DFW interview and reading from Oblivion — Wisconsin Public Radio (2004)

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TL;DR

The richest of the WPR set: DFW reads the father's-job-nightmare passage from "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and then talks about boredom as one of the country's great dread vectors — the clearest public articulation of the problem that became The Pale King. Also: the mediated-generation thesis (no generation in history so thoroughly mediated), reality TV's logic taken to "celebrity autopsy," how good advertising has gotten (made now by the hip cynical cool people he left college intimidated by), and a 2004 revisitation of the EUP irony/sincerity argument via "the inner sap" — with The Simpsons as "important art" that is also "corrosive to the soul." ASR transcript; speech is paraphrase throughout, short coinages excepted.

Key claims

Reading: the ~7-minute "Soul Is Not a Smithy" excerpt — the father returning at 5:42, the dream of a hundred gray steel desks, the story's decades of a father filling out forms at a steel desk under silent fluorescent light (published-story material as read; the print carrier is Oblivion).
Boredom as the theme: in a country with life this easy, he argues, boredom is among the great dread vectors — small creeping edges of despair, boredom at soul level; its reality is a hugely important problem nobody discusses. Every job, the writer's included, is shot through with horrible boredom, despair, and quiet fulfillments nearly impossible to describe to anyone else. (Direct Pale King pre-statement, read against an actuary's office.)
Labels disclaimed: hardly any writer he knows fails to self-identify as a realist; capital-R realism's premise that small banal detail is more authentic than large strange detail always struck him as a bit crude; "Smithy" worked as "inverted Kafka" — surreal frame, banal climax.
The mediated-generation claim: grad-school professors scorned pop culture as vapid, wanting platonic timelessness, but this WAS his generation's world and reality, as trees and babbling brooks were the Romantics' — steeped in media and marketing from early childhood, a grand experiment, no generation in history so mediated.
Why conventional realism feels false now: after a childhood of after-school specials, the conventionally realistic reads hokey — its resolutions contrived, its final purpose a sale — hence the search for different, less commercial forms for the urgent, moving stuff.
Reality TV's terminus ("The Suffering Channel"): the logic runs all the way to "celebrity autopsy" — childhood friends debating the dead star's goodness while the organs come out; the shame hobble is gone, and only time will tell how far it goes.
Advertising's conquest: the commercials appall him with how good they've gotten — trunk lines run straight into his high-school-grade anxieties and desires — and the ones making them are the same hip, cynical, cool crowd he left college intimidated by.
Irony/sincerity, 2004 edition: the EUP prediction sounds dated even to him now; the real war is between "the inner sap" — the part that can wholeheartedly weep at things — and the part that lives among smart, jaded, sophisticated people and badly wants their respect. The Simpsons: "important art" that is simultaneously "corrosive to the soul," everything parodied, everything ridiculous. The artist's present suffering is hosting the war between those two impulses, neither of them stupid, neither wrong.
On fragmentation as style: he often feels fragmented — a symphony of voices, voiceovers, and factoids running at all times; the hard trick is seeming digressive, bent inward, diffracted, while patterns and significances still emerge — many drafts' worth of work.
Philosophy residue: drawn to recursion, contradiction, paradox, the sentence that negates itself midway — via Gödel and a mid-80s deconstruction-meets-analytic training — by now, he shrugs, more tic than conviction.
On Zadie Smith's "tell us how the world works": articulate well enough what something feels like to somebody and the workings of the world come with it, template and all; language smuggles the inner/outer distinction into every conversation.

Themes

Boredom and attention (Pale King); irony vs. sincerity (the inner sap); media/marketing saturation as generational condition; realism and form; entertainment's shamelessness (reality TV); recursion and the doubled consciousness.

Cross-references

E Unibus Pluram: he explicitly revisits and semi-retires the essay's prophecy here; the Simpsons verdict updates its TV-irony argument.
Kelly, New Sincerity and Woodend on irony/affect: the inner-sap formulation is primary-source material for the New Sincerity debate.
The Unfinished: boredom-as-subject confirms how early and publicly the Pale King problem was framed.
Philadelphia reading/Q&A: same story read the same month, with the pop-culture-references argument rehearsed for an audience.
IJ connections: Hal's anhedonia vs. the inner sap (the "hip cynicism" vs. sentiment war is Hal vs. Mario); advertising's trunk lines = the Entertainment's engineered appeal; E.T.A. drills and AA's boring-but-saving repetitions as the redemptive face of drudgery.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Boredom named as one of the easy country's great dread vectors.
No generation in history so thoroughly mediated.
The Simpsons as "important art" that is also "corrosive to the soul."
"The inner sap" who can weep wholeheartedly, at war with the self that wants jaded, sophisticated company's respect.
The lost "shame hobble" — with how far we'll go now an open question.