David Foster Wallace on Commercial literature and reading 

The part about the "dread of quiet" is really true and more relevant than ever.

"We don't want things to be quiet anymore", Aldous Huxley did a marvelous essay just about that.

I really like one thing from this interview: you can see how his brain works way faster than his mouth. He's about to say something but he has to stop and say something like "well, not always" or "that's not always true"; and his eyes go somewhere and pick up other thoughts, other interpretations of reality, other points of view. He argues himself and his thought before he could even say it. And he really needs to struggle to find the right word to be less wrong. And it is something you can feel from his writings too. A beautiful mind, with huge awareness of reality in its whole.

A video of a man lamenting about the decrease in our attention spans and mental effort cut down to 4 minutes so it takes less effort to digest.

He was absolutely right about the lack of quiet, purposeful reading among many people in the U.S.

It scares me how much I agree with some of the things Wallace says, because it makes me feel so alone in a world where so many of the close friends/family I have would just consider thoughts like these to be overthinking and move on, while dilemmas like these bother me and linger in my mind for much longer. I just feel lonely for someone who can level with me sometimes, instead of just trying to get me to move on and stop thinking about a certain thing. I don’t know. I just feel real lonely sometimes, I guess.

"When people stop talking, their brains start to work." -- Douglas Adams

I was a live sound engineer professionally in my 20s and it would always bug me that people always wanted to put on recorded music between the live bands' sets - Sometimes after a particularly good set by a band I would "forget" to do this so people could dwell on what they just heard for a while and someone from whatever venue I was mixing would always run up to me within a couple of minutes without fail and insist I put the recorded music on as if I was simply incompetent and not doing my job.

Boy, what he says back then (when was this--almost 20 years ago?) rings SO true today as people become more addicted to their cellphones and can't go 30 seconds without amusing/entertaining themselves. Sitting down and focussing on a challenging novel today. As they say in New York, for 99 percent of the people, fuggedaboutit. I wish I had had the pleasure of knowing this man.

I love this and I love at the end he says "I dont know"

Being alone and it being quiet is the reason I love reading.

Some times I just want to make him breakfast and help him put on his bandana

Imagine if David had lived until today. He would probably have some very interesting thoughts on the phenomena of twitter, instagram, facebook, and vine. So it goes.

the part about your brain yearning for silence when it's been fed a lot of stimuli rings very true with me. Maybe it was because I was looking at DFW's glasses but the analogy of the muscles in your eye was an immediate comparison. There's two muscles, one which makes your pupil wide and one which makes it small - when it's just the same muscle working the whole time the other one gets weak and you become shortsighted. Which also rings very true to me as a metaphor, you loose the ability to think further ahead, and you get headaches.

Thank you so much for uploading these DFW interviews. These are so precious.

The bit in Infinite Jest about videophony is so relevant now to the Teams/Zoom Invasiveness of the stay-at-home life.

Wow, he has such an pleasant voice, I could listen for hours.

What an incredible piece to think about and comment on. I am going to have to save this and write about it. I guess this is what literary and social criticism is about. RIP Mr. Foster.

2020 where my algorithm-riders at

I perfect example of fears of being along is solitary confinement... act up and we'll make you be with yourself. That's why it's so important to be with yourself as much as possible.

I was tempted to close my Internet window because this video was taking "too long" too load. I'm glad I stayed to watch the whole thing.

beautiful, gifted man. I could listen to him for hours. It seems that in his final days, he had begun to feel that his literary style had become a gimmick and lost its vitality. I would only say that Infinite Jest is the most ambitious book I have ever read, and if the style became a gimmick in the end, it was worth it for this work alone.

“There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said, meditatively. “But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately-to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head-round and round continually.” He made a circular motion with his hands. “And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes-not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep-the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows -a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand up, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be and end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously n some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying; it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.” ― Aldous Huxley

truely heartbreaking to have lost him. Just read a passage in Infinite Jest where he is describing depression, clearly his depression and his suffering was so profound, all the more profound because of his ability to articulate it.

wow, so insightful and spot-on. And the humble, depressingly-tinged "I dunno" at the end really sums it up best. Patience, thoughtfulness, the commitment to time--they're all being bullied and subverted in modern culture. It's so sad

had to replay that video about ten times cause i kept being distracted

A friend of mine read Infinite Jest last year, and he had to go back to various points in the novel many times to try and fully grasp his own interpretation on what David was trying to say. He's still on the fence about the book to be honest, and I haven't read it yet. I'm just amazed that David finished something like that (along with his later works) with so much darkness in him. I imagine that he had to struggle with many demons every time he sat down to put words to paper.

So so so so true. And this is becoming more and more apparent and more of an issue today

Even when he talked he just said things so beautifully

I completely understand DFW's ideas on quiet....my wife and I were getting gas at a local Shell station last weekend and the pump we were on suddenly (very loudly) began giving us NFL updates as soon as we engaged the pump with an ATM card. The same news was being piped in (very loudly) to anyone else getting gas. A symphony of NFL news. I lamented to my wonderful wife that we can't even get gas without an amazing amount of noise. It bugs me.

a moment of silence is still on my bucket list

One of the great minds of his generation. He will be missed.

