© 2004 by WBUR and The Connection. Reprinted by permission.
GOLDFARB: Here are some things we know about author David Foster Wallace. He is from the Midwest, but currently lives in Southern California. He knows more about mathematics than most of us, and he’s a tennis player of some quality. And for better or worse, for richer or poorer, whether he wants to be or not, he has been handed the mantle of writer of his generation, the person among his peers most likely to write the great American novel. His last novel was Infinite Jest, a thousand-page excursion into twelve-step programs, terrorism, and other stuff, and it was published in 1996. His latest work is a collection of stories, some short others not so short, called Oblivion. The stories show an interest in the work world of media, and also the panicked world of ordinary life where substitute teachers go barking mad and babies suffer accidents that boggle their parents’ minds. We’re talking about the work and worldview of David Foster Wallace in this hour. With me in the studio is David Foster Wallace. Hi.
WALLACE: Hello.
GOLDFARB: It’s nice to meet you because I have been reading you in a variety of different places for a while now, and it’s nice to have you face to face with me. First of all, just out of curiosity, when did you move to Southern California?
WALLACE: I moved there in the summer of 2002. I got a really good teaching job that was just un-turn-downable.
GOLDFARB: And you’re living in LA?
WALLACE: I live between Los Angeles and San Bernardino.
GOLDFARB: And is it a place that’s kind of begun to work on your imagination in a different way than being in downstate?
WALLACE: I think for the most part I’m just trying to adjust. It’s both very beautiful weather-wise and very, very urban. The place I live in is essentially one great big stripmall.
GOLDFARB: Just the perfect environment. A stripmall, presumably, where every single item that’s visible to the naked eye has already been pretested and preplotted by marketing men.
WALLACE: I smell a segueway here.
GOLDFARB: Yes, thank you David, you’re very helpful. The thing that struck me in the book is how interested you are in the world of work, that nobody else is interested in. Just in the last hour we were talking about gender inequality in the workplace, talking about Walmart. But you’re interested in the way that the work of media, of marketing goes on. It’s something that comes across in the book. Where did that come from?
WALLACE: I don’t know. I know that I’m now forty-two, and grew up watching a lot of television and being part of a heavily mediated culture. I think that one of the things that interest me is the fact that, though it does compose our generation’s reality, we don’t often think of it as a human product—the product of human choices, and human thought, and human work. And I think you’re right. I think a lot of people aren’t interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff about media, as much as I am, although on the other hand, I don’t have any particular experience of it, and a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that I do is made up.
GOLDFARB: Yeah, well it’s called fiction.
WALLACE: There we go.
GOLDFARB: The first story in this collection, Oblivion, is set in a focus group, and it’s imagined, obviously. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the story and maybe read us a bit?
WALLACE: This is a long one, called “Mister Squishy,” that originally I’d done pseudonymously as part of a cycle, and the rest of the cycle kind of died. It started out to be a kind of twelve-angry-men jury story—but set in a focus group—and then I got more and more interested in the facilitator, the statistician who’s kind of in charge of the focus group. The focus group is together testing a made-up snack cake called Felonies!© that is due to be distributed soon, and there’s a lot of marketing and focus group nomenclature in the story. If the story’s got a movement, I guess, it’s that it starts out really heavily on the technical stuff about how focus-group testing and marketing works and as it goes on gets more and more interested in the facilitator as a traditional third-person schlemiel.
GOLDFARB: I like the way in the story it says “the dark and exceptionally dense and moist-looking snack cakes”—this is on a table in a focus group room—“inside the packaging were Felonies!©, a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression.” That is exactly the way they talk about these things, people who are bringing new products to market, with all of the energy and intensity and sense of profundity that people write philosophy, as if they’re making some great discovery about how we know what we know.
WALLACE: It’s really quite remarkable. I mean, I went to school with people who are now making huge salaries as kind of scholars of demography in New York, and for advertizing agencies. And, yeah, they’re very smart, well-educated people who are putting in full-time hard work on figuring out stuff that presents to us as vapid or ephemeral.
GOLDFARB: Read a bit from the story, set it up first.
WALLACE: Oh boy. I think this is a part of the story where we’re moving from the mechanics of the focus group more into the personal bio and woes of the facilitator, whose name is Terry Schmidt. There’s a certain amount of nomenclature in here, Team Δy is the focus group firm that’s being used by the advertizing agency of RSB, which is Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, which is a made-up name, and TFG stands for Targeted Focus Group. Here’s the part she marked. Sorry, GRDS is Group Response Data Summary, which is the group form that this focus group fills out.
