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

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2) Those who have interpreted DFW to be a likeably dated granola cruncher, and;

Likebly dated granola cruncher; the kind courtesy of Pexels.com under their CC0 license.

3) Goodreads-type internet commentators trying to find a popular topic with which they hope to draw attention to themselves.

I will not waste my time in responding to any of them. I said what I said; and that is all there is to it.

ED: Now that you’ve made things candidly clear, I’d like to go on a tangent. After Boston, what drew you back to central Illinois?

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DFW: It sure wasn’t the geography. It’s land that looks ironed.

There are a lot of different reasons. I liked things about Boston, but I am not wired for the East Coast. For one thing it’s loud here, and I can’t take constant noise. I don’t really like being snarled at by people in convenience stores. There’s bad stuff about the Midwest, plenty of bad stuff, but one thing about it is that folks smile at you and use their turn signals.

ED: I also just wanted to say that I really loved “The Broom of the System.” I’d never read anything like it. It was out of print for a while. Wasn’t it

DFW: My condolences. I’m trying to think. That went in and out of print and on and off various remainder tables. I think that after

“Infinite Jest” did well Little Brown put it back permanently ED: I had a question about the title. “Infinite Jest” obviously comes from Hamlet’s famous gravesite elegy to his court jester, Yorick. Was there any other deeper significance to the title for you?

DFW: There were about one hundred and seventy different dimensions for me. The book was sort of written for a relative of mine who died, and one of the characters is an art film director

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whose company is Poor Yorick Entertainment. There’s a fair amount of Hamlet stuff. I think to the extent that we’re a generation we’re kind of a Hamlet-ish one.

ED: Hamlet fits into the lost and lonely, Gen-X mode of himself.

There he was temping his way through life until poor dad got it.

DFW: Didn’t do Ophelia any good either.

ED: There was a Gen-X romance, I think. How many Hamlet references are there in the book?

DFW: I don’t know about references. When you’re doing something long you’ve usually got a whole tapestry of other stuff in your head at the time.

ED: All the reviewers made some reference to the title of Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” That does seem to be one of the main metaphors of the society and of the book. Was it not?

DFW: To an extent, although the book is strategically set in the future. It’s not supposed to be a reflection of the way things were in 1996, but a kind of extension of trends into the near

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future. Virtual reality porn was envisioned and is here in 2018.

We’re going to have to come to some sort of understanding about how much we’re going to allow ourselves, because it’s probably going to get a lot more fun than real life “issues.”

ED: Then there’s the other thought that I tend to subscribe to, that broadcast television is already dead, and that the new world of interactive media, the internet world, is a counter to that and not an extension.

DFW: 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. 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 my own opinion.

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ED: I go back to “The Broom of the System.” I was curious if what got you to write that was the desire to play with dialogue. Few books have made me laugh out loud quite so much.

DFW: It was hard when that book came out because the Japanese lady from The New York Times and other people said it was a rip-off of “The Crying of Lot 49,” which in my own defense I claim I had not read at that time. But there were parts of it that were a rip-off of an Argentine writer named Manuel Puig, who is best known for the book that “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is based on; and most of his stuff is entirely in dialogue. One of my professors at the time was also a playwright. It’s straight dialogue without attribution, so the reader has to tell who is talking by difference cadences. That was the fun part for me.

ED: The ending left me a little bit perplexed. Maybe it was supposed to.

DFW: You don’t want to hear my explanation of the ending.

ED: I had a quick follow up on this whole idea of Gen-X and yuppie angst and neuroses. That is whether our culture of work is starting to contribute to that? Are we reverting to this Victorian idea of work as religion?

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DFW: Reverting assumes we left at some point. My knowledge of the Victorians is not what it might be. Most of my friends and I tend to be pretty neurotic about achievement and jobs and who’s doing what, who’s got what. I’m not sure. Generalizing from some of the people I know, I think what’s causing the unhappiness isn’t the work. It’s the attitude towards the work. It’s not that the work is enjoyed or fulfilling in itself. It’s more about how the work stacks up with other peoples’ work. How much am I making? What does my boss think of me? All the standard psychic sludge.

ED- In the context of your having stated that “Infinite Jest”

was an unintended fractal, is it possibly the case that “The Pale King” was an unintended attempt to depict the prospect of happiness and good humor in the inevitable banalities and repetitions of our day-to-day lives; that personally expected and opinionatedly predictable lack of lexicological success your statement that there is no hope, while, again initially unintended by you, for marketing purposes, complicit or not, graying that with suggestions otherwise, which further led to your tenfold increase in popularity as the public considered you not only a genius, but a great humanist?

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DFW- Congratulations on having supplied me with the longest question-statement I have heard since the burial. The answer is no, yes, and maybe, depending upon which part is highlighted, and whether or not it is Sunday; Saturday if one is Jewish; but more importantly it is totally irrelevant as Pietsch heavily collaborated, and retained the final cut, especially in “The Pale King.” Any questions regarding the intents of the finalized books would be better referred to him. I just did them because I thought that I could, I had some understanding of the subject matter, and that Little Brown gave me some pocket money which I hoped would later turn into an El Dorado.

ED: Since your publicized demise many writers, critics, associates of writers and critics, and various commercial interests speaking for their clients have cited having had an influence on your writing. The number does seem to grow by the day. Would you share with us some of your greatest influences?

DFW: I’ve always been a reader, and in that regard can say that I’ve probably been unconsciously influenced by any of a number of writers; many of them what I’d call avant garde. Don DeLillo was my personal favorite. In terms of personal contact and even subsidiary cyber contact, I’ve had little other than what has been recorded for posterity through television appearances.

