Bookworm: David Foster Wallace on A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again — KCRW (May 15, 1997)

TL;DR

Wallace's second of five Bookworm appearances — the follow-up, one year on, to the famous 1996 Sierpinski-gasket conversation — this time on the essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, mid-tour (he had read in San Francisco the night before). A ~27-minute conversation, almost entirely about the nonfiction craft: where the anxious Midwestern persona came from and why it was constructed; what footnotes are for and why his editor cut a third of them; pace, compound conjunctions, and the brain voice (with the striking aside that IJ marked his first attempt at narration meant to sound like a person talking to you); and a long, serious exchange about two different kinds of self-consciousness, via David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Only audio survives here, machine-transcribed, so everything below is paraphrase — nothing in this note is quoted from the tape. IJ surfaces obliquely but valuably: composition dating (oldest essay ~1990, his first stab at IJ), pride in having let his editor cut IJ, and first-hand testimony on the narratorial voice.

Key claims

• Composition dating: the oldest essay in the collection was written around 1990, which he identifies as the period when he was making his first stab at Infinite Jest; a fair amount of IJ's theory comes out in the essays because he had no idea how to write nonfiction and was simply walking around paying close attention [pt2 00:00–01:05].
• Addiction as lattice, seduction as subject: the AA open meetings and addictionology reading behind IJ became a model through which American material organizes itself; advertising is seduction; an addict is the ultimate inelastic demand, which is terrific for commercial interests. He steers the frame from addiction to seduction — promising more than you can deliver — as the distinctly American experience the essays kept finding [pt2 00:00–00:26].
• Not a journalist: the pieces exist because a single Harper's commission led other editors to want more; he distinguishes himself from journalists throughout [pt2 01:05].
• The persona's origin: starting with the third essay (the state-fair piece) he found a persona rooted in genuine terror — he knew fiction, knew nothing about nonfiction — and hit on candor as the tactic: announcing on the page that he is not a journalist, is petrified, and that the terror is making him pay attention. The result reads as a lovable schmuck; a man in New York kept asking whether he had gotten it from Woody Allen [pt2 02:17–02:58].
• The persona retired on purpose: part of why he collected the essays was to stop writing that narrator for a while — by the last essay it had become a particular kind of narrator [pt2 02:58].
• Legs: he would claim he genuinely belonged in the cruise ship's best-legs contest; he has been complimented on his legs more than once [pt2 03:54].
• The Midwestern tool: a persona just shy of gee-the-buildings-are-tall is extremely useful, especially in New York, because Midwesterners are assumed non-hip and several IQ points slower, and people reveal themselves to the apparently-slower outsider in ways they never would to another East Coaster [pt2 04:15].
• Anti-sneer design: the pieces were set up to invite sneering — the East Coast egghead returns to the state fair, boards the cruise — and building himself as vulnerable and neurotic aimed the humor at himself rather than at the fair-goers or cruisers; he did not want literate parody-magazine takes [pt2 05:01–05:17].
• Nonfiction stress: you cannot lie (fact-checkers call, nervously), and reality oversupplies detail — one could spend three hours describing the not-lavish studio they are sitting in; overwhelmed about what mattered, he made utter candor the strategy, inviting the reader to share both the anxiety and the overload [pt2 07:03].
• Teaching: he is currently teaching a nonfiction class at Illinois State and realizing how illiterate in the genre he is [pt2 02:17].