[Wallace reads a single, long sentence from pages 31–33 of Oblivion, beginning “At various intervals …”]
GOLDFARB: Now, there’s a world in that, and it’s a single sentence, which is one of the reasons why she—our senior producer—marked that off for reading. A first quick question: that is one single sentence that you’ve just read. Now, you do that on purpose or the words just came out and you just said “well, we’ll just keep going to the end”?
WALLACE: Well, it looks a little more diarrhetic reading it out loud than it probably did on the page. Yeah, I think a simple deal is that, this is a weird story because it switches in and out of a more omniscient third-person narrator into the consciousness of this Terry Schmidt. The closer stuff is to Terry Schmidt, the more run-on it gets, because his thoughts sort of tumble. The whole story isn’t like this, but, yeah, there are some long sentences.
GOLDFARB: It’s a question of the style of the story, in other words, when we come to it as readers you keep going through it and you wonder, after a while, because we’re used to sentences of a certain length, or punctuated in a certain way. This is all part of the process, the interaction between the page and the reader. But the other thing about this story, and I come back to the theme of work, maybe I’m over-generalizing here, but most American writers of fiction just avoid it. And here we are, a society notorious throughout the world for living to work as opposed to working to live, working to earn enough money to enjoy life. And yet it isn’t something that hooks people in, and my own theory is that it’s partially because people don’t want to think about what goes on in marketing seminars.
WALLACE: Why do you suppose they don’t?
GOLDFARB: I don’t know, I’m asking you. To me it’s a frightening thing. I just think that a lot of writers don’t want to deal with the world of work, possibly because they haven’t experienced it first-hand, possibly because it’s just too terrifying to contemplate.
WALLACE: I prefer the terrifying explanation because it’s sexier than that people find it boring, or you know they work all day and then the last thing they want to do when they come home and put their feet up is hear about somebody else’s work. Probably this is very crude, but when you were talking about most writing avoiding the world of work, it would seem to me that a fair amount of commercial fiction emphasizes people’s work, but it’s always sexy, dangerous police or FBI or that kind of work. And literary fiction maybe emphasizes more domestic life, and the interior life and stuff. It’s not clear to me that the two are all that distinguishable. I hear the music, I’m probably supposed to trail off here in meaningful way.
GOLDFARB: You’re so well educated.
WALLACE: Media savvy!
GOLDFARB: That’s what it said in all the reviews.
[short break]
GOLDFARB: We went out talking about work and its place in American fiction. When you’re not writing fiction, David, do you think much about how real things are that are coming into your world? Do you try and play games in your own head to get to some kind of pure form of the idea of a thing, shedding all of the conditioning that’s coming to you—you’re forty-two—from watching television, from anything else that’s gone on, to some kind of pure, almost mathematical notion of what is real?
WALLACE: Do I drift along as a Platonist? I don’t know that I regard media or marketing or the degree of saturation that you and I and all of us have with this stuff as necessarily evil. I mean, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is that it’s not at all clear anymore that there’s some kind of platonic truth that rests behind people’s interpretations of the truth, and particularly paid people’s enforced interpretations of the truth. One of the things that interests me, though, is just how little we think of the fact that so much of what we voluntarily turn on and see and hear and listen to are actually human products designed by human people. I’m not a particular Luddite. I’m not particularly opposed to media. I just think it’s weird that we don’t often talk or think about the agenda behind a lot of this stuff. I mean, I’ve got a whole little story about this if you want to hear, but it’s going to take like two minutes to tell.
GOLDFARB: You know something? We have the best part of an hour yet, so tell it.
