Bookworm phone follow-up — DFW by phone from his home in Illinois (KCRW, August 3, 2000)

TL;DR

Wallace's fourth Bookworm appearance and the odd one out: a roughly 28-minute telephone interview from his home in Illinois (dog Jeeves audibly present), aired as the closing installment of Silverblatt's summer 2000 series on the post-Eggers generation, with Brief Interviews just out in paperback. Held only inside the 2h23m Bookworm compilation file — all timestamps in this note are compilation offsets, spanning [01:26:12]–[01:54:02]. The IJ headline: prompted on difficulty, Wallace says the book is not that complicated, that a couple of late plot points could resolve in either direction, and that he mostly remembers it as sad — then pushes back on Silverblatt's irresolvability framing with the argument that calling something irresolvable resolves it, and that what feels real is the labor of deciding whether resolution is worth attempting. The rest is a sustained aesthetic self-statement: awkwardness as his generation's signal of sincerity vs. smoothness as corporate slickness, Gaddis named as his chief stylistic influence, and the cold-vs-warm media diagnosis (art as gift, commercial entertainment as contemptuous economic transaction) — E Unibus Pluram restated down a phone line in 2000. ASR: paraphrase only throughout, no quotation.

Key claims

Wallace on Infinite Jest and its ending

• IJ's difficulty puzzles him from the inside. Told that UCLA graduate students successfully lobbied to put Infinite Jest on the graduate orals required list under the postmodern-novel category (Silverblatt heard this from a triumphant grad student at an ongoing Gravity's Rainbow reading at UCLA [01:28:38–01:28:53]), and asked whether the book now stands as a difficulty benchmark he must match, Wallace answers that talk of Infinite Jest's difficulty leaves him mildly puzzled: to the best of his recollection it is just not that complicated [01:30:06].
• The ending, in the author's own voice: a couple of late plot points could resolve in either direction — and for the most part he just remembers the book as being kind of sad [01:30:15]. The most direct IJ-specific statement of end-ambiguity in the spoken archive so far, and a third-date corroboration of the sad-book intent (1996 Bookworm, 1999 Bookworm, Max's testimony).
• Against irresolvability as a program. Silverblatt proposes that what qualifies a subject for Wallace is that it be irresolvable, citing IJ's ending and the audiobook of Brief Interviews [01:30:21]. Wallace declines the word: once you've concluded a thing genuinely cannot be resolved, you have thereby resolved it [01:31:45]; what feels real to him: across situations of every kind, some weighty, the bulk of the energy goes to deciding whether the thing merits any resolving effort at all [01:31:24]. Commercial art (his example: the detective genre, and arguably much realist fiction) is the machinery of puzzle-plus-resolution [01:30:21].
• Reading IJ takes genius too. At the close he argues that the writers he respects hold a very high estimation of the reader and make genius a requirement of good reading no less than of good writing [01:51:37]; the genius in question is the genius of working through the mess, of putting it together, of judging whether a thing resolves [01:51:57] — required on both sides of the transaction [01:52:26].

