Quoted By:
More thoughts: I argued in the last thread that he occasionally used pop references in a calculated way to create a certain cute impression, but I was really talking about the two specific instances I mentioned in that post. Generally, his taste for pop stuff was not feigned. In fact, he often didn't want people to know about it. For example, in the transcript the movie is based on, there's a point at which Wallace brings up Stephen King and he tells Lipsky that these remarks are only for him, that he doesn't want him to include them in the article. In the book, we get a few of his thoughts, but I think Lipsky took the rest out and in their place added a note about him "knowing King's work remarkably well" (approximate quotation). Additionally, people only found out he liked Thomas Harris after he died. Before he died, only his students knew that because he taught his books in one of his classes.
The times when he broadcasted his engagement with mass-market art are not that numerous. That Top 10 Books he gave to some list solicitors in which he only named popular books is a mix of sincerity and irony. He knows the list people were looking for literary fiction, so it's a bit of joke, but also not a joke because Thomas Harris features prominently on the list and The Screwtape Letters is at #1, which from the bio we know he genuinely liked.
But mostly, it's his engagement with literary fiction that he was most public about. In interview after interview, he talks at length and without apology about the virtues of difficult art and about the postmodern writers who preceded and inspired him. Find an interview where he's not putting his best foot forward. What the DFW movie doesn't show you is that in real life Lipsky and Wallace didn't just talk about Die Hard and McDonald's, and Wallace didn't just dispense hipster wisdom. They also talked about (off the top of my head) Don DeLillo, John Updike, Franz Kafka, Pauline Kael, John Barth, etc. etc. So while I'd agree that Wallace sometimes feared appearing too academic or pretentious (see the Charlie Rose interview), he was actually in most situations (in interviews, in print) eager to flaunt it.