WALLACE: I was thinking about this because we had some kind of public argument about this in San Francisco. I was in grad school studying writing in the mid-eighties, and there were some of us who used pop elements in some of our stories—brand names, celebrities—and our professors, who were, you know, twenty-to-thirty years older than us, strongly, strongly opposed this. Their belief was that literary fiction, like most serious art, was supposed to be timeless, and pop elements were vapid and trivial. Literary short stories were supposed to be part of high culture, which was really kind of the antidote for low culture. We had a very interesting intergenerational argument about this at school, because the kids my age—I was in my early twenties at the time—we just didn’t get it. Media and marketing and corporate and celebrity stuff were part of our reality every bit as much as cars and highways and skies were part of our professors’ reality. But as I’ve grown older I’ve realized, I think, that there is a big difference. The Romantics—skies and babbling brooks and nature and all that stuff—those aren’t human products. Much of the media world that I and we live in is a human product, made by human beings with agendas and fears and desires, and that there’s an odd resistance to thinking in any but the most reductive—these are evil people trying to manipulate us—terms of what the human reality of making all this stuff is like. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
GOLDFARB: It does. The thing is that you were talking about the generational difference, and you’re growing now to an understanding, at least, of where your professors were coming from. I also wonder if it’s an educational difference: that if you get at the elementary and secondary level, even before you get to college, a certain kind of high culture, canonical education, that it allows you to be more skeptical about the pop thing earlier on, and that you can make a distinction.
WALLACE: I think that’s probably true, and probably one reason why allowing corporations to subsidize educational materials or to move their advertising into high school cafeterias is a bit scary, because those are educating children in a very specific way that’s tailored to the interests of the corporation. On the other hand, I don’t know that it takes a great deal of special liberal arts education to be skeptical of the media, if by skeptical you mean realizing that this isn’t reality, but this is, in fact, a certain version put out by human beings who have an interest. I think what it depends upon is a willingness to pay a certain kind of attention, and I think it’s probably a certain kind of attention that people younger than me—people who are now in their twenties and thirties—are actually more accustomed to doing. I’ve had younger readers who don’t quite understand what the big deal is, why I make such a big deal of this. I think it’s harder for those of us who are older to do it.
GOLDFARB: Attention must be paid. Because you come from the Midwest, you stayed in the Midwest even after you became a celebrity …
WALLACE: With quotation marks …
GOLDFARB: I try to do that vocally, since we’re not looking at a page. But do you regard this as a Midwestern view: media culture has homogenized America—that’s also a cliché—but is this the view of someone who grew up in the Midwest as opposed to someone who grew up in Manhattan?
WALLACE: Well I think it’s certainly the view of somebody who both read and watched a lot of TV, and is very used to being on his side of the screen. The sort of celebrity that I’m writing about and thinking about has a great deal more cultural energy and dollars attached to it than the kind of celebrity of being a semi-well-known literary-fiction writer, I don’t know what the numbers are for how many Americans are interested in literary fiction, but it’s not high.
GOLDFARB: It isn’t high, in fact, earlier this week we did an hour on the marketing fact that only 44 percent of men read fiction. That to me was kind of astonishing because I figured everybody was reading at least detective novels, but apparently men aren’t reading fiction at all. In the world of public radio, you assume that you’re operating at the high end of people who are reading and so we can have this kind of conversation, but in the rest of America one isn’t sure. When you travel around the country on a tour like this, what impressions do you have about people reading, about standards of conversation?
WALLACE: Oh boy, in a literary fiction reading you’re going to get about as many people as the venue can hold, and it doesn’t seem like a very good reflection of the culture as a whole. I mean, I don’t tour all that much. I don’t talk directly to all that many readers. My sense is that, in terms of the audience I’m interested in, there are still plenty of smart, sophisticated readers who are willing to put in a little extra work. But I also think that it’s understandable, particularly maybe for men, who typically have to sit all day and do kind of boring jobs. … Reading requires solitude and extended periods of a kind of unusual sort of attention and most of my friends aren’t writers or aren’t all that educated and what they want when they get out of work is they want stimulation. They want entertainment, which TV and movies and the internet are far better suited for than literary arts.
GOLDFARB: Diana is calling from Raleigh, North Carolina.
DIANA: My question is, without this writer’s informative, intellectual, high-culture writing, why is it that we find it so hard for the masses to be exposed to this? It’s been so long for me.
GOLDFARB: It’s been so long for you down there in Raleigh to hear a conversation like this?
DIANA: I’m outside of Raleigh, as an NPR listener, but something to read …
GOLDFARB: Okay, let me put that question, Diana, to David Foster Wallace.
WALLACE: Well, I’m not totally sure what your question means, there’s hundreds of good literary fiction and poetry volumes that get published every year. It’s true that they don’t get marketed and advertised as heavily as commercial stuff for the simple reason that it doesn’t make as much money, there aren’t as many people who are interested in it. But the sense I get is that people who are interested, and are willing to dig around on the internet or to go to bookstores and look, have never found there to be any shortage of quality literary stuff of all different sorts. Am I answering your question?
