Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Computers (1989)

in Comics/Cartoons, Technology | April 10th, 2014

A friend once told me of his old­er cousin who, for the freak­ish act of installing a com­put­er in his col­lege dorm room, found him­self imme­di­ate­ly and irrev­o­ca­bly dubbed “com­put­er Jon.” This hap­pened in the ear­ly 1980s, and boy, have times changed. They’d even changed by the late 1980s, by which time Apple’s col­lege mar­ket­ing efforts had become suf­fi­cient­ly advanced to require the tal­ents of Matt Groen­ing, best known as the man who cre­at­ed The Simp­sons. But that prime-time ani­mat­ed sit­com would­n’t begin its record-break­ing run (still with­out an end in sight) until Christ­mas 1989, while the Groen­ing-illus­trat­ed Who Needs a Com­put­er Any­way? (which you can flip through above) appeared ear­li­er that year. Back then, read­ers might well have known him first and fore­most as the cre­ator of the satir­i­cal alter­na­tive-week­ly com­ic strip Life in Hell, which had debuted in 1977. One of its stars, the hap­less but good-heart­ed young one-eared rab­bit Bon­go, even made his way to Apple brochure’s cov­er. Though com­put­ers them­selves had long since come to dom­i­nate Amer­i­ca’s cam­pus­es by the time I entered col­lege, he and Groen­ing’s oth­er now-less­er-known char­ac­ters did do their part to pre­pare me for acad­e­mia.

I refer, of course, to School is Hell, his 1987 Life in Hell book offer­ing sar­don­ic primers on each and every phase of mod­ern edu­ca­tion from kinder­garten to grad school (“when you haven’t had enough pun­ish­ment”). Groen­ing’s pages in Who Needs a Com­put­er Any­way? read like a less sharp-edged ver­sion of those car­toons, fol­low­ing Life in Hel­l’s sig­na­ture “The 9 Types of…” for­mat to present the read­er with their nine types of future col­lege class­mates, from “the stressed” to “the tech­noid” to “the unem­ployed.” Between these, you can read Apple’s pitch for why you’ll find a piece of equip­ment still some­what out­landish and expen­sive so essen­tial to every aspect of your col­lege career. Though dat­ed tech­ni­cal­ly — the text men­tions noth­ing of the inter­net, for instance, which this gen­er­a­tion of col­lege stu­dents would soon­er drop out than do with­out — it nev­er­the­less under­scores the design virtues of Apple com­put­ers — an intu­itive inter­face, appli­ca­tion inter­op­er­abil­i­ty, “every­thing you need in one small, trans­portable case” — that remain design virtues today. It also dis­plays an impres­sive pre­science of the per­son­al com­put­er’s com­ing indis­pens­abil­i­ty, a con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion that, if not for the slack­er’s lev­i­ty lent by Groen­ing’s hand, might, at the time, actu­al­ly have sound­ed implau­si­ble.

via Retro­naut/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Edgy 1990s Com­mer­cial for Apple’s Mac­in­tosh Com­put­er

Every Apple Ad Ever Aired on TV

Rid­ley Scott Talks About Mak­ing Apple’s Land­mark “1984″ Com­mer­cial, Aired 30 Years Ago on Super Bowl Sun­day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free: Watch the First Episode of Silicon Valley, Mike Judge’s New HBO Series

in Technology, Television | April 9th, 2014

Mike Judge’s 1998 movie Office Space struck a nerve with just about any­one who ever wound up in a thank­less low-end white col­lar job. Few movies before or since have been able to artic­u­late the pet­ty indig­ni­ties, the inani­ties and the gen­er­al soul gnaw­ing awful­ness of such gigs. Though the film is far from per­fect, its abun­dance of painful­ly fun­ny jokes along with some emi­nent­ly quotable lines — “Ummm I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomor­row” — have enshrined Office Space into the canon of cult movies.

