DFW reads The View from Mrs. Thompson's (Hammer Museum, January 2006)

source

TL;DR

Live Hammer Museum reading (Consider the Lobster tour, Jan 2006) of the Rolling Stone 9/11 piece, nearly complete. The spoken intro carries real information: Rolling Stone commissioned ~10 writers for a "where-were-you-when-Kennedy-was-shot piece," deadline around Sept. 15-16, 2001 — the fastest thing he says he ever wrote, which made him dislike the piece and avoid looking at it for a long time. The advertised post-reading Q&A is not in this transcript. Canonical text in Consider the Lobster.

What's read / asides

Stage nerves played for charm — if he looks at the audience for even a second, he says, he won't be quite as okay; he picks a shorter piece so he can read "just about all of it."
The reading runs through the ending: Bloomington church ladies praying before the TV; nobody anywhere near hip enough to lodge the sick, obvious postmodern complaint of having seen all this before — instead they sit together, feel really bad, and pray; praying to be wrong about the president; and the closing turn, that the America the hijackers hated was far more the narrator's own than these ladies'.
Title not his, he notes ("pretty sure" Rolling Stone's).

Why it matters here

The essay is the New Sincerity test case in the field: unironic Midwestern decency observed by a narrator whose hip self-consciousness is exactly what the ladies lack — the essay's point that people of genuine decency and innocence can wear on those around them. Mario Incandenza's problem and gift, in non-fiction.

Cross-references

Consider the Lobster: canonical text.
E Unibus Pluram and Kelly, New Sincerity: the irony-vs-sincerity frame the essay enacts.
WPR 2004: the "inner sap" formulation is this essay's thesis as an aphorism.
IJ connections: Mario among the ironists; AA's embarrassing-but-true pieties; the Moms' Midwest vs. Boston sophistication.