Bookworm: John D'Agata, The Next American Essay — with a DFW reading of Ticket to the Fair (KCRW, May 8, 2003)

TL;DR

Not a Wallace interview: a Bookworm half hour with John D'Agata on his anthology The Next American Essay (Graywolf, 2003), the case for a stylistic, experimental essay tradition — Plutarch's unmediated Spartan quotations, Sumerian aphorism collections, prose sonnets, a bumper-sticker autobiography, a footnotes-only essay — against the memoir of the stubbed toe. Wallace appears twice at one remove: a recorded live reading of the baton-twirling set piece from Ticket to the Fair (the Illinois State Fair essay, which the anthology reprints under its original title), and two remarks of his relayed by Silverblatt. The Wallace-relevant yield is D'Agata's on-air reading of the fair essay's journalism conceit as a designed failure that frees a tour through the writer's thought process. Infinite Jest is never mentioned. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation.

Key claims

• The anthology's argument (D'Agata): the essay is wrongly thought never to have had a modernist or postmodernist reinvention; the collection documents a stylistic-essay tradition — as much concerned with language and style as content — running from Plutarch's Sayings by Spartans (bare, unmediated quotation lists whose juxtaposition does the arguing) and Sumerian theme-gathered aphorism collections to the present [00:00:00–00:02:28, 00:07:06].
• Boundary-stretching exhibits: James Wright's prose sonnets (unlineated but scannable, the sonnet's demonstration-to-conclusion movement as an essay form) [00:03:35–00:04:53]; David Shields's autobiography built entirely of bumper stickers, read by both men as the whole culture collaborating in one essay and as a return of the aphorism-collection form [00:06:03–00:07:06]; Jenny Boully's The Body, footnotes to an erased essay the reader projects back into the blank space — nonfiction finally making active readers of us [00:08:21, 00:12:21] (surname garbled on tape; spelling unconfirmed).
• Against the memoir default: D'Agata distinguishes the lyric essay from the merely lyrical memoir piece now borrowing the label; he wants emphasis on artfulness over the conditional facts — not the stubbed toe but the experience of the stubbed toe — and calls the choice political in a literary sense [00:09:37–00:10:50, 00:23:08].
• The fact's short lifespan: the anthology quotes a scientist on facts expiring ever faster; what stays permanent in an essay is style, structure, its way of addressing things [00:10:50–00:12:21].
• Wallace relayed, twice: Silverblatt reports Wallace locating part of writing's basic draw in a voice speaking to another person [00:13:32]; and that Wallace suggested the anthology itself amounts to an itinerary through its compiler's own preoccupations, worries, and pet peeves — which D'Agata half-confirms, saying the personal elements were meant to set an intimate tone and may have revealed things not yet clear to him [00:20:30–00:21:35]. Both are the host's attributions, not Wallace on tape.
• The reading [00:14:49–00:20:30]: Wallace, before a live audience (inferred from his closing thanks to the crowd), reads the junior baton-twirling final from the fair essay — the McDonald's tent under the inflatable clown, the sugar-and-spice division, the spectator-hazard slapstick of errant batons felling a judge, a camcorder dad, and rows of bystanders, down to his retreat as a last baton caroms off the inflatable Ronald's thigh. He prefaces that the fair was Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of, he thinks, 1993 or 1994. (The printed essay dates it August 1993 — his own hedged misremembering, recorded as said.)
• D'Agata's reading of the essay: its announced conceit — a reporter covering an event — collapses almost totally as reportage, and precisely because the piece is loosened from journalism's confines we get a marvelous excursion through this particular writer's mind at work [00:14:49]. Silverblatt's version: the addressing voice keeps hiccuping, admitting it holds no standing to judge or describe, its opportunities for judgment entirely spurious — gorgeous Midwestern detail that keeps falling apart between the serious report and the desire to make fun [00:13:32].
• The tumbleweed closer: D'Agata once mailed Silverblatt a tumbleweed from Texas during the anthrax scare; asked whether the object itself essayed Texas or was a fact that made an essay unnecessary, he rules it entirely an essay — and Silverblatt lands the episode's thesis, that it is never safe to open a box or begin an essay whose booby traps make the announced subject the thing you specifically do not learn about [00:24:57–00:26:15].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The fair essay's journalist persona is a designed failure — the announced reportage collapses so the piece can become a tour of the writer's mind

• Crux: nonfiction-persona
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] D'Agata: the piece announces a reporter covering an event, then fails almost completely at the reporting; loosened from those confines, it becomes a marvelous excursion through one writer's mind at work — offered as the source of its interest as an essay, i.e. as design, not defect [00:14:49]
  • [secondary] Silverblatt: the addressing voice keeps hiccuping and admitting it holds no standing to judge or describe these things, its opportunities for judgment entirely spurious; the extraordinary observations keep falling apart between report and fun [00:13:32]
  • [secondary] The anthologizing act itself: D'Agata places the fair piece in a collection whose stated program is style and the mind's movement over conditional fact [00:10:50–00:12:21]
• Notes: Wallace is not present to respond; his one relayed remark on the anthology (a tour of the anthologizer's interests) is congruent with the mind-tour reading but is the host's attribution. The reading itself includes the essay's own printed mid-catastrophe assertion that none of it is made up [00:18:48] — the persona claims veracity even as the journalism collapses; that veracity question (whether the set pieces are embellished) is a separate crux on which this episode offers no new testimony.

No other blocks. Nothing on Infinite Jest, which goes unmentioned; the episode's essay-theory material is not IJ-scoped.

Themes

The nonfiction persona (failure-as-method, the voice with no right to judge); style versus content as the essay's survival strategy; spectacle Americana (the fair's communal fun tipping into hazard comedy); the active reader (Boully's blank essay; the book designed to make readers do work — the same demand Wallace defends for fiction elsewhere).

Cross-references

• asft-state-fair — the essay itself; the canonical print text of the passage read on air.
• video-reading-ticket-to-the-fair — a separately circulating, previously undated clip of Wallace reading the same baton-twirling excerpt at an anthology event; this episode identifies the anthology (The Next American Essay) and so places that reading in the 2003 promotion season. Whether it is the same performance aired here or a second stop is unresolved — the two recordings differ in small wordings and in the preface.
• silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the show's IJ conversation; Silverblatt's voice-addressing-someone-else attribution here echoes the conversation-between-human-beings account of art Wallace gives there.
• kcrw-bookworm-1997-asft — the essays discussed with Wallace himself, on the same program, at book length.
• kcrw-bookworm-2006-lobster — the later nonfiction visit; the persona question as put to the author.