Six­teen years lat­er, Mike Judge has a new sit­com that aims its satir­i­cal sites on anoth­er white-col­lar ecosys­tem – Sil­i­con Val­ley (the home of Open Cul­ture). The series cen­ters on neb­bish pro­gram­mer Richard who unwit­ting­ly devel­ops a new rev­o­lu­tion­ary way to com­press files. Soon he finds him­self in a bid­ding war between two of the tech world’s biggest entre­pre­neurs. Like Office Space, the fun of the show is its wry, acer­bic obser­va­tions about the rar­i­fied cul­ture of the val­ley.

Just like some apps that offer them­selves for free before mak­ing you pay, the cre­ators of Sil­i­con Val­ley are offer­ing the first episode of the HBO series for free on YouTube. Check it out above. Now if only they would do the same thing for sea­son four of Game of Thrones.

Recent Posts:

The Secret His­to­ry of Sil­i­con Val­ley

Ser­i­al Entre­pre­neur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Human­i­ties”

Start Your Start­up with Free Stan­ford Cours­es and Lec­tures

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

in History, Maps, Technology | March 31st, 2014

1863CentralPark

When I was a kid, my father brought home from I know not where an enor­mous col­lec­tion of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic mag­a­zines span­ning the years 1917 to 1985. I found, tucked in almost every issue, one of the magazine’s gor­geous maps—of the Moon, St. Peters­burg, the Himalayas, East­ern Europe’s ever-shift­ing bound­aries. I became a car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­ast and geo­graph­i­cal sponge, por­ing over them for years just for the sheer enjoy­ment of it, a plea­sure that remains with me today. Whether you’re like me and sim­ply love the imag­i­na­tive exer­cise of trac­ing a map’s lines and con­tours and absorb­ing infor­ma­tion, or you love to do that and you get paid for it, you’ll find innu­mer­able ways to spend your time on the new Open Access Maps project at the New York Pub­lic Library. The NYPL announces the release with the expla­na­tion below:

The Lionel Pin­cus & Princess Firyal Map Divi­sion is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 car­to­graph­ic works as high res­o­lu­tion down­loads. We believe these maps have no known US copy­right restric­tions.* To the extent that some juris­dic­tions grant NYPL an addi­tion­al copy­right in the dig­i­tal repro­duc­tions of these maps, NYPL is dis­trib­ut­ing these images under a Cre­ative Com­mons CC0 1.0 Uni­ver­sal Pub­lic Domain Ded­i­ca­tion. The maps can be viewed through the New York Pub­lic Library’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions page, and down­loaded (!), through the Map Warp­er.

What does this mean? Sim­ply put, “it means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high res­o­lu­tion.” Maps like that above, of New York’s Cen­tral Park, issued in 1863, ten years before Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed and Calvert Vaux com­plet­ed their his­toric re-design.

Can you—as I did with my neat­ly fold­ed, yel­low­ing archive—have all the maps in full-col­or print? Well, no, unless you’re pre­pared to bear the cost in ink and paper and have some spe­cial­ized print­ing equip­ment that can ren­der each map in its orig­i­nal dimen­sions. But you can access some­thing worlds away from what I could have imagined—a dig­i­tal enhance­ment tech­nol­o­gy called “warp­ing,” also known as “geo­rec­ti­fi­ca­tion.”

nypl map

This, explains the NYPL, “is the process where dig­i­tal images of maps are stretched, plac­ing the maps them­selves into their geo­graph­ic con­text, ren­dered either on the web­site or with tools such as Google Earth.” For exam­ple, below see a “warp­ing” of the 1916 Redraft of the 1660 “Castel­lo Plan” for then-New Ams­ter­dam over a cur­rent-day Google Earth image of low­er Man­hat­tan (and note how much the island has been expand­ed past its 17th cen­tu­ry shores). The “warp­ing” tech­nol­o­gy is open access, mean­ing that “any­body with a com­put­er can cre­ate an account, log in, and begin warp­ing and trac­ing maps.” User con­tri­bu­tions remain, “a la Wikipedia,” and add “one more piece to this new his­tor­i­cal geo­graph­ic data mod­el.”

