The Electric Typewriter

by David Foster Wallace

The Nature o†f the Fun -  “A book-in-progress is a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention. (HT @brainpicker)

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young - “The honeymoon’s end between the literary Establishment and the contemporary young writer was an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of the same shameless hype that led to many journeyman writers’ premature elevation in the first place…”

E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction - “Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers.”

For our complete collection of over 20 oustanding essays by the late great David Foster Wallace, click here.

by David Foster Wallace

Pendent in front of John Ziegler’s face, attached to the same type of hinged, flexible stand as certain student desk lamps, is a Shure-brand broadcast microphone that is sheathed in a gray foam filtration sock to soften popped p’s and hissed sibilants. It is into this microphone that the host speaks…

by David Foster Wallace

Bullshit 1 and Bullshit 2, names conceived as usual by the extremely cool and laid-back NBC News cameraman Jim C. and—to their credit—immediately seized on and used with great glee at every opportunity by McCain’s younger Press Liaisons, who are themselves so cool and unpretentious it’s tempting to suspect that they are professionally cool and unpretentious.

by David Foster Wallace (via fwriction)

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…

by David Foster Wallace

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

by David Foster Wallace

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physi­cal vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro­economics of consumer high-tech.

by David Foster Wallace

Just about every important word on The Best American Essays 2007’s front cover turns out to be vague, debatable, slippery, disingenuous, or else ‘true’ only in certain contexts…

by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello

Rjam Productions, headquartered in a mixed black/Hispanic section of North Dorchester, is as follows:

* One (1) four-car garage fitted with dubbing and remastering gear worth more than most of the rest of the real estate on the block;
* One (1) touch-tone telephone (leased);
* Two (2) Chevy Blazers, vanity-plated RJAM1 and RJAM2, each equipped with cellular phones and slick tape decks (also leased);
* One (1) VCR with Kathleen Turner’s Body Heat cued up on the morning in question;
* Most importantly, eight (8) promising acts under binding contract.

by David Foster Wallace (via fwriction)

I grew up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids - and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force.