"I think of myself as a fiction writer. I'm real interested in fiction, and all elements of fiction. Fiction's more important to me. So I'm also I think more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I'm any good or not, or I'm on the wrong track or not. Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, it's not that I didn't care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, I'll try this. I'm not an expert at it. I don't pretend to be. It's not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me."
—Awl pal Tom Scocca, away on some rich person cruise, provides the transcript to a recently rediscovered interview he did with David Foster Wallace back in 1998.
2
"I've never had a beard. I've tried periodically to grow a beard, and when it resembles, you know, the armpit of a 15-year-old girl who hasn't shaved her armpit, I shave it off."
my legs sort of look like the armpit of a 15-year-old girl right now, but I refuse to shave.
I hope to God I still have notes I took in 2004 when I saw DFW at the Philadelphia Public Library. I was picked from the stands to introduce him, and even said "Where's Tom?" in reference to me. A homeless person asking a question about Star Wars and Shakespeare disturbed as much if not more than the story Wallace read, the one about the baby and the scalding water.
And oh yeah, I drew a picture of him in my notes.