The Great Concavity Ep. 10: Nick Maniatis of The Howling Fantods — 19 years of the DFW web (Feb 2016, around IJ's 20th anniversary)

TL;DR

Recorded around IJ's February 2016 20th anniversary (Bucher had just attended the Ransom Center's anniversary celebration), this is the fan-infrastructure companion piece to the Bucher-history sources: Nick Maniatis, proprietor of The Howling Fantods since 1997, on the site's origins, near-death, and name; the lost EZBoard era; and — the emotionally substantive half — how 20 years of aging and Wallace's death rewired both men's reading of the novel, from textual puzzle to near-autobiography. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

• Site origin (first-person): Maniatis found IJ via a large Australian national newspaper review with a big Wallace photo — he has never been able to re-identify which paper — then impulse-bought a discounted hardcover first edition in Canberra (he cites a back-cover error as the first-edition tell; ASR garbles it as "the volum and error," plausibly the Vollmann-blurb misprint) and started it on the bus home, 1996–97. He stalled around pp. 250–300 for months (uni), then finished the last 300–400 pages in a binge. The site began as his GeoCities personal page (the athens/acropolis neighborhood, chosen for his Greek surname), grew out of a competitive urge to collect every Wallace link in one place, and was soon bigger than the only predecessors he knew: Bob Wake's IJ-reviews collection and one other small Wallace site. At recording he's coming up on 19 years of running it.
• Pre-Google discoverability: Bucher found the site in 1997 via WebCrawler/AltaVista; wallace-l at the time required Unix commands to join, which made Maniatis's free EZBoard message boards (from ~1998) the low-friction gathering place.
• The lost EZBoard archive: a platform-wide EZBoard hack wiped hundreds of boards including his — years of IJ close-reading threads gone, with only the thin first months recoverable via archive.org. The thread he mourns by name: someone systematically tracking Don Gately against the labors of Hercules with textual evidence — a reading lineage that now survives only in this reminiscence. The loss is why he never rebuilt forums (also: he can't moderate 24/7).
• The hosting ransom (~2011): his post-GeoCities host (a hosting package run by the guy who took over the brickfilms site) was sold; the new owners silently cut off all hosted customers; he learned the site was gone from reader emails, spent days ripping his own content from archive.org, and ultimately paid the new owners an "affordable" sum to switch the server back on — total downtime about two weeks, nothing lost, and a permanent conversion to backups.
• Wallace knew about the site and wasn't comfortable with it: Maniatis never wrote to Wallace, partly because people around the scene told him Wallace would feel obligated to reply (he answered everyone), partly because he understood Wallace knew the Fantods existed "and wasn't totally comfortable with it" — so he kept the site about the writing, not the man. Bucher corroborates from the other side: the Ransom Center holds printouts of Howling Fantods pages (c. 1998–2000) that agent Bonnie Nadell faxed to Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown — roughly "be aware of this" — because a literary-fiction fan site was then unheard of.
• The site's name is a mistake: he launched it as The Screaming Fantods, having misremembered the phrase, and was corrected by a reader. He never intended the fan/fantods pun; when the community started calling themselves "fantods" the wordplay landed on him unbidden, and he finds it both amusing and annoying — he'd have chosen differently had he noticed.
• wallace-l institutional history (Bucher): wallace-l is a spin-off of Pynchon-l; the host community he describes as Minneapolis vegan-anarchist Burning Man people who have never asked him for a dime. The list's founder was Dan Schmidt — the same Dan Schmidt whose late-90s IJ notes the archive holds — who passed the reins to Bucher ~14 years before recording (~2002); the list's 20th anniversary fell in April 2016 (so founded April 1996).
• The reading that changed with age (both men): young readers, they identified with Hal, rushed the Marathe/Steeply chapters, and read the AA material as "great material about addicts"; in middle age the book's center of gravity is Gately and AA. Maniatis read the Marathe "choosing to love" passage at his mother's funeral — explicitly choosing a relationship to a parent he wasn't close to, rather than love-as-automatic — and says those steeply/Marathe sections went from skimmable to wonderful. He also describes a period when his IJ obsession itself "felt like a problem" (he notes the thematic irony) and he deliberately stepped away from the book for a while.
• The post-2008 autobiographical turn: both agree that before ~2005 they read IJ as text and puzzle; after Wallace's death and the halfway-house/ depression revelations (the Granada House testimony), it became nearly impossible not to read it autobiographically — Maniatis singles out the Kate Gompert hospital interview and the overheard line in Pat Montesian's office — in print: "I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself." (p. 178) — as passages that now stop his breath. Bucher adds that Wallace "was very cagey and straight up lied" (ASR, approximate) about his own program involvement — consistent with AA anonymity — which had made the it's-just-literature distance easy at the time. Maniatis says the book is now almost too affecting to reread straight through, which is why he dips in and out.
• Wallace's fiction as therapeutic frame: after a student death at his school, Maniatis saw counselors through work and found himself running the meta-conversation about the conversation — like the professional-conversationalist parody and "The Depressed Person" — and told the therapists so; he reports it genuinely helped, another instance of the voice-in-your-head cliché being real.
• The tattoo: Maniatis, having just turned 40, got his first tattoo — the partially occluded annular circle, copied from Peter Knox's wrist tattoo, on the inside of his left arm — sparked by Casey Henry's article on annular circles in IJ, which made him realize how central the book is to his identity.
• Personal-interaction datum (Bucher): he had "some personal interactions with Wallace where he was not kind to me" (ASR, approximate) — offered without details, alongside his insistence that nothing Wallace did could have alienated him, and that he never blamed Wallace for the suicide.
• Wallace-studies publishing snapshot (early 2016): Bloomsbury as the de facto Wallace-studies house (Hayes-Brady's book en route to Maniatis; Hering's fiction-and-form book due September); Columbia UP as the other pole (Fate, Time, and Language; the Freedom and the Self collection; Jeff Severs forthcoming) — with Bucher's observation that scholarship has outrun any individual's ability to keep up, where one paper a year was once an event. Both note Australia's disproportionate scholarly presence (Lucas Thompson named) and Maniatis half-announces an Australian DFW conference in the works, Melbourne-focused, with possible funding — timing unsettled (late 2016 or 2017). [No archive record that it happened on that schedule; record as announced plan.]
• Reception minutiae: no galley of the 20th-anniversary IJ edition had leaked at recording (Bucher pre-ordered; dislikes the cover); ex-Little Brown publicity director Marlena Bittner used to send them advance Wallace books. Maniatis's comfort reading is Clive Barker, and he describes feeling "broken" by Wallace's scathing Great and Secret Show review — one he concedes is "quite spot on" (ASR, approximate).

