The Electric Typewriter

by David Foster Wallace

Just about every important word on The Best American Essays 2007’s front cover turns out to be vague, debatable, slippery, disingenuous, or else ‘true’ only in certain contexts…

by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello

Rjam Productions, headquartered in a mixed black/Hispanic section of North Dorchester, is as follows:

* One (1) four-car garage fitted with dubbing and remastering gear worth more than most of the rest of the real estate on the block;
* One (1) touch-tone telephone (leased);
* Two (2) Chevy Blazers, vanity-plated RJAM1 and RJAM2, each equipped with cellular phones and slick tape decks (also leased);
* One (1) VCR with Kathleen Turner’s Body Heat cued up on the morning in question;
* Most importantly, eight (8) promising acts under binding contract.

by David Foster Wallace (via fwriction)

I grew up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids - and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force.

by David Foster Wallace

It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

by David Foster Wallace

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but in the day-to-day trenches of life, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.

by David Foster Wallace

Bullshit 1 and Bullshit 2, names conceived as usual by the extremely cool and laid-back NBC News cameraman Jim C. and—to their credit—immediately seized on and used with great glee at every opportunity by McCain’s younger Press Liaisons, who are themselves so cool and unpretentious it’s tempting to suspect that they are professionally cool and unpretentious.

by David Foster Wallace (via fwriction)

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…

by David Foster Wallace

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he’s peeing on a tree. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

by David Foster Wallace

Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes - scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff - strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.