• Footnotes and the editor: Michael Pietsch (the tape garbles the surname) trimmed the footnote mass by about a third, hitting the Lynch and cruise pieces hardest, at exactly the spots where Wallace had stopped identifying with the reader; Pietsch edited both books well and gets what the footnotes are for [pt2 09:06–09:41]. Wallace claims he is now in cold turkey from footnotes and not doing them anymore [pt2 10:00].
• Pace over style; the brain voice. What interests him is pace, not style; his stuff is not meant to be read aloud, and tour readings give him breathing trouble — the text's revenge [pt2 10:26–10:36]. Compound conjunctions mimic fast talkers who stop breathing; sparse punctuation and strategically ungrammatical syntax keep the reader's inner voice sounding like actual speech [pt2 10:51–12:14]. Infinite Jest, he says, was his first piece of writing built so its narrating voice sounds like somebody addressing you; his first fiction was written, distant, contained, and the essays — in roughly chronological order — show that voice creeping in, maybe not entirely intentionally [pt2 12:43–12:58].
• The San Francisco reader: at the previous night's reading, an acute audience member pointed out that the collection's second essay argues that hip irony can turn toxic while much of the rest of the book runs on hip ironic self-consciousness; the observation made him uncomfortable and he concedes it [pt2 15:04–15:16].
• Self-deprecation diagnosed: apologizing for being smart can become heading off criticism — getting to the self-judgment first so no one else can; he calls this manipulative, a tic of his own psychology, very American, and something his work would be better with less of [pt2 15:32–16:21]. He knows he is bright but is terrified of coming off as someone who thinks so [pt2 20:46].
• Two self-consciousnesses: the Markson / Rilke / Kafka kind is deeper, wiser, autonomous, almost solipsistic — closer to self-awareness and an involved acceptance of human limitation — where his own kind is consumed with others' perceptions; self-consciousness wants a richer vocabulary, on the model of all those proverbial Eskimo snow-words [pt2 18:44–19:18]. Sitcom logic enforces the tic: everyone knows what happens to the character who lets himself look puffed up [pt2 19:41–19:46].
• The defense of the neurosis: it is mimetic of a late-twentieth-century America in which people are terribly afraid of one another with few venues to say so; betraying the neurosis on the page at least invites a conversation between writer and reader [pt2 20:22–20:27].
• The Gass hypothetical and the aphoristic ideal: Silverblatt wishes The Tunnel, after fifteen years, had been a heroic 77 pages; Wallace agrees in principle that the condensed register — Zarathustra, the Philosophical Investigations, the Tao Te Ching, the end of the Tractatus — is the higher mode, but in nonfiction it would set the writer up as a teacher rather than a companion, and it is the work of a Mozart of living after decades of effort; he is comfortable saying he is not there yet [pt2 20:51–22:44, 25:02–25:14].
• On IJ's editing: the thing he is proudest of about Infinite Jest is that, for once, he did not cling reptile-fashion to every page — he let himself trust a very smart editor and part with material [pt2 23:02].
• Minimalism: the 1980s movement aped the condensed form without its spirit — Americanized into formal mannerisms, a look, a persona; exceptions in Carver moments (the "So Much Water, So Close to Home" ending, perhaps) [pt2 23:25–23:38].
• The companion stance: in the nonfiction he wanted to be a companion or tour guide — observant, possibly annoying, but never BS-ing the reader, never posturing above her, and every bit as bound up, Americanized, self-conscious, and insecure as she is; he grants this is a defense of a literature inferior to the effaced, live-as-if-already-dead mode, which he has seen only in spiritual and religious writing — but not without value [pt2 23:54–24:56].
• Production credits on tape: associate producer Melinda Siegel; engineer Jennifer Swadek (spelling approximate) [pt2 25:32–25:35].

