Caleb Crain interviews DFW, raw cassette (Oct 17, 2003) — tape diff vs the printed Boston Globe Approaching Infinity

source

TL;DR

This is a DIFF note. The interview on this cassette already exists in the archive as a digested print source — the Boston Globe Ideas piece Approaching Infinity (2003-10-26), held via Burn ch. 17, pp. 121–26 (burn-conversations-with-dfw) — so the only new value recorded here is what the tape has that print does not. Verdict: the ~81-minute tape was boiled down to a ~2,300-word print Q&A, and the unprinted majority is substantial, though most of it is Everything-and-More shop talk and biographical color rather than IJ material. Print kept nearly all of the tape's IJ content (Boston novel, Whitey Sorkin, the fake Greek epigraph, Marijuana Thinking, Platonism); the genuinely unprinted IJ-bearing material is a footnote origin story (IJ as the first book Wallace composed on a computer, footnotes as a schizoid second narrative voice — his fullest apparatus testimony on tape anywhere in the archive), a hedged authorial gloss on Gately's higher-power passage prefaced by an explicit admission that he no longer remembers Infinite Jest very well, and an unprompted display of familiarity with Gravity's Rainbow's contents that bears on the denied-but-real pynchon-influence ledger. Headline unprinted biographical fact: Everything and More was originally going to be a book about Gödel and the incompleteness theorems. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation anywhere below; the print sibling in Burn remains the quotable layer for everything that appears in both.

Capsule

Friday 2003-10-17, Wallace's New York hotel room, on the Everything and More tour; Crain (freelancing for the Globe Ideas section, filing by the following Tuesday) runs a cassette recorder, and decades later posted the raw audio on his blog, which is what the archive holds. Wallace is on roughly two hours of sleep and says so twice, negotiates ground rules at the top (tell me when an answer is not boil-downable; a few marked off-the-record moments), and is by turns exact and punchy. Side 1 (48m) is almost all Everything and More: origins, design, the derived-sets walkthrough, math-class anger, Platonism. Side 2 (33m) has the Boston and IJ material, the God questions, Oblivion, footnotes, and the closing small talk. The tape cuts off mid-sentence at the end of side 1 (a Gödel-was-a-Platonist point begun at [side 1, 00:47:35] is lost to the flip, as both men note at the top of side 2).

What print already carries (cite Burn ch. 17, pp. 121–26, for the quotable form of all of these): the Science-review audience critique; the Aczel foil and wanting to show where the math came from; the uniqueness theorem as the hardest part; the fondest-hope average-reader answer; the pablum/madness-and-genius line; Zeno, semi-impoverished, and working out his own math-class anger; the irrational-numbers exchange; brainwashed-into-Platonism and the metaphysics of the integer 3 (including the trees-and-Calebs joke, which the tape confirms was live wordplay on the interviewer's name [side 1, 00:44:34]); Marijuana Thinking next to the math-philosophical abyss; the Platonism confession (God's languages: music and mathematics); the one-basic-problem-in-all-writing empathy answer with the monster-character analogy; the Pomona eclectic-modern reading list; missing Brighton/Allston/the Back Bay; the Boston-novel dialect answer; Whitey Sorkin vs Whitey Bulger and the lottery-fixing myth; the made-up Greek epigraph; Gödel as the devil for math and the great postmodern uncertainty; and the Oblivion-delivery news including the not-all-under-my-name detail and the footnote monkey off his back.

Key claims (unprinted tape material only)

