Read a Line-by-Line Breakdown of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Backbone’ Edits

The New York Times Magazine’s 6th Floor Blog points us to this comparison of a 2000 DFW story draft with its finished version (published in last week’s New Yorker). File it away for your next long read; it’s interesting.

If this is going to devastate me the way the Lish/Carver edits published in the New Yorker did, I’m not reading it. Also, not only do I think you’d have to take Adderall to read DFW w/ edits, I think you’d actually have to be Adderall. Like, a big 20mg blue capsule of the stuff reading all the inserts and corrections and formatting points.

Line-by-line edits of David Foster Wallace stories are what Adderall reads when it wants a challenge.

Line-by-line edits of David Foster Wallace are what wakes Ritalin up in the night, in a fit of cold sweats, so terrified that it has to watch six episodes of Golden Girls on TBS to stop the panic

The most literary strain of cocaine known to man reformats its Iphone’s contact list to sort names by frequency of contact, then talks for three hours to a stranger about their late aunt, and how, you’d really love her because like, you just gotta be who you’re gonna be in this world, man,you know?, spouts a bunch of rubbish about Gogol, and then that same Cocaine looks at line-by-line DFW edits and goes, I’d like something mellower and less intense, please.

I think I’ll just read the edited version when it comes out. On this issue, I am proudly Team Dumb Guy.