‘I am wonderful to talk to. I’m a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It’s conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?’
‘How did you know I was interested in Byzantine erotica?’
‘You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle with the word Conversationalist on it, and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff? Researchers at my beck? You think we don’t delve full-bore into the psyches of those with whom we’ve made appointments to converse? You don’t think this fully accredited limited partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and stimulates our conversees?’
- David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
I’m re-reading Infinite Jest, concurrent with more books than really makes sense, after listening to the 1996 KCRW interview with Wallace that I mentioned here a few days ago. Many things from the interview are worth thinking about and blogging about, but the one that makes the most sense for this post goes like this:
INTERVIEWER: … the book is long enough, involved enough, rich enough, deep enough, and moving enough to begin to feel like a dialogue — that you could go back and talk to the book in the form of reading it again. Because I did. I’m halfway through it a second time. And of course, the second time round you know things that you couldn’t have known the first time through, and so the book is like getting to know someone well.
DFW: … I mean, this is probably a little pretentious to write a book this long and have it be designed to be read more than once. That, for me, wasn’t the thing that was really hard and really scary. The really hard and really scary thing was trying to make it fun enough so somebody would want to.
Which brings us back to the passage quoted at the top of this post.
