The David Foster Wallace Reader
Page 80
SEMESTER & WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
For Wed., 30 January: Read the following published essays: (1) Jo Ann Beard’s “Werner,” (2) Stephen Elliott’s “Where I Slept,” (3) George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” (4) Donna Steiner’s “Cold.” Pick one of these essays, pretend that it’s been written and distributed by an E183D colleague, and write a practice letter of response to it, being as specific and helpful as possible in detailing your impressions and reactions and suggestions for how the essay might be improved.
For Wed., 6 February: Read the following published essays: (1) David Gessner’s “Learning to Surf,” (2) Kathryn Harrison’s “The Forest of Memory,” (3) Hester Kaplan’s “The Private Life of Skin,” (4) George Saunders’s “The Braindead Megaphone.” Pick one of these essays, pretend that it’s been written and distributed by an E183D colleague, and write a practice letter of response to it, being as specific and helpful as possible in detailing your impressions and reactions and suggestions for how the essay might be improved.
For Wed., 13 Feb. : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 20 Feb. : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 27 Feb. : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 5 March : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 12 March:
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(**Essays for 26 March are to be distributed on 12 or 13 March**)
For Wed., 19 March: SPRING BREAK
For Wed., 26 March : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 2 April : Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 9 April: Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 16 April: Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 23 April: Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 30 April: Discussion of essays by:
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For Wed., 7 May: Discussion of essays by:
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(** Portfolios Collected; Any/All Revisions Due**)
English 183D Student Data Sheet
Name:
Class & Major:
Best Phone Number:
Best Email:
OK to include your phone/email info in a Class Roster for everyone to have? Yes / No
Approximate # of finished pages of creative nonfiction you’ve written so far, lifetime:
Name a couple pieces of literary nonfiction you’ve read that actually mean something to you. Explain why they’re important to you, if you can.
Taken any kind of creative writing course before, ever? If so, when & where? What was the best thing about the class? What were some not-so-good things about it?
How do you expect the writing you’ll be doing for this course to differ from the nonfiction writing you do in regular humanities classes?
How concerned are you about grades in this course? What do you expect your final grade to be based on? If you were the instructor for the class, what criteria would you use for determining students’ grades?
ENGLISH 183A, 16 OCTOBER 2002 —YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $ AT WORK
(It would be really nice if people actually read these handouts and applied the prescriptions to their stories.)
1. Can not is not a synonym for cannot. “I cannot go to the store” means I can’t go to the store. “I can not go to the store” means I have the power to refrain from going to the store. 99.999% of the time, what you mean to say is cannot.
2. “Joe is five years old” needs no hyphens. But when you turn the predicate into a compound adjective or compound noun, you do need hyphens: “Joe is a five-year-old chess prodigy”; “Joe, a five-year-old, mated the Grand Master in sixteen moves.”
3. In dialogue, the “he said/she said” stuff is called attribution. Other attributions are various synonyms for or embellishments on said. As a general rule, you end a sentence of dialogue with a comma only when what follows is an attribution:
“I hate you,” she said.
“I hate you, too,” he replied, grinning fiendishly.
If what follows a sentence(s) of dialogue is not an attribution, you normally end it with a period:
“I hate you.” She brandished the skillet menacingly.
“Not nearly as much as I hate you.” He prepared to duck.
N.B. Smiled, grinned, scowled, etc. are not attributions, so:
“I also hate your cat, your cooking, and that mud mask you wear to bed.” He smiled bitterly.
4. Family names like mother, father, mom, dad, uncle, etc. need to be capitalized when they’re proper nouns—“Why are you hitting me, Father?” “I’m scared of Aunt Regina, Mom”—but are lower-cased when they’re common nouns: “My dad is abusive”; “Our aunt held seances whenever we visited, and I finally told my mom about it.”
5. In literate usage, the correct relative pronoun to use for people is who/whom. “He is the man who loves me”; “The man whom I love is a podiatrist.” Using that for people is, as of 2002, a perceived sign of ignorance or poor education (e.g., PTL in “The PTL Club” stands for “People That Love,” which William Safire spent several Times columns sneering at). The point: In fiction, do not use the relative pronoun that for people unless you specifically want literate readers to see the speaker/narrator as ignorant/uneducated/low-caste.
