David Foster Wallace on the Marketing of Writing (2003, ZDF cut)

source

TL;DR

A ~10-minute edit of the unedited 2003 ZDF interview on book promotion, notable for DFW naming the paradox while inside it: he is about to complain of the difficulty of dealing with the media, he notes, while speaking to the media. Readings, he says, turn writers into penny-ante, cut-rate celebrities; and his prose was never built to live on the breath. All material is in the unedited tape; this note anchors the ID.

Key claims

See video-zdf-2003-unedited. Highlights gathered here:

Fiction resists Q&A: most of what fiction actually concerns, he says, is nearly impossible to discuss head-on — which is exactly why writers invent stories about it instead.
The on-camera paradox: were he the one watching, he jokes, his first question would be why the son of a bitch is on camera at all — so how, he asks his interviewer, should he handle that?
Against readings: his prose was never built to be carried aloud on the breath — too little punctuation for it; bookstore crowds come to check the author's face and test the real voice against the one in their heads, none of which matters — "It's icky." The whole circuit turns writers into "penny-ante or cheap versions of celebrities."
Why he complies anyway: corporate publishers lose money on literary work; the agent he owes "25,000 favors"; the deals one makes.
Compensation of small audiences: "I'm pretty sure my readers are about as smart as I am... I don't worry that people who are reading my stuff are misunderstanding it."
Translation as control-freak nightmare: read one translation he could read, "it was just so different from anything I meant" that he prefers languages he doesn't know.

Themes

Fame/celebrity economics of literature; media self-consciousness (the camera as the thing he "really sees"); communication's failure in promotional formats.

Cross-references

Same session: unedited interview and the other cuts (Consumerism, Responsibility & Maturity, Popular Entertainment). The Pretentious Language clip once listed here was re-attributed to the 2006 Garner session.
Lopate 1996: the hype-about-a-book-about-hype irony, seven years earlier.
Lipsky: tour mechanics and the seduction of attention.
IJ connections: the book's own attention/image culture (the "professional conversationalist," Orin's Subject-seduction as marketing logic; Madame Psychosis's facelessness as the refusal of this machine).