DIANA: Well I agree with exactly what you said. What I guess it is, is the varied topics that you write about. Didn’t quite make myself clear. It’s so exciting because it just hits, hits, hits on so many different things, and I’m not exposed to your writing and I’m very excited about going to my independent bookstore and looking you up.
WALLACE: Or a library.
DIANA: I’ve got an English degree, and I’m working as a substitute teacher right now, while I’m working on getting my certification. So my curiosity is very high about substitute teachers gone mad.
GOLDFARB: It’s a very, very interesting story.
DIANA: I look forward to reading it.
GOLDFARB: The book is Oblivion, thank you, Diana. Amy is calling from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
AMY: Hi. I have a question for David Foster Wallace. I read Infinite Jest—I put in the effort, as it were—and what you’ve been saying in some of this conversation today made me think about a question about the idea of material that’s put out by humans, talking about corporate output and being influenced by products, and so forth. The kind of just media-saturated existence. And what I wanted to ask you about is the very last sentence of that book. It struck me that it took the entire book to get to that very last moment. It was like a last gasp. It was actually kind of a moment of redemption, I was really shocked by it.
WALLACE: You’re talking about the last sentence of the main text?
AMY: Yeah, of Infinite Jest, not the last sentence of the footnotes.
WALLACE: I like it as a last sentence, so obviously I’m going to agree with you.
GOLDFARB: Amy, you don’t have it memorized do you? What is it?
AMY: I don’t have it in front of me. It’s a character—one of the myriad characters you’ve been following—and I was actually feeling resentful toward the end because I realized there was no way you’d be tying up all the stories you’d begun. I couldn’t believe that I’d gone that far and wasn’t going to get a neat bow on everything.
WALLACE: Yeah, I got hate mail about that.
AMY: I forgave you, though, at the end because it was just clear that that wasn’t what you wanted, and it was all fine, you know. But it was so violent and surreal for so much of the time, so much suffering, and the very last sentence I was literally shocked by it, because it brought it to—it’s going to sound a little corny—a truly human moment. It took a ten-pound book to get that one sentence.
GOLDFARB: David, Amy was talking about the experience of getting through the book. As a writer, do you like getting that kind of very specific feedback from readers?
WALLACE: Well, sure. That book, there’s a certain amount of stuff that I do that plays a little game where it’s hard, but I’m trying to make it seductive or natural—like a two-page sentence. If I do it right, yes it’s a long sentence, but you can track it grammatically and syntactically. I get worried when people draw attention to it, because I feel like if they’re able to notice it, I’m not doing the job entirely well. I don’t know that all of Infinite Jest is a support structure for the last sentence, but I, too, like the last sentence. And I didn’t want to wrap various plots up neatly within the frame of the book, I think, largely because a lot of commercial entertainments that I grew up with use that and it’s not entirely real. It’s a kind of falsely satisfying way to wrap up various things that happen, and now I’m just maundering on.
GOLDFARB: So you’re consciously aware that there’s an element in your work that is in response to the neatly wrapped-up two-hour, three-act structure of a Hollywood movie, or even six episodes of The Sopranos. As an artist, what you’re trying to do is avoid that?
WALLACE: Well, I’ve got that wrapped up as a nice soundbyte answer because I’ve been asked a whole, whole lot why, after making the reader kind of climb this big hill does Infinite Jest not wrap up. That book, actually, for me does resolve, but it resolves sort of outside the right-frame of the picture. You can get a pretty good idea, I think, of what happens. I think, for the most part, I’m just like all writers. I want to do stuff that feels real to me, and so stuff that’s been very heavily used in commercial entertainments, that are very neat and slick and sophisticated are probably going to strike me as not real, and I’m going to avoid them. And probably in some cases that’s a problem because there are certain types of artworks that should wrap up neatly. The visceral knee-jerk—oh god, if it’s ever been done in a commercial thing, I shouldn’t do it—is probably something of a limitation, I hope I don’t have that all the time.
GOLDFARB: You were talking about your friends who aren’t writers and they come home from work and they’re watching stories. Stories, which is what people used to read 150 years ago, and now you have stories told to you, you said passively watching them on television.
WALLACE: Except before that 150 years ago, stories were things we told each other. So there’s a neat coming full-circle about the whole thing. They weren’t originally told to us by someone whose entire agenda was to acquire our attention so that he could deliver messages to us that were for the sake of somebody who was giving him money. So there’s a bit of an odd spin on it now.
