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Replace DFW German interview link with a working copy. 

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voussoir 2022-10-06 19:09:13 -07:00
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voussoir.net/writing/motivations_for_writing/motivations_for_writing.md
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@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ A little more than a year ago I discovered the world of fan-made film commentari
[Paul Graham's articles](http://paulgraham.com/articles.html), particularly [Why Nerds are Unpopular](http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) and [The Age of the Essay](http://paulgraham.com/essay.html). Thank you Paul for helping me realize that writing can be approachable, and that the 5-paragraph assignments from school have wrongly commandeered the word essay.
[David Foster Wallace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace). I learned about DFW via Will Schoder's video [The Problem with Irony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4). Then I read DFW's *E unibus pluram* (1993) and *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* (2000) and watched [this interview he did on German tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbdR6lkL9jU). I have not read any of his other works yet but I will get to them in time.
[David Foster Wallace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace). I learned about DFW via Will Schoder's video [The Problem with Irony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4). Then I read DFW's *E unibus pluram* (1993) and *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men* (2000) and watched [this interview he did on German tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc). I have not read any of his other works yet but I will get to them in time.
I don't read books very often. The number of books I've read on my own accord is very small. So maybe I'll sound like a noob discovering the [best thing since sliced bread](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgzACnYsV8U "Spongebob - Squidward finds canned bread"). Having said that, *Brief Interviews* is one of the few things I've ever read where I was actually amazed at what I was seeing. I say "seeing" and not "reading" because at the moment I'm not even talking about the message, but rather the formatting, the torrent of footnotes and asides, the introduction of terms like [flexion of upraised fingers to signify tone quotes] which over the course of a few pages shortens to [finger flexion] then [f.f.], the unabashed reuse of chapter titles and recurring segments, and the chapter *Datum Centurio* which is written like an excerpt from a dictionary from 2096 with an obscenely overwrought system of superscripts, daggers, subsections, IPA, and index cross-references (KEY at BABE, CYBER-). Suddenly my poor use of the comma doesn't seem so bad. Reading this book is like watching [2001](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)>)'s stargate sequence or [Beyond the Black Rainbow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Black_Rainbow) or [House](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(1977_film)>) or [Let the Corpses Tan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Corpses_Tan) to some extent. I have always had a tendency to overuse parenthetical asides, but my growing affection for footnotes is thanks to DFW.