NYRB: David Foster Wallace on Television and Writing.

As for me, I've read The Broom of the System, and either I'm not smart enough to understand it or ... whatever.  Bethatasitmay, I love the idea of David Foster Wallace, the enormously gifted and tragic writer who love writing and reading.  So I was catching up on the July 15, 2010 of The New York Review of Books and was enjoying Wyatt Mason's review of David Lipsky's book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.  In the review, I cam across this: 

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

and then this...

The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader…. A lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader…. Given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening.

Now I need to consider taking a run at Infinite Jest.