Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who who can read hello and welcome to bookworm

this is michael silverblatt and today my guest is david foster wallace author most recently of a

collection of essays and arguments called a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again he's the

author as well of infinite Jest. Listeners to Bookworm know that I

consider him to be the rare thing, someone who knows how to build something new that's complicated

and rich and maybe one among the last who knows how to create technologies that result in these kinds of structure.

I noticed when I was reading the essays in a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again,

that at a certain point most of the things that you are looking at yield an addictiveness

quotient. The tennis gets to a point where the volley turns into a trance. The pampering

on board the cruise in the final essay

becomes something that yields a desire for still more mega pampering.

And I wanted to ask you to address this.

I found, as I was reading the essays,

that I was growing addicted to them.

That the essay itself, in its length, in its repetitions, were forming a counter-trans-like addiction.

And I wondered if you could talk about it.

I think the oldest essay in that collection was written in like 1990, which is when I was making the first stab in Infinite Just. There's a lot of addiction stuff in Infinite Just, and it's odd. I mean, I went to a lot of open AIA meetings, i read a lot of um sort of a dictionology books and it does become a kind of model or lattice through which you end up seeing

a lot of stuff particularly um particularly american stuff um advertising a seduction and um i mean

...