David Foster Wallace is, indeed, Smarter than You Think : Neuron Culture

Search

Profile

I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

You're encouraged to check out my third book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career; subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my work at my main website ; or track Twitter feed, my Google Reader shared items, or my Tumblr log, which gets it all.

Twitterature>

Follow me on Twitter

Worth Noting

David Foster Wallace is, indeed, Smarter than You Think

Posted on: June 25, 2010 9:58 AM, by David Dobbs

Every time I read David Foster Wallace, I think, that's just classic David Foster Wallace. Which is to say it's completely unexpected, novel, different from the way almost anyone else thinks, including David Foster Wallace the last time I read him.

This is a fun review in the NY Review of Books of a book about Wallace I think I now must get.

I like the title. That's Wallace: Smarter than you think. And even smarter than you think or remember Wallace is from last time you read him.

Smarter than You Think

"What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who's doin' a profile of me," David Foster Wallace told the journalist David Lipsky in 1996 during a series of conversations now collected as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. "It would be a way," Wallace continued, "for me to get some of the control back":

[excerpt] You can't tell outright lies that I'll then deny to the fact checker. But...you're gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.... I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that's coming across. [end excerpt]

As Lipsky tells us in his introduction, he loved Wallace's idea of profiling the profilers:

[excerpt] It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in--the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices.... That's what this book would like to be. It's the one way of writing about him I don't think David would have hated. [end excerpt]