Michael Silverblatt's Famous Interview With David Foster Wallace Inspired Some of My Most Unreadable Writing
This past Saturday, Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm and one of the great literary critics of the late 20th and early 21s centuries, passed away at the age of 73. Listening to Bookworm was essential to my mostly homegrown literary education in my high school and college years, so upon hearing of Silverblatt’s death I was immediately inspired to revisit some of his most memorable interviews. The first of these that came to mind was his interview with David Foster Wallace about the then recently published Infinite Jest, a book about which I’ve obviously written before.
Silverblatt begins the interview by posing to Wallace that the novel’s structure imitates that of a fractal. Wallace responds, surprised, that Silverblatt is correct, and the novel’s structure is based on the Sierpiński gasket, a rudimentary fractal figure. When I heard this as a teenager, I felt like I was witnessing the discovery of relativity, or the splitting of the atom. I later discovered that the figure I had been absentmindedly doodling in my notebooks for years by that point was also a kind of Sierpiński Gasket.
In a novel I started around this time, which would eventually turn into what I submitted as my thesis at Bennington, a character with severe anxiety doodles Sierpiński Gaskets obsessively as a coping mechanism. At the time, I was experimenting with some very programmatic writing techniques, partly inspired by the nouveau roman, which may or may not have been misguided, but are still amusing for me to reexamine today. The following passage is a product of those experiments, and of the formative insights about textual structures I owe to the late, great Michael Silverblatt.
Art was in Jen’s room. Jen was sitting cross-legged on her bed with a notebook in her lap and a pen in her hand. Jen’s room looked like Art’s room, but Art’s bed sheets were grey with blue stripes. On one side of Jen’s bed was a set of shelves where Jen’s books rested. On the other side of the bed was her desk, where she kept the rest of her things. Art was sitting across the room from Jen in a fold-up chair behind an electric keyboard. Surrounding Art was the rest of his musical equipment, which included an eight-track tape recorder, a tube amplifier and a black and white Fender Stratocaster.
Art was wearing black shoes, olive green socks, brown corduroy trousers, a blue and green button-down flannel shirt, a white undershirt, and wire-rimmed glasses with black frames. Jen was wearing black jeans, white socks, light blue shoes and a navy blue sweater. Art was sitting with his back to the door, facing Jen. Jen was sitting facing the door and Art. Jen was looking down at her notebook and Art was looking down at the keyboard.
Jen’s notebook was quadrille ruled and her pen was a black ballpoint pen. She was composing a fractal. Sometimes, to pass the time, Jen composed fractals in her notebooks. The fractal Jen was composing was called a Sierpiński Gasket.
Art was practicing scales on his keyboard. Art liked to practice his scales by playing diatonic triads starting from each scale degree. Today he was practicing his scales in the key of A major. Art also liked to play all of his scales in ascending order and then descending order with his left hand, and then in ascending order and then descending order with his right hand.
Starting from the top left corner of the page, Jen drew a line segment across the top of the page with a length of exactly 32 units, and then another line segment of the same length down the left side of the page. Then, starting from the second endpoint of this second line segment, Jen drew another line segment across the middle of the page, parallel to the first line segment, and then she connected the two not yet connected endpoints of the two parallel line segments to form a square with an area of 32 units by 32 units.
Starting on an A below Middle C, Art played an A major triad, a B minor triad, a C# minor triad, a D major triad, an E major triad, an F# minor triad, a G# diminished triad and an A above Middle C with his left hand, and then he played the same pattern in reverse with his left hand, and then again with his right hand, and then again in reverse with his right hand.
Starting from the bottom left corner of the square, Jen drew a diagonal through the center of the square with its second endpoint at the top right corner of the square, forming two opposite 45-45-90 right triangles. Starting next from the midpoint of the base of the square, she drew a line segment with its second endpoint at the midpoint of the diagonal. Then starting from the point at which this newest line segment intersected the diagonal, she drew a line segment with its second endpoint at the midpoint of the square’s right side, forming a new square with an area of 16 units by 16 units.
Starting again on the same A, Art played an A minor triad, a B minor triad, a C major triad, a D major triad, an E minor triad, an F# diminished triad, a G major triad, and the same A above Middle C with his left hand, and then he played the same pattern in reverse with his left hand, and then again with his right hand, and then again in reverse with his right hand.
Starting from the bottom left corner of the new, smaller square, Jen drew a diagonal through the center of the square with its second endpoint at the top right corner of the square, forming two opposite 45-45-90 right triangles. Starting next from the midpoints of the horizontal legs of the three new 45-45-90 right triangles surrounding the 45-45-90 right triangle that had its legs’ intersection at the midpoint of the larger square’s diagonal, she drew a line segment with its second endpoint at the midpoint of each triangle’s hypotenuse. Then, starting from the points at which these newest line segments intersected their respective triangles’ hypotenuses, she drew three new line segments with their second endpoints at the midpoints of their respective triangles’ vertical legs, forming three new squares, each with an area of 8 units by 8 units.
Starting again on the same A, Art played an A minor triad, an A# major triad, a C major triad, a D minor triad, an E diminished triad, an F major triad, a G minor triad, and the same A above Middle C with his left hand, and then he played the same pattern in reverse with his left hand, and then again with his right hand, and then again in reverse with his right hand.
Starting from the bottom left corners of the three new, smaller squares, Jen drew a diagonal through the center of each square with its second endpoint at the top right corner of the square, forming six opposite 45-45-90 right triangles. Starting next from the midpoints of the horizontal legs of the three new 45-45-90 right triangles surrounding each of the three 45-45-90 right triangles that had their legs’ intersections at the midpoints of their respective larger 45-45-90 right triangles’ hypotenuses, she drew a line segment with its second endpoint at the midpoint of each new, smaller triangle’s hypotenuse. Then, starting from the points at which these newest line segments intersected their respective new, smaller triangles’ hypotenuses, she drew nine new line segments with their second endpoints at the midpoints of their respective triangles’ vertical legs, forming nine new squares, each with an area of 4 units by 4 units.
Starting again on the same A, Art played an A major triad, a B major triad, a C# minor triad, and a D above middle C, and stopped. At the same moment, Art looked up at Jen and Jen looked up at Art.
What? said Art.
Nothing, said Jen. She stood and walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.
this is mad lol
That was actually pretty cool! I'd love to see what you could do with a Mandelbrot set.