The interviewer's questions

Silverblatt's questions, paraphrased in order (he is the most formally attentive interviewer Wallace faced, and the questions are half the content):

1. Nearly everything the essays examine yields an addictiveness quotient — the tennis volley becoming trance, cruise pampering breeding a hunger for mega-pampering — and the essays themselves, in their length and repetitions, form a counter-trance addiction in the reader. Would he talk about that? [pt1 00:43–01:31]
2. The essays recall James Thurber, whose technique was to make the narrator exactly the wrong person to be present at the events — the humorist must first disqualify himself; once he has turned himself into a Chaplin, whatever befalls him lands as comedy. Is that the mechanism here? [pt2 01:43–02:11] (Follow-up: Thurber's Midwesternness, the Ohio State eye-in-the-microscope episode, the blind cartoonist's endearing tone, set against Wallace in the beautiful-legs contest [pt2 03:12–03:39].)
3. The writing presents information-gathering as a kind of hunger — the state-fair historian's undigestible facts recited dutifully, capped by the wish for a pen — and there is an aggressiveness about how much information arrives and how it gets parsed; Infinite Jest situates its reader the same way, revealing only a third of the way in what year it is. Is how one takes in and arranges new information his real subject? [pt2 06:13–06:34] (Wallace: this is what is neat about coming on the show — being shown things he had not realized.)
4. The overload spills into footnotes — spatially, information overrunning what the page can hold — and this echoes his own claim about television splitting word, image, and commentary-about-the-image; a tennis game between text and note. The footnote form has become his; is he using it for everything now? [pt2 07:34]
5. He appears to be the inventor of the paragraph-opening compound conjunction; he does it ferociously, so presumably not unconsciously — what is it for? [pt2 10:04]
6. These books are written in the brain voice — a phrase Silverblatt thought he had invented — with a countervailing desire not to sound impressive: Infinite Jest is full of people saying brilliant things and apologizing for thinking them at that rate and length. Doesn't this come from somewhere in the culture — a generation that went to college and let page-locutions (inasmuch-as constructions, meta-language, small apologies for intelligence) into speech? [pt2 12:19–14:32]
7. They share an admiration for Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress — its marriage of extraordinary intelligence and sadness, intelligence swallowed by a narrative situation that compresses it almost past expression. Rilke and Kafka manage self-consciousness that attains a kind of sanctity or humanness; is that the alternative to the massive book, the massive self-consciousnesses and paralyses, of Infinite Jest? [pt2 16:42–18:17]
8. After fifteen years of Gass working like a dog on The Tunnel, wouldn't a 77-page book have been heroic — not an aperitif-and-toothpick book but the essence? The questions ASFT asks (how to exit the loop of addiction and consumerism) seem to demand telling not the process of truth-telling but the truth itself. Does that capacity for heroic discarding of brilliant set pieces intrigue him? [pt2 20:51–22:27]
9. What about a literature that implicitly absorbs the Zen maxim about living as one already dead? [pt2 24:35] (Wallace: that is an effaced narrator as fact rather than literary choice — spiritual and religious literature aside, he has not seen it done [pt2 24:42–24:56].)

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The ASFT persona — anxious, candid, Midwestern-naif — is a constructed rhetorical instrument, built out of genuine terror of the genre, deployed tactically, and retired deliberately with the collection

• Crux: nonfiction-persona
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Origin account: starting with the third essay (the state-fair piece) he found a persona; he was petrified because he knew fiction and nothing about nonfiction, and hit on candor as the tactic — a narrator who comes out and says he is not a journalist, is terrified, and that the terror is making him pay a whole lot of attention; the effect is a kind of lovable schmuck [pt2 02:17–02:58]
  • [author] The Midwestern-naif is named as a tool: just shy of gee-the-buildings-are-tall, useful especially in New York because Midwesterners are presumed non-hip and several IQ points slower, and people reveal themselves to the apparently-slower outsider [pt2 04:15]
  • [author] He owns the constructedness outright: it is somewhat of an ironic pose, since he is bright and a good writer and is not shaking straw out of his hair; the anxious, compulsive, agoraphobic figure is partly built [pt2 04:15–05:01]
  • [author] Design motive: the assignments were set up for sneering (the egghead at the state fair, on the cruise), and casting himself as vulnerable and neurotic aimed the humor at himself rather than at his subjects [pt2 05:01–05:17]
  • [author] Candor as overload-management: nonfiction means you cannot lie and reality oversupplies detail; being utterly candid about being overwhelmed invites the reader to share the anxiety and the overload [pt2 07:03]
  • [author] Deliberate retirement: he collected the essays partly so he could stop writing that narrator for a while — by the last essay it had become a particular kind of narrator [pt2 02:58]
• Notes: The Thurber disqualification frame (the humorist must first disqualify himself) is Silverblatt's, not Wallace's — Wallace says he had not thought of it that way and knows little Thurber [pt2 01:43–02:11]. Author-side complication for the scholarly version of this crux (the disingenuous expertise-abrogation reading): Wallace confirms the pose is partly constructed and tactically useful while insisting its root — the terror, the not-knowing-the-genre — was genuine; sincere origin and strategic deployment are asserted in the same breath.