Wallace on his aesthetics, influences, and generation

• Awkwardness reads as sincerity now. Reaching for a toss-off passage about awkwardness vs. smoothness in blues music from George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context (ASR drops the surname) [01:35:56], he argues that for his generation — born 1962 and after [01:36:28] — smoothness and prettiness carry a different connotation than they did for the prior generation, for whom they meant education and refinement [01:36:34]. For his cohort, seamlessness (no unresolved question, no unfired third-act gun) equals slickness and corporate product; a certain awkwardness or lack of patrician refinement signals not clumsiness but sincerity, being heartfelt, real, homemade [01:37:41–01:37:54].
• Gaddis is the influence. Gaddis's messy, very hard-to-read stretches fit a subject matter of corporations, forgeries, lawsuits — the smooth, sleek, basically lying styles we live inside [01:38:11]; if any single writer shaped Wallace's style, Gaddis, he says, is the likeliest [01:38:40]. The strongest single-influence claim in the spoken archive.
• Class questions became corporation questions. For the founding postmodernists, experiment still had to establish class credentials — Dukes and Earls rebelling instead of the rabble [01:39:51]. Somewhere in the late eighties, as minimalism passed from vogue, the class questions did not change so much as disappear, replaced by questions of corporations vs. consumers, corporate vs. homemade, non-corporate transactions [01:42:03]. Smoothness, easy black-and-white resolution, and standardly gratifying endings he associates with corporate entertainment whose agenda is fundamentally financial, with no warmth toward the reader [01:41:17–01:43:23].
• Cold vs. warm: gift vs. economic transaction. His preferred poles are cold and warm rather than Silverblatt's: the question is whether the fundamental transaction is artistic — which involves a gift — or economic, which he regards as cold [01:47:30–01:47:36]. Television, commercial film, and top-40 music (in which, he concedes, he has put in his time) are very cold media even though they are nearly the last home of melodrama: none of it is for you; it exists to make you like it enough that rewards accrue to the producers and sponsors [01:46:05–01:48:09]. Alternative music, poetry slams, makeshift park art — some of it ugly — feel warm because the exchange is — no better word for it — spiritual, person to person, with economics not at the fundament [01:48:09–01:49:03].
• He names the contradiction himself: both books under discussion are Little, Brown titles; Little, Brown belongs to Time Warner, and Time Warner — he guesses — now belongs to AOL [01:48:33].
• Writing-class formation. As a dutiful student in writing classes, the great odium was melodrama and tearjerker material [01:46:05].

Loneliness, double binds, and Brief Interviews

• The loneliness thesis, restated with a delta. The Brief Interviews book, if unified by anything, had to do with loneliness, particularly in relationships between people — and, as far as he can see, everything he writes ends up being about that [01:33:27]. (The full loneliness/BIWHM ground is in the 1999 studio episode's note; the phoner's addition is the double-bind specialization below.)
• Double binds feel like the way things are. Asked whether the double bind is the inspiration point for these fictions, he reaches for the W. Somerset Maugham Appointment in Samarra figure — fleeing death toward the city where death waits [01:33:56] — and says such cosmic ironies carry a resonance for him that is not entirely intellectual; it just seems to be the way things are [01:33:27].
• Silverblatt's setup pair: the kleptomaniac who develops agoraphobia and so cannot reach the places he yearns to steal from, solved by mail fraud (ASR: male fraud) — a test Silverblatt says is given to students in Infinite Jest [01:32:20–01:32:38] — paired with his reading of the BIWHM perfect-mother story whose title frames a suicide as a sort of present [01:32:46]. (Same exam anecdote Silverblatt retold in the 1996 episode, compilation [00:24:57]; page verification pending.)

Occasion, format, and biography

• Closing installment of Silverblatt's series a heartbreaking group of staggering geniuses; the series' earlier guests include Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim, George Saunders, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Dennis Cooper (sequence not meaningful), plus one more whose name the ASR garbles [01:26:32–01:26:38]. Wallace is framed as the writer those guests most frequently cited as inspiration and benchmark [01:26:38].
• Conducted by telephone to Wallace's home in Illinois — an outpost of Illinois, Silverblatt says, hostage to whatever noises the phone line and the household supply [01:27:37–01:27:45]. The dog is named Jeeves; Silverblatt jokes that Jeeves had been looking forward to sitting in but was called away [01:28:08]. Biographical corroboration: Jeeves is one of Wallace's documented Bloomington dogs.
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men newly issued in Back Bay Books paperback [01:26:38] — the occasion peg.
• Wallace recorded a two-volume Time Warner AudioBooks tape of uncut Brief Interviews stories, which Silverblatt says he listened to [01:30:40] — a product/biography fact worth keeping.
• On-tape candor kept in the broadcast: at sign-off Wallace asks what he should say in response, they audition alternatives, and Silverblatt suggests something collegial — a pleasure as always — which Wallace then delivers [01:53:11–01:53:28]. Silverblatt closes by conceding the sound falls short of Bookworm's usual bell-clear audio but that the conversation justified the engineering difficulty [01:53:42–01:53:56].

