Check out the above clip from David Foster Wallace. I transcribed what he's saying, it's just a short couple of sentences. It seems to be a response to a question about whether he belongs to a school of writers, though we don't get the question. So I'll notate it Wallace-style:
Q.I think that description is right on the money as far as Infinite Jest goes. (Have I mentioned lately that I love that book?) Some of his other writing, I'm not so sure about. The book that continues to vex me is his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" -- I just don't know what to make of it. And they're making it into a movie, can you believe that? I think I need to read that book again. I read it at a point in my life when I was very melancholic, and I have often wondered if I saw it through a dark lens, so to speak.
A. One symptom of what you could call the American disease, is that I don't know any writers who think of themselves as like other writers. Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more the techniques of postmodernism and experimentation, and then there's a group of traditional, sort of more realistic writers. Many of the writers I admire, and (unintelligible) whether I'm one of them, are interested in using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic, but using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional human veritities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community, ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old-fashioned. So that there's a kind of melding -- It's using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there is a group -- and some of whom I think are here this week with me -- If there is such a group, that's the group I want to belong to.
On another issue, in light of the recent New Yorker article on the Ransom Center's literary archive, how does a library preserve video like this? The reason I transcribed the quote is because the video could go away for any number of reasons (not least of which would be complaints from conference organizers or DFW himself). I think it's valuable from a literary-historical point of view to hear what writers have to say about their own writing, and the fledgling librarian in my instinctively says such video should be preserved for research purposes. I wonder if the Ransom center has multimedia archivists? Hmmm ...
On a related note, the spouse is always hassling me to archive this blog is some way, but I'm lazy, and I have confidence that the Google servers will keep chugging along. From an archival point of view, I should print it out though, on acid-free paper and store it in a fire-proof box somewhere. (The difficulties inherent in digital archives are a post for another day; I'll put it on my list of future posts.)
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