DFW on A Supposedly Fun Thing — Wisconsin Public Radio (April 1997)

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TL;DR

A loose, jokey live-audience phone interview (DFW calling from Bloomington) for the essay collection — more comic sparring than substance, but with a few genuinely useful bits: footnotes as "double consciousness" on the page (and a self-declared "footnote ban" going forward), the Gen-X-label absurdity (a generation's voice defined by having none), state-fair reporting details (the 4-H kids vs. the meat-company judges), and a revised verdict on Lost Highway ("kind of a dink") that walks back the essay's enthusiasm, including the Richard Pryor cameo as Lynch's "coldness and meanness." ASR transcript, noisy; speech is paraphrase throughout.

Key claims

Footnotes as voice: his consciousness, he says, runs sort of doubled, and a footnote is a way of getting that double consciousness — a call-and-response — onto the page; with the caveat that a writer must watch how much of it readers are made to slog through (some people, he allows, think he overshot). Also: a self-declared "footnote ban" going forward — he simply lost control of them — and the essays can be dated by footnote density (pre- vs. post-IJ).
Fame deflated: literary fame amounts, in his line, to the fame of a small-market TV weatherman.
The generation-label gag: born 1962, demographically a boomer; a caller asked if he was the voice of Generation X — a generation defined, he notes, precisely by having no voice. Why the labeling? Times this confusing, with this much information, send everyone hunting for pigeonholes — for stuff and for themselves.
State fair texture beyond the essay: the three non-mixing crowds (husbandry / Midway / Expo); the kicker he calls the "tragic" undertone — 4-H kids sleeping beside immaculate heifers while the judging dais seats men in string ties from the companies that buy the winners.
Both books were cut: a fifth or more came out of each at his and the editor's own hands, he says — hence the irk when reviewers call the books padded.
Lynch revisited: Lynch strikes him as almost wholly unironic — a man for whom "keen" ranks as top-shelf praise — which is what makes the on-screen sadism strange. Having seen the finished Lost Highway, he calls the movie itself kind of a dink, says he comes off a bit stupid in the essay, and promises the paperback a few more footnotes. The Pryor cameo: Pryor, he'd wager, never knew he was there as a damaged object for theoretical scrutiny; there is a coldness and meanness in Lynch that repels and fascinates him at once — watching sadism from a safe distance. Lynch's films work on us the way dreams do, and leave us vulnerable the same way.
The cruise/fun-coercion bit (preview of the cruise interview): let anyone scream in his face that fun is now occurring and a small-child part of him juts its lip and declines to have any.
Stray color: Harper's gives "no instructions," which works because terror makes him pay attention to everything very closely; the slaughterhouse second date; playing tennis "as it lies" against wind and cracked courts in rural Illinois.

Themes

Footnotes/doubled consciousness (the formal signature explained casually); fame and category-mania (information overload again); irony vs. the unironic artist (Lynch); engineered fun (cruise/fair as IJ's pleasure-industry in miniature).

Cross-references

Charlie Rose 1997: same tour, the serious version of the endnote and Lynch material — note the contrast between "useful compromise" (Rose) and "I lost control of them" (here).
WPR cruise interview: the fun-coercion thesis expanded.
E Unibus Pluram: unironic Lynch as the inverse of TV's institutionalized irony.
The essays themselves ("Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," the Lynch piece, the title essay) are in A Supposedly Fun Thing.
IJ connections: footnote/endnote poetics; the fame-pigeonholing machine; judged-and-purchased youth (4-H heifers as a darkly comic ETA rhyme — ranked kids groomed for buyers).

Notable moments (paraphrase)

The footnote as call-and-response: double consciousness put on the page.
Literary fame sized to a small-market TV weatherman's.
Lynch as the man whose highest praise is "keen" — set against the homicidal-dwarf evisceration on his screens.
The Lost Highway walk-back: the movie a dink, the essay's author left looking a bit stupid.