Everything and More began life as a Gödel book. The series came to him (a fax from his agent reached him in Texas); the original plan he dickered over was a book on Gödel and the incompleteness theorems, which he abandoned as too heavy math-wise — set theory he had actually studied, whereas on Gödel he would have been faking expertise. He notes the series gave Gödel to someone else with a personal connection to the subject [side 1, 00:09:51–00:10:48]. (Archive annotation: the series' Gödel volume became Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness, 2005 — an after-the-fact identification, not on tape.)
Math background, specifics print omits: English/philosophy double major; the philosophy was mathematical logic and semantics, which carries the history of math without the calculus pyramid; one summer — 1983 — he took an actual set-theory course at the University of Illinois (home for the summer) toward his undergraduate thesis [side 1, 00:11:40–00:12:38].
The tech-writing origin of the book's method: at Illinois State a tech-writing teacher worked two offices down; with nobody visiting his own office hours Wallace listened through the wall and got interested in tech writing as a continuum (training manuals up through Sacks and Greene), heavily rhetorical in the old Greek sense, all about audience — and E&M is framed on tape as pop technical writing, with a simile print dropped: taking the reader up in an elevator while building the shaft around them [side 1, 00:07:30, 00:13:24–00:15:36]. He read about 50 other math books to write it, wanted the reader to feel the austere crystalline beauty rather than be told about it, and took the job partly because he thought he could knock it off in six months, fiction being a pain anyway — it took far longer [side 1, 00:16:21–00:17:47].
The Science review was the book's seed: the 2000 math-melodrama review is when the first note-taking for E&M happened, per Wallace directly [side 1, 00:17:47]. Print implies the sequence; tape states it.
Author's own map of the book's weak points (mostly unprinted): the derived-sets/uniqueness-theorem stretch is the shakiest part and he considered cutting it [side 1, 00:28:23]; the book ran about 100 pages over the word limit, which is why Bolzano-Weierstrass gets no real development [side 1, 00:30:07]; by his own accounting the step where series of fixed quantities give way to series of functions wants another 30 pages [side 1, 00:31:18]. Marked off the record on tape mid-sentence (resuming on record after): the derived-sets material was the part of set theory he understood least well as a student, and the publisher would kill him for saying so [side 1, 00:29:14]. The exchange around it is a genuine ten-minute math tutorial in which he re-derives the null-set walkdown for Crain [side 1, 00:23:24–00:29:14].
The design vocabulary print dropped: twin-scaffold structure (one tower historical, one conceptual), the emergency glossaries, and the just-in-time-inventory idea for delivering concepts only when needed, lifted from a business article read while outlining [side 1, 00:19:50–00:21:31]. Also the blunter register: the madness-and-genius framing of pop math books is called horseshit and marketing on tape, with a self-aware profanity spiral about family newspapers; print softened this to romantic-but-flabby [side 1, 00:34:02].
Teaching plans beyond the printed list: fall = introductory workshop; spring = an advanced-composition essay class he planned to run experimentally, like a fiction workshop but for nonfiction; the one-class-a-semester load is named as a reason he took the Pomona job [side 1, 00:03:58]. Reading-list color: a Believer piece on high fructose corn syrup and converted munitions factories he wanted to pair against something from the American Spectator, Menand's New Yorker piece on term-paper boilerplate, McPhee, Didion, Woolf [side 1, 00:04:55–00:07:30].
The Boston-novel reading has a name print withheld: what print attributes to a friend of the interviewer is, on tape, Alex Star(r) — the Globe Ideas editor who assigned the piece — who holds that IJ should be understood as a Boston novel and that this is the key to all keys. Wallace's dialect answer (the printed part) responds to that [side 2, 00:07:56]. (Editor surname as ASR renders it; the Ideas editor of record was Alex Star.)
Sorkin naming, the unprinted half: the name Whitey was rare enough that he does 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 his own estimate, by exactly one person — himself [side 2, 00:08:57].
He no longer remembers IJ well (2003): asked a close reading question about Gately, Wallace confesses directly that he does not remember Infinite Jest very well and answers as a guess [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, start]. A standing source-weighting caution for all post-2000 authorial statements about IJ details (see Accuracy notes).
Oblivion, morning-of testimony: he had delivered the post-editing draft of the story collection that very morning; most pieces novella-ish; publication expected in about a year; roughly Brief Interviews length but pretty different — a collection where BI was more a cycle; at most one story with a couple of asterisk footnotes [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, mid-late]. (The not-under-my-name and monkey-off-my-back lines made print; the comparisons did not.)
E&M as the last footnote-heavy book, and the apparatus origin story — see the THEORY block below; the whole riff is unprinted except the monkey line [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, late].
The Bloom/askesis exchange: Crain suggests the footnote-purging fits Harold Bloom's askesis stage (E&M pokes fun at Bloom at one point); Wallace has to be reminded of the word, likes it enough to say he will use it, and adds that he has little sense of what his own work is like or how it changes — like knowing what your own face or recorded voice is like [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, late].
Biographical color, all unprinted: quit smoking in June 2003, not snapping back, an expensive dependence on nicotine patches (print kept only the patch stage-business in its intro); remembers quitting-anxiety about whether he could write, and being amazed that things smelled [side 1, 00:01:07]. Deeper into side 2: his heavier dependency was chewing tobacco rather than cigarettes, chewed while writing; jokes that having quit he may never write again; the physical cravings were the least of it next to the associations [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, close]. Two hours of sleep, worried his answers sound like Ophelia's mad monologue [side 2, 00:14:12]. Baseball grief, datable to the week: raised a couple of hours below Chicago, he suffered with the Cubs, was literally sick when they failed to close out the NLCS days earlier, and offers condolences to heartbroken Boston — the session sits the day after the Red Sox lost ALCS game 7; he had listened to some of the series on the radio, nostalgically [side 2, 00:07:56, 00:15:05–00:16:15]. The closing on-record offer is answered with a deadpan Clinton-denial joke, followed by a sincere plea not to be quoted one word out of a sentence [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, close].
Interviewer context: Wallace flips the tape recorder request — asks Crain to turn it off so he can find out whom he is dealing with [side 2, 00:10:05]; the audible resume has a warm exchange about Lingua Franca (Crain wrote for it): Wallace bought the Lingua Franca anthology for his father for Christmas, describes the magazine as half wonderful essays and half venomous academic backbiting he compares to Dallas or Falcon Crest, and relishes the detail that the Chronicle of Higher Education bought the name in bankruptcy — in his figure, so the vampire could finally get its stake [side 2, 00:11:00–00:12:39]. Crain is a freelancer and early-Americanist (revolution to Civil War); Wallace jokes Pomona is hiring medievalists [side 2, 00:12:39]. Crain mentions his boyfriend in passing while describing testing the recorder; no reaction, no printed trace [side 2, 00:00:00]. Wallace twice compliments the homework (identifying the Science review; the Marlon Bain catch) and sets an off-record protocol early because Crain seems trustworthy [side 1, 00:02:14, 00:17:47, 00:45:23].
E&M odds and ends: the composite character whose name the ASR renders roughly as Robert Gortz (E&M's math-teacher figure) is a conflation of three real people, two of them math teachers he is still in touch with; none had read the book yet [side 2, 00:05:48]. The word booklet: his editor Jesse Cohen gave him grief over it; he kept it because relative to its coverage the book is a booklet, changed it only inconsistently, and calls the remaining usage a fuck-up on tape [side 2, 00:06:55]. Series provenance: Cohen (a mensch, twice recommended to Crain as an interview) drives the series, Atlas got the money, Penguin Lives pedigree [side 1, 00:09:02; side 2, 00:15:05]. And an E&M self-positioning note print dropped: the good Gödel book he imagines would be the real story of math's last century, and E&M ends abruptly at the shore of that ocean on purpose [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, mid].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The footnote/endnote apparatus is a second, schizoid narrative voice — made practical by IJ being the first book Wallace composed on a computer, addictive thereafter, and deliberately retired after E&M