6. Please be alert to the difference between a hyphen and a dash, and do not use a hyphen when you need a dash. Most Word® programs have a nice dash that you can insert via the Insert/Symbols function (sometimes it’s referred to as an em-dash, which is a long story that I’ll spare you unless you ask). Or you can use two hyphens to signify a dash, as in “Wait -- didn’t the podiatrist say not to use heat on that corn?” What’s tricky is that a double-hyphen dash takes a space before and after (see supra), whereas a more professional-looking inserted em-dash does not take extra space:
“Wait—didn’t the podiatrist say not to…?”
ENGLISH 183A, 30 OCTOBER 2002—YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $ AT WORK
1. Though the words are logically converse, the distinction between comprise and compose is tricky, and 85% of writers misuse comprise, usually in sentences like “The USA is comprised of 50 states.” Here’s the easiest way to remember the relevant rule: when you have a large thing that’s made up of several small things, the large thing comprises the small things, and the small things compose the large thing. Literate rewrites of the above sentence include “The USA comprises 50 states” and “The USA is composed of 50 states.”
(Perhaps an even easier mnemonic is this: the phrase comprised of is never right; whenever you need an of, you know the verb you want is composed.)
2. People are persistently confusing the comparative adverbs like and as. Here’s the rule: when you’re doing a simple comparison involving two constructions, you use like when what follows is just a noun; you use as when what follows is a clause (meaning noun + verb). So “Bob went crazy just like his father did” is wrong—“his father did” has both a noun and a verb—and should be revised to “Bob went crazy just as his father did.” “Bob went crazy just like his father,” though, is right. See the difference? (FYI, in the ’70s there was a whole huge ad campaign for Winston cigarettes based around this distinction. The initial slogan was “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” which some pedantic figure would correct by x-ing out the like and substituting as [and the as is, of course, correct, since “a cigarette should” contains both a noun and a verb], at which point the original speaker/writer would respond, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, GOOD GRAMMAR OR GOOD TASTE?” which was the mnemonic slogan that the advertisers wanted you to associate with Winstons.)
3. Farther and further are not interchangeable. Farther refers to additional distance—“How much farther is it to the rest stop?” “He hurled the dwarf much farther than Seamus had”—while further refers to additional extent or time—“I refuse to discuss this any further”; “
There were further infractions, which the D.A. proceeded to list.” The most common error is using further in reference to distance: “Canada is further away than Mexico” is wrong; “She was getting further into the deep woods” is wrong. Learn it; know it; live it.
ENGLISH 183A, 13 NOVEMBER 2002—YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $ AT WORK
1. There is no such English construction as a myriad of. Myriad is just a plain old adjective. “There were myriad problems with the proposal” is fine; “There were a myriad of problems with the proposal” is wrong. It may be mnemonically helpful to keep in mind that myriad functions just like numerous. Sentences like “There were a numerous of problems with the proposal” are obviously f***ed up, but in fact the previous sentence is no wronger than “There were a myriad of problems.…”
2. Loan is a noun; the associated verb is to lend. Constructions like “He loaned me his car” are OK only in extremely casual writing or from an uneducated narrator/character. Learn it; know it; live it.
3. It would be in your interests to learn and memorize the difference between the verbs to compliment and to complement, and between their respective nominalizations compliment and complement. The SpellChecker will not help you with this.
4. It is not necessarily wrong to start an SWE sentence with And, But, or So; but as a general rule, you should not follow them with a comma. A sentence like, for instance, “Or, maybe you’ve been in love with Veronica all along!” would be a lot better without the comma.
5. Let us continue to be on the watch for dangling participles. “Tapping first one key, then another and another, the sound of his typing became almost unnoticeable” is, of course, a dangling participle: the literal meaning here is that the sound was tapping first one key then another.… But not all participles end in -ing. Can you see that “Dressed in tight jeans and a T-shirt, his walk hinted at soft muscles hidden beneath his clothes” is also a dangling participle? If not, ask me: it’s well worth your taking the trouble to learn.
6. To peruse actually means to read closely and with great care. It is therefore a total boner to employ it as a synonym for to skim.
7. The adjective nauseous actually means productive of nausea. If you say “I’m nauseous,” you’re really saying that you are sickening to others. The adjective that means nauseated is nauseated. Learn it; know it.…
E 183A 6 October 2004
VALUE FOR YOUR LIBERAL-ARTS $
1a) We ate apples, hot dogs, cotton candy, and got home from the fair quite late.