GOLDFARB: And also the stories took on this extra life throughout the day in other places, because the people who appear in these stories are also on billboards, talking about something else, wholly unrelated to the story in which you saw them. But I mean, when you’re writing, are there moments where you say, “You know, I could resolve this situation very easily, but no I’m not going to do it because that’s the way they would do it in Hollywood”?
WALLACE: Here’s what’s hard about talking about this: the truth—at least for me—is not nearly as sophisticated or interesting as the kind of question you’ve just posited. It’s usually a tummy thing: does this feel real? Does this make me want to puke? Does this seem fake or contrived or not? And there’s not a whole lot of cerebration, at least for me, going on.
[short break]
GOLDFARB: We can talk about writing, David, or you can just read some of your writing, that might work also.
WALLACE: Okay. Another thing that’s been selected is part of a story called “Good Old Neon,” that’s basically a story about a lot of different kinds of loneliness.
[Wallace reads part of a paragraph, from pages 150–51 of Oblivion, beginning “Once again, I’m aware …” and ending at “It’s not really like that.”]
WALLACE: That last part was a separate sentence, by the way.
GOLDFARB: That’s an interesting technical stylistic point.
WALLACE: It’s just that she’s picked all the really long, run-on sentences that we read out loud.
GOLDFARB: But this one is particularly good, because it seems to me to about the process of consciousness before it forms itself into language. Do you think that language is the endpoint of the process of formulating a thought?
WALLACE: There’s a whole, very heavy debate to get into here. There are schools of thought, some of which I find persuasive, that argue that there really is no meaningful reality outside language. That language creates in a very complicated way what we call reality—that would be your poststructural …
GOLDFARB: One of the reasons I didn’t complete a Ph.D. in philosophy—I just didn’t want to have that conversation for professional purposes.
WALLACE: The stuff is incredibly abstract and abstruse, partly because it’s dealing with the paradox that we’re attempting to talk metaphysically about language using nothing but language, which sets up certain paradoxes that your readers may not find all that interesting but are really, really kind of tough.
GOLDFARB: Well, we’ll challenge them. Tell us some of the paradoxes that they set up.
WALLACE: The basic paradox, which is one that’s handled more facilely in mathematical logic, is that it’s very, very difficult to talk about a language within that language. Kurt Gödel’s famous “I am lying” paradox—I’m sorry that’s not even Gödel, that comes out of Ancient Greece—is the first instance of this fact. This is making the story that I read from seem very cerebral—this is actually supposed to be kind of the saddest story in the book—but one of the things about the narrator is, he’s had enough sort of education to drive himself crazy with the surface of these certain paradoxes. The philosophy of the whole stuff is very interesting; I don’t really keep up that much with it.
GOLDFARB: David is on the line from Boston.
DAVID: Earlier in the show you touched, very briefly, on the question of truth in the postmodern era. And I think we live in a very, I don’t know what you’d call it, where truth is up for grabs. I just would like you to elaborate a little bit more on where you were going with that thought.
GOLDFARB: Okay David, that’s a good question.
WALLACE: I think you were talking about the truth thing. Were I to weigh in, I guess I would say that to an extent I agree with you, and I think this is an interesting legacy of postmodern skepticism. The idea that everything is spin. That there is no truth. That you can derive one truth even about the day’s events from, say, Fox News, and another from the great liberal conspiracy of the New York Times and CNN—is, I think, both liberating and exciting and also extremely scary.
GOLDFARB: David?
DAVID: Your latter point has me in the same paradoxical, ambivalent, situation. It has me very scared as well, and I’m not sure there’s an easily reconcilable way out.
GOLDFARB: Thank you for your call.
WALLACE: An astute call, I think.
GOLDFARB: It is. But truth, at the personal level—it used to be that an artist said “I want to create the truth out of my experience of life.” Are you operating there or is that just a concept that adds extra weight to the process?