Crux: endnotes-function
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] (tape-only) Wallace dates the habit mechanically: IJ was the first book he composed on a computer, and a typewriter makes footnoting a huge nuisance — measuring, pencil lines, leaving room — so the computer is what made the apparatus a live option; it then became a really neat way to have a schizoid narrative voice [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, late]
- [author] (tape-only) The function stated: he rarely has just one voice in his head, and footnotes are the easiest way to put a second voice in the reader's head; the craft trick is making the footnote a human voice a reader would want to read rather than the dreaded stuff at the bottom of the page [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, late]
- [author] (tape-only) The danger stated: the device is habit-forming and can tangle your instincts as a storyteller; E&M — with its IYI optional footnotes on top of regular ones, which he concedes gets top-heavy — is described as the final footnote-heavy book, and the new collection's near-total footnotelessness is a point of pride [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, late]
- [author] (print-corroborated) The monkey-off-my-back framing and the asterisks-because-so-few detail appear in the print version — quote those from Burn ch. 17 (pp. 121–26)
Notes: Consistent with the archive's existing read of the composition history rather than disturbing it: the device story there (apparatus invented April 1994 as a length-management device, per the Max material) is complemented, not contradicted — a typewriter-era deterrent plus computer-era enablement is exactly the story that caps any conceived-as-architecture-from-the-start gloss. The tape gives the archive's most direct authorial function statement (second voice / schizoid narrator) outside the April-1994 pitch. DFW firsthand — [B]. Also anchors the detox narrative: Gilbert 1997's footnote-detox claim (Burn note) → E&M 2003 relapse, named on tape as final.