1b) We have cool-sounding names, personalized capes, a whole myriad of weapons, and we take out the trash.
2) On the bus, I sat to myself as usual.
3a) A clean, white sign marks the end of the quarantine zone.
3b) We sat on an old, wooden bench in the garden.
4) Thick, gray, poison slowly fills the air.
5) There were hushed tones and muffled words—I couldn’t understand what Lois’ friends were saying.
6) I was unable to even remain in the same room with her.
7a) He plays the sax just like Charlie Parker does.
7b) As a doctor, the results of your EKG are of great concern to me.
7c) The clouds outside the window were dull and ashen. Lying low like they were, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the rain started.
8) We drive fast, so the poison cannot seep through our skin.
9) The gray clouds continued to drop rain off and on for the next few days.
10) In the mean time, I decided to retrieve the poster.
11) It was a difficult problem, and I had to mull for a long time.
E 183A 12-1-04
$ AT WORK
(a) She’s the mother of a two-year-old who works sixteen hours a day.
(b) I was riding the pony I had had when I was a child along a river bank.
(c) She looks down and notices the dark Chinese dirt caking her boots that somehow made it through Customs unnoticed.
(d) I dozed afterwards as usual, but, unlike most days, I had a dream.
(e) “The first thing that needs to be done is we’ve got to unequivocally deny these accusations—Dick is not going to have this free air time unchallenged.”
(f) He was a burden on not only himself but on those around him.
(g) She holds up a finger and he waits patiently until she finishes her gulp.
(h) They embrace, and she lies her head on his shoulder.
(i) “Alright, well have a good day…” he said.
(j) I soon approached a bridge, with steps down to the river bed.
(k) My wife heard my heavy steps, bounding precariously against the rocks and shrubbery of my subconscious.
(l) I would have hiked the six miles to the scene I sought right then, but I knew that I had to have everything, including the time of day, be the same if I were to find a resolution to the thump, thump, thump of her awful pulse.
(m) She sees a note left for her on the table next to the water glass with his new cell number and a suggestion that they get together for lunch.
NONFICTION
Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.
In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana’s university, whose ranks swelled enough in the flush 1960s to make outlying non sequiturs like “farm and bedroom community” lucid.
Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers’ and dentists’ kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Association’s Western Section (“Western” being the creakily ancient USTA’s designation for the Midwest; farther west were the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent. I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which everyone’s a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player. My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with a thumb and pinkie, and could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket. What I could do was “Play the Whole Court.” This was a piece of tennis truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.
Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The summer heat and wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and broadleaves up through the courts’ surface by main force, the midges that feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that sp
awn in the fields’ furrows and in the conferva-choked ditches that box each field, night tennis next to impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights form a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is aflutter with spastic little shadows.
But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois’ quality of outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes than I can summon about bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for kinds of wind than there are in Malamut for snow. The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer’s Rule and the cross-products of curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel out not only driveways but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois “blizzard” starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind begins. Most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic flags tied down over their parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind wind etc. etc.
The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o’clock stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo, Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. Weatherwise, our township is on the eastern upcurrent of what I once heard an atmospherist in brown tweed call a Thermal Anomaly. Something about southward rotations of crisp air off the Great Lakes and muggy southern stuff from Arkansas and Kentucky miscegenating, plus an odd dose of weird zephyrs from the Mississippi valley three hours west. Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses. The worst was spring, boys’ high school tennis season, when the nets would stand out stiff as proud flags and an errant ball would blow clear to the easternmost fence, interrupting play on the next several courts. During a bad blow some of us would get rope out and tell Rob Lord, who was our fifth man in singles and spectrally thin, that we were going to have to tie him down to keep him from becoming a projectile. Autumn, usually about half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into force-curves—I’d heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy, my first high-tide wave break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles. Summers were manic and gusty, then often around August deadly calm. The wind would just die some August days, and it was no relief at all; the cessation drove us nuts. Each August, we realized afresh how much the sound of wind had become part of the soundtrack to life in Philo. The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal. It was months after I moved to western MA before I could really sleep in the pussified whisper of New England’s wind-sound.