The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

Here FN 16 “The problem for professional…” = Ibid., p. xi; plus the traditional-type definition of rhetoric is adapted from p. 1114 of the 1976 AHD.

  Here “The arrant solecisms…” = Bishop, 1976 AHD intro, p. xxiii.

  Here “The English language is being…” = John Simon, Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline (Crown, 1980), p. 106.

  Here FN 19 “We have seen a novel…” = Wilson Follett, “Sabotage in Springfield,” the Atlantic Monthly, January ’62, p. 73.

  Here “A dictionary should have no…” = P. Gove in a letter to the New York Times replying to their howling editorial, said letter reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt, eds., Dictionaries and That Dictionary (Scott, Foresman, 1962), p. 88.

  Here FN 21 Newman’s “I have no wish…” = Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? (Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 10.

  Here Simon’s “As for ‘I be,’…” = Paradigms Lost, pp. 165–166.

  Here FN 22 The Partridge quotation is from p. 36 of Usage and Abusage (Hamish Hamilton, 1947). The Fowler snippet is from A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1927), pp. 540–541.

  Here “Somewhere along the line…” = ADMAU, preface, p. xi.

  Here FN 25 “The most bothersome…” = Ibid., preface, p. xv.

  Here “1—Language changes…” = Philip Gove, “Linguistic Advances and Lexicography,” Introduction to Webster’s Third. Reprinted in Sledd and Ebbitt; Gove’s axioms appear therein on p. 67.

  Here FN 28 “the English normally expected…” = p. 459 of The Little, Brown Handbook, Fourth Edition (Scott, Foresman, 1989).

  Here FN 32 Norman Malcolm’s exegesis of Wittgenstein’s private-language argument (which argument occupies sections 258–265 of the Philosophical Investigations) appears in Malcolm’s Knowledge and Certainty (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 98–99.

  Here “A dictionary can be…” = “Usage Levels and Dialect Distribution,” intro to the American College Dictionary (Random House, 1962), p. xxv; reprinted in Gove’s letter to the NYT.

  Here “[T]he words ‘rule’…” = S. Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 371. The chunk also appears in Pinker’s “Grammar Puss” New Republic article, p. 19.

  Here FN 36 “No one, not even…” = The Language Instinct, p. 372.

  Here“When a scientist…” = “Grammar Puss,” p. 19.

  Here FN 40 Garner’s CLASS DISTINCTIONS miniessay is on ADMAU’s pp. 124–126.

  Here FN 46 “[Jargon] arises from…” = ADMAU, p. 390.

  Here FN 51 “knowing when to split…” = Ibid., pp. 616–617.

  Here “hotly disputed…” = ADMAU’s SKUNKED TERMS miniessay, which is on pp. 603–604.

  Here FN 57 A concise overview of these studies can be found in Janice Neuleib’s “The Relation of Formal Grammar to Composition,” College Composition and Communication, October ’77.

  Here FN 62 Dr. Schwartz and the Task Force are listed as the authors of Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing (Indiana U. Press, 1995), in which the quoted sentence appears on p. 28. The Forster snippet is from the opening chapter of A Passage to India.

  Here FN 65 “vogue words have such a grip…” = ADMAU, p. 682.

  Here “At first encounter…” = Karen Volkman’s review of Michael Palmer’s The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, October ’98, p. 6.

  Here FN 66 The OBSCURITY miniessay is on p. 462 of ADMAU.

  Here “This is the best and only way…” = President Clinton verbatim in mid-November ’98.

  Here & Here FN 67 Quoted bits of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” are from the essay as it appears in, e.g., Hunt and Perry, eds., The Dolphin Reader, Fifth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 670–682.

  Here FN 68 The Jameson sentence also appears in ADMAU’s miniessay on OBSCURITY, p. 462; plus it appears in the same Sacramento Bee article mentioned in FN 66.

  Here The various quoted definitions of authority here come from The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 124.

