I know this blog is a self-selecting society, and everyone is here because on some level they do care or are interested in these issues (as most of the posts attest). But I can’t help thinking that the bulk of people out there in the world DON’T care, and not because they’re ignorant or immoral or apolitical. They’re simply too busy coping with the challenges of the real world — like losing their jobs, losing their health coverage, losing hope — to care what DFW has to say about the moral vacuum within us, and too tired to affect an appropriate level of detachment and irony about themselves and their circumstances.

I’ve never understood why people (some, anyway) force the connection between aesthetics and ethics and politics to the point where it becomes “a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible.” Who told you that you have the “power and duty” to do anything? Did an administrator from some agency contact you when you first started writing and tell you this?

It’s a personal belief and conviction sent out in the guise of a universal imperative. If that’s your deal then that’s great. Go to, and prepare for war. But it’s not everyone’s deal. Some people’s deal is story. For others it’s lyricism. Some people like to take their kids to monster truck shows.

And the very idea of a necessarily moral-political writer necessarily presents problems. At the risk of sounding sensationalist, does anyone question that Hitler wrote “morally passionate fiction” when he wrote Mein Kampf? His passion flared up in the right place at the right time to not only do as much evil as the world has ever seen, but to marry it to an assembly-line process that (I would guess) made it all the easier to commit. This is obviously an over-the-top example, but seriously, where do you draw the line? Mao Tze Tung? Pat Robertson? Postmodernism? I like Orwell and consider him sane and prescient and wise — mostly because I agree with him. But a hell of a lot of people agreed with these other writers and thought they were wise and prescient, too.

Why would or should anyone accept someone else’s preferences or values over their own? It’s terribly self-important and egotistical to presume that you (speaking generally) have any claim to someone else’s time and attention unless they grant it to you (and as a writer, I would presume that’s something you’d be duly grateful for).

I think one poster summed up the major problem with the essay: “If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough.” There’s a tremendous amount of sincerity and enthusiasm (which I do not doubt is genuine), but not much by way of clarity. It’s almost like reading a new-age manifesto. Aside from the obvious egotisim and aforementioned Hitlerian risks, what does “inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth” even mean? I know all those words, but I have no idea what this statement is supposed to state.

It makes me feel like something is being obscured and deliberately hidden, and that’s not (in my opinion) what good writing should do. You shouldn’t have to “dig and strip away at the prose” to get what the writer is saying.

The whole concept (as I understand it) behind this essay is swimming in narcissistic self-revelry. To take one example:

“‘I’ must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love.”

How tremendous an ego do you have to have to sincerely believe you are giving the world a gift so precious “it can never be returned” (I read ‘returned’ as ‘repaid’)? There certainly is love and affection here, but it’s self-directed. The question of fraudulence is relevant: doesn’t this kind of self-serving, self-awed stance suggest a very different “mindfulness” — the mindfulness that the writer’s ego will be fed by the cosmic praise that undoubtedly will resound from all corners of the universe at so great, so gargantuan a work as this story/novel/book/poem, the likes of which the world has never seen and will likely never see again.

I respect that people look for different things in what they read and write, and usually those things reflect or follow their own personal values and pleasures. But I just do not get the aesthetic-moral-political connection. It seems irrelevant in the larger world, on occasion dangerous, astoundingly self-absorbed, and if nothing else, condescending and unable to admit any other non-moral, non-political points of view — which is to say it is exclusionary and, in an odd way, isolationist.

But I don’t get the impression anyone here would want those labels applied to their work or the works they enjoy reading.

I know this blog is a self-selecting society, and everyone is here because on some level they do care or are interested in these issues (as most of the posts attest). But I can’t help thinking that the bulk of people out there in the world DON’T care, and not because they’re ignorant or immoral or apolitical. They’re simply too busy coping with the challenges of the real world — like losing their jobs, losing their health coverage, losing hope — to care what DFW has to say about the moral vacuum within us, and too tired to affect an appropriate level of detachment and irony about themselves and their circumstances.

I’ve never understood why people (some, anyway) force the connection between aesthetics and ethics and politics to the point where it becomes “a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible.” Who told you that you have the “power and duty” to do anything? Did an administrator from some agency contact you when you first started writing and tell you this?

It’s a personal belief and conviction sent out in the guise of a universal imperative. If that’s your deal then that’s great. Go to, and prepare for war. But it’s not everyone’s deal. Some people’s deal is story. For others it’s lyricism. Some people like to take their kids to monster truck shows.

And the very idea of a necessarily moral-political writer necessarily presents problems. At the risk of sounding sensationalist, does anyone question that Hitler wrote “morally passionate fiction” when he wrote Mein Kampf? His passion flared up in the right place at the right time to not only do as much evil as the world has ever seen, but to marry it to an assembly-line process that (I would guess) made it all the easier to commit. This is obviously an over-the-top example, but seriously, where do you draw the line? Mao Tze Tung? Pat Robertson? Postmodernism? I like Orwell and consider him sane and prescient and wise — mostly because I agree with him. But a hell of a lot of people agreed with these other writers and thought they were wise and prescient, too.

Why would or should anyone accept someone else’s preferences or values over their own? It’s terribly self-important and egotistical to presume that you (speaking generally) have any claim to someone else’s time and attention unless they grant it to you (and as a writer, I would presume that’s something you’d be duly grateful for).

I think one poster summed up the major problem with the essay: “If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough.” There’s a tremendous amount of sincerity and enthusiasm (which I do not doubt is genuine), but not much by way of clarity. It’s almost like reading a new-age manifesto. Aside from the obvious egotisim and aforementioned Hitlerian risks, what does “inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth” even mean? I know all those words, but I have no idea what this statement is supposed to state.

It makes me feel like something is being obscured and deliberately hidden, and that’s not (in my opinion) what good writing should do. You shouldn’t have to “dig and strip away at the prose” to get what the writer is saying.

The whole concept (as I understand it) behind this essay is swimming in narcissistic self-revelry. To take one example:

“‘I’ must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love.”

How tremendous an ego do you have to have to sincerely believe you are giving the world a gift so precious “it can never be returned” (I read ‘returned’ as ‘repaid’)? There certainly is love and affection here, but it’s self-directed. The question of fraudulence is relevant: doesn’t this kind of self-serving, self-awed stance suggest a very different “mindfulness” — the mindfulness that the writer’s ego will be fed by the cosmic praise that undoubtedly will resound from all corners of the universe at so great, so gargantuan a work as this story/novel/book/poem, the likes of which the world has never seen and will likely never see again.

I respect that people look for different things in what they read and write, and usually those things reflect or follow their own personal values and pleasures. But I just do not get the aesthetic-moral-political connection. It seems irrelevant in the larger world, on occasion dangerous, astoundingly self-absorbed, and if nothing else, condescending and unable to admit any other non-moral, non-political points of view — which is to say it is exclusionary and, in an odd way, isolationist.

But I don’t get the impression anyone here would want those labels applied to their work or the works they enjoy reading.