Omnivoracious: Watching DFW: State Fair Twirlers and Cruise Ship Service

Watching DFW: State Fair Twirlers and Cruise Ship Service

by Tom on September 19, 2008

There have been many, many more comments and tributes about David Foster Wallace since our first responses last weekend. We could hardly catalogue them all, but a couple places you might want to stop by, if you want to read more, are the tribute pages put together by Edward Champion and McSweeney's (the latter is especially full of life, including a photo sequence of DFW swapping a trademark bandanna for a Lucky Charms t-shirt and an anecdote that ends with him digging through a dumpster for a spit cup: "Mind if I dip in your car?"), and the archive of his articles and stories Harper's has put up (including the famous state fair and cruise ship pieces, as well as two I remember vividly about windy teen tennis and uptight grammarians, of which he was one). But what I wanted to share with you until I got distracted by the above were videos. I ran across one today and it led me to another and I was glad and sad to watch them and wanted to share.

Here's Dave (one of the McSwy's notes, from a former student, reports that the whole "David Foster Wallace" thing was thrust upon him by agents/publishers to separate him from all the other Dave Wallaces) reading from the baton-twirler sequence in the Harper's state fair piece (listen for the "whorp-whorping" toward the end):

And in Italy, talking about postmodernists trying to tell old-fashioned stories:

You'll find a lot more related videos from that conference, with Franzen and Zadie Smith popping up in the background. Here he is reading from the state fair piece (including a different version of the twirlers) and the cruise ship piece (it's a long one):

And, finally, here is another video that keeps popping up as a related video for the rest of these, called Roger Federer as Religious Experience. No sign of DFW in it (oh, I see, there's a quote from him in the info section), but the connection is clear to anyone who's read him on tennis or Federer in particular. Watching it and thinking of DFW's awed, good-enough-to-know-what-greatness-means appreciation for a master like Federer, and then of one's own awe at Wallace, a rare Federer in his own craft, well, it's hard to keep watching...