Throwback Thursday: Three David Foster Wallace Blog Posts, an Essay and Four Quotes

The very talented DFW. (Photo: Creative Commons 2.0)

In 2016 I got into a Davd Foster Wallace groove after being inspired by his superb Roger Federer essay. Here are three blog posts from 2016, plus a few extras which I will label as icing on the cake. If you don't much care for cake, then call it cheese. 

Thoughts about DFW's last interview, captured in Quack This Way 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/11/quack-this-way-dialogue-on-language-and.html

David Foster Wallace Skewers the Current State of American Literature 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/09/david-foster-wallace-skewers-current.html

 

Magical and the Marvelous: DF Wallace's Roger Federer Essay

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-magical-and-marvelous-df-wallaces.html
The original essay that got me jazzed about DFW: Roger Federer as Religious Experience

DFW QUOTES

The Role of Fiction
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
--From an Interview by Larry McCaffery

On Psychic Pain
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Thinking
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being "an excellent servant but a terrible master."
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Despair
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
--From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Quack This Way: A Dialogue on Language and Writing

I've been thinking of calling 2016 "the year I discovered David Foster Wallace." His linguistic alchemy and straight talk have cast a spell over me. As I've many times stated, if a man is worth knowing at all he's worth knowing well. DFW's become someone I've been doing my best to get to know, to internalize his ideas and views in order to see and feel and communicate like a real writer.

Having just finished Quack This Way I felt a need to put in a plug for what is essentially a transcript of a 90-minute interview of DFW by another writer whose obsession is usage, as in how words are used. Garner placed DFW in front of a camera and grilled him for juicy bits that could be shared with others. Yumm.

As a result of Quack This Way I'm now adding Garner's name to my list of people I'd like to know better. Check out these volumes he's produced. Yes, I realize that at first glance these look like books that will bore you to tears. No prob. Most of them, maybe all, are not for you. If writing well is not important to your career or life aspirations, take a pass. If you believe writing well is an essential skill to have in your life toolkit, both these men have something to offer.

Here's a pair of insights from the early part of the book:

In my experience with students the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. In order to write effectively... you never forget that what you're engaged in is a communication to another human being.

And...

Probably the second biggest lesson is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.

A little further along Garner probes Wallace to squeeze out a more defined understanding of what it means to write well. This spoke to me.

Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, it actually has calories in it for the reader – the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put in your reading the thing – maybe isn't hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike's first drafts are these incredible... For me the cliché that "writing that appears effortless takes the most work" has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.

Wallace and Garner got along because both were fanatical about words, especially how they get used. Garner's catalog includes numerous books for the legal profession. Two that caught my eye were Legal Writing In Plain English and Making Your Case: The Art Of Persuading Judges, which he co-authored with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The HBR Guide to Better Business Writing seems a worthwhile addition to a corporate executive's bookshelf. Don't buy it just to show people you own it though. This is surely a volume to be studied and used, not displayed. If I myself were doing time, though, I'd find a away to get my hands on Making Your Case.

Here's the first paragraph of the Amazon.com review that persuaded me to purchase Quack This Way:
This is a transcript of an interview between Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace. The original interview lasted less than 90 minutes, and won't take you as long to read. But I've just completed my first read, and I've highlighted so many nuggets that I am certain I will want to go back and re-read this a few more times. The conversation between Garner and Wallace is riveting - revealing as much about Wallace's thoughts on writing as it does his own peculiar personality.

If you're serious about your writing and seem to be struggling with where to go with it,  how to make it more alive, I'd encourage you to more familiar with David Foster Wallace. Whether you begin with Quack This Way or one of his collections of essays is up to you. The essays in Consider the Lobster are a great starting point. I'm currently bouncing around inside A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's delicious.