THEORY: The footnote apparatus is a call-and-response, dimension-dropping device — and a compulsion that needs editorial policing, because notes must be read exactly the way text is

• Crux: endnotes-function
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] In the later essays — written while he was typing Infinite Jest — footnotes became, in his word as rendered on tape, addictive: a call-and-response set up in the head, a terrific way to drop back a dimension or make a meta-comment on the thing you are doing; in essays already about the anxiety of their own production, the notes were the natural place for that layer [pt2 08:23]
  • [author] The compulsion mechanism: an anxiety that something is not entirely clear, or that an element of reality has escaped his ken, gets dropped to the bottom of the page [pt2 09:06]
  • [author] The reader-cost asymmetry, stated precisely: to the writer a footnote can feel like a corollary or afterthought, but the reader must stop, hold her place, go down, read the interpolation, and return — the notes demand more than the text does, and get read with the identical discipline the text gets [pt2 09:06–09:41]
  • [author] The editorial control loop: Pietsch cut roughly a third of the footnote mass (about a third, Lynch and cruise pieces hardest hit) at exactly the spots where Wallace had lost it — ceased identifying with the reader and was working out the form's addictive pull; Pietsch sees the notes' virtues and edited both books well [pt2 09:06–09:41]
• Notes: Silverblatt's framing question maps the footnote onto the TV essay's split of word, image, and commentary-about-image and calls the page a tennis game [pt2 07:34]; Wallace does not take up the television mapping — his answer substitutes the call-and-response account. Scope caution: the cut-a-third figure is about the ASFT essays (Lynch, cruise), not about IJ's endnotes — it must not migrate to the IJ cuts ledger. The cold-turkey vow — he says he is done with footnotes [pt2 10:00] — did not survive his later books. Compatible with the theory record's account of the apparatus as discursive intrusion mimicking information-flood; this adds the author's own functional vocabulary (dimension-drop, meta-comment, call-and-response) and the compulsion-plus-editor dynamic.

THEORY: The prose is engineered for pace, not style — compound conjunctions as breath-cues, sparse punctuation and strategic ungrammaticality to make the reader's inner voice mimic speech

• Crux: prose-tempo-design
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] His stated interest is pace rather than style; his stuff is not meant to be read aloud, and tour readings give him breathing trouble — the text's revenge [pt2 10:26–10:36]
  • [author] The compound conjunction explained as a speech-borrowing: fast talkers on a roll stop breathing and stack conjunctions because the sentence must serve contrast, continuation, and extrapolation at once; on the page it is an unconscious clue to the reader that she is more listening than reading, that the passage now runs on sound, pace, and breath rather than short contained sentences [pt2 10:51]
  • [author] The like-comma example: writers who render spoken hedges with commas make the text easier to read but stop the brain voice from mimicking how a person actually sounds; passages meant to be read fast get little punctuation and strictly-speaking ungrammatical but strategically built syntax [pt2 11:49–12:14]
• Notes: Second author-grade sighting for this crux (the first: the 2004 San Francisco stage conversation, where he calls himself a control freak about reader speed); the two accounts are fully consistent — there the mechanism was sentence length, here conjunctions and punctuation, both in service of engineered tempo. Silverblatt's prompt credits him with inventing the paragraph-opening compound conjunction and presumes it is conscious [pt2 10:04]; Wallace neither claims invention nor denies deliberateness.

THEORY: IJ's narration is a designed talking-to-you voice — his first outing, by his own account, whose narrator is built to sound like someone addressing you

• Crux: narrator-proximity
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Taking up the brain-voice phrase, Wallace identifies IJ as his first piece of writing whose narrating voice is built to sound as if it is addressing the reader directly; his first fiction was what he then thought of as literary — very written, distant, contained — and the essays, in roughly chronological order, show that voice creeping in, maybe not entirely intentionally (he jokes he would happily pretend it was, to sound impressive) [pt2 12:24–12:58]
• Notes: The crux's existing sightings describe a documentarian, instructive, dissociative-focalized mode; this testimony is the intimacy pole of the same design question — what register the narrating voice is engineered to hold — and the first author-grade sighting keyed to the crux. It feeds the who-narrates question without taking any position on it. Phrase provenance on tape: Wallace uses brain voice first in-episode (in the like-comma answer [pt2 12:00]); Silverblatt then says he is glad Wallace used the phrase because he thought he had invented it [pt2 12:14–12:24]. The intentionality hedge (not entirely intentional) is in-source counterweight to any strong-design gloss and is recorded here deliberately.