Castello_Plan_Warp

The “warp­er” is a spe­cial fea­ture that helps place his­tor­i­cal maps in a mod­ern visu­al field, but it in no way ruins the enjoy­ment of those maps as archival pieces or art objects. You can see car­tog­ra­ph­er John Wol­cott Adams orig­i­nal 1916 Castel­lo Plan redraft below, and vis­it NYPL’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions for a high res­o­lu­tion image, ful­ly zoomable and, yes, print­able. For more on the incred­i­ble warp­ing tech­nol­o­gy NYPL makes avail­able to us, see this extend­ed blog post, “Unbind­ing the Atlas: Work­ing with Dig­i­tal Maps.” Over ten thou­sand of the collection’s maps are of New York and New Jer­sey, dat­ing from 1852 to 1922, includ­ing prop­er­ty, zon­ing, and topo­graph­ic maps. In addi­tion, over one thou­sand of the maps depict Mid-Atlantic cities from the 16th to the 19th cen­turies, and over 700 are topo­graph­ic maps of the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an Empire between 1877 and 1914. That should be enough to keep any ama­teur or pro­fes­sion­al map-lover busy for a good long while. Start dig­ging into the maps here.

1660CastelloPlan

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

14,000 Free Images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion Now Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Harvard’s Free Computer Science Course Teaches You to Code in 12 Weeks

in Harvard, How to Learn for Free, MOOCs, Technology | March 27th, 2014

At the begin­ning of last year, we wrote about CS50, Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Com­put­er Sci­ence course, taught by Pro­fes­sor David Malan. Today, we bring you the updat­ed ver­sion of the class, filmed through­out the past semes­ter at Har­vard. Why revis­it an updat­ed ver­sion of the same class a year lat­er? For one thing, the mate­r­i­al has been updat­ed. And, as you can tell by the rous­ing recep­tion Malan receives from the audi­ence at the start of the first lec­ture (above), Malan is kind of a big deal. From his open­ing boom of “This is CS50,” Malan imme­di­ate­ly comes off as an unusu­al­ly charis­mat­ic pro­fes­sor. He offers what might just be the most engag­ing online class you’ve ever seen.

So what does this charis­mat­ic com­put­er sci­en­tist cov­er over three months? An impres­sive­ly large amount of infor­ma­tion about cod­ing. Malan builds the course from the ground up, and begins by describ­ing how tran­sis­tors are employed to trans­mit infor­ma­tion with­in com­put­ers. From then on, he out­lines a vast amount of com­put­er sci­ence in high­ly acces­si­ble lan­guage. This will almost undoubt­ed­ly be the clear­est pre­sen­ta­tion of top­ics like “com­mand-line argu­ments,” “cryp­tog­ra­phy,” and “dynam­ic mem­o­ry allo­ca­tion” that you’re like­ly to hear.

The class videos are avail­able on iTune­sU, YouTube, and in audio, 1080p HD video, and text tran­script form on a crisp course web­site. The course may also be accessed through edX, Har­vard and MIT’s MOOC plat­form, which allows users to receive a cer­tifi­cate upon com­ple­tion. It’s easy to tell that Malan and his team have gone above and beyond the require­ments of cre­at­ing a help­ful intro­duc­tion to com­put­er sci­ence. They deliv­er an astound­ing­ly easy-to-grasp primer on a daunt­ing top­ic.

