DFW reads "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" + Q&A (Free Library of Philadelphia, June 2004)

TL;DR

Oblivion-tour reading (a "Soul Is Not a Smithy" excerpt, then "Incarnations of Burned Children") followed by the most IJ-consequential audience Q&A in this collection: direct on-record answers about why IJ ends where it does (two nearly parallel lines that converge somewhere past the narrative's frame) and about Hal's condition (a handful of engineered candidate explanations, each meant to be plausible and interesting). Canonical story texts in Oblivion. ASR transcript; the Q&A is paraphrase throughout.

What's read

• A snippet of "The Soul Is Not a Smithy," then "Incarnations of Burned Children" complete. Same pairing and similar nervous-preamble jokes as the Lannan 2000 reading (won't look up or he loses his place; gets nervous on behalf of nervous performers).

Q&A content (the payload; paraphrase)

• On IJ's ending: what interested him, he says, was something like two lines running almost but not quite parallel, which do meet somewhere — only not necessarily inside the narrative's actual frame; his hope was that close, attentive reading would leave a reader with a reasonably good idea of how the various plots were headed. Authorial confirmation that the resolution is recoverable but extra-textual — primary evidence for the ending-reconstruction notes.
• On why Hal can't communicate in YDAU's first scene (mold? DMZ?): if the book is set up right, he answers, there are somewhere between three and five candidate explanations, each of them neither implausible nor uninteresting — so why not stop the exchange right at that point, leaving the question open. Deliberate, engineered multi-explanation ambiguity, from the author.
• On pseudonyms ("Mr. Squishy" as Elizabeth Klemm): he'd planned a whole cycle under the pseudonymous author; the transparent disguise failed partly because he's "dumb and out of touch."
• On pop-culture references dating the work (a questioner's father objects): retells the mid-80s grad-school war — professors read brand names as "affected tics," as low culture inside the high culture whose whole point was redeeming readers from the crap, while for him the brands were simply the world he knew, written the way the Romantics wrote their babbling brooks. Both sides earnest, reading the same pages entirely differently.
• Current canon: his American "Holy Trinity" — Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo — with Denis Johnson closing in hard as fourth.
• Misc: math reading for Everything and More (Morris Kline's history of mathematical thought praised); nonfiction entered his career sideways, he says, mostly via being broke; on the Illinois→LA move, nervous systems "not geared toward dense human populations"; one heckler-ish audience member produces the funniest exchange (his aside that the Q&A is taking a bit of a turn).

Themes

The ending and Hal's condition (authorial statements); pop culture as lived world (mediated-generation argument); Oblivion-era craft.

Cross-references

• Swartz on the ending, Infinite Tasks, Endings II, Fiction Advocate pt. 1 / pt. 2: his almost-parallel-lines-meeting-outside-the-frame remark (see What's said above) is direct support for reconstruct-it-yourself readings.
• ConsiderIJ spoilers/explanations: the "three to five possible explanations" line bears on every what-happened-to-Hal theory (mold, DMZ, the Entertainment, withdrawal...).
• WPR 2004 interview: same month, same story, the interview version of the pop-culture argument.
• IJ connections: Hal's opening scene; the annular plot structure; endnote-style multiplicity of explanation as design principle.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

• The ending as two almost-parallel lines whose meeting point sits past the narrative's frame.
• The stated hope that close, attentive reading yields a reasonably good idea of where the plots were headed.
• The three-to-five engineered explanations for Hal's incommunicability — and the choice to close the answer while leaving the question open.