Harder than Average, Weird, Requires Some Work to Read

The above 1996 interview by Charlie Rose with Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Leyner  is a fascinating glimpse into the writers that were just a few years ahead of the milieu that Might and McSweeney's would emerge from in the mid and late 1990s -- not direct influences, necessarily, but just one step ahead historically, and all writing (as Wallace puts it) "stuff that's at least harder than average, weird, [and] requires some work to read." (And yet, as he later adds, not academic avant garde work -- which he criticizes as joyless.)

The segment focuses on that perennial question about state of fiction: "Are we as novelists up against the obsolescence of serious art in general?" Amusingly, "The Age of the Internet" looms as a culprit in the opening question -- even though modems were still dialup, Google didn't exist, and the internet had 36 million users total worldwide.

The more keenly felt question winds up being the influence of television -- and that even back then, in that pre-smartphone era, Leyner notes "we're dealing with people that never experience any downtime from electronic media."