Silverblatt's questions, paraphrased (interview-questions shelf)

1. Do you see Infinite Jest as a standing challenge to yourself — does the prospect of matching its difficulty fatigue or inspire you? (He notes he has never asked anyone this before.) [01:27:57]
2. Is irresolvability what qualifies a subject for you — as in the ending of Infinite Jest and across the Brief Interviews stories? [01:30:21]
3. Is the double bind the inspiration point for many of these fictions? [01:32:20–01:33:27]
4. Can you talk about the prose being written now — the beautiful mess — as against the belletristic tradition (ASR: bellatristic) of Nabokov, Mann, Joyce, and even Barthelme's tidy collage? [01:34:24]
5. Why warm and cold as the poles, given that a whole generation treated heart-melting warmth as the artillery of the corporate logo? [01:46:05]
6. Does the staggering in staggering genius re-humanize the genius writer — genius returned (Volmann, Danielewski, Wallace) but marked human and non-corporate, against the imperial genius of Nabokov, Joyce, Barth, Pynchon and the anti-genius persona of the minimalists? [01:49:33–01:50:32]

Format note for the comp: Silverblatt says explicitly that he prefers to work without prepared questions, responding instead to what the guest fills him with [01:43:23]; two of his turns are long readings (the tar-baby figure — the writer caught inside the problem, the book as the record of seeking an extrication point while suspecting none exists [01:39:51]; the Barth/Updike class-credentials genealogy [01:43:23–01:44:46]) offered for confirmation rather than as questions.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: For Wallace's generation, awkwardness in prose signals sincerity and the homemade, while smoothness signals corporate slickness — an authorial definition of the sincerity axis

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] The Trow-derived generational flip: smoothness/prettiness meant education and refinement to the prior generation; to people born around 1962 and after, seamlessness reads as slick corporate product, and awkwardness reads as sincerity, heartfelt, real, homemade [01:35:56–01:38:04]
  • [author] Gaddis offered as the proof case — mess that is very hard to read, matched to a subject matter of corporations, forgeries, and the sleek lying styles we move in; Wallace's chief stylistic influence by his own naming [01:38:11–01:38:40]
  • [author] The warm/cold recast: the artistic transaction involves a gift; the economic transaction is cold; melodrama survives mainly in cold media [01:46:05–01:47:36]
  • [secondary] Silverblatt's tar-baby extension: naming the problem no longer puts the writer above it but inside it; the beautiful mess is the record of seeking an extrication point while suspecting none exists [01:39:51]
• Notes: Oeuvre-scoped and post-IJ, framed generationally rather than about any one book. Complements (does not repeat) the 1999 studio episode's sincerity THEORY — there sincerity was a cunning-riddled, self-scanning project; here it gets a surface signature (awkwardness) and a class-to-corporation genealogy [01:39:51–01:42:03]. Silverblatt supplies the generational-genius frame; the awkwardness-equals-sincerity equation is Wallace's own.

THEORY: The IJ ending is undecidable in the weak, deliberate sense — a couple of late plot points could resolve in either direction, and the reader's work is deciding whether resolution is worth attempting

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [author] Puzzled by difficulty-talk; the book is not that complicated; a couple of late plot points — his hedge — could resolve in either direction; for the most part he remembers it as kind of sad [01:30:06–01:30:15]
  • [author] The anti-irresolvability argument: determining that something is irresolvable is itself a resolution; what feels real is that most energy goes into deciding whether it is worth spending energy trying to resolve at all [01:31:24–01:31:45]
  • [author] Good reading requires the genius of working through the mess and judging whether a thing resolves — required on both sides [01:51:57–01:52:26]
  • [secondary] Silverblatt advances the strong form: what qualifies a subject for Wallace is that it be irresolvable, as in the ending of Infinite Jest [01:30:21]
• Notes: Attribution split matters: the strong irresolvable-by-design framing is Silverblatt's; Wallace explicitly resists the word and substitutes the weaker deciding-whether structure — in-source pushback that must travel with the block (counterevidence clause). His not-that-complicated deflection also cuts against maximal-designed-obscurity versions of the crux. IJ-specific and in the author's voice at a 2000 date — earlier than the 2004 City Arts endings testimony the theory record currently leans on for author-grade evidence.

