To the Best of Our Knowledge re-airs the 2004 Oblivion conversation — WPR rebroadcast segment (2015, The End of the Tour occasion)

source

TL;DR

An eleven-minute re-airing, occasioned by the 2015 film about Wallace, of the program's last conversation with him: the 2004 Steve Paulson interview around Oblivion, opening with Wallace reading the father's-job-nightmare passage from The Soul Is Not a Smithy and running the boredom, realism, mediated-generation, and irony-versus-inner-sap material. Every word of Wallace here is already carried by the archive's note on the full 2004 interview (video-wpr-2004-oblivion); what is unique to this broadcast is the 2015 frame — the host looks forward to the new movie while reporting that the people closest to Wallace, his family and editors, have been critical of it, mostly because they think he himself would have hated it, wanting people's attention on his work and his words. The re-air is also the broadcaster's own on-air identification of the 2004 interviewer as Steve Paulson. ASR transcript: paraphrase only, no quotation.

Key claims

The 2015 frame (the new material): the host is personally looking forward to the film about Wallace, but reports sharp criticism of it from the family and the editors, mostly on the ground that Wallace would have hated it himself — he wanted attention on his work, his words; the re-air is offered as exactly that attention [00:00:00]. The closing line asks whether the tape doesn't make you miss him [00:10:17–end].
Attribution fixed on air: the segment names the 2004 conversation as Steve Paulson's, twice — in the introduction and the outro [00:00:00, 00:10:17] — and dates the program's last Wallace interview to 2004, after Oblivion.
What the cut keeps (all owned by the 2004 note): the Smithy reading (the father home between 5:42 and 5:45, the highball, the thirty years at a metal desk among actuaries) [00:00:43–00:01:36]; boredom as one of the big dread vectors of a comfortable country, down to the soaring grade-school relief of movie days [00:01:36–00:02:26]; the teacher-parents and office-worker friends behind the story's interest in boredom's reality [00:02:26–00:03:42]; the realist self-description and the crudeness of equating the banal with the authentic, with the admission that interviews force all manner of pronouncements, and few writers know what they are [00:03:42–00:04:29]; the mediated-generation thesis (grad-school scorn for pop material, the romantics' trees, the grand experiment of a generation steeped in marketing) [00:04:29–00:05:58]; the hip-cleverness hazard and the hokeyness of conventional realism [00:05:58–00:07:25]; hotel-room commercials and the hip cynical college intimidators now making two million a year [00:07:25–00:08:06]; the irony-tyrannizes retrospective, the sounds-dated-now disclaimer, The Simpsons as important art that is also corrosive, and the inner sap versus the world of jaded sophisticates — today's artistic suffering as the battleground of those two impulses [00:08:06–00:11:01].
What the cut drops relative to the full 2004 interview: the reality TV and celebrity-autopsy material, the fragmentation-of-voices craft answer, the philosophy-residue and Zadie Smith exchanges.

Theories & evidence

No blocks filed. The interview content — the boredom dread-vector, the mediated-generation claim, the irony-and-sincerity revisitation — is recorded with its evidence at video-wpr-2004-oblivion; this re-air adds no new statements by Wallace. The 2015-new material (the family's and editors' reported hostility to the film, on he-would-have-hated-it grounds) is a reception fact recorded in Key claims.

Themes

Posthumous reception (the estate-versus-biopic tension, and a broadcaster electing the work over the movie); otherwise the themes of the underlying 2004 conversation — boredom and attention, media saturation as generational condition, irony versus the inner sap.

Cross-references

video-wpr-2004-oblivion — the full 2004 interview; the owning note for all Wallace content here.
ttbook-dfw-remembrance-2009 — the program's 2009 memorial hour, which excerpts this same 2004 tape; with this 2015 segment it makes three airings of the material across the program's history.
ttbook-1996-ij — the program's first Wallace interview, whose note also documents the pattern of WPR re-airing its own Wallace tapes with retrospective frames.
lipsky-becoming-yourself — the book behind the 2015 film the frame reacts to.