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ED: Is writing the highest art form?

DFW: Alienating some readers, I once stated that it was third after music, especially rhythm, and painting. I have since changed my assessment. Performance tops them all. The vast majority of art exists in a time and place. It then becomes a museum piece requiring study for any possible appreciation. It periodically resurfaces, as the invention of a shield would have been useless prior to swords, then irrelevant with higher powered weapons, then again useful in a time of terrorism. There is almost nothing which automatically transcends.

ED: Does “Infinite Jest” transcend?

DFW: You must be kidding me. Of course not. It’s placed right here in Boston.

ED: You no doubt saw the beginnings of Goodreads and other online literary sites. What effect do you believe they’ve had?

DFW: Like all manifestations of computer based social communication, it increases the quantity at the sacrifice of quality. Words scribbled in HTML compatible format cannot convey

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what is easily conveyed in person through touch, inflection, and body language. Ten years ago, Goodreads had the potential to make readers aware of books they would not have otherwise known.

However, it has even failed in that seemingly simple mission; basically because of the “reforms” put in place by Amazon, taking advantage of the complaints registered by the whining indie writers, which made it into a reviewer-writer fed marketing program. The information it contains can be replaced and exceeded by Wikipedia. It is merely a poor promotion vehicle for the best known books, and serves as a cloister for tiny writing groups to review and “like” each other’s work; unknown to the vast majority of the readers.

ED: Do you object to the un-professional nature of Goodreads reviewers?

DFW: Not at all. This was the center of their lost potential benefit. Keep in mind that there are only two types. Some come out screaming like hell. Others display a calm acceptance. This is natural. Neither type become critics until they observe things for five minutes; thereby an acquired taste; albeit one quickly digested. Then puberty sets in and confuses the whole thing. By the same token, the existence of a non-professional bulletin board obligates the reader to differentiate between

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sources more than ever. I do have a temper, and I saw that one of their top rated reviewers said that I was a sad waste of a big talent. I suppose that I really shouldn’t care about his remarks as for the most significant thing in his existence he strives to get 100 like clicks as his source of self-worth, and also because in an indirect way that blurb was actually complimentary. However, when in the appropriate bad mood, I’m tempted to tell this unduly opinionated Brit a few things which just might blow his little hoary head. The audacity to refer to someone with a book on the top 100 all-time list as “wasted talent,” is not only stupidly presumptuous in innumerable ways inclusive of this bucket crab’s accomplishment-based-indication of an inability to assess “talent,” but also a testimony to not having seen and/or understood the “Infinite Jest” footnote #24

descriptive of J.O. Incandenza’s eclectic filmography; which is in fact a rendering of my “chosen writing career.” His impudence to pre-suppose that I should have done some un-defined something else of his un-stated specifications in order to meet and have the world presumably benefit from my having met his “exalted”

standards is a testimony to his being an embarrassingly-out-of-his-league, judgmental, incompetent, self-deluded, loudmouth, sufficiently dim-witted to have found inordinate pride in having acquired a non-paying miniscule, cyber-geek audience, ostensibly as dried up and crotchety as he, which either enables them to

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pretend to “enjoy” or find a laughing-at-retards amusement in reading his derivative put-downs of primary efforts to which he and they have been excluded through a total lack of talent. You might have noticed that I don’t play defense; as the best possible outcome if played to perfection is a tie, and is thereby never that. I like offense. Yet, to say what is immediately seen as “cruelly” accurate in a judgement-free characterization, construed by the self-proclaimed “nice arbiters of mannerisms” to be some sort of detestable “trolling”

in the US, their most logical, but extensively lesser position presumptive of the fact which they alone have seen that it is not everyone who can see the farce, which the culturally advanced French have found TV entertaining for a 21st century decade, while this “reviewer” is still obviously enthralled with multiple self-posted photos of Mick Jagger in lipstick; his keyboard unfortunately still operational. The Goodreads grounded bonehead repeated my phrase of “invaginate volunteer beans” as if those words do not convey a simple accurate picture; and even if he had not had the demonstrated inability to see these words as being together in a poetic sense, he has further confessed to being too deaf to understand the concept of the sound of words with some similarity to a DeLillo type mixing which may ignore stated dictionary based meanings. If people of this deaf, dumb, and blind ilk had any say so, we would be required to ban all

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cameras. The last time this guy was fond of a book or its author pre-dates his addiction to Depend Adult Undergarments. Having said all that, and despite its lost possibilities and “like”

button attracting morons, Goodreads is still the best vehicle for artists who were not as fortunate as me, to establish a supportive community, assuming at least one of them can recognize and shoot a weasel, when necessary. I’d like to not further speak of Goodreads, because it is numerically immaterial, much too easy a target for potshots at laughable, self-important incompetents, and also seems to be doing its best to make itself totally defunct.

ED: You seem to have a poor opinion of contemporary writing. Are you trying to discourage people from doing what you’ve done?

DFW: No. If one is inflicted with a passion for writing, like any other passion, it seems best to follow it. But recognize that 99.99999% never make a living from this; so keep your day job until regular checks are coming in. My case was a bit different in that I kind of fell into it largely out of a disinterest in other disciplines, and I got immediately lucky.

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ED: We seem to have a natural break right here. This is a perfect time to hear from one of our oldest friends; Mayfair Bookcases.

A Supposedly Fun DFW Interview