  Here “The reality I care about…” = ADMAU, preface, pp. ix–x. The next five quotation-snippets—on pp. 123–124 and in FN 80—are also from the preface.

  Here “Sometimes people strive to…” = ADMAU, p. 345.

  Here “To the writer or speaker for whom…” = Ibid., p. 604.

  Here “Whatever you do…” = Ibid., p. 186.

  1999

  The View from Mrs. Thompson’s

  Location: Bloomington, Illinois

  Dates: 11–13 September 2001

  Subject: Obvious

  SYNECDOCHE In true Midwest fashion, people in Bloomington aren’t unfriendly but do tend to be reserved. A stranger will smile warmly at you, but there normally won’t be any of that strangerly chitchat in waiting areas or checkout lines. But now, thanks to the Horror, there’s something to talk about that overrides all inhibition, as if we were somehow all standing right there and just saw the same traffic accident. Example: Overheard in the checkout line at Burwell Oil (which is sort of the Neiman Marcus of gas station/ convenience store plazas—centrally located athwart both one-way main drags, and with the best tobacco prices in town, it’s a municipal treasure) between a lady in an Osco cashier’s smock and a man in a dungaree jacket cut off at the shoulders to make a sort of homemade vest: “With my boys they thought it was all some movie like that Independence Day, till then they started to notice how it was the same movie on all the channels.” (The lady didn’t say how old her boys were.)

  WEDNESDAY Everyone has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: you never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small, regular flag-sized flags. A lot of homeowners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. Plus thousands of the little handheld flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades—some yards have dozens of these stuck in the ground all over, as if they’d somehow all just sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. A good number of vehicles have them wedged in their grille or attached to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast. More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multistory flags hanging gonfalon-style down over their facades. It’s a total mystery where people can buy flags this big or how they got them up there, or when.

  My own next-door neighbor, a retired bookkeeper and USAF vet whose home- and lawn-care are nothing short of phenomenal, has a regulation-size anodized flagpole secured in eighteen inches of reinforced cement that none of the other neighbors like very much because they feel it draws lightning. He says there’s a very particular etiquette to having your flag at half-mast: you’re supposed to first run it all the way up to the finial at the top and then bring it halfway down. Otherwise it’s some kind of insult. His flag is out straight and popping smartly in the wind. It’s far and away the biggest flag on our street. You can also hear the wind in the cornfields just south; it sounds roughly the way light surf sounds when you’re two dunes back from the shore. Mr. N____’s pole’s halyard has metal elements that clank against the pole when it’s windy, which is something else the neighbors don’t much care for. His driveway and mine are almost right together, and he’s out here on a stepladder polishing his pole with some kind of special ointment and a chamois cloth—I shit you not—although in the morning sun it’s true that his metal pole does shine like God’s own wrath.

  “Hell of a nice flag and display apparatus, Mr. N____.”

  “Ought to be. Cost enough.”

  “Seen all the other flags out everywhere this morning?”

  This gets him to look down and smile, if a bit grimly. “Something, isn’t it.” Mr. N____ is not what you’d call the friendliest next-door neighbor. I really only know him because his church and mine are in the same softball league, for which he serves with great seriousness and precision as
his team’s statistician. We are not close. Nevertheless he’s the first one I ask:

  “Say, Mr. N____, suppose somebody like a foreign person or a TV reporter or something were to come by and ask you what the purpose of all these flags after what happened yesterday was, exactly—what do you think you’d say?”

