Gus Van Sant Interview with DFW

Yeah. I know. Things are kind of slow and the same around here. What can I say? I'm working on a few posts. I'm writing my thesis and am on a tight deadline. I'm reading Infinite Jest and yeah, it's kind of consuming in a way that my thesis isn't - not that it isn't interesting. But you know, I'm a playwright and I want to write some plays. It's true. I am kind of obsessed here with the Infinite Jest thing. I will say this: the past six months of reading it (2X) has helped my critical writing like exponentially (which I may show off for you in the next few days). To say nothing of playwrighting (which I won't be showing off since I'm not working on anything except in my head at the moment). But ok. Like I said, I'm working on a couple of posts and hopefully I'll get them up in the next few days. Thesis deadline comes first however. I so want to get out from under this thing. In the meantime, here's an interview between Gus Van Sant and David Foster Wallace.

GVS: Who are some of your favorite writers?
DFW: You're really wielding the old baton on this aren't you? To be honest... my faves?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Ones that people don't know all that well? Oh, that's right this is a British magazine so they won't have heard of a lot of these. Cormac McCarthy, have you read "Blood Meridian"? It's literally the western to end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can't figure out he gets away with it, he basically writes King James English, I mean, he practically uses Old English thou's and thine's and it comes off absolutely beautifully and unmannered and ungratuitous. He's got another one called "Suttree," God that one, God that would make a fantastic movie.
GVS: (perks up) What's it called?
DFW: It's called "Suttree."
GVS: How do you spell that?
DFW: S-u-t-t-r-e-e. It came out, oh golly, mid 70s. But it's about a down and out college educated man named Cornelius Suttree who has kind of abandoned everything to live in a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 40s and early 50s and all of his friends in his entire world are derelicts and retards and twisted people. It's about four hundred pages of the most dense lapidary prose you can imagine about characters who are at the level of functional idiots and are drinking rot-gut. "Suttree" is the book that got him a MacArthur grant and he used the MacArthur to go to Mexico and do the research for "Blood Meridian." Okay, we'll play. Are there any new movies coming out that you like?

Read the rest here. And um, you know? I'm going to be reading Blood Meridian again, so it can really be said that I've become mired down with the novelists (2 of them at any rate).