David Foster Wallace's Cover Letter to Harper's

It's a war zone out there...
Here's an amusing and no doubt absolutely serious cover letter that David Foster Wallace faxed to Harper's magazine demanding no edits to a piece he wrote about Kafka. I'm using it as a model for my own cover letter for my creative nonfiction essay--honed in Iowa and now ready to go!--which USPS will convey without incident to Chapel Hill, NC, today. Thank you to my classmates, Michele, and most especially to BK Loren for helping me finish it and suggesting the perfect venue. Woohoo!

ATTEMPTED FAX COVER SHEET
From: David Wallace
To: Joel Lovell, Harper's

This is pretty much the best I can do, I think. I feel shitty sticking a lot of what you wanted in FN’s, but I didn’t see any way to work it into the main text w/o having to rewrite whole ¶s and throw the thing’s Styrofoamish weight off. The deal is this. You’re welcome to this for READINGS if you wish. What I’d ask is that you (or Ms. Rosenbush, whom I respect but fear) not copyedit this like a freshman essay. Idiosyncracies of ital, punctuation, and syntax ("stuff," "lightbulb" as one word, "i.e."/"e.g." without commas after, the colon 4 words after ellipses at the end, etc.) need to be stetted. (A big reason for this is that I want to preserve an oralish, out-loud feel to the remarks so as to protect me from people’s ire at stuff that isn’t expanded on more; for you, the big reason is that I’m not especially psyched to have this run at all, much less to take a blue-skyed 75-degree afternoon futzing with it to bring it into line with your specs, and you should feel obliged and borderline guilty, and I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering* if you fuck with the mechanics of this piece.)

Let Me Know,
Dave Wallace

* (It may take years for the oportunity to arise. I'm very patient. Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis.)

David Foster Wallace, tagger extraordinaire

Photomontage: Heidi Utz

For this series, I'm taking some of my favorite artists and setting them against murals and street art I've shot in NM and OR that seem to most suit them.

Rest in Peace, David Foster Wallace

So many great quotes from one of the few people who gives me hope, just having walked the Earth.

David Foster Wallace: February 21, 1962-September 12, 2008


“It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.” 

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” 
― Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” 
― This is Water

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.” 
― Up, Simba!

*The truth will set you free--but not until it's had its way with you." 

“The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.” 


“Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.” 
― Infinite Jest

“This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.” 

“I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear” 

Giovanni Giovannetti Capri

I'll Do a Great Job! Just Ask My Corgi...

I recently temporarily disabled this blog because I was looking for work and became concerned that anything I said could and would be used against me by a potential employer. My best friend urged me not to, telling me I expressed myself well in writing and had nothing to worry about. Is that naïve? A 2009 Harris Interactive poll for Careerbuilder.com, which questioned 2,667 managers and HR workers, found that 45% of employers use social networks to screen job candidates, and 35% declined to offer a job to a candidate based on social networking site content. I’m sure that by this time, both numbers are well over half. Granted, blogs are not Facebook, but I know that potential employers examine them, too.

This hit me right between the eyes at a group job interview 4 years ago, when an admin assistant brought up photos of the corgi I’d displayed on my blog many months before. OK, harmless enough, but…Jesus! At that time I was posting the blog for family and friends who had asked to see photos from my travels. I actually ended up declining this job when it was offered to me, partially because I believed that my privacy would not be respected in this apparently boundary-less environment. Four years later, this seems to have become curiously old-fashioned thinking, as reasonable expectations of privacy have eroded like glaciers in Greenland.

But as I again look for work, it continues to bug me. That, as a potential employee, I could be rejected because someone strings together a few things I’ve said on a blog, taking them completely out of context, then decides that I would be a poor fit for the “corporate culture.” Never mind that they’ve never even met or spoken to me in person. Never mind that 5 other people could read the same 3 facts and draw completely different conclusions. And never mind that they might be reading the blog of a person with the same name!

