Although, Of Course…

There is a substantial portion of my personal library cornered off for the work of David Foster Wallace. I don’t think I need to justify this fact. Having gobbled up most everything that he’s written (save The Pale King), eventually I arrived at David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

Transcribed from an interview (well, more of a very long conversation) this 300+ page tome is pure DFW. Lipsky guides the frail genius along as best he can (like a sheepdog might a passing train), and this mid-90s era lost gem springs to life and offers a peek into the life of DFW at the height of his fame recognition. (Rockstars and rap artists experience fame.  Authors, not so much.)

I’m intentionally taking my time with this one, so two weeks in, I’m only at page 94. Below are some gems that I underlined along the way. After reading, perhaps you will feel compelled to buy this fine book. I’ll likely post again about Although Of Course, a bit later on.

pg. 8 “The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment.”

pg. 40 “If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might be just a neurologically healthy person - who’s automatically able to decoct, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that coming at you all the time.”

pg. 41 “… if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

pg. 41 “But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less right, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, make me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”

pg. 42 “To the extent that I think of myself as different from other people, then I’m not gonna be having a conversation with the reader.”

pg. 63 “Cause see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing, right? It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted.”

pg. 64 “What it is, is that, at a certain point you really, you have to grow up a little bit. You have to impose your own discipline- you’re not in a workshop anymore.”

pg. 78 “[Philip] Roth writes for two years, but mostly to get voice. Throws away all for 18 months, writes a book in last six.”- Lipsky, not DFW

pg. 81 “So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just- we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape-in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way- that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, “Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a imple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due.” And that that’s fine, in low does. But there’s something about the machinery of our relationshop to it that make low does- we don’t stop at low doses.”

pg. 88 “If you go back to Hobbes, and why we ended up begging, why people in a state of nature end up begging for a ruler who has the power of life and death over them? We absolutely have to give our power away. The Internet is going to be exactly the same way. Unless there are walls and sites and gatekeepers that say, “All right, you want fairly good fiction on the Web? Let us pick it for you.” Becasue it’s gonna take you four days to find something any good, through all the shit that’s gonna come, right?”

pg. 91 “I have this- here’s the thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

pg. 92 “Which means that if people are reading in more short bursts or whatever, that art will find a way to form conversations with readers in the brain voice or vernacular that they’ve got.”

pg. 94 “I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me.”