THEORY: There are two kinds of self-consciousness — a deep, autonomous, almost solipsistic self-awareness (Markson, Rilke, Kafka) and a shallow, other-directed, defensive kind — and his own apologizing-for-being-smart is the second: manipulative fear-management, not sincerity

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] The diagnosis: apologizing for being smart can become heading off criticism — showing a hip, self-aware judgment of yourself first so the other person never gets the chance; it is of a piece with a very American insecurity he has fully internalized, terror of another's judgment [pt2 15:32]
  • [author] The verdict on his own practice: it really is manipulative — acting out of terror of judgment — a tic of his own psychology; his work would be better with less of it [pt2 16:06–16:21]
  • [author] The taxonomy: the self-consciousness of Wittgenstein's Mistress, the notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, A Hunger Artist, The Metamorphosis is deeper, wiser, more autonomous, almost solipsistic — more like self-awareness, an involved and sophisticated acceptance of human limitation — where his kind is consumed with how others perceive him, positioning against an imagined catastrophe; the term, he adds, deserves the same lexical abundance the Eskimos proverbially give snow [pt2 18:44–19:18]
  • [author] The cultural enforcement mechanism: every erudite remark gets an instant not-puffed-up disclaimer because American sitcoms have taught everybody the fate of the character caught looking pretentious [pt2 19:41–19:46]
  • [author] The partial defense: the neurosis is mimetic of a late-twentieth-century America in which people are terribly afraid of one another and have few venues to say so; betraying it on the page at least invites a conversation between writer and reader about it — and he is terrified of coming off as someone who thinks he is bright, because such people are insufferable [pt2 20:22–20:46]
  • [author] The trigger anecdote: at the San Francisco reading the night before, a reader observed that the collection's second essay argues hip irony can become toxic while much of the rest of the book runs on hip ironic self-consciousness; he concedes the point and calls that register unattractive and not what he is comfortable with [pt2 15:04–15:16]
• Notes: Silverblatt's prompt frames the tic sociologically — a college-educated generation letting page-locutions (inasmuch-as constructions, meta-language, small apologies for intelligence) into speech — and pairs ASFT's self-styled weenie with IJ's people who say brilliant things while apologizing for thinking them at that rate and length [pt2 13:09–14:32]. For the scholarly crux (sincerity as coherence rather than authenticity), this is primary author testimony on the mechanism of the failure mode: performed self-deprecation as audience management, distinguished by him from a wise, timeless self-consciousness he says he sometimes reaches in later work [pt2 19:18–20:22].

THEORY: The IJ cuts were real and willingly taken — he did not fight for every page

• Crux: ij-cuts
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] Prompted by the Gass 77-page hypothetical, he says that long as IJ is, his proudest fact about it is that for once he declined the reptilian cling to every page — trusting a very smart editor and letting material go, the letting-go itself being what the process was worth [pt2 23:02]
  • [author] Pietsch named (garbled on tape) as a really good editor of both books [pt2 09:41]
• Notes: No scale is given; the phrasing — cut some of it — sits more comfortably beside the modest-cuts reading than the hundreds-of-pages legend, but the statement is offered as pride in a process, not as a size claim, and should not be cited as one. The footnote-cut figure elsewhere in the episode (a third) concerns the ASFT essays, not IJ.

CONNECTION: The essays as IJ's theory in the wild — addiction as a lattice for American material, advertising as seduction, the addict as the ultimate inelastic demand

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: [scene] Answering the addictiveness-quotient question, he dates the oldest essay to about 1990, his first stab at Infinite Jest; the AA meetings and addictionology reading became a model or lattice through which American material gets seen; advertising is seduction; no demand is more inelastic than an addict's — a gift to commercial interests; and the essays kept turning out to be about kinds of seduction — promising more than you can deliver — which strikes him as particularly American [pt2 00:00–00:26]. He adds that it is unsurprising that a fair amount of the theory behind IJ comes out in the essays, since he did not know how to write nonfiction and simply went around attending as closely as he could manage [pt2 01:05]
• IJ echo: the essay-to-novel program the archive tracks under this crux — malignantly addictive entertainment as commerce's limit case; the Entertainment as seduction perfected; Marathe on choosing what to give yourself away to
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Post-IJ continuity, not prefiguration — the interview restates the lattice a year after publication. Wallace's own redirection from addiction to seduction is in-source nuance worth preserving: he half-resists the addiction frame Silverblatt offers (he says he is not sure about addiction so much) and re-centers on seduction. Silverblatt's opening thesis — that the essays themselves become addictive, a counter-trance [pt1 00:43–01:31] — is host framing that Wallace never affirms.

