IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace — The Last Interview, Expanded with New Introduction

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TL;DR

Melville House's Last Interview volume, expanded edition. Smaller than Burn's anthology but with material Burn doesn't have: Streitfeld's new introduction (personal memoir with unpublished letters and emails), his raw "Wasted Land" interview transcript at ~4x the length of the Details print piece (Wallace on the cuts to IJ: "We kept cutting and cutting. I wish we hadn't"), the Valerie Stivers Stim.com 1996 interview (the best single statement of the entertainment thesis post-publication, plus the endnotes-cut-from-400-pages fact), the full unedited Scocca transcript, Gerald Howard's Elle Q&A, the Schmeidel Amherst self-portrait, and the Eggers Believer exchange. Six of the ten interviews are new to the archive in this form.

Duplicates / edition notes

  • Katovsky 1987 (pp. 1-10) — identical to Burn ch. 1; see burn-conversations-with-dfw.
  • Miller, Salon 1996, retitled "Something Real American" (pp. 45-59) — same text we hold as miller-1996-salon-interview.
  • Paulson, TTBOOK 2004, "Some Kind of Terrible Burden" (pp. 154-75) — same WPR interview as Burn ch. 18 / our video-wpr-2004-oblivion captions, BUT this version keeps a coda Burn cut: an off-air exchange about Dale Peck's "eight hundred pages of it was crap" review — reviews as eavesdropping ("You'd do it, but you wouldn't be glad you did it"), trash-talk reviewing as shame-hobble-off attention strategy, "he wore leather pants and I found it unusual" (pp. 172-75).
  • Farley, WSJ 2008 (pp. 176-83) — same as Burn ch. 21.
  • Streitfeld "The Wasted Land" (pp. 17-44) — the March 1996 Details piece exists in Burn ch. 7; here it's replaced by the raw December 1995 interview transcript with new framing. Treat as a distinct, much richer source (below).

Key claims (new-to-archive material, by piece)

  • Streitfeld, Introduction (2018/2020, unpaginated front matter): his own previously unpublished material. The 1996 chain-letter anecdote (Costello → Wallace → Streitfeld/Franzen); Franzen quotes from the 1996 profile legwork — Boston-era Wallace "very furtive… Even if he was present, he wasn't really present," and "what leads you into that hell is precisely what pulls you out of it"; the 1996 NBA snub fight (his Washington Post piece, Kirn's "anyone who doesn't think it was one of the year's five best swings at the ball is nuts," Amy Bloom's non-defense); the Granta 1995 Best Young Novelists fiasco (Wallace not even on the long list of 52); Sotheby's letter auctions (incl. the "three-mile pile-up of infidelity" confession letter); late emails ("My private voices have much more interesting stuff to talk about than what's a book tour and what isn't"); his verdict that "We have found the Infinite Jest videotape, and are inside it" (the internet); the Onion breakup-letter parody as the most accurate Wallace criticism; his bounced final email to Wallace the night of the suicide.
  • Howard, Elle Feb 1996, "Infinite Jester" (pp. 11-16): short written Q&A with his first editor — not in Burn. The loneliness credo in its most compressed form: fiction is where loneliness "can be both confronted and relieved… countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. In lots of ways it's all there is"; the American-sadness thesis ("more lost, more afraid, more empty—as our Cold War enemies have surrendered… and they've even found a way to make chocolate fat-free"); on the Incandenzas: "what a family is is a tiny lab receptacle, a culture placed in a small space under terrific compression and heat… they literally make and break you. … The language is always smarter than we are"; the Melanie-Griffith ideal-reader gag; Powers and Vollmann as "the twin towers of this generation".
  • Streitfeld, "The Wasted Land" raw transcript, Dec 1995 (pp. 17-44): the first IJ interview, expanded far beyond Details. Composition timeline: wanted to write about addiction "from the beginning" but waited, haunted by "the idea that I was a sham and a whore and a fraud"; "January 1992 was the real start of the book… delivered the manuscript in the summer of 1994. So it was two and a half years of sixteen-hour days." On the cuts (NEW): "We kept cutting and cutting. I wish we hadn't. But they said we need to keep the price down… The book business is already a pathetic tentacle of the movie business"; yet "it seems to be a pretty tight ship. I don't want to lose another word." The addicere etymology on record: "addict… from the Latin 'addicere'—to apprentice, to devote yourself to something… Addiction is a mode of existence for everyone, whether approved culturally or not"; "People are going to worship something. If you take away one god, they're going to worship something else. Pleasure, for example" (the Tartu/ZDF worship riff, eight years early). Suicide watch dated "October and November of 1988," "I came close to blowing my brains out in my mid-twenties"; "I have three friends who killed themselves"; writing as the one devotion "that hasn't killed me"; Burroughs's Junkie/Exterminator named as IJ influences; the monk-or-whore dichotomy; the DeLillo letters taped to his kitchen cabinets and the later letter to DeLillo about the reporters' intrusion — "He feels violated." is Streitfeld's own summary, outside the quoted letter (his frame, pp. 43-44); the Hal-as-self-portrait moment ("I consume libraries" — "Self-portrait").
  • Stivers, Stim.com May 1996, "The Jester Holds Court" (pp. 60-77): the entertainment thesis at its sharpest: "It's not TV's fault… It's our fault. We're choosing this"; the future "glittery but cold"; "The people who think there is a technological solution to the problem are wrong"; the net-prediction passage — democratization is an illusion because "people can't receive it all—their heads will bleed," so filter/portal sites will hold the power (InterLace as exactly such a node); the 100,000-kisses-before-kissing-a-girl mediation bit; TV's yak-herder illusion of access vs. fiction's real intimacy ("I'll never be that intimate with anyone in person"). Composition/cuts (NEW, key numbers): "Most of the cuts were in the end notes; there used to be almost four hundred pages of endnotes, now there are one hundred" — wanted "a sort of tsunami of information"; the virtual-reality-fad allusions lost their explanatory material in the cuts. Also: the fake-but-careful email addresses; "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes" contained fiction (Antitoi "no such person" — the name was already in his head for IJ); F. P. Foster the dedicatee = his mother's father; he read the abridged OED through K at thirteen; halfway-house lurking research ("nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away"); footnoted asides with friend Erin Poag soothing him mid-interview.
  • Scocca, Feb 1998, "There Can Be No Spokesman" full transcript (pp. 78-114): the unedited tape behind Burn ch. 11 (~3.5x longer). Nonfiction as "slice open my head… a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person's head"; footnotes "an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and they get to be kind of—you get sort of addicted to 'em," loopy thinking as mimetic; the embellishment confession ("you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment"); the Harper's cruise-essay rewrite drama; magazine "massage"; mostly works on a typewriter, never been on the Internet. Extra transcript-only texture: the Panasonic Easa-Phone opening, the beard like "the armpit of a fifteen-year-old girl", extended pre-Socratics/Amherst tangents.
  • Schmeidel, Amherst Magazine Spring 1999, "A Brief Interview with a Five-Draft Man" (pp. 115-27): interview-by-mail; the Five Draft method (from Kennick's philosophy papers); the Amherst self-portrait — "cripplingly shy… I studied all the time," study as hiding, and the retrospective insight that "feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all"; reviews are "not for me. They're for potential book-buyers" (eavesdropping figure); impact as lottery; what actually moves him — Bridges of Madison County on a plane, It's a Wonderful Life, Frodo's "I have been too badly wounded, Sam", The Velveteen Rabbit; the closing anti-interview argument ("no truly interesting question can be satisfactorily answered within the formal constraints… of an interview").
  • Eggers, The Believer Nov 2003 (pp. 128-53): not in Burn. Political rhetoric circa 2003 — "95 percent of political commentary… is now polluted by the very politics it's supposed to be about"; fiction writers' civic use is empathy, "trying to imagine what it's like to be the other guy"; admits he is "at present, partisan" and therefore distrusts his own speaking out; plan: "knock on doors and stuff envelopes… To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more." Work process: "Darwinian struggle" of parallel drafts, only what's "emphatically alive" survives; dogs reshaped his writing locations; the Tobacco Story (quitting makes him stupid — "Really stupid."); the Aczel takedown (Cantor was bipolar; the madness-drove-him genius myth is "dreck"); radical specialization and the genius of plain technical communication (the IT-tech/oncologist ankle-hugging passage) as the case for pop-tech writing.

