David Foster Wallace is gone. Deeply shocked. And saddened. Just crushingly sad.
See him on Charlie Rose interview from 1997.
DFW: You confront your own vanity when you think about going on TV. So I’m — no apologies, but just — that’s an explanation. The — the footnotes in the — there’s a way that — there’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about writing one of those, writing about that reality, is that text is very linear and it’s very unified and you — I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disoriented. I mean, you can — you know, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody — nobody’s going to read it, right? So you’ve got — there’s got to be some interplay between how difficult you make it for the reader and how seductive it is for the reader so the reader’s willing to do it. The end notes were, for me, a useful compromise, although there were a lot more when I delivered the manuscript. And one of the things that the editor did for me was had me pare the end notes down to really the absolutely essential. (@18:53)
Also, this interview with Caleb Crain, on Everything and More: A Compact History of ∏.
Kakutani Appraises. It has been a rainy day.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I cannot believe he is gone.