David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

I’m 35, and I think for the generation that starts with me or a couple years younger, the whole defining thing is that there can be no spokesman. It’s completely atomized, and there’s nothing like a kind of unified consciousness the way there was, I don’t know, in the ’60s, or even during that kind of conservative spasm in the ’80s.

Oh, golly. Ever since I was in college, I’ve been an enormous fan of both Joan Didion and Pauline Kael. And I don’t know—I think prosewise, Pauline Kael is unequaled.

I think the cruise essay was about 110 pages, and I think it ended up getting cut just about in half. And every time I’d bitch and moan to Harper’s, they would say, well, this is still, this is going to be the longest thing we’ve ever put in Harper’s. At which point I would have to shut up or look like even a bigger prima donna than I am.

There was something about Brooke Shields looking like somebody you’d masturbate to a picture of but not have sex with, that was really one of those four-in-the-morning, 15-cup-of-coffee-really, if I’d been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have put it in the final draft, but I did.

DFW: I was hired to teach creative writing, which I don’t like to teach.

a friend of mine read it and said it gave him an erection of the heart

The person I’m highest on right now is George Saunders, whose book Civilwarland in Bad Decline just came out, and is well worth a great deal of attention.

Historically the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries: Socrates’ funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats’ shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, although the translations are all terrible, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway—particularly the ital stuff in In Our Time, where you just go oomph!, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick—the stories, especially one called ‘Levitations,’ about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called ‘The Balloon,’ which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver’s best stuff—the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he’s not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby.

There’s so much mass commercial entertainment that’s so good and so slick, this is something that I don’t think any other generation has confronted. That’s what it’s like to be a writer now. I think it’s the best time to be alive ever and it’s probably the best time to be a writer. I’m not sure it’s the easiest time.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there’s so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren’t. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It’s unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it’s neat.