Farewell, David Foster Wallace

WORTH IT above – Wallace on Charlie Rose. Let it load and go to the 23 minute mark or read the transcript here. Wallace speaks on the conflict between teaching and the department’s demand for publishing, his philosopher father (James Donald Wallace), being on set with and his love for David Lynch, in “The English Patience” the “desert looks like a body”, his pleasure with Michael Ondaatje’s poetry, the construction of “Shine” and “The Unforgiven,” on essay writing, on the footnotes in “Infinite Jest,” the ego in interview on television, on Paul Cezanne, back to Blue Velvet, on being suicidal, and loads of other topics.

Students and teachers and anyone with some smarts may want to take a peek at a post I did on Wallace back in 2006, “…Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. […]” [from 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address].

—Salon Interview

—Excerpt from Consider the Lobster read by D.F.W.

—On boiling alive and eating meat

—David Foster Wallace on John McCain

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