For oth­er Comp­Sci class­es taught by David Malan, check out our list of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence cours­es, part of our larg­er list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­put­er Sci­ence: Free Cours­es

Codecademy’s Free Cours­es Democ­ra­tize Com­put­er Pro­gram­ming

Learn to Build iPhone & iPad Apps with Stanford’s Free Course, Cod­ing Togeth­er

 

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Buckminster Fuller Gives a Lecture About Semantics at San Quentin State Prison (1959)

in Technology | March 6th, 2014

San Quentin State Prison, Cal­i­for­ni­a’s only male-inmate death row, has a rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing con­tained some of the most fear­some mur­der­ers to make head­lines, up to and includ­ing Charles Man­son. But some non-ser­i­al-killing cul­tur­al fig­ures have also passed through it gates: coun­try singer-song­writer Mer­le Hag­gard, for car theft and armed rob­bery in his youth; actor Dan­ny Tre­jo, who did a few years in the six­ties; jazz sax­o­phon­ist Art Pep­per, who served two sen­tences there in that decade; and Neal Cas­sady, the inspi­ra­tion for Dean Mori­ar­ty in Jack Ker­ouac’s On the Road, locked up for mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion in 1958. The fol­low­ing year would see the con­struc­tion, up north at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon, of the very first full-sphere “con­tin­u­ous ten­sion-dis­con­tin­u­ous com­pres­sion” geo­des­ic dome. What on Earth could link these these two struc­tures, one bru­tal­ly util­i­tar­i­an with a name that spooks even hard­ened out­laws, and the oth­er a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly for­ward-think­ing, utopi­an attempt at archi­tec­tural­ly bring­ing about a bet­ter world?

The con­nec­tion comes in the form of Buck­min­ster Fuller him­self, the archi­tect, inven­tor, writer, and much else besides respon­si­ble for the design of the geo­des­ic dome. (He also invent­ed the Dymax­ion Car, Dymax­ion House, Dymax­ion Map… and the list goes on.) He came to San Quentin that same year, not as an inmate — one imag­ines him as far too busy spin­ning off new the­o­ries or keep­ing the Dymax­ion Chronofile to so much as con­sid­er com­mit­ting a crime — but as a lec­tur­er. Described as “a talk giv­en to inmates on gen­er­al seman­tics,” Fuller’s address, which you can hear above, start­ing around the 20:30 minute mark, takes on an even more gen­er­al breadth of sub­jects than that, includ­ing his own biog­ra­phy and the expe­ri­ences that orig­i­nat­ed the ideas that drove him to live his life as “an exper­i­ment to find what a sin­gle indi­vid­ual can con­tribute to chang­ing the world and ben­e­fit­ing all human­i­ty.” Through that con­cern with human­i­ty, he could relate to pris­on­ers just as well as he could to any­one else. “There are no throw-away resources,” he says at one point, “and no throw-away peo­ple.” At over three hours long, the lec­ture gets into some detail, but if you want a still more thor­ough look into Fuller’s mind, con­sid­er fol­low­ing it up with the 42-hour Every­thing I Know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

875 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies

in Film, Technology | February 19th, 2014

Why have cinephiles, from the era of Laserdiscs through that of DVDs and now Blu-rays, so con­sis­tent­ly respect­ed The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion? Speak­ing as one such cinephile, I could point to a num­ber of fac­tors: their cura­to­r­i­al bent toward impor­tant films, their pro­duc­tion of rich sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures, their always impres­sive pieces of cov­er art. But Cri­te­ri­on has become increas­ing­ly known for the con­sid­er­able work they put in not at the end of the process, when they pack­age a clas­sic or poten­tial­ly clas­sic motion pic­ture for max­i­mum aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al appeal (and your pur­chase), but at the begin­ning, when they track down the actu­al cel­lu­loid film in the first place, often aged or dam­aged, and engage in the often painstak­ing task of return­ing it to the prime of visu­al and son­ic life.