THEORY: Gately's higher-power material is about spiritual realities and cultivating a relationship (church / 12-step program), not a merely technical interface — offered as a hedged guess by an author disclaiming memory of his own book

Crux: gately-salvation
Stance: entertains
Evidence:
- [author] (tape-only) Crain proposes an analogy: Gately having to accept that a merely technical response to the higher power will eventually work, set against Cantor building a technical apparatus for interfacing with mysterious infinity. Wallace finds it interesting, then guesses that Gately's subject is spiritual realities of a particular kind and the work of building a relationship with them in a church or 12-step setting — and contrasts that with E&M's agenda, which he calls diametrically different: E&M wants more than a merely technical understanding of infinity [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, start]
Notes: Counterevidence is built into the same breath: Wallace prefaces the gloss by confessing he does not remember Infinite Jest very well, so this is [B]-grade but weight-capped by its own disclaimer — record it as a 2003 authorial lean, not a ruling. The interpretive kernel (spiritual relationship over technical interface) sits comfortably with the archive's salvation readings and the addiction-and-recovery synthesis; nothing here contradicts an archive ruling. Speaker attribution around the analogy is clean (Crain proposes, Wallace responds), though the ASR renders the title as Infinite Justice in this stretch.

THEORY: Gödel's incompleteness theorem is one of the ur-texts of Gravity's Rainbow, which carries three or four Gödel references

Crux: pynchon-influence
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] (tape-only) Unprompted, at the end of the Gödel run, Wallace remarks that Pynchon has three or four Gödel references in Gravity's Rainbow and that he thinks of Gödel as one of the ur-texts for that novel [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, mid]
Notes: The claim itself is about Pynchon's sources, not IJ's — its value to this crux is evidentiary posture: what matters is Wallace's reliability as a self-reporter. Severs and McHale [S] argue the Pynchon influence is real despite Wallace's on-record denials of having read Gravity's Rainbow [author], and here is Wallace, unprompted and off print, speaking with specific familiarity about GR's contents — a tape-only datum for the denied-but-real side. Caution: knowing a famous novel contains Gödel references does not strictly entail a cover-to-cover read; a sighting, not a conviction. This bears on Wallace's biography and influences, not on any question inside the novel's text.

CONNECTION: God-concepts built by deleting limitations — E&M's infinity/divinity analogy glossed live, with the Kroneckerian deflation on the other side

Crux: wallace-theology-arc
Early text: [scene] Asked about the E&M passage observing that the parallels with familiar conceptions of God are plain, Wallace glosses it: in the anthropology of religion you assemble an idea of God by subtracting every limitation and flaw the world shows you, and infinity is the same move — everything is limited; imagine something without that. He then voices the deflationary counter himself: a Kroneckerian would say infinity and God are the same sort of thing, wishful castles built by people who never came to terms with limit's inescapability, a unicorn assembled from glued-together concepts [side 2, 00:16:15–00:17:23]
IJ echo: Gately's higher-power struggle and the novel's pragmatic, relationship-not-doctrine theology (the same tape's Gately block above); the archive's theology thread (theology-sin-salvation, Braithwaite apparatus)
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Directionality: post-IJ continuity, not prefiguration — the Early-text field holds the tape moment (this source postdates IJ); locators are tape timestamps, not paragraph indices. Speaker attribution in this passage is the murkiest on the tape (unpunctuated turn-taking; the anthropology gloss could begin as a confirm-the-question move) — flagged for any future verification listen. The printed Platonism confession is this passage's on-record twin; tape adds two things print smoothed away: the confession was delivered with a between-you-and-me hedge, and it came bracketed by the it-does-not-matter-what-I-think deflection (the book is about what Cantor and Gödel thought) [side 1, 00:46:23–00:47:35].