CONNECTION: Cold vs. warm media — commercial entertainment as a contemptuous economic transaction, art as gift — E Unibus Pluram restated by phone in 2000

• Crux: eup-connection
• Early text: [scene] Wallace argues that TV, commercial film, and top-40 music are very cold media: none of it is for you; it exists to make you like it so rewards accrue to producers and sponsors [01:46:05–01:48:09]; the facile and corporate carries a cool contempt for the audience, a low estimation of its willingness to do work or withstand discomfort [01:52:45]; warm counter-examples are alternative music, poetry slams, and makeshift park art, where the transaction is between people and economics is not at the fundament [01:48:09–01:49:03]
• IJ echo: the Entertainment's lethality as commercial spectation carried to its asymptote — the same lethality reading EUP develops as malignant-TV economics; the gift/economic distinction also maps onto the novel's gift structures (AA sponsorship as non-economic transmission)
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Directionality: post-IJ continuity, not source material. He raises the complication himself — his own books sit inside Little, Brown / Time Warner / AOL [01:48:33] — which bears on book-as-entertainment (whether the artifact can be warm while corporately distributed); recorded here as his own tension, not adjudicated.

CONNECTION: Loneliness named again as the unifier of everything he writes — here specialized to double binds inside relationships

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Early text: [scene] The Brief Interviews book, if unified by anything, is about loneliness in relationships; double binds and the Maugham Appointment-in-Samarra figure resonate for him not intellectually but as the way things are [01:33:27–01:33:56]
• IJ echo: the oeuvre-wide communication/solipsism spine; within IJ, the double-bind machinery Silverblatt cites is the students' dysfunctional-double-binds exam (print-verification lead recorded in the working notes)
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: Near-ground-shared with the 1999 studio episode's loneliness thesis — the 1999 note holds the full statement; this block records only the phoner's delta (double binds as the loneliness mechanism, the fatalist the-way-things-are register).

Themes

Entertainment and irony (the cold/warm media economics — the note's largest single arc); sincerity vs. slickness (awkwardness as the generational signature of the heartfelt); communication vs. solipsism (loneliness as the declared unifier, double binds as its mechanism); endings and resolution (the deciding-whether-to-resolve reframe); gift economy (art as gift vs. economic transaction — same vocabulary the archive tracks in the AA material); IJ reception history (UCLA orals canonization four years after publication).

Cross-references

• kcrw-bookworm-1999-biwhm — the studio appearance one year earlier; holds the full BIWHM ground (silent interviewer, misogyny-as-fear, loneliness thesis, rhetoricalized self-presentation). This phoner deliberately records only the delta: ending/irresolvability, awkwardness-sincerity, Gaddis, cold/warm.
• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — first appearance; Silverblatt's kleptomaniac/mail-fraud double-bind exam anecdote here [01:32:20] is a callback to the same passage he retold in 1996 (compilation offset [00:24:57]); the sad-book self-description recurs across both.
• kcrw-bookworm-1997-asft — the TV-and-entertainment ground of the essay-collection episode; the phoner's cold-media argument is its 2000 continuation.
• kcrw-bookworm-2006-lobster — the next and final appearance; its note logs Silverblatt's remark that they had not met in person for a couple of years by then, which the phone-only 2000 encounter is consistent with (recorded there, not adjudicated).
• e-unibus-pluram — the 1993 essay whose attention/economics diagnosis the cold/warm arc restates.
• mccaffery-1993-interview — the art-as-gift vs. commercial-transaction frame is the 1993 program in nearly the same vocabulary, seven years on.
• city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the other author-voice endings testimony (designed-holes, Oblivion-era); this phoner is the earlier, IJ-specific sibling.