From President Obama’s statement:
We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again. So it falls to us as best we can to forward the example that he set: to make decisions guided not by hate, but by love; to never discount the difference that one person can make; to strive for a future that is worthy of his sacrifice.
David Foster Wallace and Bryan A. Garner. Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing. Dallas: RosePen Books, 2013. 137 pages. $24.95 hardcover. $18.95 paper.
When it comes to language and usage and writing, there are two kinds of people: those who care, and those who could care less.
Yes, could care less is an infelicity. And here, a joke. As Bryan A. Garner explains in Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), couldn’t care less is “the correct and logical phrasing.” Garner’s entry for this phrase gives an example of could care less in print (from George Will), addresses the dubious claim that the infelicity is a matter of purposeful sarcasm, and cites two scholarly articles in support of a likelier explanation: that the two dentals of couldn’t have blurred into the one of could.¹ That kind of patient, thoughtful attention to language is evident on every page of GMAU. Garner, you see, is the first kind of person. So was David Foster Wallace. This book is for their kind.
Quack This Way is the transcript of a sixty-seven-minute interview recorded in a Los Angeles hotel room in February 2006, the last lengthy interview that Wallace gave. Garner and Wallace might best be described as friends in the art of writing: they met in person just twice (the first meeting followed Wallace’s 2001 Harper’s essay “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage”); they appeared together as guests on a Boston radio show, phoning in from separate locations; they kept in touch through the mail, e- and real, before Wallace slipped into silence.²
We now know that at the time of this interview, Wallace was in difficulty with The Pale King: as he says here, without further explanation, “I have no idea what to do. Most of what I want to do seems to me like I’ve done it before. It seems stupid.” It is easy to sense his inveterate unease with the prospect of an interview, as he deprecates his responses and checks for Garner’s approval (“Is that an example of what you want?”). Garner strikes just the right note, responding with enthusiasm (“That’s great,” “I love this”) feeding question after question, and (mostly) hanging back. And it works, as Wallace becomes increasingly expansive and animated. By my estimate, he speaks four-fifths of the words in these pages.
And what words. The model of good writing that Wallace expounds is founded on clarity and concision: “the fewest words, each of which is the smallest and plainest possible.”³ Such writing calls for attention, to one’s habits of language and to the person on “the end of the line”: writing as communication, not self-expression; an act of regard for another, for whom the content of the writer’s mind is not just given. Anyone who has read Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address will hear its overtones in this interview.
Along the way, there are glimpses of Wallace’s snoot childhood (“Mom’s brainwashing”), remarks on the advantages of writing by hand, a description of work habits (“time and drafts and noodling”), and good-natured dissings of airport language, ungainly nominalizations, and “crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose.” Wallace casts in homely and appealing terms his advice for becoming a better writer:
[W]e’re training the same part of us that knows how to swing a golf club or shift a standard transmission, things we want to be able to do automatically. So we have to pay attention and learn how to do them so we can quit thinking about them and just do them automatically.Improvement, on Wallace’s terms, is a matter not so much of intellect or verbal skill as of spirit:
And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages, only some of which have to do with the actual content of what it is I’m trying to say.What I didn’t expect to find in Quack This Way: so many exchanges relevant to academic life and teaching. Wallace suggests why so many academics write badly (because they are preoccupied with showing that they know the ways of a professional community), and he diagnoses a problem endemic to writing classrooms: responses to a text that leave the text behind for a reader’s autobiographical revery. (How exasperated he must have become in such circumstances.) Wallace offers a clear-eyed but compassionate appraisal of teachers who enforce unfounded rules of writing, and he gives good advice about writing for an academic audience: write well and trust that the reader will recognize and appreciate good writing, even if he or she is unable to produce it.
[Peanuts, December 5, 1960.]
Today’s Peanuts, a repeat of a 1960 strip, is a variation on Gertrude Stein’s “Pigeons on the Grass,” from Four Saints in Three Acts.
NYT at Faber-Castell Now with a working link to Contrapuntalism’s Faber-Castell story.
The New York Times visits Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, resulting in an article and a short film. I’m not sure what this kind of attention means. Are pencils the new typewriters?
Earlier this year, Sean at Contrapuntalism chronicled his journey to Faber-Castell headquarters in a great, photograph-filled post, The Stein Way.
[Count Basie had the better band, but Count Anton has the better pencils.]
[An interior, from El espíritu de la colmena. Click for a larger view.]
With Vermeer in the air, in the air, I thought it fitting to post an image that I’ve been saving for close to a year.
El espíritu de la colmena [The spirit of the beehive] (dir. Victor Erice, 1973) is a beautiful film. Like The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955), it dwells on a magical and frightening world of childhood. Laughton’s film looks and feels like a dream. Erice’s looks and feels like paintings. See above.
The film is available from — who else? — The Criterion Collection.
[Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for the first Vermeer link.]
This post has been getting visits from the British Isles in a way that made me wonder what’s up. I turned to the Google, and a search of the past twenty-four hours brought the news that John Williams’s novel Stoner has been named Waterstones’s Book of the Year. Stoner was published in 1965 and quickly went out of print. New York Review Books issued a reprint in 2006. Stoner is a great novel. I’m beginning to fear that it will become a movie.
Waterstones is a British bookstore chain that dropped its apostrophe in 2012.
[Life, February 12, 1940.]
I think that the fellow in this advertisement must have been a dolt even by 1940 standards. He is making the kind of goofy adolescent utterance that I associate with, say, Leave It to Beaver.
I had hoped that something in this issue of Life would show up the athlete/girl dichotomy as unfounded. No soap. The closest this issue comes to showing a female athlete: a feature about roller-skating socialites, which is not very close.
In last night’s 60 Minutes segment on Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Charlie Rose described the way Amazon workers pick and pack items:
Those bins eventually wind up in front of a packer, who knows exactly how big of a box to use based on the weight and amount of items . . . .Elaine and I said it simultaneously: number.
Amount is used with mass nouns [a decrease in the amount of pollution], number with count nouns [a growing number of dissidents].And there’s another problem: “big of a box.” Sheesh. That’s an instance of what Garner’s Modern American Usage calls “intrusive of,” as in “not that big of a deal.” Corrected:
Those bins eventually wind up in front of a packer, who knows exactly how big a box to use based on the weight and number of items . . . .But the more I look at this sentence, the more ungainly it becomes. The phrasing — “exactly how big a box to use based on” — is just awkward. And there is a weird asymmetry in what follows, with weight applying to the items collectively; number, individually. And is number the issue anyway? Isn’t the size of an item the crucial element in choosing a box? One more time:
Those bins eventually wind up in front of a packer, who knows which box suits the size and weight of an order . . . .That’s better, with size and weight referring perhaps to a single item, perhaps to items in the aggregrate. But simpler still:
Those bins eventually wind up in front of a packer, who knows the right box to use for each order . . . .Because what basis is there for choosing a box other than the size and weight of the order? The word right takes care of everything.
