Readers of the April 2005 Atlantic were treated to a cover story unlike anything the magazine had published before—David Foster Wallace’s profile of John Ziegler, who was then a talk radio host in Los Angeles. In print, Wallace’s signature multilayered footnotes appeared in colored annotations adjacent to the primary text. Web design has advanced quite a bit in the decade since “Host” was published, so we’ve taken the opportunity to recreate this story online with restyled annotations; to read them, merely click or tap on the highlighted text. For example, we asked John Ziegler, the subject of the profile, for some remarks on the story; you can read those by clicking on these words. As that example demonstrates, several annotations include their own annotations, which work the same way.
D. T. Max’s Biography of David Foster Wallace
as Alcoholics Anonymous would put it, Whoever is upsetting me most is my best teacher, and as Wallace put it, in his novel “Infinite Jest,” “It starts to turn out that the vapider the A.A. cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”
.. Wallace’s oeuvre is internally varied but also of a piece. It reminds me of what an amateur deep-sea diver once said to me about why he liked diving solo: If you stop concentrating for even a few seconds you might die, he said, and I have a hard time concentrating, and so, well, I like to dive. Wallace had a problem with distraction, too; likewise, he converted it into a ferocious attentiveness.
.. One understandably slips from reading something concerned with how to be a good person to expecting the writer to have been more naturally kind himself. That thinking is perfectly wrong, though. Alec Baldwin surely has more to teach us than most about how to hold one’s temper; the co-founder of A.A., Bill W., is a guru of sobriety precisely because sobriety was so difficult for him.
Jeffrey Eugenides on time with David Foster Wallace, etc
The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy—of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others—that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.
.. In November, Wallace told Harvard health authorities that he felt he was a threat to himself, and he was sent to a locked ward at McLean Hospital, the well-known psychiatric institution in Belmont, Massachusetts. The head of the Whiting Foundation heard the news and asked Mary Karr, who had recently won a Whiting Award for her poetry and was living nearby with her husband, if she would go see Wallace when he was in detox.
.. “I hated The Broom of the System,” Karr says. “I thought it was one of the worst books ever written.” She felt Wallace was “showing off,” writing fiction that pointed to all that he’d read rather than stirring feeling in the reader. And wasn’t that the point? If the literary bright white guys were going to follow in the line of the bright white guys of a generation before, she wasn’t interested.
.. Was fiction about mastering the sweep of the culture in an innovative way, or was it about telling a more intimate story and delivering reading pleasure?
.. He once wrote to her about the “long thing I want to do” and said that when he looked at material he’d written earlier, it wasn’t as “awful” as he feared, but it was “way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be. Much of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from you, more from the example of your work and your feelings about your work than from any direct advice. You’re good about not giving advice; you just live, and let me watch.”
.. Wallace remarks in the note that he seems better able to summon enthusiasm for something when it is secondary to something else in his life. He writes, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).”
“Who is IJ?” Karr said.
“Infinite Jest.”
“Oh!”
She did not seem flattered. I read the sentence again. “How is it a means—to capture me, is that it?” Karr said. “That’s crazy. That’s really insane.”
.. As Franzen saw it, Wallace had managed to incorporate the kind of broad-canvas social critique that the great postmodernists did into a narrative “of deadly personal pertinence.”
.. Franzen became more secure in himself in the wake of The Corrections, Costello says. But Wallace? “Dave never had a secure hour in his life.”
.. Like Eugenides, whose search for faith is a major element of The Marriage Plot,Wallace quietly sought out spiritual answers and flirted with joining the Catholic Church, as Karr later did. (When they were together, they tried to pray every day.)
Capitalism’s Suffocating Music
I kept thinking of another writer, David Foster Wallace. His novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, imagines a tomorrow in which time itself is auctioned off to the highest bidder and the calendar becomes a billboard. There’s the “Year of the Whopper,” the “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster” and even the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad” — a 12-month paean to posterior discomfort, 52 weeks in honor of hemorrhoids.
Is that future so far off? While recording devices have liberated many of us from commercials on television, the rest of our lives are awash in ads.
.. Inside the stadium, the Verizon scoreboard was not to be confused with the Bud Light scoreboard or the Pepsi scoreboard.
.. When Americans talk about how crass contemporary life can seem, this advertising onslaught is part of what they’re reacting to. And their growing chilliness toward corporations and sense of capitalism run amok aren’t just about the salaries of chief executives and the tax dodges in play. They’re about the way hucksterism invades everything, scooping up everyone.