Meeting a fan of pop culture

If any author captures the pop-culture infused excess of the '90s, it's David Foster Wallace. Just look at the size of his novel Infinite Jest (Back Bay Books, $14.95) that racks in at a whopping 1,079 pages. Wallace is just one of the many prestigious authors who has created a book of such epic proportions. Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, Peter Nadas' The Book of Memories and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter are huge, sprawling fictions that many of us buy, hoping to someday spend a week immersed in these critically acclaimed works. It just doesn't happen.

While DeLillo, Pynchon and Banks sit on your shelf, it would be more worthwile to sink your teeth into a little David Foster Wallace – and this time, it's certainly not as Infinite. His collection of "essays and arguments," A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Back Bay Books, $13.95) offers a taste of the author's ribald humor, wild cultural analysis and intelligent prose.

In one piece, Wallace explores the films of David Lynch after being admitted onto the set of Lost Highway. But the author never meets the infamously bizarre director:

"The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree. I am not kidding. This on 8 January in West LA's Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway's exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. Lynch is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the Base Camp's trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it'd take him to run down the Base Camp's long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first sight of Lynch is only from the back and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway's cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch's urinating in public, and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you'd ignore a child's alfresco peeing."

Nonfiction writing doesn't get much better than this. Wallace's hilarious commentary combines the talents of his peers, the social critic Camille Paglia and humorist David Sedaris.

The Daily Princetonian recently interviewed Wallace and we asked him to answer the "Hodgepodge" section of Princeton's admission application (not all of which are printed here) along with a few more serious questions. Daily Princetonian: OK, what's your favorite book? David Foster Wallace: Somebody could ask you that question 30 times and you'd give 30 different answers. Are you asking what you think is the best book or what the best book is to read when you're depressed? What's the context? I don't think I'd get into Princeton, would I? (ed. note: DFW went to Amherst.) I think probably my single favorite book is an old book of Julio Cortazar called Final Del Juego or End of the Game. It's just an incredible, scrotum-tightening book of weird South American short stuff and "The End of the Game" is probably the single best short story of the 20th century. DP: How about your favorite recording? DFW: My favorite piece of music is from my childhood. My parents used to play for me a piece called "The Modal" by a Czech composer named Smetena. This is very embarrassing to say because its total cheese – the whole piece of music emulates the ebb and flow of a river from a little creek into the ocean – but every time I hear it, I burst into tears because I remember being a little kid on my mom's lap. I really wouldn't get into Princeton. DP: Any favorite activity? DFW: These are impossible questions, man. I guess I'd probably say reading, but there are answers that are just unprintable, you know? I don't like that question. I'll just say reading. DP: Your favorite movie? DFW: Oh, God (he groans). DP: Or favorite recent movie? Favorite movie from last year? DFW: Christ, Breaking the Waves, probably. It's like a Flannery O'Connor story. Lars Von Trier is just very interesting. He's the first really interesting European who's getting American exposure. DP: (Beginning to move a little faster.) Favorite word. DFW: Oh wow. Exeleutherostomize, which means to speak out freely in an inappropriate context. You can only find it in the LED, it's not in the Webster's. DP: Favorite time of the day. DFW: Ooh, good one – 11 a.m. DP: Favorite expression. DFW: All right, if I'm filling out the application, mine would be "I've never even met her!" DP: Favorite source of news. DFW: I'm not sure I understand. Oh, oh, oh, radio. DP: And the best advice you've ever received? DFW: I had somebody once tell me at age – I'm embarrassingly old – I think it was at 27 or 28, that fear wasn't necessarily a sign that you shouldn't do something. It's embarrassing that I've spent my whole life trying to avoid that, but at the time, it seemed very profound to me. I doubt it's news to anybody else, especially bungee jumpers. DP: After writing the an entire piece about a cruise ship, what exactly is your opinion of the success of Titanic? DFW: Let's remember that the series The Love Boat which took place exclusively on a cruise ship was solid in the ratings for at least nine seasons. I've seen Titanic a couple of times, I'm a huge James Cameron fan, at least of his early stuff. Terminator and Aliens are damn near classics. Titanic, I thought I'd never seen special effects used more judiciously and more beautifully. I think it's the best special effects movie ever because all of the effects are not there just to distract you from the fact that the movie's stupid. They're there to be beautiful and seem real. The plot itself – i've seen it about four trillion times before and I didn't think that DiCaprio or Winslet were really exceptional. They were competent. DP: But what about our cultural fascination with the ship? DFW: I think for some reason, the real demographic root of this is in Love Boat. Since Love Boat, we somehow unconsciously equate ships with romance. Cameron, I'll bet, really wanted to do a realistic movie about building a ship and sinking it and the idea of selling it to the money guys was this upper-class/lower-class romance that will draw the paying customers in. But I think it's The Love Boat with its paint-by-numbers romance every episode that has instilled into our brains the idea that ship equals romance. DP: Did you want to dispel that myth? DFW: Harper's has had me do a couple of what they call experientials – just go on these things and report what you saw. Cruises are extremely luxurious for people who are middle class and below. It's sort of the average American's idea of real class and so there was a particular lush vulgarity involved. I didn't do as much of the class stuff that the editor was interested in. I was also on a cruise ship primarily known for its restaurant and most of the cruisers were 50 and over or married. There just wasn't a whole lot of romance on it. Apparently Carnival is just like a floating bordello. I, of course, lobbied hard to be on a Carnival cruise. DP: Infinite Jest is a massive novel and the pieces in this collection are much shorter. Do you prefer one over the other? DFW: They're just incredibly, incredibly different. The length I'm happiest with is about 100 pages. A novel is, for me, like a marriage and a short story is more like a date. And if it's not working out, it's far better to know it 5 pages into a story than two hundred pages into something that's long. DP: How do you feel about the current state of publishing and the fact that less and less Americans actually read for pleasure? DFW: To be honest with you, this is stuff that I and my friends worried about in our twenties. I'm now 36 and I really like to do this. It's nice that my work gets bought and I get a little bit of money. And it's especially nice if someone comes up to me and tells me they liked it. I know now I'd do this whether anybody took it or not. I really don't care a whole lot. I think six hours of TV a day and no reading is kind of weird on the human brain. But, we live in a country where it's about providing what people want so you can get money and people want pleasure and they want a distraction from their ordinary cares and worries. Since most literary fiction is about people confronting various parts of themselves, it's not very surprising that not a whole lot of people want to spend time and money on reading this stuff. DP: What do you tell people who are struggling as writers? DFW: There's a seminal episode of The Partridge Family in which Keith writes a cello concerto and gets an audience with this classical conductor. The man listens to Keith and says, "So what do you want from me?" Keith replies: "I want you to tell me whether I'm any good." The guy says, "Well, if I tell you you're not any good, are you going to quit right now?" Keith says, "Yeah." The conductor says, "Well then you ought to quit right now, because if what I or anyone else says to you matters that much, then you don't have the commitment."

Now, I can tell you – having done this for 12 or 13 years – that this is absolutely true. If you really want to do this, you go through moments of exhilaration when something gets taken and moments of devastation when something doesn't. The fact of the matter is that you are alone in a room and if something about that drives you enough, then you will continue to do it. If more people read, more books would be bought and more people would be able to make a living doing this. And it's sad that more people who want to can't; it's a very weird kind of profession. Because so much of the time is alone, you have to reach a compromise with yourself. Try to worry about the publication stuff as little as possible until you're 30 or 35. So few young people get lucky – my first book didn't deserve to get published. Being young then was hot. So just save yourself a lot of grief by trying not to lie awake at night worrying about these things. All this is a cliché, but it's true.