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I guess what makes me sad is that I would like my generation to realize that it would be way better for us, like inside, in our stomachs, to be willing to pay higher taxes to be able to shelter and feed poor people, not for their sake but for ours, so that we would be the sort of culture that doesn’t let people die. And instead we’re all so worried about an extra 4% off our monthly paycheck that we get all exercised about it. And I see you looking at me… I know this sounds all pious and weird and it’s got nothing to do with the book, but doing this book was hard for me because it was about why exactly are we so sad and how have we become so unbelievably selfish, like lethally selfish and self-indulgent.

I love David Foster Wallace because he is one of those people who have a knack for summarizing and articulating huge concepts that have great relevancy to me. This quote stood out to me especially as a source of personal sadness and a sadly still-relevant commentary on our culture.

This is a beautiful sentiment from one of my favorite writers, but it also highlights why these arguments are so often unproductive. Obviously, there are people who think that handouts result in a net loss in happiness for the world. Especially in progressive nations with functioning economies. You might disagree with that calculus, but it's silly to think that the people on the other side are just big meanies.
To elaborate, I'll paraphrase Adam Carolla by pointing out that the worst thing you can do is give someone a free house in a place they don't want to live. You'll find that person unhappy, clinging to the free house 30 years from now. Indeed, I think most of us here derive our most intense satisfaction from creating and pushing forward. It's not hard to see how a system that makes a handout contingent on not advancing could have unintended effects. Again, I'm not suggesting that we let people die in the streets. I'm suggesting that the stuff DFW is sympathetic to is a much softer form of charity than that.
What a hypocrite. He wishes so dearly that everyone have the same opinion he does so as to willingly work more to pay for other people's shelter and food. He can be the change he wants to see - all he has to do is take care that the poor people around him have shelter and food. Aren't we seeing something similar in India, with neighborhoods getting together without help from any organization and fixing their death traps and beautifying their pissing corners and walls? DFW could have done that, but instead he was an armchair idealist who one day wished some centralized power would take a lot more money from a lot more willing people so that they alone could solve the problems of the world. How convenient.

That quote that stood out to you is the myopic and uneducated opinion of a depressed person. At least with my depression I don't go around like a lunatic defending there must be a power giant to steal more of people's money and give it to the poor, as if that ever worked. A true Utopia that this planet has never seen. I have seen pictures and videos of those citizen movements in India and that is not Utopia but real life. Alas, not good enough for DFW. It seems every depressed person hates this world and wishes for a better one, but with all his reading and writing, his opinion never matured beyond that of current high-schoolers.

Accusing someone of hypocrisy is not a refutation of their idea. It's base rhetoric, used when one can't address the actual argument being put forward. The fact that someone does not devote their life to a goal they put forward in no way makes the goal wrong. If a smoker tells you to not to smoke, is he a hypocrite? Sure. Does that mean that he's wrong and you should smoke? No.

I'd like to think that HN can do better and actually examine ideas, and not dismiss them because of hypocrisy. Your second paragraph is much, much better in this regard.

It's amazing to me that you would accuse DFW of myopia and hypocrisy when your argument here is, well, hypocritically myopic (not to mention one might say that DFW's overarching thesis in all of his work was encouraging his readers to be less myopic e.g. [1][2])

To tackle a problem like world hunger and homelessness takes an incredible amount of effort across a huge number of domains by an enormous amount of people. DFW was obviously not someone best suited to go e.g. repair "pissing corners and walls", and we should not expect him to be. Instead, he did many things to inspire many people to lead more altruistic and less self-centered lives. This was his talent, and it's probably done more good for the world than any amount manual labor he could have done in his lifetime. Ignoring this aspect of helping the afflicted is the same strain of myopia that thinks charities should give 100% of their fundraising to researchers/etc, as if raising awareness and paying competitive salaries were not the lifeblood of said charities[3].

I'll leave your rant about how "power giants stealing money have never helped the poor" alone, as your rhetoric and ignorance of evidence to the contrary clearly imply you're not about to have a rational discussion about it.

[1] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf

[2] http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-ph...

