"Brevity is the soul of wit" -David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest

it is a bit ironic, at least prima facie, that DFW is concerned with parsimony given the length of his novel, Infinite Jest.. parsimony is the virtue of the philosophers not so much of the novelist.

technically "posterior" means "after", as in "a posteriori" meaning "after the fact". but I like his sentiment here. language's nuances complicate learning and message transmission. language to me is a utility, not an art.

Or if you overuse the word 'use,' it's nice to utilize an alternative.

So funny, a college prof told me the same thing about use vs. utilize. I agree, however think there is merit in "utilize" when it makes the cadence or musicality of a sentence flow better. (Not a common circumstance though)

This is from Lipsky's tapes. I didn't know he video recorded any of it. Does anyone know if there are other Lipsky videos?

At this time I'm enjoying this video, prior to that I was not.

he is the best current writer around why oh why did you kill yourself ? we need someone like you RIGHT NOW,darnit

whoa.....dude i get that some people don't like his writting but thats no reason to be rude.

You know what, although your comment is highly offensive, I feel as though calling DFW a "redundant fuck" is pretty damn accurate.

Hahah good to know.

Cool. And I was just quoting yr snottiness, of course. Fun fact: In "Tense Present", you learn the difference between snottiness and SNOOTiness. Snottiness = bad, SNOOTiness = good.

Wow..

proper DFW fan*

Thanks for letting me know about 'Tense Present'. I didn't know about it. You make it sound like to be a proper DFW you have to have read all his articles and every word he's ever written. If my original comment came off snotty, I apologize. I usually don't mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about, at least not without making my uncertainty known. Again, thanks for letting me know. The same goes for everyone of you who has responded to my earlier comment.

Got it.

If you got the chance to tell him, I'm sure he'd be relieved that something he did in some way brought happiness to your life.

Assholes like me.

Also impossible to overlook: Obviously you don't love DFW as much as the next guy or you'd know this interview is about an essay he wrote called "Tense Present" that reviews Garner's Dictionary of American Usage. It's in Harper's Mag 4/01 if you want to read it.

I'm glad that you are definately going to die in Winter 2013 from acute renal failure caused by your underlying yet previously undiagnosed acquired immune deficiency syndrome which was brought on by your recent bodily fluid exchange with the man in the gas station bathroom that you thought nobody else could see. What's worse is that you didn't even know that Lance gave you the disease last month at your local 7-eleven porta-shitter until I just told you about it. I'm damn sorry!

I am happy this redundant fuck killed himself.

I think he may be making a distinction between using those words, or words like them, in a novel and using them in plain, daily conversation. He often talks about reading being "hard work", but he seems to see conversations differently. He talks about people who SAY "at this time" rather than "now".

if I occupied my brain space with trivial distinctions like this I'd also want to kill myself

ohhhh, so you're a post-modernist. Then you wouldn't agree with Chomsky at all. I'm afraid I don't agree with your position. It's all right. We've moved away from the topic....

American journalism? You mean WHAT they write, or HOW they write? Americans are very conscious of style. I think the New York Times best illustrates Americans attention to fine writing, more so than you'll find in British journals. PhD? -- isn't that a concept we got from the German research university? Traditional American education is classical education, of which the closest we have today is a liberal-arts education.