These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. In fact, here’s a whole interesting chunk of an interview he did with Larry McCaffrey:įor most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. Some googling reveals that DFW did like Barthelme.
When I was an aspiring fiction writer everybody read Barthelme, but I haven’t heard him mentioned in years. I think this has been retroactively forgotten because no one cares about that tradition anymore. Something that I think has been retroactively forgotten about DFW is that he meant his writing to be in the experimental, avant-garde American tradition he was thinking about John Barth, and I guess about Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme too, though he hasn’t mentioned them yet in this book.“In those essays that you like in Harper’s, there’s a certain persona created, that’s a little stupider and schmuckier than I am.”.
It’s hard going - hard meaning sad, not hard meaning difficult. It’s mostly a book-length transcript of an interview David Lipsky conducted with David Foster Wallace in March 1996.
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