[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

Pleasantly surprised to see this on HN. I've read all of DFW's work and he's such an interesting writer/human being. The biography "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" is a must-read for anyone who's interested. My favorite lines he wrote are in IJ: "you'll worry a lot less about what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."
Interesting -- I've also read (nearly) all of DFW's work, but I've held out on ELSISAGS due to unflattering reviews. Why is ELSISAGS a must-read for you, and what do you say to reviewers who call it an insubstantial pop biography?
i've read all his work, too.

I enjoyed the biography because it gave context to his interviews. He would say things in interviews that were clearly misleading because of certain things he had gone through in his past. The book highlights the reasons for why he would say these things. And if you go back and listen to his interviews you get a new take on things. It's as if you are hearing a new interview (after reading Ghost Story).

I would say that while his biography is worthwhile, it's obviously less worthwhile than his writing. And, in the end, I preferred the "Although Of Course" bio-book a bit more than Ghost Story.

Hey John,

I found I couldn't put ELSISAGS down -- I think it's because I so desperately want to get as complete a picture of DFW as possible and the book more than anything helped me understand what DFW was really up against w/r/t his depression and its presence throughout his life. If anything, I found that ELSISAGS demystified DFW to some extent, though maybe part of that is my getting older, too.

Grew up in Boston and spent more nights in the stacks at the BU bookstore than I can remember (third floor). I never met him and wouldn't have recognized him if I had but I stumbled across IJ years later.

I think people tend to focus too much on the "gen X" factor when they put on their DFW hats, as if he were a precocious but emotionally fragile teenager who missed some key lessons in life. I think there was more vigor to DFW's vision of the world than that. He called it an "extrapolation" but it's an extrapolation that carries a lot of insight about the thing it's extrapolating from. Also he had too much humor, wit, and insight to be "gen-X" in the sense it's used in this interview. DFW was a once-in-a-generation writer. Maybe once in a lifetime. I would've loved to have seen what he could've produced by the time he turned 50.

One of my favorite David Foster Wallace essays is this Esquire piece on an obscure but top 100 tennis player named Michael Joyce (who later coached Sharapova for a while) http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-079...
The ending of the interview is really disturbing:

Is there a lifetime ahead for a 34 year old writer who’s just delivered a thousand page bomb on us?

David Foster Wallace:

I think assuming I drive carefully, sure.

Christopher Lydon:

Please do.

Listen to the end of the Charlie Rose interview. Last words something about not jumping off a building any time soon.
Nothing disturbing about these things. Depressed people think about that a lot and blurt it out on occasion.
This bit stands out to me as prescient:

>The idea, though, that improved technology is going to solve the problems that the technology has caused seems to me to be a bit quixotic. I understand that there’s a certain amount of hope about the Internet democratizing people and activating them. The fact of the matter is that it seems to me if you’ve still got a nation of people sitting in front of screens interacting with images rather than each other, feeling lonely and so needing more and more images, you’re going to have the same basic problem. And the better the images get, the more tempting it’s going to be to interact with images rather than other people, and I think the emptier it’s going to get. That’s just a suspicion and just my own opinion.

What a great find! Like reading his work, listening to him talk is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

One bit I don't quite get is the sadness/lost/loneliness that he posits plagues Generation X (in response to the first caller at around the 19:00 mark).

At least among the people in my circles, everyone seems grateful for how good we have it compared to past generations. Are there problems and iniquities that need to be addressed? Of course. But from where we stand, looking back, we've come a long way.

I'll admit that's a bit of a truism, as DFW would say, but I certainly don't think "sadness" characterizes the zeitgeist of Gen X.

He was speaking in 1996 and characterizing Generation X at that time. What you're comparing to seems to be Generation X now.
I am profoundly scandalized that they edited 500 pages out of this monument.

Give them to me.

Now.

I need them.

Agreed. And I wonder what the Pale King would have looked like if he had gotten the chance to defend it from cuts.
Im working on The Pale King right now and fuck its a hard read. Infinite Jest is next on the list when I work up the courage.
Really happy to have seen this pop up. I'm a huge DFW fan. This is a stellar listen.