IJ study archive

Lannan Foundation tribute evening for David Foster Wallace (Santa Fe, 2011): Rick Moody, David Lipsky, and Joanna Scott read; panel on the pre-publication Pale King

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TL;DR

A two-hour tribute evening from the Lannan season that gave Wallace his Marfa residency: three novelists read him aloud — Moody the McCaffery interview's CPR-for-what's-human argument and the account-representative story, Lipsky the Ennet House things-you-learn list and the cruise-ship pampering saga, Scott the snootlet section of the usage essay and (as a two-hander with the host) Hal's professional-conversationalist scene — then sit for a grieving, anecdote-rich panel. Its distinctive yields: the host's firsthand retelling of the radio interview in which Wallace said he wanted a novel shaped like the Sierpinski gasket he'd had on his childhood wall, Moody's report that Wallace showed surprisingly little interest in Pynchon, and the swallows-of-Marfa story — Wallace leaving $150 for the care of the birds nesting at his residency.

Key claims

  • Occasion: the season's final reading; the panelists have read The Pale King in confidential advance copies from Little, Brown ahead of its imminent publication; the death is dated on stage at three years past. [00:00–00:07]
  • Host's framing: Wallace wrote for everyone; his job as he saw it was to connect the word whatever back to human feeling; he loved contradiction and double binds and so aimed at a demanding novel that stayed open to every reader — difficulty and accessibility at once. [00:01–00:05]
  • The math book: the host, a former math student, offered to read the Cantor book in draft and was declined — Wallace wanted a reader who thought he hated math, having built the book for a person convinced he cannot understand mathematics. [00:08–00:09]
  • The swallows of Marfa: after a residency at the foundation's writers' colony in Marfa, Texas (the same foundation that gave him one of his few literary prizes), Wallace wrote back concerned that no one disturb the swallows nesting at his house, enclosing a check for $150 for the birds' care — guano on the porch notwithstanding, they were good birds. [00:09–00:10]
  • Moody's reading: a page and a half of the McCaffery interview — TV's desire to be liked absorbed as a poisonous lesson, the seduction dynamic's love-hate of the audience, the American Psycho critique, fiction's job as CPR for what's human and magical in dark times, what it is to be a human being — followed, wittily, by the Girl with Curious Hair story in which an account representative performs literal CPR in an empty executive garage, chosen as foreshadowing The Pale King's later obsession with offices and capital; then The Pale King's opening prairie paragraph. Moody dates his first sighting of Wallace to a Dixon Place reading circa 1988–89, shared with William Vollmann (Wallace read for eighty-plus minutes; Vollmann fired a starter's pistol), and notes they later shared an editor at Little, Brown. [00:16–00:44]
  • Lipsky's reading: Wallace on writers (not smarter, just more compelling in their confusion; the license to sit and be excruciatingly aware; the writer's job as reminding readers how smart they are); the terminating-the-conversation bit and the Good Old Neon keyhole passage as twin statements of the communication problem; facial-expression set pieces from the porn-awards essay and the Lynch essay; the Ennet House list of exotic new facts; a montage of skies and weather; and the cruise essay's zinc-oxide pampering double-bind with the Hungarian waiter footnote. [00:44–01:08]
  • Scott's position: the only reader on stage who never met Wallace — she reads him as a captivating, defining voice you start thinking in, and chooses the usage essay's discourse-communities section (the snootlet's playground education in dialect and inclusion) and the author's-foreword section of The Pale King (the veracity contract, the paid-term-papers backstory, student-loan pragmatism). [01:08–01:21]
  • The two-hander: Scott and the host perform Hal's appointment with the professional conversationalist — the father-in-disguise scene (scene 005). [01:21–01:37]
  • Panel — Lipsky on the man: Wallace loved chess and was a poor chess player (confirmed, he says, by others who played him); he described writing as conversational chess — the if-I-say-this-what-will-you-say game that is fatal in personal discourse and essential on the page; the Harper's-era glamour (a friend's email describing him as a handsome do-rag-wearing participant in the urban experience); the airplane PA correction (smoking only permitted outdoors vs. smoking is permitted only outdoors) as the grammarian reflex in the wild. [01:38–01:42, 01:51–01:52]
  • Panel — Moody on the man: a legendary Village Voice-adjacent dinner (arranged by editor Lee Smith) seating Wallace, Franzen, Eugenides, Antrim, and Moody at one table, at which Wallace quoted DeLillo's then-out-of-print first novel Americana from memory; shared recovery history as a bond (a substance-misuse past is Moody's own on-stage self-description); Wallace as a literary older brother whose loss — given that art and sobriety are what enabled Moody's own life — was terrifying. [01:42–01:43, 01:55–01:57]
  • Panel — the host's history: his first Wallace interview began with a question about fractals and coastlines; Wallace lit up and said he had wanted a novel based on an impossible geometric figure — the Sierpinski gasket, a childhood wall poster he described as a pyramid on acid — and, in an aside the host only caught re-listening after the death, asked whether the host would adopt him. They corresponded for the rest of his life (a sample worry-note about layered offense is recalled); the host, a fellow depressive and recovering drinker, says they talked repentance; his unreturned last message — a request to talk after his father's death — was followed two weeks later by the news of the suicide. [01:44–01:48, 01:57–01:59]
  • Sierpinski correction on stage: the host first misremembers the figure's name; Lipsky looks it up and supplies Sierpinski. [01:46, 01:51]
  • Panel — reception claims: Lipsky argues the difficulty reputation is backwards — Wallace is the easiest, most fun writer, whose real difficulty is that other prose feels flat afterward; his readers were everywhere (the story of a retired Army captain, twice deployed to Iraq, weeping in the rain at the news, who had hoped Wallace could someday tell him how to feel about his war); the Onion's fake 70-page-breakup-letter-with-footnotes story as proof of how legible his persona was. Scott: above all an American writer, one who caught the culture's static; art that instructs you to notice. Moody: no one can write like him, but he made it indelible that fiction should fire on every intellectual cylinder — a liberation from the Carver-workshop model. [01:53–01:55, 02:00–02:06]
  • Moody's footnote-priority aside: a footnoted story of his own appeared in 1994, technically predating Infinite Jest, and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine mattered to him — offered as literary-history context (models recur when needed), not as a charge. [02:04–02:06]
  • The kleptomaniac joke: a panelist recalls as one of the funniest jokes in the novel the exam question asking what a kleptomaniac who is also agoraphobic is to do — answer, mail fraud (print home: scene 070). [01:51–01:52]
  • Wittgenstein framing: the host casts Wallace as profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein, with the unknowability of other minds as the radical-skeptical root of the communication problem the readings kept circling. [02:06 region, untimestamped tail]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace designed Infinite Jest on the Sierpinski gasket — a figure he'd had on his childhood wall and wanted a novel to be shaped like

