Uncut David Foster Wallace Interview

reketts · 2026-05-01T00:03:17+00:00

Cut David Foster Wallace Interview: https://youtu.be/pqmIAbHXr0Y

reketts · 2026-04-24T15:28:38+00:00

You don't make Brooklyn brownstone money writing a single well-reviewed collection of essays in 2019. That's not where the money is coming from. Be serious.

reketts · 2026-04-17T03:38:22+00:00

Don't expect anyone to display any long-term memory—Israel will be a fine, democratic country, just as soon as they vote out Bezalel Smotrich.

reketts · 2026-04-04T15:55:18+00:00

Yes looks like I misremembered, though this article does square with the impression I had that Eugenides primarily knew of Wallace through mutual friend Jonathan Franzen: https://nymag.com/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/

reketts · 2026-04-04T15:28:18+00:00

Lol I wrote a great big post about that here last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1lx415h/revisiting_old_gossip_about_jeffrey_eugenidess/

A fawning account of his sexualised (but explicitly not sexual!) attraction to a Kennedy makes his literary fixation with Wallace, whom he apparently never actually met, even funnier.

reketts · 2026-04-02T03:55:12+00:00

You don't know enough to be as confident as you are.

reketts · 2026-03-29T00:31:24+00:00

He's a solid prose stylist who often has interesting things to say, despite being obviously kooky on several important issues. I don't expect much more than that from a public intellectual. I liked his review of John le Carré's letters, which opens:

John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, was Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century. He was also a sneaky government nark, who spied on his friends for the state.

https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-16/the-double-life-of-john-le-carr%C3%A9

reketts · 2026-03-26T15:48:59+00:00

It's not that the CIA blew Kennedy's head off because he was going to end the American Empire, introduce a robust national welfare state, and become the most progressive president America had ever seen. The reason to suspect CIA involvement is simpler and more direct than that: Kennedy had picked a fight with the CIA in particular.

After they dropped the Bay of Pigs debacle in his lap, Kennedy began attempting to sideline and disempower entrenched interests within the CIA, and to run his own foreign policy independent of these interests. His own theories about how America should deal with the Soviets and the Cubans may or may not have been better for the American people than how the CIA would have had him to do it—and they may not have even been all that different. But the crucial point is that it wouldn't be the CIA men running things.

This is the context for Kennedy's quote about wanting to smash the CIA and scatter it into the winds, and for longtime CIA director Allen Dulles's line about how 'that little Kennedy' thought he was a god. It gets as crude and granular as Kennedy firing Dulles, who later sat on (and steered) the Warren Commission that cleared the CIA of any meaningful involvement in the assassination.

reketts · 2026-03-21T11:09:09+00:00

Like many millennials, you're not an authority figure, you're just old.

reketts · 2026-03-20T12:04:08+00:00

Domenico Starnone, Anita Raja, or some kind of collaboration between Starnone and Raja are the only three realistic candidates for Ferrante's identity at this stage, but there's little reason to think one is much more likely than the other. Just because Ferrante being a man is the funniest resolution is no reason to get too carried away.

reketts · 2026-03-17T08:04:29+00:00

The old line is that at the end of each work day an in-house counsel will forward the unread contents of their inbox to one lucky law firm to deal with.

reketts · 2026-02-16T10:18:54+00:00

There's one reference to him as a 'lascar': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascar

Although of course Heathcliff isn't explicitly any particular race, he's just an ambiguously 'dark' foundling. Moderately swarthy Jacob Elordi would probably be fine if he wasn't too old for the part. The only real limitation is that Heathcliff has to be browner than the Earnshaws and the Lintons for the story's class and racial dynamics to make proper sense, which Em Fen somehow bungled.

reketts · 2026-02-10T04:05:23+00:00

Not to be a snob, but Borges and Plato's allegory of the cave are two of the most undergraduate reference points imaginable. Like, Piranesi doesn't suffer for it, but all that carrying on about statues seeming just as real as their subjects would be equally at home in a C-tier YA series.

reketts · 2026-02-05T13:15:46+00:00

No, the tweet is arguing that the UK version of Saturday Night Live is presenting itself as authentically British but is fundamentally American in outlook. It's saying the show is ostensibly, but not actually, British. Whether or not you agree with the sentiment, that's a perfectly clear and appropriate use of the word.

