Tennis and Teaching at ISU: An Animated Interview with David Foster Wallace

While he may have left the temporal world almost five years ago, central Illinois native David Foster Wallace is still making news. Just this past week he was the subject of PBS's new series of animated shorts called "Blank on Blank" in which interviews with cultural figures are turned into simple black-and-white animations. Entitled "Wallace on Ambition," the four-plus-minute clip includes bits from a 1996 interview with Wallace just after the publication of his masterpiece "Infinite Jest." At the time he was living in Bloomington, Ill., and working as a professor at Illinois State, which he talks about as well as his youth tennis career. Notice how he revels in being considered the "Grammar Nazi'" at ISU. Careful with those semi-colons, people! Enjoy!

About the Author

A Juilliard-trained writer, Kevin Kizer has fought against numerous world-champion writers during his career, besting the reigning middle weight writing champion in an exhibition bout in Helsinki in 1976. He also played a crucial role on the U.S. gold-medal winning writing team during the 1984 Pan-Am games, where he came off the bench in dramatic fashion to write the winning prepositional phrase just as time expired.