David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview

My wife introduced me to Wallace around the time of his suicide. I read <i>IJ</i> in 2010, and have been hooked ever since. I watched this interview in its entirety about a month ago, and really enjoyed it. The wincing which the Open Culture post mentions was mostly induced by the camera man, who accused Wallace of "pontificating" early in the interview. After that, every time Wallace thinks he might be getting too heady, he looks worriedly in the camera man's direction. :-)<p>The part of the interview about liberal arts students going on to careers which have nothing to do with the emancipatory values they were taught in their degrees is reminiscent of the bitterness in some of the recent metafilter critiques of PG's essay "How To Do What You Love."<p><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/113015/How-to-do-what-you-love" rel="nofollow">http://www.metafilter.com/113015/How-to-do-what-you-love</a>

David Foster Wallace had an uncanny prophetic ability in Infinite Jest, he describes a company called Interlace which is essentially just Netflix. He also describes the failure of video-phoning because of social pressure<p>When I was reading the passages about new technology and the de-contextualation of media I was actually stuck by how the reality of media and communications landscape has eclipsed the novel in terms of absurdity. We now don't just phone instead of video-chat we text each other, now instead of physically owning entertainment cartridges we just receive a 30-day license that allows us to watch it. The truth as always has surpassed fiction.

Absolutely worth watching, every second of its uncut entirety. Despite his initially almost paralysing self-doubt, defensiveness about European views of America and distinct unease at the start of the interview, he gets himself ever so gradually disarmed by the German interviewer. Her English is pretty awkward, but she's actually incredibly genuine and she repeatedly charms DFW with sincerity, as he becomes increasingly fluid and open. It helps that the producer is an absolute dick, allowing for a kind of common enemy to pave the way of rebellion. If you have a bottle of tequila or some other hideous drink, you should definitely reach for it each time he mentions the word "paradox" or "irony".

So much has already been discussed about DFW. And still being written(for example: <a href="http://www.thepointmag.com/2012/essays/coming-to-terms" rel="nofollow">http://www.thepointmag.com/2012/essays/coming-to-terms</a>). I must say I'm almost surprised to see Hacker News branching into literary subjects, but of course there are related topics concerning technology in his work. Next thing we know, we'll start seeing articles about philosophy and metaphysics!

Today would have been his 50th birthday.

And here's an intriguing article about DFW's fascination with self-help books: <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library" rel="nofollow">http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-p...</a>

Probably one of the most unlikely guys to talk about some of the interesting/terrifying implications of technology on communication and interaction (among many other things)

The actual text he writes, like each sentence and phrase, is extremely well crafted syntactically, whatever style he is going for. In particular, I've noticed he is extremely aware of verbal ambiguity. His prose has coherence and obsessive detail that remind me of Bach's music. These things seem deeply intertwined with software dev, I'm surprised he doesn't show up on HN more.

There's an odd moment just at the end of part 1 and the start of part 2. The camera guy complains a little that Wallace is moving around a lot as he talks, and then he tells Wallace that he's 'pontificating'. It's a strange one, I think the cameraman is kind of being a dick, and you can see Wallace is bothered by it and not really sure how to react.

Quick script to download all videos locally (I have no faith these will stay up for posterity).<p>Requires the cclive command line tool. <a href="https://gist.github.com/1879275" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/1879275</a>