But the odd thing about this type of “fact-finding” mission is that there’s very little about me in this blog you can establish for certain. Not even what may seem like obvious facts:

1) I speak English (or just know how to use Google translator)

2) I can write a grammatically correct sentence (or employ a skilled editor)

3) I can take a decent photo (or have good taste when I grab them from the Web)

4) I’m an American (have you seen my passport?)

And as computers become increasingly sophisticated, it’s not necessarily a given that… I’m human.

This is the basis of a great new book I’m reading, The Most Human Human: What Computers Can Teach Us About Being Us, by Brian Christian. In it, the author, both a scientist and philosopher, discusses an annual contest between AI programs and humans, in which judges try to ascertain via IM who’s a person and who’s a bot. Called the Turing test, it’s not as easy as it sounds, and several years ago, the bots began fooling the humans a significant percentage of the time.

I’ve just started it, so I won’t launch into a whole review. But Christian clarifies something I’d suspected after reading one too many Comments page after news articles. Humans really falter—and begin to get into disagreements—when information is “stateless,” i.e., lacking in context. The human brain likes a bigger picture, the backstory, and when that is missing, conversations quickly devolve into argument, and very little truth can emerge.

One of the reasons modern life can feel so challenging for those of us who have lived through analog is that we now dwell in a highly decontextualized world. Fragments of information float through cyberspace like dust particles, and since we no longer have eye contact or tone of voice to help us, we make of them what we will. Conjecture and projection become commonplace. Our brain begins to fill in blanks we don’t have any right to. You “like” these 10 films, therefore you must be x… you post 10 comments about that topic, therefore you must be y. We’re all guilty of trying to form conclusions in situations in which we really don’t have enough information to do so. But, irony of ironies in the “too much information” age, not having enough real and meaningful information online is the case more often than not. It’s easy to feel frustrated and empty and grabby like AI hungry ghosts, searching for ever more. Not just a bunch of data points. But simply the few strands of information we really want to know.

Because I need to find a way to drag Dave into this, I'll close with a quote that Christian also uses, 

"Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange?"  -David Foster Wallace

http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?id=pr519&sd=8/19/2009&ed=12/31/2009&siteid=cbpr&sc_cmp1=cb_pr519_&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=8412d5b32ef54ce6854a035cf3a59d12-303995843-x3-6

Missing David Foster Wallace

Photo: Giovanni Giovannetti

In the summer of 2000, I listened to David Foster Wallace speak at a Lannan Foundation reading. At that time, he was living in Santa Fe as a Lannan writer-in-residence. Despite being only passingly familiar with his work, I felt drawn to go see the scruffy renegade in the publicity shot. In the near past, he’d published several short story collections and his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, which had impressed me in heft alone, though I’d not yet cracked it.

Trading glances with the floor, Dave schlepped to the stage and began speaking in his usual self-effacing, tic-forward, verbally aerobic style. The audience fell into his hammer grip almost immediately. I loved the whole look, the casually muscular, tennis-playing academic; the bandana; the gold-rims: the sturdy, visceral presence. Something in the contrast between the hulking frame and the gentle self-effacement was unexpected and wonderful. He seemed both genial and trustworthy. If this "regular guy" persona was a device, it was working, and of course he was smart enough to deliberately employ it. But I suspect that it came more from a genuine place inside him that both realized how unusual his gifts were and fathomed that this could be a barrier in relating to others. He not only seemed to want people to like him, but also to genuinely connect, despite the stature conferred by size, intelligence, academic degrees, writing ability, and literary celebrity. And like a big, shaggy St. Bernard who jumps in your lap, he didn’t seem to completely realize his own mass in those respects.