No other blocks. The tape advances nothing on hal-dmz, the ending, the Entertainment, the wraith, ij-cuts, or two-books-fusion — all of its composition talk is about Everything and More, none about IJ (the one IJ-composition-adjacent item, the computer/footnotes story, is filed above). The IJ-specific diff is real but modest; the bulk of the unprinted material is E&M craft testimony and biography, held in Key claims as [author]-grade context, not forced into blocks.

Themes

Mostly meta for this archive: authorial self-assessment and its limits (the shakiest-part admissions; not remembering IJ; not knowing what his own work is like), communication/empathy as the one problem in all writing (the printed jewel line, here seen growing out of a decade of eavesdropped tech-writing pedagogy), theology and limit (the God-by-deleted-limitations gloss against the Kroneckerian unicorn), and addiction texture in passing (nicotine, chewing tobacco while writing, footnotes themselves described in addiction vocabulary — monkey, addictive, detox).

Cross-references

burn-conversations-with-dfw — the print sibling and quotable layer (ch. 17, pp. 121–26); everything in the capsule's print list quotes from there, never from this tape.
gc-ep008-dt-max-biographer — Max's caution that Wallace ran canned interview answers; this tape is a rare chance to watch the canning: the print Q&A was assembled from tape moments up to forty minutes apart and lightly rewritten (see Vs the archive).
dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the April-1994 endnote pitch; the tape's computer-enablement story is the mechanical prehistory of that pitch.
themes/structure-and-hamlet — the four-functions endnote synthesis this tape's second-voice testimony feeds.
city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the nearest ASR sibling (eight months later, same format, same transcription discipline). Note the fit, not conflict, between that tape's longhand-first drafting routine and this tape's IJ-as-first-computer-book claim: drafting stayed longhand; the computer enters at the typing/assembly stage, which is exactly where footnotes live.
mccaffery-1993-interview — the 1993 program; the tape's empathy-without-manipulation formulation is its E&M-era restatement (print carries the quotable form).
e-unibus-pluram — only obliquely (the television-acculturation frame is absent here; nothing to file).

Accuracy notes

The published Q&A is an edited composite, not a transcript: printed answers splice tape moments recorded many minutes apart (one adjacent pair of printed answers fuses material from at least four separate stretches of the tape), the Platonism answer drops a spoken between-you-and-me hedge, one prompt reattributes the Ideas editor's reading to "a friend" of the interviewer, and phrasings are lightly smoothed throughout. The print remains the quotable layer — but what it prints is an artifact of editing, and where the nuance matters this note gives the tape context in paraphrase.

Notable unprinted moments (paraphrase only — ASR source)

Opening ground rules: if an answer will not boil down, say so instead of smiling politely; he is more prone to unusable answers unslept [side 1, 00:00:00].
The reassurance that Crain seems a trustworthy young man, with the off-record protocol set accordingly [side 1, 00:02:14].
A ten-minute impromptu set-theory tutorial when Crain names exactly where the book lost him, ending in the author conceding Crain found the shakiest section [side 1, 00:23:24–00:30:07].
The mid-sentence move off the record, the confession about his own weakest set-theory ground, and the deadpan request to be told when they are back on the record [side 1, 00:29:14].
The profanity spiral upon realizing none of an answer can run in a family newspaper [side 1, 00:34:02].
Genuine delight at being out-homeworked: nobody coming to the hotel room usually knows the Science review or Marlon Bain by name [side 1, 00:17:47, 00:45:23].
The tape flip eating the Gödel-was-a-Platonist point, discovered with mild mutual dismay at the top of side 2 [side 1, 00:47:35; side 2, 00:00:00].
Cubs grief offered as credentials for consoling Boston, the morning after game 7 [side 2, 00:15:05–00:16:15].
Wallace interviewing the interviewer with the recorder nominally off, then the Lingua-Franca-as-soap-opera riff [side 2, 00:10:05–00:12:39].
The Ophelia's-mad-monologue worry about his own sleep-deprived answers [side 2, 00:14:12].
The Clinton-denial joke as his official closing statement, followed by the sincere request not to be quoted one word from one sentence [side 2, 00:18:27 stretch, close].