CONNECTION: The Markson/Wittgenstein constellation as stated aspiration — marrying intelligence and sadness; the condensed aphoristic mode he is not yet good enough for

• Crux: wittgenstein-frame
• Early text: [scene] He calls Wittgenstein's Mistress a magical book — not for alternating stunt-pilot intellection with pathos but for wedding the two — which he names as his dream, to someday do something like that [pt2 18:17–18:33]. The condensed aphoristic register — Zarathustra, the Philosophical Investigations, the Tao Te Ching, really good poetry, the end of the Tractatus — is agreed to be the higher mode, the work of a Mozart of living after decades of effort, and he is comfortable saying he is not there yet [pt2 22:27, 25:02–25:14]
• IJ echo: the Wittgenstein-as-governing-frame reading of Wallace's work — language, solipsism, and the limits of what can be said as the problem his fiction keeps working
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: It is Silverblatt who positions the Markson/Rilke/Kafka mode as the alternative to Infinite Jest's massive self-consciousnesses and paralyses [pt2 16:57–18:17]; Wallace agrees in principle but relocates the difference into kinds of self-consciousness (see the sincerity block). The exchange also recalls that the two have discussed the book before — the shared-admiration framing is explicit on tape [pt2 16:42].

CONNECTION: The writer as companion and tour guide, not teacher — fellowship with the reader as the reachable good, in an America afraid of itself

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: [scene] Condensed aphoristic nonfiction would set the writer up as a teacher; he wanted instead to be a companion or tour guide — very observant, possibly somewhat annoying, but one who will not BS the reader and will not posture above her, being every bit as bound up, Americanized, self-conscious, and insecure as she is [pt2 22:44, 23:54–24:11]. He grants this defends a literature inferior to the effaced, live-as-if-already-dead mode — which he has seen only in spiritual and religious literature — but insists it is not without value [pt2 24:23–24:56]. Earlier, the same stance grounds his defense of the on-page neurosis: an era terribly afraid of one another, few venues to talk about it, and the essays as an invitation to a conversation between him and the reader [pt2 20:22–20:27]
• IJ echo: the communication-and-solipsism spine — fiction as a conversation between human beings against loneliness, as he put it on this same program a year earlier
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Continuity, not prefiguration. The companion figure here is the nonfiction persona's ethical justification — the same construct the persona block records tactically is defended morally as anti-hierarchy, anti-BS fellowship.

Themes

Seduction and addiction as the American commercial condition (the inelastic demand); sincerity, irony, and the two self-consciousnesses (the episode's deepest vein); communication versus solipsism (companion over teacher; the conversation the neurosis invites); craft as breath and pace (conjunctions, punctuation, the brain voice); apparatus and editing (footnote compulsion, the Pietsch discipline, the IJ cuts); the constructed persona and candor as strategy.

Cross-references

• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the prior appearance, one year earlier: there structure (the Sierpinski gasket), addiction as displaced worship, and the conversation-between-human-beings statement of art's point; this episode never revisits the gasket, and the companion/tour-guide stance here is that statement's nonfiction restatement.
• city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the other author-grade tempo testimony (control-freak-about-reader-speed, sentence length as the lever); this episode supplies the conjunction and punctuation half of the same account, seven years earlier.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the 1993 program (fiction against loneliness; what fire to steal) that the companion stance and the marrying-intelligence-and-sadness dream restate; also the era of his published enthusiasm for Wittgenstein's Mistress.
• e-unibus-pluram — the second essay the San Francisco reader threw back at him; the toxic-irony argument he concedes the rest of the collection complicates.
• infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — the editor's side of the cutting relationship Wallace praises here.
• video-wpr-1997-cruise and video-wpr-1997-supposedly-fun-thing — same tour, same collection; the radio siblings of this episode.
• dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the April 1994 endnote-pitch record this episode's footnote testimony sits beside.