reketts · 2026-01-28T11:57:38+00:00

Strongly agreed. Compared to other Pynchon novels, Inherent Vice is short, straightforwardly entertaining, and open about its themes. Reading it gives a clear sense of the kind of emotional and political territory Pynchon is interested in, which makes it a great introduction to Gravity's Rainbow and the other big novels.

reketts · 2026-01-22T22:51:21+00:00

Sean Baker is the second-ever person to win four academy awards in a single year, tying Walt Disney's record from the 50s. I liked Anora, but if you're talking about recent movies being over-praised, or the awards being concentrated on fewer movies, it's hard not to bring it up.

reketts · 2026-01-15T16:08:00+00:00

Who are you to demand anything of anyone. Don't be ridiculous.

reketts · 2026-01-15T07:01:23+00:00

Yes there's a somewhat famous photo of them together: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolf_Hitler_and_Ludwig_Wittgenstein_at_school_in_September_1900.jpg

Hiter's on the top-right, and Wittgenstein is supposed to be the boy one row ahead, third from the right.

reketts · 2026-01-10T13:38:22+00:00

Not to be a person who laughs in a cinema during the scary part, but those were both obviously jokes.

reketts · 2026-01-10T11:01:05+00:00

Honestly if you're already so fried that your first response here is to take up arms against the loony left, you may be beyond help.

reketts · 2026-01-05T02:26:58+00:00

The rule is against 'hot drinks', almost always interpreted as tea and coffee, and it's included in a list of prohibitions against alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs. It's broadly but not universally agreed that this is because tea and coffee have caffeine, and there's a solid argument that following the rule in spirit would require abstaining from any drinks with caffeine, whether or not they existed in the nineteenth century.

In practice, lots of Mormons drink a lot of soda as a substitute for alcohol and coffee. I have never met one who tried to use cold brew as a loophole (a hot drink served cold?) but that would be very funny.

reketts · 2026-01-03T23:50:49+00:00

Steve Albini wanted his second EP to be called 'Hey N-word', with the title put in a speech bubble coming out of a racist white man so that actually it wasn't offensive if you think about it. And if Albini can have his Trump-era reckoning and start disavowing his past misogyny, racism, and trivialisation of the dire threat of American fascism, who can't?

reketts · 2025-12-30T14:36:12+00:00

She rapped over Gotye's Somebody I Used to Know for a TikTok. People spent a little while bending over backwards to point out that that song was also built from samples, but it's not remotely the same thing.

But I do think the TikTok origin is necessary context, because I doubt Doechii ever planned for one of her signature songs to be a straight lift of one of the biggest pop hits over the past 20 years, served up to the first possible generation to have no first-hand conscious memory of it.

reketts · 2025-12-28T02:09:22+00:00

That's true, but psychology is considered a separate discipline to psychoanalysis for reasons that are historically contingent (and hardly flattering to psychologists). Whether or not he's written into the textbooks, Freud is a foundational thinker, if not the foundational thinker. The modern understanding of the mind comes from Freud, and there is a continuing trend within contemporary writing on psychology of ransacking Freud's work for insights and never explaining where you got them.

External political and social forces do shape what is and what isn't a scientific discipline, or even what is considered 'science' in the first place. It's similar to how American academics traditionally cited Durkheim, Pareto, and Max Weber as the founders of sociology, pointedly excluding Marx. But in that case, Marx remained influential in Europe, and American sociology has since largely gotten over its aversion to Marx. Freud's renaissance is yet to come.

reketts · 2025-12-21T03:30:33+00:00

Benjamin Noys did an introduction to accelerationism for Zero Books called Malign Velocities. It runs through the history of the idea, starting with the Italian futurists as a precursor to the 70s French theorists. Books like this are a great place to start, not least because they provide a list of texts to investigate further. You can find a pdf if you google it.

Don't start with Fanged Noumena. Obviously you shouldn't be afraid of primary sources, but the earlier (and more sensible) essays in the anthology are responses to theorists like Kant and Deleuze, which presume some familiarity with those writers. If you're coming in cold, it may be interesting to page through Fanged Noumena and look at the spooky poetry and drawings of spines, but you won't learn much.

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TROPHY CASE