I’m talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high shool or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don’t believe in politics, and don’t believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce of some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Or who just…who don’t believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s just a whole lot else.
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David Foster Wallace (David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself)
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jordaneash:
Free-form thoughts on David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace:
Wallace’s self-consciousness: touched upon in ‘E Unibus Pluram: Televison and U.S. Fiction’ from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, here I see the effect of writerly/postmodern/artistic self-consciousness in full effect — elucidated nicely:
Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people …
(click link to read more)
At our first big conversation—our first stunning meal: Chicago-style pizza, the cheese mound and topping landslide—he’ll tell me he wants to do a profile of the reporters who’ve come stamping through, doing profiles about him. “It’d be a way for me to get some of the control back,” he’ll say. “Because if you wanted—I mean, you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.” It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices. The comedy of a brain so big, careful, and kind it keeps tripping over its own lumps. […]
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David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (via trenchantashell)
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I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart.
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David Lipsky, Although of course you end up becoming yourself: A road trip with David Foster Wallace (via malkav)
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harpyphoto:
“Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you’d like to hang out with. Chapters, pages, novels, articles are the next best thing. Even when it’s just a good factual writer, you want to hang around them to get the facts, the way you’d sit next to a brainy kid at a test to copy off their answer sheet…
David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely.”
- David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
Essere se stessi (Rivista Studio)
archivio-dfw:
di Cristiano De Majo
Può essere molto istruttivo, soprattutto se si coltivano più o meno in segreto velleità letterarie, leggere Come diventare se stessi (minimum fax), la lunga intervista concessa da David Foster Wallace a David Lipsky nel 1996, originariamente commissionata, ma poi rifiutata, da Rolling Stone all’indomani dell’uscita di Infinite Jest,e che lo stesso giornalista ha poi deciso di far diventare un libro, sfruttando la diffusione dell’interesse, anche extra-letterario, per la vicenda Wallace dopo il suo suicidio.
Read More
From "Becoming Yourself," pp. 216 - 217
Lipsky: You acting like someone who's about thirty-one or thirty-two, who's playing in the kid's softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less.
Wallace: You mean in the book?
Lipsky: No, I mean in your social persona. And you're someone who's really trying—
Wallace: You're a tough room.
Lipsky: You make a point of holding back—there's a point, there's something obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what you're aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are somehow younger or...
Wallace: Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn't it?
Lipsky: No it wouldn't: It would make you a reformed person.
Wallace: The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
crownpublishing:
“Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.” - David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 today.
Take a moment, look around.
To dilute his feeling of being reported on — to make me seem more like an unbelievably inquisitive house guest — David invited me to sleep in his second bedroom. “My spare blanket is your spare blanket,” he said. I woke up in the middle of the night. One of the dogs on a cycle: howl, pause, repeat. Then I heard David, sleep as the crust in his voice, say “Jeeves — enough.” I felt all the strangeness of it. Two a.m., this person I didn’t know — I was listening to David Wallace in negotiations with his dog.
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David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (via trenchantashell)
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archivio-dfw:
Alcuni estratti delle conversazioni tra D. Lipsky e DFW, trasformate poi nel libro ‘Come diventare se stessi’ (minimum fax)