In the short Giz­mo­do video at the top, Cri­te­ri­on direc­tor Lee Kline and his team talk about the work they did to restore Alfred Hitch­cock­’s 1940 For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent, which includ­ed acquir­ing the neg­a­tive from the Library of Con­gress, scan­ning the whole thing at high res­o­lu­tion over two days to a week, doing the research nec­es­sary to fig­ure out how the film “should have looked,” clean up scratch­es and film dam­age, and fil­ter out the clicks and pops on the sound­track. (And yes, we get some insight into its “snazzy” cov­er design as well.) The Kline-nar­rat­ed video just above offers a demon­stra­tion of Cri­te­ri­on’s restora­tion process on anoth­er piece of clas­sic Hitch­cock, the first, 1934-made ver­sion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a pic­ture with no known neg­a­tive still in exis­tence. A for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge, but if we film geeks entrust that job to any­one, we entrust it to Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

The Restora­tion of a Mas­ter­piece, as Nar­rat­ed by Mar­tin Scors­ese

Watch The Plea­sure Gar­den, Alfred Hitchcock’s Very First Fea­ture Film (1925)

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Some of the First Words Ever Spo­ken on Film …. and They’re Saucy Ones (1929)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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Ridley Scott on the Making of Apple’s Iconic “1984” Commercial, Aired on Super Bowl Sunday in 1984

in Technology, Television | February 2nd, 2014

“I like to claim that I bought the sec­ond Mac­in­tosh com­put­er ever sold in Europe,” writes actor, come­di­an, writer, wit, and die-hard Apple enthu­si­ast Stephen Fry in a Tele­graph essay mark­ing the Mac­in­tosh com­put­er’s 30th anniver­sary. “My friend and hero Dou­glas Adams was in the queue ahead of me. For all I know some­one some­where had bought one ten min­utes ear­li­er, but these were the first two that the only shop sell­ing them in Lon­don had in stock on the 24th Jan­u­ary 1984, so I’m stick­ing to my sto­ry.”

Fry had found the only com­put­er that made him want to write; “I couldn’t wait to get to it every morn­ing,” he remem­bers. He did­n’t even need con­vinc­ing from “1984,” Rid­ley Scot­t’s “leg­endary com­mer­cial” above, which he did­n’t see “until it crept onto Eng­lish tele­vi­sion screens way past its dra­mat­ic Super Bowl debut.”

Now that we’ve come upon the 30th anniver­sary of that dra­mat­ic Super Bowl debut, why not get a lit­tle insight from the man who direct­ed it? In the clip just above, Scott, who by that time already had the rich and trou­bling futur­is­tic visions Alien and Blade Run­ner under his belt, talks about his expe­ri­ence bring­ing the sto­ry­boards — auda­cious by the tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial stan­dard of the era, let alone for per­son­al com­put­ers — onto the screen. He dis­cuss­es look­ing to the past for his “slight­ly deca­dent-look­ing” future, hang­ing jet engines on the set as an act of “good dra­mat­ic bull­shit,” putting out a “fright­en­ing” cast­ing call for a back­ground full of skin­heads, get­ting the total­i­tar­i­an text for Big Broth­er to intone, and find­ing a young lady who could swing a ham­mer. And what would he have done with an even big­ger bud­get? “Not very much. I think we nailed it.” As, Fry and his fel­low user-enthu­si­asts agree, did Apple.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Apple Ad Ever Aired on TV

Mar­tin Scors­ese Appears in New Apple Ad with Siri, Plays on His Chill­ing Cameo in Taxi Dri­ver

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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David Foster Wallace Talks About Literature (and More) in an Internet Chatroom: Read the 1996 Transcript

in Books, Technology | January 28th, 2014

dfw internet chat

Reddit’s Ask Me Any­thing (AMA) series, where users get the chance to pose ques­tions to the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy, pro­vides a sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple way to inter­act with celebri­ties. Before Reddit’s arrival in 2005, how­ev­er, real-time exchanges between your gar­den-vari­ety Inter­net user and famous per­son­al­i­ties were occa­sion­al­ly con­duct­ed in Inter­net cha­t­rooms. One such ear­ly case appears to be a chat between the read­ers of WORD Mag­a­zine and David Fos­ter Wal­lace (read 30 of his essays free online), which seems to have tak­en place in May of 1996.