If you watch the full interview, the cameraman gets all pissy at one point because David keeps "moving back and forth, in and out and frame." As a photographer it just pains me that he didn't think to maybe move the camera back for more space in the frame. It should be intuition. The guy was a real prick and made me feel bad for David. Like it's not the person who's being interviewed's job to worry about framing issues. Anyway, great interview.

Thanks for this upload!

I like his humility.

he's right on. Greater rewards in life require work and focus

Thank you David. I didn't finish your book (about half)......but I love you.

I really enjoyed what he said about things that are hard and involving a certain amount of drudgery yielding satisfaction in the end.

I think partly what he's trying to conclude with the portion where he talks about inner complexities not being fed enough. We all have this sort of wiry inside of our minds, and clearing it and digging through it, and analyzing it takes time but provides a clearing of the entanglement within us. Many people I think are scared of what they will find, or that they will be incapable of doing it, and so they never start, and ignore the hardship that they may have to endure. So the corporations (such a cliche way to put it sorry) and things for profit create a fast paced environment, a sort of turnabout setup where we drive in and out, but always come full circle and never really get anywhere, we never dig deep enough.

Wow, this is fascinating. Brilliant man.

Such an inteligent, sensitive human being!

I think certain computer games, because of the interactive nature have perhaps helped create a new, or recreate that ability in the consumer of art (in its broadest definition of creative media) to put work into gaining more satisfaction out of it. Plenty of games try to do little more than recreate an action movie, which is fine and they have their place, but for example the Harry potter books, films and games - I can go back and read/watch/play through them all and love it and I really enjoy the depth of knowledge and immersion I have about that universe. Or EVE Online which is such an open-ended game there are still new ... Careers/activities both within and outside the game mechanics being thought up. I remember my first time exploring low sec, null sec, wormhole space, first time of faction warfare, first PvP fight, first time in a stealth bomber, first time bombing some miners in wh space and stealing I think a few hundred mil isk of loot, and the depth of the universe, the depth of the fact that I had had to earn all the money I had to buy all the shit I had to do all the things I did. Of course it's only natural if you go from stationary art (books, photographs) and introduce the magic of cinema and then TV and music and sound to accompany it, and make it so easily available and accessible, that the mass consumer will adapt but I think we are starting to see both counter-examples and examples of other better things. Every new medium introduces at first hype, euphoria, addiction and eventually adaptation and integration. When TV became mainstream people used to watch hours a day, now I think perhaps because of streaming there is so much choice that people have to be picky. And you could argue that just looking at reviews like Rotten Tomatoes to gauge if it's worth watching is a cheap shortcut to discovering that peice of art for yourself. But people have always done the same thing with books and films and TV shows. You know, people have always been addictive and addicted. Around the turn of the century in Britain we had simultaneous gambling, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, opium etc. Addictions on scales unseen since. It's not new, it's just different.

He said what I'd been trying to describe to people but couldn't. This is true gold.

The famine of the “small quiet voice"

can't stop touching his nose bless him

I have a friend who teaches high school in Long Beach and he has a pretty bitter and realistic picture of the education system. He just doesn’t expect his students to do the assigned reading anymore when you’re worried about feeding your family. I saw plenty of bright, bright people continue to fail in my SI and tutoring sessions simply because they were never given the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills. It’s a systemic sort of thing that I can’t think too much on because if I do well.... I get pretty depressed....

Way ahead of his time. Such a wise pov

Could be just me, but when he suddenly smiles when he says "drudgery" @ 1:52 caught me so off guard, my heart damn near leapt out of my chest!

I just can't believe that there's an actually David Wallace. I have no idea why this came on my suggested videos

@thisisgrey "It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out." -DFW Superficiality, I suppose is a way out of this responsibility. His novel Infinite Jest illustrates this point. The Novel is "deep" but it's also FUN to read, so the answer, I imagine, is to try to reach a balance of both.

One of the good ones. RIP

How I wished he had lived for another 30 years, at least. Now we are left to lament the lost body of work he could have given this world.

You don't have to be alone to read-not if you're with another person who is also reading.

We are changing rapidly as a species --they way we choose to consume information, the value or lack of value we assign to it. The way we make decisions, the way we think about ourselves and other people. We're getting very good at some skills and completely losing others. It's accelerating at a quicker pace all the time. Scary. DFW saw this.

Love this man.

I really wish I could have met this man.

Gone but never forgotten

wish we could have seen him interact with eckhart tolle, or his take on 2020.

I remember when I've read Brothers Karamazov, that book literally changed me, in a way that I cannot explain....

I loved him so

He was too good, miss him.

Northrop Frye once said that books are the most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented, it's still oddly true even with the concerted effort in recent years to replace them with audiobooks and e-readers, in addition to just the internet in general which can create a lot of unhappiness in someone like me who is a reader but also an addictive personality.

Where is the full version?

What a brilliant mind & soul, I am excited to read some of his work. Any recommendations?