Themes

Addiction/worship (the raw Wasted Land has the addicere etymology and the everyone-worships argument in 1995, predating the 2003 ZDF/Kenyon versions); entertainment and the self (Stivers: choosing the Entertainment, InterLace as filter-power prophecy); composition/cuts (400→96 pages of endnotes, the price-driven cutting he regretted then disowned regretting); irony/sincerity (Eggers's politics-of-empathy as the late-period civic translation); communication/solipsism (Howard's "it's all there is," Schmeidel's alone-and-inferior valent bond).

Cross-references

  • burn-conversations-with-dfw — sibling anthology; overlap table there. For Streitfeld and Scocca, prefer THIS volume's longer texts; for everything 1996-2005 not listed here, Burn.
  • infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij, debraski-ij-cuts, moore-first-draft-ij — the endnote-cut numbers (Stivers p. 73) and "We kept cutting and cutting. I wish we hadn't" (Streitfeld p. 26-27) are the author-side view of the same editing story; note tension with his Lopate-show praise of the cuts (video-lopate-1996).
  • video-zdf-2003-unedited and entertainment-addiction-tartu — the worship/addicere material here is its first on-record articulation.
  • mccaffery-1993-interview — Howard's Elle answers are the loneliness thesis compressed to publication-week size.
  • lipsky-becoming-yourself — Streitfeld's intro narrates the same 1996 publicity moment from the other journalist in the room ("I said yes to Rolling Stone so that I could feel OK to saying no to doing anything on TV; … Rolling Stone was essentially TV anyway").
  • the-ending — nothing new on the ending here (Streitfeld's intro notes the Onion parody: "knowing David, it probably just leaves a whole bunch of loose ends untied"); the new ending statements are in Burn (Donahue, Goldfarb).
  • Characters/scenes: Hal's "I consume libraries" as self-portrait; InterLace; the Antitoi name's pre-IJ life; Kate Gompert's Face In The Floor passage read back to him (pp. 28-29).

Notable passages

  • "We kept cutting and cutting. I wish we hadn't. … The book business is already a pathetic tentacle of the movie business". (Streitfeld transcript, pp. 26-27)
  • "there used to be almost four hundred pages of endnotes, now there are one hundred." (Stivers, p. 73)
  • "People are going to worship something. If you take away one god, they're going to worship something else. Pleasure, for example." (Streitfeld, p. 34)
  • "Writing is the first thing I've found that I really loved and given myself away to that hasn't killed me." (Streitfeld, p. 36)
  • "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." (Stivers, pp. 66-67)
  • "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." (Stivers, p. 72)
  • "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." (Howard, p. 14)
  • "feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all." (Schmeidel, p. 120)
  • "We have found the Infinite Jest videotape, and are inside it." (Streitfeld, introduction)