WALLACE: Well, that’s a bit of a Romantic thing. The thing about it is, it is true because when you’re doing stuff like this so much of it is tummy-truth, as opposed to head-truth—does this feel true or not? The interesting thing for me, this is a very Romantic—capital R—idea of truth that as far as I can tell comes from Nietzsche, that all truth is perspectival. It seems to me that one of the ingenious things that particularly the right in America has been able to do is to inject this kind of skepticism into public debate. Where if you or I proffer something that seems absolutely true—that, I don’t know, justice for the homeless might be an imperative—they can say, “Well, that appears to you to be true only because you’ve been conditioned by a liberal conspiracy within academia and the media in order to think that way.” And, rhetorically, it is very difficult to come up with an effective, concise rebuttal to that, because anything you say can be said to be a further product of the conditioning of your perspective. It is scary, I agree with David. But it is also really exciting because I don’t know that there’s been a rhetorization of the debate in quite this way in America ever before, and I think that any time capital-A Authority is brought into question is exciting. Also it seems to me to have a huge capacity for danger.
GOLDFARB: Jennifer is calling from Durham, North Carolina.
JENNIFER: I wanted to ask you about your sense of maturing as a writer. You mentioned earlier things that you see differently now than you did when you were in school, and I recently went back and reread “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is an essay I loved. And I still loved it but—being not in my mid-thirties but now I’m closer to forty—my experience of it was, not exactly that it was sarcastic, but that it was funny at the expense, in some places, of people or things. And I’m wondering if you think there is a trajectory from something like sarcasm for a writer to something more generous, and—if so—if there’s an edge that gets lost?
WALLACE: That is an uncomfortably good question. You’re referring to a long essay I did about a cruise ship that was funny, and I rather liked it when I first did it. And now, about ten years later, particularly with respect to certain people I met on the cruise, when I read sections of it I wince because it seems cruel. I know I don’t do as much nonfiction as I used to as a writer, and I think part of it is that I don’t have the heart or stomach to say even truthful things that might hurt somebody’s feelings. I doubt that is artistically all that promising, although it might make me maybe a slightly better human being. I think I’m going through the standard arc that just about everybody goes through, in that my interest in intellectual and cerebral and clever stuff—although it’s not like I’m not interested in that, but I was very, very interested in that when I was a really young writer—and the older I get the more what’s magical about art becomes for me the idea of stuff that’s moving. And I don’t necessarily just mean sad but has a very complicated emotional resonance as opposed to an intellectual or kind of meta-artistic resonance, ooh, which sounds like a very egg-headed answer. Actually I thought your question was dead on.
GOLDFARB: Jennifer?
JENNIFER: Your response is just pretty much what I would have expected, and it actually excites me about reading your new work. I mean, I think especially if we age with the writers we like then I will be in the same place that you are now, and I was in the same place you were when I first read something that was perhaps more biting.
WALLACE: Imagine it from the writer’s point of view, though. The writer’s point of view is that I’m pretty good at being a smartass, but what if this new stuff that affects me a lot more, what if I can’t do that as well? And it’s probably the same conflict I’ll have in my fifties or my sixties, it ends up being kind of scary.
JENNIFER: Well that’s what all artists have to face if they grow.
WALLACE: Well, you’re a smart person.
GOLDFARB: David, you’re teaching now—earlier we were talking about your experiences as a student—do you think the people that you’re teaching are different than you were when you were in your early twenties and taking a degree in writing?
WALLACE: Well, I teach undergrads and, yeah. Although I don’t have children, I’m going through my version of the-older-you-get-the-smarter-your-parents-get thing, because I hear leaving my mouth certain things that professors said to me and I thought was just a sign that they didn’t recognize, you know, my genius and that I could transcend all of that stuff. So, it sounds like a cliché, but the fact of the matter is the good thing about teaching is that you learn more than anybody else in the classroom.
GOLDFARB: We had Evan Wright on the other day, Generation Kill, and he thought there was a fundamental difference between the marines that were fighting in Iraq, say, and the marines that would have fought in Vietnam, and it had to do with the way the kids he was observing had been involved in video games and all the media stuff we talked about earlier. Do you get that talking to the young writers? Whereas you were just fighting to have pop references respected in a high-cultural sense, do they think it’s a fight worth fighting or are they just used to that’s the way it is?
WALLACE: I mean, this is still a big split in fiction, and there’s a lot of really good, vibrant, capital-R Realistic fiction that doesn’t engage very much with features of the culture that you also couldn’t have found a hundred and a hundred and fifty years ago. What I notice more with my students, sort of the way Evan notices video games as operant conditioning helping people be better killers, is that their attention spans are shorter but also more agile. There are more flash-cuts in their stuff. The differences, to me, seem really to be far more technical than spiritual.