  “Why” (after a little moment of him giving me the same sort of look he usually gives my lawn), “to show our support towards what’s going on, as Americans.”*

  The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to make a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you don’t have a flag out. It’s not totally clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t happen to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the Fourth of July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they know to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag. At some point there starts to be actual tension. Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, how come your house doesn’t have a flag?,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine them thinking it. Even a sort of half-collapsed house down the street that everybody thought was abandoned has one of the little flags on a stick in the weeds by the driveway. None of Bloomington’s grocery stores turn out to stock flags. The big novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are actually open, but even the closed ones are now displaying some sort of flag. It’s almost surreal. The VFW hall is obviously a good bet, but it can’t open until noon if at all (it has a bar). The counter lady at Burwell Oil references a certain hideous KWIK-N-EZ convenience store out by I-55 at which she’s pretty sure she recalls seeing some little plastic flags back in the racks with all the bandannas and NASCAR caps, but by the time I get down there they all turn out to be gone, snapped up by parties unknown. The cold reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody’s yard is clearly just out of the question. I’m standing in a fluorescent-lit KWIK-N-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn’t get really bad until people come over and ask if I’m OK and I have to lie and say it’s a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen).

  … And so on until, in one more of the Horror’s weird twists of fate and circumstance, it’s the KWIK-N-EZ proprietor himself (a Pakistani, by the way) who offers solace and a shoulder and a strange kind of unspoken understanding, and who lets me go back and sit in the stockroom amid every conceivable petty vice and indulgence America has to offer and compose myself, and who only slightly later, over styrofoam cups of a strange kind of perfumey tea with a great deal of milk in it, suggests construction paper and “Magical Markers,” which explains my now-beloved and proudly displayed homemade flag.

  AERIAL & GROUND VIEWS Everyone here gets the local news organ, the Pantagraph, which is roundly loathed by most of the natives I know. Imagine, let’s say, a well-funded college newspaper co-edited by Bill O’Reilly and Martha Stewart. Wednesday’s headline is: ATTACKED! After two pages of AP stuff, you get to the real Pantagraph. Everything to follow is sic. Wednesday’s big local headers are: STUNNED CITIZENS RUN THROUGH MANY EMOTIONS; CLERGY OPEN ARMS TO HELP PEOPLE DEAL WITH TRAGEDY; ISU PROFESSOR: B-N NOT A LIKELY TARGET; PRICES ROCKET AT GAS PUMPS; AMPUTEE GIVES INSPIRATIONAL SPEECH. There’s a half-page photo of a student at Bloomington Central Catholic HS saying the rosary in response to the Horror, which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer. The Op-Ed column for 9/12 starts out: “The carnage we have seen through the eyes of lenses in New York City and Washington, D.C., still seems like an R-rated movie out of Hollywood.”

  Bloomington is a city of 65,000 in the central part of a state that is extremely, emphatically flat, so that you can see the town’s salients from way far away. Three major interstates converge here, and several rail lines. The town’s almost exactly halfway between Chicago and St. Louis, and its origins involve being an important train depot. Bloomington is the birthplace of Adlai Stevenson and the putative hometown of Colonel Blake on M*A*S*H. It has a smaller twin city, Normal, that’s built around a public university and is a whole different story. Both towns together are like 110,000 people.

  As Midwest cities go, the only remarkable thing about Bloomington is its prosperity. It is all but recession-proof. Some of this is due to the county’s farmland, which is world-class fertile and so expensive per acre that a civilian can’t even find out how much it costs. But Bloomington is also the national HQ for State Farm, which is the great dark god of US consumer insurance and for all practical purposes owns the town, and because of which Bloomington’s east side is now all smoked-glass complexes and Build to Suit developments and a six-lane beltway of malls and franchises that’s killing off the old downtown, plus an ever-wider split between the town’s two basic classes and cultures, so well and truly symbolized by the SUV and the pickup truck, respectively.*

  Winter here is a pitiless bitch, but in the warm months Bloomington is a lot like a seaside community except here the ocean is corn, which grows steroidically and stretches to the earth’s curve in all directions. The town itself in summer is intensely green—streets bathed in tree-shade and homes’ explosive gardens and dozens of manicured parks and ballfields and golf courses you almost need eye protection to look at, and broad weedless fertilized lawns all made to line up exactly flush to the sidewalk with special edging tools.* To be honest, it’s all a little creepy, especially in high summer, when nobody’s out and all that green just sits in the heat and seethes.