Trying to be an author with a unique voice refusing to pander in this day and age, is perhaps the most difficult thing i have ever attempted in my life. Being a young, black male from the hood writing about science-fiction that has nothing to do with drugs, alcohol, basketball, or sex but instead astrophysics, alien life, politics and family while everyone rather watch videos on their phones depresses me beyond belief

I totally agree with basically everything he's saying. Very well said.

The Pale King, though unfinished, was about this very topic. How to sit, be quiet, focus, and dread and tedium and repetition. Good read, and again, though unfinished, I'd recommend to serious readers.

It makes itself felt in the body.

Really like these comments Wallace makes in these 4 minutes.

I've thought this for ten years. Everywhere plays music and I hate it. I the notion that I need music force fed to me while I shop or eat something.

The dread of quiet is the root of so many bad choices

"I don't know..." is how I end all my thoughts too. Great insights, David :3

When did he cut his hair? Where is the bandana?! Why is Gamora?

For me it's more boredom and being scared of quiet. I really enjoy reading and feel good about myself afterwards, but it is like going to the gym for me. It's work.

I think it's easier than that. The written word, except when explicitly and purposefully conveying information, is art. This is the reason why, for example, painting lingers. You can't nudge writing out of the way using HD screens for the same reason writing can't displace sculpting, or painting, or music or dancing -- art isn't subject to the number of pixels on your screen.

Will never forget my first reading of the metamorphosis (Kafka) and I couldn’t stop laughing. It was a very fulfilling experience. That level of genius must be super rare.

He is so right about commercial literature. If it’s a book that’s sold in an airport newsstand, I don’t want it. It’s too quick; too easy. Reading should be work; it should be challenging, it should make you dig deep. A good book lives in the quiet.

@Savorist Obviously you're welcome to whatever opinions you like, it just seemed from your first post that you were putting DFW and Franzen into the lazy categories I myself put them in before paying closer attention to each. They are trying to do very different things, and I say that not as an empty cliche. Here's a potentially disturbing question for you: which do you think is most similar to Kafka?

that i don't know at the end though

I think there are two types of audiences: 1) The ones who buy what is out and come back to it. The sophists and such who are driven by the latest and greatest -- who make waves. 2) The ones who sit inside a small niche making it seem like everything worth anything is unearthed. 3) Then you have the classical, romance, foreign, and other genrists (including the deceased writers club) who are well versed in everthing else. I think the third group is the used book store enthusiasts who have a wealth of literature at their disposal that has already survived the test of time.

What year is this from?

Idk why this was on my homepage at 2 am but this is some real shit

Words of wisdom

I hope Mr. Wallace is not overlooking the hard and strange and out-of-the-mainstream rock and rap music...things one can think hard about and engage deeply with just as with classical music or literature

Voice sounds reminded me of James Ellroy. Different of course and kinda soothing.

I completely agree with you. Would be really grate if we can listen Palahniuk opinion about DFW, or DFW opinion about Palahniuk, because I didn't find anything about a connection between them..

I cant stop wondering what DFW would have think of social media.

@thisisgrey Thanks for commenting. Mr. Wallace bravely prospered as a writer, DESPITE a debilitating illness. He tragically succumbed to this illness, but I'm sure he never capitulated on any of his convictions.

If you liked this, you should watch the movie Slacker from 1991.

I get a sense of dread from reading books quiet often, usually if its something I dont like, I think its cause the words in a book are so solemn and lifeless and uniform, but when read they create another world.

We experience an information overload every time we unlock our phones. Snapchat stories, Instagram stories, and Facebook stories (notice a pattern?) deliver ephemeral, brief content - too long and it becomes suspiciously unorthodox and loses its appeal to a frantic audience. Stories also prevent a backlog of information.

beautiful Minded man

The irony in all of this is that the old cliche is true: that it takes a lot of hard working making something look so easy. David Foster Wallace, perhaps his one genius, was that he decided that he could forgo the part of the process to make something readable and wrote from a place of freedom of expression. But even still, it doesn't make Infinite Jest any less broken as a narrative, or any more effective than say, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. And perhaps David had something important to say to the world, but he hid it in mountains of jargon and over-explanations.

'Commercial' fiction can be very fun to read, but I've never heard someone say that a James Patterson or John Grisham book changed their life. However, a work of great literature can change how you see the world. I have a simple philosophy: a good book is a good book. Whether it's a classic from 100 years ago or a contemporary fantasy novel, a good book is a good book.

@scrumpyJ5 That's from lullaby.

Funny that in the preface to a later edition of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth said society was becoming to fast, too interested in noise, gossip and the sensational at the expense of the contemplative and the stillness of reflection. And in Exactitude, Calvino describes what he calls a plague afflicting humanity in its most distinctive quality, speech, and that was written circa 1980 give or take a few years.

That DOES make whole lot of sense.

Aw snap, are you using that new potato capture card? Shit looks tight!

If you all appreciated David Foster Wallace's words, you should check out the book "Reaching Out" by Henri Nouwen.

You know he is right. In any domain you can think of, it is the deeper works that reward putting time into it, like timeless music versus whatever is popular currently. But you know if you talked in this way in your social circles, you would get called a snob and "Who are you to tell me what is and isn't worth my time???"