String Theory: David Foster Wallace

I think that, having read DFW's prose now for some 3-4 hours, plus consider the lobster and having listened to his graduation speech online. I think that his writing in many ways evinces to me what it actually means to write well in some ways.

Number 1. He is very very good at following the Orwellian rule of making up your own metaphors. His writing always feels completely fresh because it never uses even a single cliche. Even grammatically he constantly finds ways to write a simple sentence in an unusual way, so that your mind has to pay a bit more attention to parse it, and yet it is not unenjoyable.

Number 2. He has a great gift for explaining things. He explains them relatively simply, but full of imagery. His consider the lobster essay dips deep into lobster regulatory systems; considers whether they can feel pain both scientifically and empathetically; describes in detail their nervous system and anatomy. Yet he breaks it up with so many anecdotes that it actually serves as a break from the journalistic aspects of his report. He does this constantly, breaking his story and description up in a colloquial yet dense manner. You're aware as you're reading it that you're reading something of unusual complexity, and yet it never saturates the page with Judith Butler-esque neologisms or thesauric butchery. He writes a complex idea and then the next sentence will continue it extremely simply.

Number 3. An author has an ability to scalpel extremely precisely the reader's attention to any aspect of the story they see fit. DFW seems to fit in absolutely everything and include an amusing anecdote about cab drivers mad that their evening dinner is too expensive. His stories feel complete, exhaustive, without being exhausting. You're not really ever looking at the page count with him or wondering when it will end.

Number 4. He ends very spectacularly. I think that his endings are very subtle actually. There's often with books or essays a point where you're really very far past the climax and resolution, forced to patiently read, umarell-like, as the author sort of putters through to an ending. Not with DFW. The other thing is that he ends not only on a real thought provoking idea, one that at least to me is unique, but he fully finishes the idea. It is a complete, crystalline thought dropped into your lap and topped with prose that personally reminds me of the end of the Myth of Sisyphus. You are left feeling, for a moment, enlightened to some idea, and the way that I think about sports is forever changed.

Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today's pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men's tennis, and for the first time in years the game's future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds' outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year's Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead—all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can't be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform—and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliche as trite as "One ball at a time" or "Gotta concentrate here," and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it's because, for top athletes, cliches present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that's all there is to it. What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, "I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it," the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there's nothing she can do about something bad and so she'd better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? OR is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened? This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to explain how Tracy Austin's actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive. It may also, in starting to address the differences in communicability between thinking and doing and between doing and being, yield the key to why top athletes' autobiographies are at once so seductive and so disappointing for us readers. As is so often SOP with the truth, there's a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.