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May 25, 2010
David Foster Wallace Had No Idea Who Stockhausen Was
Yesterday on his blog, Glen Kenny reacted to David Lipsky’s book about DFW, which included this amusing anecdote:
There’s also a wonderful bit in which Dave’s discussing writerly craft, and he tells Lipsky, “One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression—both in lines and between the lines—that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings. And it’s like—it’s something that I’m fairly good at. Is I think I can seem, I think I can seem like I know a whole lot about stuff that in fact pretty much everything that I know is right there.” This wasn’t quite what Dave was talking about, but I was reminded anyway of being in the big ballroom at Caesars for the AVN Awards in ‘98 and sitting at out table and looking at some of the hanging banners on the upper parts of the walls advertising upcoming events. One was for what I presumed would be some kind of Cirque-du-Soleil-type thingie that was called “Kontakte.” Whipping out my own particular brand of callowness, I pointed out the sign to Dave and said, “I didn’t know Caesars’ was so big on Stockhausen.” “What do you mean,” he asked, and I was like, you know, Stockhausen, Karleinz Stockhausen, modernist German composer, very severe, you named one of Incandenza’s filmmaking contemporaries after him in Infinite Jest; “Kontakte” is a famous piano piece of his. “Oh,” Dave said, “I really had little or no idea of who Stockhausen was/is when I put that in,” seeming in fact to not really recall putting it in at all; “I just liked the name.” But liking the name and intuitively knowing how to use it so that it might work as an allusion that you’re not necessarily aware your making but which does, in fact, turn out to be somewhat apt; there, then, is a trick of genius.
Originally posted by jodru from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on May 25, 2010 at 08:50 PM