Foster Wallace: A Good Writer

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Better help is a truly affordable option and very bad wizards listeners will get 10% off your first month with discount code V B W. Simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched with a counselor you'll love once again that's better help dot com slash V B W thanks to better help for sponsoring this episode by the way just as an aside I'm certainly not the literary man that you are but I'm wasn't struck at all that that the writing was was brilliant it read to me like somebody trying to write like somebody brilliant would it.

Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.