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 can read. From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael

Silverblatt, and this is bookworm. When David Foster Wallace died on September 12, 2008, he left

a hole in the world. I thought it would be best to remember him by hearing an interview with David at his height

just after the publication of his brilliant classic Infinite Jest.

I don't know how exactly to talk about this book,

so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me.

But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary,

which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.

Expand on that.

It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented

allows for a subject to be announced in a small form,

then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects,

and then it comes back in a second form containing the

other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were,

and I don't know this kind of science, but it just, I said to myself, this must be fractals.

It's, I've heard you were an acute reader.

That's, that's one of the things structurally that's going on.

It's actually, it's actually structured like something called a Sarpinski gasket,

...