David Foster Wallace was one of my earliest “real literature” dives. From the days when, sometimes after a long day of work, I just didn’t want to do more work on the Google shuttle. I got back into reading after not reading so much in a personally-directed way in college. Recently, flipping through Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, I found a business card from Google that I had been using as a bookmark.

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story is a DFW biography. (DFW = David Foster Wallace.) Whenever I read DFW in particular it makes me want to put parentheses in my writing. (Not footnotes… parentheses seem more appropriate for someone who spends more time working with programming languages than human ones.)

It’s interesting to learn more about his writing process. I hadn’t realized how much he blurred fiction and nonfiction. There is a lot of fictional stuff in his “nonfiction”. Many incidents that seem to not have happened, but they made for better reading. It reminds me of the Hemingway quote. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.” Like Labatut’s style.

Also the other way around. So much of his short fiction and Infinite Jest was based on his own life. From tennis camps to halfway houses to the “brutalist sun” of Arizona. And this relates to his difficulty in writing a second great novel. You pour your whole life into the first novel, and then what’s left? Like Eminem struggling for material once he is no longer an underappreciated rebel.

The Pale King is really great. It’s a literary tragedy that he never completed it. I wish the rest of it existed. Wouldn’t it be amazing if one day AI could finish it? Your first instinct is probably to shudder, but I mean finish it in a good way. I used to think this was impossible, but I actually thought the Sanderson part of the Wheel of Time was better than the original. Let’s just consider this my personal benchmark for literary superintelligence.

In some sense this post is a book review. But really, the book you should get if you are intrigued is The Pale King. Not this biography.

The topic of The Pale King I never would have expected. Boredom. The IRS. Endurance in a mental sense, jobs that require grinding through analysis. I wonder if reflected his struggle with his own work, like Knausgard or Levrero. The Pale King is the hero we need in our modern era, achieving professional triumph through his superhuman ability to endure boredom.

Infinite Jest was prescient. He wrote it based on the media environment of cable television, but he was either brilliant, or got lucky, or both, because the internet era only enhanced the danger and the power of the technologically-boosted-entertainment. Both the “web” and the “feed” models. Infinite Jest zoomed into the dystopia of this world. And maybe The Pale King has a vision of a way out. To focus on a goal and use your own individual, human powers to transform the boring work on it into something greater.

These two poles, the temptation of entertainment and the value of boredom, they both reflect a sort of difficulty in two parts of the mind coming to terms with each other. The short term instincts and the long term goals. And DFW’s style seems perfect for this, as a lens or digging tool, the recursive thought patterns or branching textual structure combining or overlaying the multiple different sorts of thoughts and desires. A technique to reflect a mind torn between its different impulses.

I like to daydream that today, in some perfect parallel universe, DFW, after a record-breaking, pathologically extended period of procrastination, in his 60s, has finally finished The Pale King.