IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 1: Introductions — the hosts, wallace-l, and the DFW community (2015)

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TL;DR

The debut episode (mid-to-late 2015, recorded before The End of the Tour's wide release) of the first podcast dedicated entirely to Wallace. No textual argument about IJ here — it's a who-we-are episode — but the hosts happen to be two load-bearing figures of the fan infrastructure this archive already documents: Bucher is the wallace-l admin and the publisher of Carlisle's Elegant Complexity, Laird an MA student writing a thesis on IJ and theology. Valuable mostly as community/publication history told first-person, plus one genuinely obscure textual catch (the BC apple juice). ASR transcript: paraphrase only; names corrected where identifiable.

Key claims

  • Bucher's first-person wallace-l history: he joined ~1998–99 and has been admin since 2002; the list was started in 1996 by a spinoff group from the Thomas Pynchon list (Pynchon, as Bucher tells it, publishes too rarely to keep his own list busy, so the Pynchon-l crowd told the IJ-chatterers to start their own list); it lives at waste.org and the lowercase l stands for literature, a Usenet-era convention people still mistake for an uppercase i. Matches and personalizes bucher-fantods-wallace-l-fandom.
  • Elegant Complexity backstory from its publisher: Carlisle wrote it ~2005–06 and could not find a publisher — he was ready to give up entirely when Bucher's Sideshow Media Group (run with his brother John) took it on, because circa 2006 there was no market for ancillary critical works on Wallace; Bucher publicly needled traditional publishers about this on The Howling Fantods when Nature's Nightmare (Carlisle on Oblivion) came out, noting Bloomsbury now has ~15 Wallace books. A new, possibly slimmed edition of Elegant Complexity was being discussed as a year-or-two-out prospect (i.e., ~2016–17).
  • Ransom Center sociology: Bucher (an Austin local) describes the Wallace archive's real use as religious pilgrimage — it's partly publicly funded, so ordinary fans can sign in and physically handle IJ drafts, which sits uneasily with academic dispassion; at the 2014 Paris conference there was visible status-posturing between those who had and hadn't been. He guesses the scholar population splits roughly half/half between lifer-fans and American-lit generalists for whom Wallace is one tour stop among Franzen/DeLillo.
  • Laird's textual catch: at Molly Notkin's party Joelle drinks British- Columbian apple juice — print's "extra-sweet Canadian juice" (p. 228) that clueless Notkin counts among the two women's biggest vices — muddy-looking and matte as Laird recalls it, and framed as a near-vice beside the freebase she's about to do. Laird, who lives in BC's Okanagan orchard country, notes the juice is plausibly from his own region.
  • Bucher's conference paper (2nd annual DFW Conference, May 2015): The Pale King sec. 22 read as a "Fogle novella" — a Christian conversion narrative patterned on St. Paul (conversion triggered by sound: the Jesuit substitute's sermon, as Paul's was by the voice, sermons being the engine of conversion in pre-literate and pre-20th-c. religion); therefore TPK is not at bottom a boredom-and-taxes book but about adulthood and going straight.
  • Laird's paper: Lethem's Chronic City contains a heavy-handed Wallace homage — novelist "Ralph Warden Meeker" and his gargantuan Obstinate Dust, which the protagonist hurls into the garbage-filled "Urban Fjord" (a Great Concavity analogue), read alongside Lethem's moments of authenticity around a church spire as a possible alignment with Wallace's single-entendre rebel manifesto from E Unibus Pluram.
  • Reception snapshot, 2015: IJ/DFW as pop-culture furniture — the Simpsons cruise-ship cameo, an extended IJ conversation on The Affair, the unnamed-but-obvious big book in Liberal Arts (set at Kenyon), New Girl mentions. The hosts read this as Wallace mattering culturally in a way Updike or even Faulkner no longer does, while conceding Faulkner matters more academically; Updike Society's purchase of Updike's childhood home is floated as the precedent for eventual Wallace canonization-tourism.
  • DFW Conference history: first annual at ISU (Bloomington/Normal) in 2014, notable for mixing academics with pure fans; after two years it still felt precarious to the hosts, with rumors of moving to LA; the 2015 edition included a private screening of The End of the Tour. Paris's "Infinite Wallace" conference (Sorbonne, Sept 2014) featured a paper titled "Covered in P" (Wallace covered in Pynchon).
  • Podcast origin: Dave's wife Rachel suggested it on a road trip after he confirmed no dedicated Wallace podcast existed; icon is Robyn O'Neil's graphite piece "These Final Hours Embrace at Last, This Is Our Ending, This Is Our Past" (ASR, approximate title); theme music Parquet Courts' "Instant Disassembly."

Theories & evidence

None — a who-we-are/community episode: no IJ interpretation crux is engaged (nothing on the ending, Hal's collapse, the Entertainment, the wraith, structure, or intertexts; the full transcript was re-swept to confirm). The episode's two interpretive arguments concern other books and stay in Key claims per the exemplar's handling of non-IJ readings: Bucher's Pale King sec. 22 Fogle-as-Pauline-conversion paper [00:24–00:26] and Laird's Chronic City-as-Wallace-homage paper [00:26–00:29]. Laird's BC apple-juice catch (p. 228) is a textual observation, not a theory.

Themes

Mostly meta/reception rather than the novel's internal themes: community and loneliness (the fan community as the lived version of fiction-makes-you-less-alone), canonization and reception history. Glancing contact with addiction (Joelle's juice-as-vice) and entertainment (pop-culture cameos).

Cross-references