Since that lecture, I’ve read a lot of his work and greatly enjoyed David Lipsky’s book-length interview, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, published a few years back. I tend to pick up Wallace when I’m feeling lonely. When I can’t seem to connect with the world and its humans. When I’m cursing the Great Dumbing Down of America and living in places where critical thinking and intellectual discussions seem few and far between. I pull out an essay and watch Wallace’s microprocessor start whizzing away on any given topic, witness that intense consciousness, the brain on which truly nothing is lost, and start to feel better. If life on Earth can include a David Foster Wallace, then maybe we’re not quite as fucked as we appear to be. Reading Dave is like apprehending a transcript of human consciousness, all those fragments of thoughts, ideas, criticisms, internal dialogs that most of us bother to repress so as not to get locked up. Dave lets loose on the page full-blast, a faucet without a shutoff valve. 

When I first heard about Dave’s death I internally enacted what’s known in Expressionist circles as “schreien”—to shout, to scream, to cry, to yell, basically to howl, much in the manner of Edvard Munch. I was living in a small town in rural southern Oregon. Despite its few pockets of cultural aliveness, I nevertheless realized that there was no proximate human with whom I could share my despair. I didn’t dare even ask, for fear of the blank looks or vapid comments that would reveal utter lack of recognition for the man and his oeuvre. “David who?” would surely hit like a blade to the gut. Forgive me for wanting to live on the planet where everyone has read and can cogently discuss him.

I hoped it was a hoax, a publicity stunt, something The Onion had cooked up in the manner of his reputed 67-page footnoted breakup letter to his girlfriend.1 Surely just another postmodern manifestation of angst taken to a slight extreme. It couldn't be that we had this guy for only 46 years, only 3 novels, only 3 short story collections. Couldn't be that the Yosemite waterfall of verbiage was now, permanently, depleted.

Photo: Suzy Allman

Dave would have turned 50 today, and I'm pushing it, hard. We share the same cultural points of reference. Here was someone who had experienced the same music, art, books, film, TV, and vagaries of civilization, and could examine, deconstruct and criticize them in ways that launched an avalanche of thought. An American, who was all-too-familiar with the crassness and noise of our culture. Someone who admitted he watched too much TV but could simultaneously observe the behavior and realize where it was taking us, personally and as a culture. Wallace understood that for our generation and its successors, the seduction of the many screens was a force to reckon with. And it felt important enough to him to spend 1,079 pages delineating the landscape.

When I read Wallace, I felt a little saner. I looked to him as a kind of North Star. If Dave could endure this tedious, life-strangling universe, couldn’t I? Despite all of the world's problems, and his own tendency toward depression, he remained engaged, in the world, curious--not bitter and jaded and dulled. I’d imagine him my co-conspirator, the smirking best friend sitting with me on the park bench in Washington Square Park telling me to look over there! Then whispering in my ear an 800-SAT-scoring verbal aside of what the two guys in the cowboy hats were doing with the teenage girls from Bayonne. Right down to the frizzy perms and bad accents. And me unable to stop laughing until he did it again, 10 seconds later, with the Brooklyn alta kocker playing chess with the ballistic Armenian. How many times in a lifetime do we find a “friend” like this--someone so tapped in that reality comes through on 200 HD channels every moment at full volume and in 15 languages, all of which they speak, read, and write fluently? 

Ironically, Dave could often lift my own depression, precisely because I felt a kindred spirit actually did exist, in a world where I’ve experienced that feeling extremely rarely. In the words of Infinite Jest editor Michael Pietsch, "It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind."2 We both seemed to be coming at life from a depression-etched sensibility, the cognitive function moving continuously forward while an emotional spirit chastened by so much, so often, signaled to pull over and stop at the side of the road. Inside his writing, beneath all the bubbles of nervous energy and compulsion, I felt the despairing guy, scribbling for his life, like a Cuban salsa dancer dancing frantically for salvation. Beneath all the mania was someone waiting for the ultimate existential reassurance: you exist. There’s a place for you in the world you were born into.

