A Supposedly Posthumous Fun ...... by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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of his non-mummified self standing at a podium, which was garishly superimposed on the wall behind the communal desk.

David Foster Wallace; property of the author.

DFW: I commend your thoroughness, if not your affinity to mislead. Where on earth did you find one of me smiling?

ED: The commendations go to my staff. It is an improvisation dashed off by a young, aspiring, but not yet accomplished caricaturist interning here ostensibly in hope of attaining three graduate credits if he writes a comprehensible paper about it. Good evening, David. May I call you David?

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DFW: You can call me David or you can take the other choice of referring to me as “The DFW Brand,” which seems a bit cumbersome, Evan. May I call you Evan, Evan?

ED: I’ll stay with David; and one Evan will suffice. Why the garb, David? Have you acquired a taste for tactile, tertiary, Tutankhamun, tomb-trendy togs?

DFW- Tactlessly, I’ve become very recognizable, and I didn’t want to be noticed; just a practical consideration. It became totally taxing when the T-Viewers targeted my teasing technique with their expectations of constant and repetitive brilliance.

Any notions of brilliance seem to come in spurts.

ED: How can I be sure that it’s you under there?

DFW: Of course you can’t. What matters to you is what you think is there; which may or may not be the case anywhere other than in your own mind.

ED: Are you bringing Derrida into the conversation this soon?

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DFW: Enhanced Derrida ala Joelle Van Dyne. And I might point out that there is no Derrida anymore; just the Derrida Brand; as it is practically and popularly promoted.

ED: This personally impresses me as being too plentifully prompt to have penned the P’s in the presence of Vladimir Nabokov.

Perhaps to change the path toward the presumed point it’s been nine years since your reported suicide. Why reappear now and why here?

Significant sections of the attentive audience produced thought-to-be requisite smiles coupled with a low grumble which on stage may have been mistaken for a collective canine cry. The vacationers in from the outskirts seemed puzzled by the others’

responses. The inebriated local codgers moved their heads from side to side in what had to have been recognition of the preliminary warming up aspect of the breezy presentation. The MFA candidated Millennials effected “smiles” like those made when your overbearing uncle tells the old vagina joke for the tenth time. The litbloggers used their spasming keyboard comfortable fingers to, as was customary, type in whatever they heard some other “literary” person say. For the moment, the

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previously over-riding feelings of abysmal misfortune were put on sundry back burners.

DFW: You have courteously conceded the concluding catchphrase. I have become incensed with the misrepresentations made in furtherance of the marketing the DFW Brand. And since you are filming out of the basement of the Institute of Contemporary Art, formerly known as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, I thought it the antediluvian appropriate place.

ED: Perhaps our audience would like you to elaborate upon the misrepresentations regarding the DFW Brand and the true DFW; as indeed seems your primary interest.

DFW: The people who own the rights now have marketed David Foster Wallace into the DFW Brand; that being a sweet, brilliant person. I am certainly not sweet. They have removed films from YouTube which suggest otherwise; and there were quite a few. I’m particularly proud of the time I reduced Franzen to a stuttering wreck after he made numerous snide comments about length. At least I don’t have to belabor, get pedantic, and write filler to get there. And of course my pal Leyner. Mark gets the distinction of scoring my only knockdown. Of course it was a one-line cheap shot he threw in while I was basking in the

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foolish delight of having made a blubbering idiot of Franzen.

Mark paid. In that sub-par, redundant, and irrelevant television essay of mine everyone now extolls, I blasted Markie in a way from which he never recovered; might be permanent brain damage.

There were some minor events too; like that worm on appropriately named “Bookworm.” His pretentious and un-heralded voice droned on and on with the type of question designed to make himself seem superior. He obviously did not do a minimum of his homework. He must not have seen that my bio stated me as having had a math undergraduate major, as well as having written a book on the subject. When he persisted in lecturing me about his apparently recently acquired “acumen” in the subject of fractals, it got funny. There were others, but they tended to be backdowns from an initially aggressive posture, as when I kind of said to Charlie Rose; “Bring it” stated as “I’m ...

literally ... sitting ... here .... shaking.” I could go on, but my point is that the DFW Brand machine has distorted David Foster Wallace into a depressed, nice, wimpy book nerd, and has consequently increased book sales tenfold.

Particularly depressing for me was that after I became recognized as this “genius,” needy people would ask me how they might fix their lives. I admire their search, but I was always tempted to tell them a truth I knew that they didn’t want to

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hear. I’d like to have encouraged them to ask me again after I had figured out how to fix up my own fucked up life.

Another of my exasperations stem from the cut-rate, tawdry, and contemptible claims perpetrated by people who have attempted to usurp credit for having consulted with me while I wrote

“Infinite Jest.” Rather than the ostentatious inference surrounding “consulted,” nattered is a more accurate word, and I will graciously admit that I did indeed natter with a few of them almost as much as I nattered with the friendly Walmart greeter. Anyone taking the trouble to check will note that I gave no credits other than “For F.P. Foster; R.I.P.” However now, in the apparent Year of the Tuck’s Medicated Pad, certain parts of the beached minnow contingent, A/K/A Po-mo pushers, have attempted to take credit for having been instrumental in my solitary composition. This is being primarily done through a minor reviewer who occasionally gets his “jollity” into the Washington Post, ostensibly on slow news days, and his pathetic Goodreads flunkies, with a further claim of being significant to something appropriately called the Dorky Archive Press. Even my publisher, Little Brown and Company, did not include any one of their “reviews” among the twenty-one insertions placed at the front and back of the book. I cannot even be fairly called a

A Supposedly Fun DFW Interview