Quack This Way. This item is unavailable.Quack This Way

Two friends, both of them vocational snoots, sat down to film an interview in February 2006. Their subjects: language and writing. The interviewee drove more than an hour, from Claremont to downtown Los Angeles. The interviewer flew from Dallas. They spoke on film for 67 minutes and then walked uphill to a nearby seafood restaurant, where they continued the running conversation they had started five years earlier. They liked each other, and they seemed to understand each other. The rest is history. This is the last long interview with David Foster Wallace.

It was an accidental friendship if ever there was one. David Foster Wallace was at the center of late-20thcentury American literature, Bryan A. Garner at that of legal scholarship and lexicography. It was language that drew them together, and it was DFW who reached out to BAG. It was DFW who penned “Authority and American Usage,” the encomium to Garner’s dictionary of American usage. The 95- page essay appeared first in Harper’s in abridged form and in its full-length version in Consider the Lobster. It was an auspicious beginning for their friendship.