical story, a prescription drug story" — twenty years on Nardil, impossibly hard to come off, "a small chance that you might not be able to come back on. That's what happened to David." He explicitly de-links the death from The Pale King.
  • DFW quoted on the IJ-era crisis: "I'm not Elizabeth Wurtzel. I'm not biochemically depressed... It was almost more of a sort of an artistic and religious crisis... I got to have a midlife crisis at twenty-seven."
  • Composition testimony: LaMont Chu's fame-hunger was "bitter truths" about the young writer's craving for print ("Only a writer under, like, thirty would have known that that came out of bitter truths"); Pietsch's cuts ("that book is partly him. A lot of the cuts are where he convinced me of the cuts"); the deliberate 9-point font; Costello: Wallace announced in college "I want to write books people will read 100 years from now."
  • Wallace on Broom's ending and the 17-page letter to Gerry Howard defending it: "a brilliant little theoretical document, unfortunately it resulted in a shitty and dissatisfying ending... I was in... Dave Land." (Relevant contrast case for the IJ ending-by-design argument.)
  • Lipsky put the road-trip's chronology-final scene at the front of his book deliberately, imitating IJ's Year of Glad opening — "I've focus-grouped this."
  • Drug history: pot from 15-16 on the tennis team (like Hal), "a reasonable amount of dope, particularly in college and grad school. And... drank a lot"; the slide dated to post-"Westward" sadness at Harvard, mostly alcohol.

Themes

Community/communication (the list as the anti-solipsism device the novel keeps asking for); addiction-and-recovery (Nardil account; Hal-like pot chronology); composition history and the ending; fandom as "active surrender" culture.

Cross-references

Notable passages

"You know, for emotional reasons and sanity, I have to pretend this [wallace-l] doesn't exist." — DFW, March 2003

"I think of it as a medical story, a prescription drug story." — Lipsky on the suicide

"The irony of Wallace fans circulating USPS-delivered samizdat was not lost on said fans."