After Tom B.'s post a few weeks ago about David Foster Wallace's latest short story collection, Oblivion, we got to talking about DFW and found that we share a preference for his non-fiction over his fiction. I appreciate what he's trying to do with the short story form, at the very least it's a hell of a lot better than Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, but it still comes off as a bit forced and not nearly as enjoyable to read as the essays and journalism in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I've been taking a lot of essay-type classes the last few semesters, and DFW's non-fiction has been an indespensible well of inspiration for me, I love to just soak up the tone of his writerly voice and hopefully internalize some of those qualities without biting him too hard. His reputation is all wrapped up in the ridiculous vocabulary and the constant rattling off of minutiae and factoids, but if all people get from him is a showoff-y collegiate smartypants, then they're really missing out. The guy has the most perfect pitch of the intellectual mixed with the uncondescendingly colloquial, a dry wit with occasional splashes of slapstick. I mean, shit, he's like Rakim to me.

So the good news is that DFW's next book is reportedly going to be another non-fiction collection. Judging from the individual pieces that have been published so far, it has a lot of potential. "Tense Present", which appeared in Harper's a few years ago, was essentially a review of a dictionary, but so much better than that description probably lets on. Tom and I turned out to have copies of a couple pieces that each other hadn't read, so last week when we met up at a show we traded. I gave him the August 2004 issue of Gourmet magazine, which featured "Consider The Lobster", DFW's piece about the Maine Lobster Festival. It's very much in the style of the Supposedly Fun essays about state fairs and luxury cruises and almost as good. But then somewhere along the line he derails itwith a bunch of hand-wringing about the moral implications of boiling a lobster alive. As in, supposing that it's somehow different or worse than all the other ways we weat and kill animals. And a couple months ago, Salon ran an interview with a guy who wrote a book about lobsters and basically refutes everything DFW says in "Consider The Lobster" and accuses him of just regurgitating a bunch of PETA propaganda.

And what I borrowed from Tom is DFW's John McCain profile from the primary campaign trail in 2000. It ran in Rolling Stone as "Up, Simba!", but in the version in The Best American Magazing Writing 2001, which is what Tom gave me, it's re-titled "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub". I missed out on it when it originally ran, and it's nice to finally see it, especially now. It really brought back to mind, buried beneath the past 4, almost 5 years, was just how heartbreaking McCain's defeat to Bush was, in a way moreso than even Gore's or Kerry's defeats to Bush, or Dean's defeat to Kerry. McCain's was maybe the hardest loss to take because even then it was clear that Bush was bad news, although we had no idea just how much at the time, and that was the first stinging realization that not everyone saw it so clearly, not even the majority of the voting public. And every Bush victory since then has had the painful ring of the familiar. I don't know if this is all just the naive reaction of a young voter to the first taste of disappointment, but it feels like more than that.

BTW, Tom, have you read the other Rolling Stone piece in that collection, "In the Jungle" by Rian Malan? If not, when I give it back to you, check it out, I remember reading it at the time back when it originally ran in RS. It's a really amazing investigative report about the complicated origins of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

Labels: reading/writing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 8:06 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.