Theories & evidence

Locator caveat: the auto-transcript for this episode is a single untimestamped block after [00:03]; timestamps below are estimated from position in the text against a ~68-minute runtime — treat as approximate.

THEORY: IJ is a near-autobiographical book — after 2008 the autobiographical reading became almost unavoidable

• Crux: ij-autobiographical
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The posthumous revelations — Wallace's depression, the halfway-house residence, the Granada House testimony — recast the book; both men date their shift from textual-puzzle reading to autobiographical reading to after Wallace's death (Bucher: "now I see it almost as a completely autobiographical book," ASR, approximate). [~00:47, estimated]
  • [text] The passages that now read as lived: the Kate Gompert hospital interview, and the overheard line in Pat Montesian's office — "I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself." (p. 178; the hosts recall it loosely) — which now stops Maniatis's breath. [~00:48, estimated]
  • [author] Wallace "was very cagey and straight up lied" (ASR, approximate) about his own program involvement — consistent with AA anonymity — which had made the it's-just-literature distance easy at the time (Bucher). [~00:49, estimated]
  • [inference] Bucher: with a writer who died young and whose biography is now known, the authorial voice and the book are almost inextricable — he names the intentional-fallacy problem explicitly and sets it aside. [~00:52, estimated]
• Notes: Advanced jointly by Maniatis and Bucher as testimony about how their own reading changed (pre-~2005 text-and-puzzle → post-2008 autobiography), not as a thesis argued against opponents; Maniatis adds the reading is now almost too affecting to do straight through.

THEORY: Don Gately's story tracks the labors of Hercules

• Crux: gately-hercules
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • none offered — Maniatis's appreciative reminiscence of a lost EZBoard thread whose author systematically tracked Gately against Hercules's labors with textual evidence; the thread died in the platform-wide hack and is unrecoverable. [~00:09, estimated]
• Notes: Third-party theory sighted secondhand; counted as a popularity sighting. The supporting evidence existed but is lost with the EZBoard archive.

No other theory blocks: the episode advances nothing on the standing cruxes (ending, DMZ, wraith, structure) — notably Maniatis's known on-site marijuana-withdrawal dissent from Swartz never comes up (see Vs the archive); the entertainment-prediction remark is a passing observation, not an argued reading.

Themes

addiction-and-recovery (the AA material's slow-release payoff; obsession with the book itself as quasi-addiction); communication-and-solipsism (literature making you feel less alone, enacted as a 19-year transcontinental friendship; the meta-conversation in therapy); entertainment-and-the-self (Maniatis on IJ's predictive accuracy about entertainment consumption; both hosts' confessed screen-dependence); family (the funeral reading — choosing to love); annularity as identity (the circle tattoo).

Cross-references

• howling-fantods-ij — the site itself; this episode is its origin story, including why its link-catalog form (no forums, chronological accretion, out-of-date but irreplaceable) is the way it is.
• bucher-fantods-wallace-l-fandom — the written history of the same community; this episode adds the Nadell fax, the Schmidt handoff, and the Pynchon-l/Minneapolis-anarchist color first-person.
• schmidt-notes-on-ij — the archive's endogenous-DMZ theorist is here identified (by Bucher) as the founder of wallace-l; provenance worth attaching to that note.
• gc-ep001-intro-discussing-dfw and gc-ep008-dt-max-biographer — the adjacent community-history episodes; ep008's fan-mail material pairs with Maniatis's reason for never writing to Wallace.
• harvard-dtmax-wood-dfw / dtmax-every-love-story — the Granada House revelations driving the autobiographical turn described here.
• Characters/scenes: Don Gately (the Hercules-labors thread; the adult reread's center); Kate Gompert's hospital interview; Pat Montesian's office; the Marathe/Steeply mountainside dialogues ("choosing to love"); Hal as the young reader's mirror; Johnny Gentle (the closing convexity/concavity joke).