  Like most Midwest towns, B-N is crammed with churches: four full pages in the phone book. Everything from Unitarian to bugeyed Pentecostal. There’s even a church for agnostics. But except for church—plus I guess your basic parades, fireworks, and a couple corn festivals—there isn’t much public community. Everybody has his family and neighbors and tight little circle of friends. Folks keep to themselves (the native term for light conversation is visit). They basically all play softball or golf and grill out, and watch their kids play soccer, and sometimes go to mainstream movies…

  … And they watch massive, staggering amounts of TV. I don’t just mean the kids, either. Something that’s obvious but important to keep in mind re Bloomington and the Horror is that reality—any felt sense of a larger world—is mainly televisual. New York’s skyline, for instance, is as recognizable here as anyplace else, but what it’s recognizable from is TV. TV’s also a more social phenomenon than on the East Coast, where in my experience people are almost constantly leaving home to go meet other people face-to-face in public places. There don’t really tend to be parties or mixers per se so much here—what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody’s house and watch something.

  In Bloomington, therefore, to have a home without a TV is to become a kind of constant and Kramer-like presence in others’ homes, a perpetual guest of folks who can’t quite understand why somebody wouldn’t own a TV but are totally respectful of your need to watch TV, and who will offer you access to their TV in the same instinctive way they’d bend to offer a hand if you fell down in the street. This is especially true for some kind of must-see, crisis-type situation like the 2000 election or this week’s Horror. All you have to do is call someone you know and say you don’t have a TV: “Well shoot, boy, get over here.”

  TUESDAY There are maybe ten days a year when it’s gorgeous in Bloomington, and 11 September is one of them. The air is clear and temperate and wonderfully dry after several weeks of what’s felt very much like living in someone’s armpit. It’s just before serious harvesting starts, when the region’s pollen is at its worst, and a good percentage of the city is stoned on Benadryl, which as you probably know tends to give the early morning a kind of dreamy, underwater quality. Time-w
ise, we’re an hour behind the East Coast. By 8:00, everybody with a job is at it, and just about everybody else is home drinking coffee and blowing their nose and watching Today or one of the other network AM shows that all broadcast (it goes without saying) from New York. At 8:00 on Tuesday I personally was in the shower, trying to listen to a Bears postmortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago.

  The church I belong to is on the south side of Bloomington, near where my house is. Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church. It’s not one of those churches where people throw Jesus’ name around a lot or talk about the End Times, but it’s fairly serious, and people in the congregation get to know each other well and to be pretty tight. As far as I know, all the congregants are natives of the area. Most are working-class or retired from same. There are some small-business owners. A fair number are veterans and/or have kids in the military or—especially—in the Reserves, because for many of these families that’s what you do to pay for college.

  The house I end up sitting with shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler seventy-four-year-olds and exactly the kind of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over. She lives about a mile away from me on the other side of a mobile-home park. The streets are not crowded, but they’re also not as empty as they’re going to get. Mrs. Thompson’s is a tiny immaculate one-story home that on the West Coast would be called a bungalow and on the south side of Bloomington is called a house. Mrs. Thompson is a long-time member and a leader in the congregation, and her living room tends to be kind of a gathering place. She’s also the mom of one of my very best friends here, F____, who was in the Rangers in Vietnam and got shot in the knee and now works for a contractor installing various kinds of franchise stores in malls. He’s in the middle of a divorce (long story) and living with Mrs. T. while the court decides on the disposition of his house. F____ is one of those veterans who doesn’t talk about the war or belong to the VFW but is sometimes preoccupied in a dark way, and goes quietly off to camp by himself over Memorial Day weekend, and you can tell that he carries some serious shit in his head. Like most people who work construction, he wakes up very early and was long gone by the time I got to his mom’s, which happened to be just after the second plane hit the South Tower, meaning probably around 8:10.