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] The host's firsthand recollection of his first radio interview with Wallace: asked about fractals and coastlines, Wallace said he had wanted to build a novel on an impossible geometric figure whose poster hung in his childhood bedroom and which resembled a pyramid on acid. The name is supplied on stage as Sierpinski after an initial misremembering. [01:44–01:47, 01:51]
  • Notes: Secondhand recollection of a recorded 1996 exchange the archive holds directly; the childhood-poster and pyramid-on-acid details go beyond the fan transcript of that interview and need verification against the original audio before use as independent facts. The would-you-adopt-me aside is the host's re-listening discovery, not structural evidence.

THEORY: Pynchon's influence on Wallace is overstated — he showed little actual interest in Pynchon

  • Crux: pynchon-influence
  • Stance: complicates
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Moody: talking with Wallace about Gravity's Rainbow, he found Wallace seemed to have not much interest in Pynchon at all — which struck Moody, who assumed shared roots in 1960s–70s experimental writing, as fascinating. [02:04–02:05]
  • Notes: In-source tension: Moody simultaneously places Wallace (and himself) in the experimentalist lineage Pynchon headlines — the disinterest report complicates rather than severs the genealogy. Consistent with Wallace's own recorded denials of having read Gravity's Rainbow, which the archive tracks under this crux.

THEORY: The difficulty reputation is backwards — Wallace is a pleasure-first writer whose novel was engineered to be hard and devourable at once

  • Crux: book-as-entertainment
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The host: Wallace loved contradiction and double binds and wanted to write a hard novel everyone could read — caring about difficulty and accessibility simultaneously, and succeeding. [00:04–00:05]
    • [secondary] Lipsky: the difficult-writer reputation is painful to him as a reader because Wallace is the easiest, most fun writer; the real difficulty is that after a jag of him, other writers feel flat and unintelligent. [02:00–02:01]
  • Notes: The host's version is framed as author intent (secondhand); Lipsky's as reader experience. Neither engages the anti-pleasure design readings this crux also carries.

THEORY: Wittgenstein's problem of other minds underlies Wallace's communication theme

  • Crux: wittgenstein-frame
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The host: Wallace was a reader profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein, for whom the contents of another mind are unknowable — a radical skepticism the host offers as the deep form of the inability-to-communicate material read that evening. [02:06 region, untimestamped tail]
  • Notes: Name-checked with a biographical anchor (the philosopher father) but no textual evidence offered.

Themes

Communication and its impossibility (the keyhole, the conversationalist, conversational chess); addiction and sobriety, spoken of firsthand by two panelists; entertainment, pleasure, and difficulty; grief and the resistance to reading the author as his suicide; language, usage, and belonging (the snootlet); boredom and work (the Pale King frame).

Cross-references

Advances