I'm Christopher Lighten. This is Open Source. We're in David Foster Wallace World.

Our lives imitating his wacky art. The new movie catches him on tour in 1996.

Not quite 20 years ago. His masterpiece, Infinite Gest, was new. His cult was young.

Our future was ripening. This was DFW on Wisconsin Public Radio.

You know, the book is meant to seem kind of surreal and outlandish at first and then in sort of a creepy way

to seem not all that implausible. And it would seem to me. I mean at some point in the next 10 or 15 years

we're going to have virtual reality pornography, which I would just invite you to think about.

I mean what it's going to be like and what sort of resources we're going to have to cultivate in ourselves and in our citizenry

to keep from sort of dying.

On the same book tour he spoke with Charlie Rose on PBS.

The thing that interests me and a lot of the stuff I think that I do has to do with commercial entertainment.

It's efficiency. It's sheer ability to deliver pleasure in large doses.

Changes people's relationship to art and entertainment. It changes what an audience is looking for.

I would argue it changes us in deeper ways than that.

And then David came to Boston to this very studio at WBUR to speak with me on a show known as The Connection.

He was a recovering addict who had sobered up around issues like instant gratification and spiritual drift.

I think somehow the culture has taught us or we've allowed the culture to teach us that

really the point of living is to get as much as you can and experience as much pleasure as you can

and that the implicit promise is that that will make you happy.

I know that's almost offensively simplistic.

The effects of it aren't simplistic at all.

I don't have children but I'm sort of obsessed with the idea of what my children will think of me and of us.

...