David Foster Wallace & Richard Powers Q&A moderated by John O'Brien (12/2000)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- 9:55
“Who cares if it’s boring. Rick and I have been talking a lot about teaching and there’s this fundamental difference -- that comes up in freshman comp and haunts ya all the way through teaching undergrads -- is that there’s a fundamental difference between expressive writing and communicative writing. And one of the biggest problems in terms of learning to write or teaching anyone to write is getting it in your nerve endings that the reader cannot read your mind. That what you say isn’t interesting simply because you yourself say it. Whether that translates to a feeling of obligation to the reader, I don’t know. But we’ve all probably sat next to people at dinner or on public transport who are producing communication signals but it’s not communicative expression, it’s expressive expression. Right? And actually it’s in conversation that you can feel most vividly how alienating and unpleasant it is to feel as if somebody is going through all the motions of communicating with you but in fact you don’t even need to be there at all.”
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Check out these David Foster Wallace books on Amazon!
The Life of David Foster Wallace: geni.us/7xzix
Conversations with David Foster Wallace: geni.us/HHYcGBe
Infinite Jest: geni.us/RwhKG
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The rather useless indulgence of white privilege.
Reading "The time of our singing" by Powers. What a powerful and touching book.
Wow! This is so good. I can't believe I've never heard it before. I knew DFW could be funny, but he is truly on fire here, haha. I don't think I've ever heard him sound quite so off the cuff before.
"I'd just like to be that healthy between my ears." I would've loved to see the expression on the face of those people after they'd finished laughing.
"How alienating and unpleasant it is to feel as if somebody is going through all the motions of communicating with you but in fact you don't even need to be there at all" David says and the people laugh because it's so unlikely to be in a state of mind to appreciate a statement like that in the company of people, but it poignantly and empathetically captures one aspect of the Existential loneliness which troubles us all.
This was so funny..however I received it as specifically covering those who are using another in conversation to vent or to hear their own thoughts or stories....perhaps likely without realizing it is not including the other in any connective way.
@@CadeCYC I agree with you. I think some of the laughter comes from the listeners who have been in those scenarios and have dealt with people who are only expressing and not communicating. It does in a way feel to me as though some of the laughter comes from the uncomfortable place of thinking that you might be the person he’s talking about. Seems like this is the case in a lot of DFW discussions. He was so bright. The ability to make someone think without directly saying “hey, use your head” is a skill he had mastered
Imagine being taught creative writing by him.
Bill burr was.
Like touching a meteor.
@@Shmarful Ahem... WHAT?
@@YodasPapa Yes bro, so was Paul Thomas Anderson lmao.
th-cam.com/video/TxLcBBBNHBI/w-d-xo.html
@@YodasPapa yea. He went to Emerson and was a student of DFW. So was Paul Thomas Anderson. The latter makes a bit more sense.
He resembles a prisoner in that attire. He was a prisoner of his own mind no doubt.
This laughter feels like a compulsion to dispel discomfort rather than genuinely finding something funny.
nice talk thanks for uploading, about to finish Overstory by Powers and its great literature
Powers comes off very stuffy here...loved David’s casual brightness and (rare in interviews) relaxed jocularity
I would've thought that the host is Cormac McCarthy if I didn't see the title 😄😄
10:07
"...haunts ya..."
“A good kind of tired” - my dude
O'Brien's voice is eerily similar to Cormac McCarthy's
David is often quite funny. However, as some others have pointed out, many times during this video, the laughter seems like a nervous, instinctive reaction to seriously discomforting ideas. Something about it came across as uneasy and anxious in the face of a deep concept that you don't really want to fully come to terms with. I know this kind of analysis can come across as over-analyzing, but in this particular video I really did feel that disconnect between me not laughing whatsoever at something the audience found totally hilarious.
I think it has a lot to do with his celebrity status amongst the crowd at the time too
Disappointedly, Too shallow superficial questions, embarrassing the 2 of Genius Artists of the World with, which nearly drive them both into speechless. A moderator should enjoy plunging into their outstanding fantastic Worlds, not as a judge vocationally… Hopefully the Dialogue would be profoundly beautiful!
at around min 20 it's like....ooops Here it comes Folks! I
Just out of curiosity, which John O'Brien is this? Author of Leaving Las Vegas died in 1994 so it can't be him. Another writer with the same name?
Almost certainly it's the founder of Dalkey Archive Press.
@@Orpheuslament oh yeah, of course it’s him.
Damn. That shit around the 4:20 mark is spot-on
I for one can definitely say that I'd LIKE to be able to calculate pleasure/enjoyment/etc in advance, but it's probably not possible. The closest you could possibly get would be to verify a certain potency/purity of very powerful drugs, then inject. But you'd need to be a junky first in order to predict with better precision. And moreover, then you're a fucking junky.
TL:DR - The World is a fucking mess, we'll never know everything, and no one 100% always knows what their doing, or why their doing it.
interviewer has no clue