AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

What about the original usage, that is, writers as soul-engineers? I can see many of the most creative novelists in that light. They are exploring the architecture of the self, their characters often represent various stances the self can take to the world – this is kind of soul-engineering. Writers like David Foster Wallace or Vonnegut don't just tell a story, they construct an entire stance of their own, a stance which is somehow shared with their readers. To the extent this construction is deliberate, maybe it is a kind of engineering.

David Foster Wallace appeared to be trying to write himself out of nihilistic depression, and ultimately failing. Infinite Jest is largely about the corrosive effects of addiction on meaning-making; and his unfinished final work The Pale King takes place inside an IRS office, that is, the most boring and meaningless place conceivable.

There's a whole chapter in All Things Shining on "David Foster Wallace's Nihilism".

book by DFW, not just any book but the defining novel of a certain time and sensibility. I used to live in the area of Boston (Allston/Brighton) where the Enfield Tennis Academy was supposed to be, and many other of my Boston haunts appear, including the MIT Student Center (“gutted with C4 during the so-called MIT Language Riots of twelve years past”).

David Foster Wallace

30 Oct 2021 - 08 May 2025

Huh Rudy Rucker really hated his attempt to write a math book: Infinite Confusion

And this critiques some of the mathematics in IJ itself The Mathematical Accuracies and Inaccuries of Infinite Jest / Nina Baker. Funny because I read IJ in a reading group along with a mathematician, and I don't recall any of this stuff coming up.