If AMAs are an order­ly, if vast, Q & A ses­sion, this chat is more like a boozy group meet­ing with your favorite Eng­lish lit pro­fes­sor in a smoky bar. (Read the tran­script here.) Wal­lace, using the han­dle “dfw,” is on a refresh­ing­ly lev­el field with the oth­er chat par­tic­i­pants, and the con­ver­sa­tion nat­u­ral­ly drifts from one top­ic to anoth­er. Things, as they often do, begin with a bit of ban­ter:

dfw: I’ve had some unpleas­ant nick­naames and monikers in my time, but nobody’s ever hung “fos­ty” on me before.

Keats: You know, I still think it should be spelled Fos­tie, or Fos­tey.
Keats: Fos­ty looks too much like “Frosty” and “sty” to me.

Keats: And makes me think of eye­balls packed in ice.

dfw: “Sty” as in an impact­ed eye­lash or a pig­pen, you mean?

Keats: Yeah. Is that what a sty as in “sty in your eye” is?

Marisa: I used to think the word “sty” was pro­nounced “stee”.

Keats: I had no idea exact­ly, just an unpleas­ant feel­ing about it.

dfw: Yes. Mas­sive­ly painful and embar­rass­ing, too. Like a car­bun­cle on the exact tip of your nose — that sort of thing.

Keats: I used to think the word “trough” was pro­nounced “troff.”

Keats: You know, I hap­pen to have a car­bun­cle on the tip of my nose right now.

Keats: Except it’s not a car­bun­cle, it’s more like a welt. It’s still embar­rass­ing.

dfw: In my very first sem­i­nar in col­lege, I pro­nounced facade “fakade.” The mem­o­ry’s still fresh and raw.

Soon, things take a turn for the seri­ous, and read­ers begin to ask Wal­lace about irony:

dfw: I don’t think irony’s meant to syn­er­gize with any­thing as heart­felt as sad­ness. I think the main func­tion of con­tem­po­rary irony is to pro­tect the speak­er from being inter­pret­ed as naive or sen­ti­men­tal.

Marisa: Why are peo­ple afraid to be seen as naive and sen­ti­men­tal?

dfw: Marisa: I think that’s a very deep, very hard ques­tion. One answer is that com­mer­cial com­e­dy’s often set up to fea­ture an iro­nist mak­ing dev­as­tat­ing sport of some­one who’s naive or sen­ti­men­tal or pre­ten­tious or pompous.

Keats: I’m start­ing to see a lot of irony in Hol­ly­wood and in adver­tis­ing, but its func­tion seems to be to let them talk out of both sides of their mouths.

dfw: Keats: adver­tis­ing that makes fun of itself is so pow­er­ful because it implic­it­ly con­grat­u­lates both itself and the view­er (for mak­ing the joke and get­ting the joke, respec­tive­ly).

Wal­lace also drops a few men­tions of some of his favorite authors:

DaleK: Mr. Wal­lace, I’m curious…who among cur­rent nov­el­ists do you find the most inter­est­ing?

dfw: Dalek — DeLil­lo, Ozick, R. Pow­ers, AM Homes, Denis John­son, David Mark­son, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich.

While we can’t con­clu­sive­ly con­firm that this was indeed the real DFW con­duct­ing the chat, it’s hard to deny that “dfw” sounds very much like the author. Cer­tain­ly, the com­plete exchange is as much fun to read for its mid-90s inter­net cha­t­room nos­tal­gia as it is for Wallace’s thoughts on irony, Infi­nite Jest, and the sound of one hand clap­ping. The whole tran­script is avail­able here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Love of Lan­guage Revealed by the Books in His Per­son­al Library

The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Archive: A Lit­tle Gift For the Novelist’s 50th Birth­day

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