While it’s been said that readers read to stave off loneliness, sometimes I think writers write for similar reasons: to be heard, and in the process, to be reassured that others understand and maybe even agree with your perceptions. To realize that you’re articulating thoughts that others have as well. Wallace left thousands of pages about modern life, thousands of ways for us to potentially connect, to see through the world’s illusions and get down to fundamental truths… It’s hard to realize that those thousands of hands extended toward the world didn’t seem to get met with enough of what he needed to continue to go on. Fucking depression, the great isolator.

I just reread the commencement address Dave offered at Kenyon College in 2005 (published as This is Water). It’s a wonderful piece that seems to boil down to some simple Buddhist concepts: mindfulness and compassion. And a testament to the basic goodness and generosity of spirit that drew people to him. Here he speaks a lot about the default settings we walk around with, the lens of self we bring to the world and how difficult that can be to transcend. A quote:

“…the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.”3 

1 http://www.theonion.com/articles/girlfriend-stops-reading-david-foster-wallace-brea,76

2 Michael Pietsch, "Editing Infinite Jest," http://infinitesummer.org/archives/569

3 "David Foster Wallace, In His Own Words," http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

For a sweet remembrance of Dave by four people who actually did know him, see http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/03/26/everything-and-more-a-tribute-to-david-foster-wallace-conversation-16-march-2011-video/.

David Foster Wallace - Quote of the Day

"I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me."

     —  A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and  Arguments

A Prescient Quote from "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"

David Foster Wallace, discussing his book Infinite Jest and the addictive qualities of TV and the Internet:

"The technology's gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it's amoral.

It doesn't...have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It's got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that's something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we're postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we're supposed to have grown up...

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And they're there for me, and I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.


The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know, I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up.

...as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up...at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screeen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're gonna die."


It's difficult not to agree with DFW. While distraction in measured doses can be a beautiful thing, the cumulative presence of TV, Internet, gaming, cell phones, texting, IMing, smart phones, social media, and sundry other technologies has undeniably altered the ways in which we relate to other humans. I have lately acutely observed the flattened, sometimes surreal quality of relating online versus the depth of experience one feels in 3-D (aka “real” life).

Online communication adds a layer of abstraction that seems to confound my brain. There is the person to whom one is speaking, then there becomes this avatar, the recipient of the email, who, while resembling this person, is solely a cognitive/verbal entity. The physical field is completely wiped out, and the emotional field clouded. Online relating brings with it much space for interpretation, in a way that face-to-face encounters often do not. In person, we read people’s energy more quickly than we do their words, and in fact process what they say via how they look and how they say it. Actual verbal content has been proven to be just a small component in the communication process. How things are said—vocal intonation, gesture, pitch, volume, phrasing—holds much more sway. All of this is absent in virtual communication.

Email and the Internet have also impacted the length of our relationships to others. Virtual communication makes it very easy to jump ship—to move on to the next person, the next topic, to blow people off, to not spend a lot of time working through issues. There are simply too many other options, and we lose patience quickly. Like a baby averts its eyes from anything that disturbs it, we can easily perform a few mouse clicks and the offensive entity has been excised. And if I can’t see you, see the upset you may feel when I dismiss you, then it doesn’t exist, right?

So if we in our world allow ourselves to be passively entertained, and accept a dehumanizing medium as our predominant form of communication, over time, what is the end result? While Foster Wallace’s conclusion feels somewhat extreme at this moment in time, it's certainly not inconceivable.

“ …each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. For us, it’s gonna be that at…a certain point…we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt. Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to be like it’s gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won’t be anybody else doin’ it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.”
























I highly recommend all of David Lipsky's fascinating book, which documents a 5-day road trip taken by the Rolling Stone correspondent and David Foster Wallace in 1996. It's both a compelling conversation and a glimpse into the writer's thought processes, interspersed with plenty of humor, humanity and bits of profundity. We're fortunate to have this transcript as a glimpse into Wallace's amazing mind.