The Boston Sunday Globe's Ideas section features an interview with one of Em's favorites, David Foster Wallace. The good news is, DFW has apparently broken his addictions to cigarettes, and footnotes: "I don't think any of [my new] stories have footnotes, which I'm rather proud of. Got that monkey off my back. I think one story maybe has a couple of asterisk footnotes. You know, there are so few of them that you can use asterisks."
Interviewer Caleb Crain (what a name for a writer!) notes DFW's Boston connection via a semester as a grad student at Harvard in 1989, but passes over DFW's brief stint as an Emerson College lit professor in the early Nineties. After Girl With Curious Hair and Broom Of The System, but before Infinite Jest, DFW taught Literature at Emerson. How do I know this? Yours truly was a student of his. I liked the stuff he made us read, specifically Don Delillo's Great Jones Street. At that time, in an interview with the Emerson student newspaper, DFW didn't pull any punches regarding his opinion of us Emerson students. He lamented that we were so absorbed in movies, TV, radio, and theater, that he assigned a book about a rock star (Great Jones Street) in the hope that we would actually read it. Worst part is, he was right.
I have had a hardcover copy of Infinite Jest on my shelf for years now, but it looks too daunting to start. I like his magazine pieces that Em makes me read, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and a few pieces he wrote under a pseudonym for Premiere magazine. In the Globe interview, he mentions some of the magazine work he has published under a pseudonym will be published in a collection of his soon, so I'm hoping his piece about a pornography convention sees the light of day.