The Curious Case of David Foster Wallace

What? Why am I so interested in DFW you ask?

Before I go on, a short disclaimer; Nothing really qualifies me to talk about DFW, I have watched several of the guy's interviews but haven't really finished through his books yet, nor am I an expert in literature or one of those people who study other people for a living. Apart from the reasons that you clearly asked for it, I write this just to document what makes me curious about DFW from the little that I know about him, and before I delve into his work.

The first reason I am interested in DFW is because of sheer boredom. Not in the sense that I am bored and I find DFW entertaining, but boredom as an entity in itself. I think DFW successfully managed to dissect post modern life and isolate this component of boredom, which usually is taken as an absence of something instead of a thing in itself. Most of the time, it does not even make it to the table for any analysis or discussion. Of course, if it is treated as an absence of something, you save yourself the trouble of assigning it a purpose and thereby any importance, and that should sit very well with the speedy consumerist attitude we see around us today. I suspect that there is more to boredom than a mere void that desperately needs to be filled in with whatever is at the arm's reach. The contrarian in me seeks to explore it and I don't know anyone other than DFW who has run a flashlight of it in a way that I find interesting and palpable.

The second reason, I am interested in DFW is more to do with his personal quirk than his work per se. If you have seen DFW sit through an interview, most of you will agree that it is not the most pleasant experience for anyone involved; him answering the questions with something profound and yet immediately attacking himself for not doing a good enough job. You see him try very hard to bring his oral communication on par with his standards for written words and then take the stunned-out-of-his-brilliance listeners as a cue to be discouraged instantly for a job not done well. I have not seen anyone hold themselves accountable to such a degree of whether what comes out of their mouth makes perfect sense every time, obsessive compulsive articulation disorder. Or maybe it is the fear that the depth of what he writes will be lost when he is asked to talk about it. Anyways, I can relate to the frustration of not being able to communicate in the most perfect and lossless fashion every time, but I don't expect someone as brilliant as DFW to have the same issue. Or perhaps, it's just that he is not meeting his standards, and I am not meeting mine. Although I understand that absolute perfection in communication is a mirage in a desert, DFW inspires me to still walk a little further.