A.K.A.: A Case Study in the Habits of a Highly Effective Thinker (who also had a profoundly tragic life, and thus shame on you if you only see it as an opportunity for self-betterment)
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| Photo Source: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/david-foster-wallace |
The word sprachgefühl means “feeling for language,” and it’s one of a 104-entry vocabulary list DFW made for himself in 1989. We all like that clicking-into-place feeling of finding a word that will zap unnecessary, fumbling explanation. This word, however, conjured a feeling I never had before (and perhaps one that deserves its own word): to find the definition of a word and realize that you are experiencing what that word means in the moment of learning it. One of the benefits to reading Wallace: he engenders sprachgefühl.
If you are not a David Foster Wallace fan, this post can be beneficial because it can be read as a list of habits of effective thinkers. The genius label is quickly calcifying on Wallace. As a teacher, I know the term geniusis deceptive and detrimental. The second someone calls you a genius is the second you fear risks because you want to do everything you can to preserve the title. We think of “genius” as some defining characteristic determined at birth, when in reality, genius is the prolonged practice of hard work, discipline, willingness to fail, and sheer stubbornness. (For more, see the work of Carol Dweck and growth/fixed mindsets):
If you are a Wallace fan, then my hope is to share some behind-the-scenes insight from looking at his papers at the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Center – the kind of stuff that isn’t in the books and you can’t currently find online.
The last thing I want is to provide some hagiographic junkie his/her fix. That sounds crazy, but read a whacked-out blog post like this one. I hate thinking about the possibility that Michelle Dean neglected walking her dog in order to write that.
Instead, if you like the ideas behind a few pieces of Wallace’s stuff and would care to know more of the submerged part of the iceberg, then you may appreciate this post.
I looked at earlier drafts of “Consider the Lobster,” “This is Water,” Everything and More, a free-write section of The Pale King, the vocabulary lists, and some of his teaching materials.
“Consider the Lobster”
Here’s the full text for reference.
1. I looked at what was called the “mildly revised version.” That heading was accompanied by a smiley-face. One of the overall impressions I had about Wallace’s materials is that he genuinely enjoyed a lot of what he did (but certainly not all the time). But for the most part, there were many playful, inchoate annotations, which suggests to me that he was having fun.
2. His line-editing techniques were completely standard. That’s a reassuring point if you fancy yourself a writer. He wrote many drafts and he thoroughly line-edited them. That’s all. One common trend was his notating “stet” by things he had cut. “Stet” is the Latin for “let it stand,” meaning that he originally cut a section and then later decided not to cut it. His editing practices match his claim to “have a problem with length.”
3. In the last paragraph of the essay, (which I wrote about at the end of this post), he cuts a clause (original with cut portion in brackets):
These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, [about what the adjective’s real and connotative range is in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living,”] and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here.
I suspect he made that cut because it was potentially too critical of Gourmet.
4. He wanted to cut Footnote 4:
Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring.
He stets this as well. By pure conjecture (I was only a mediocre grad student, so don’t peg any scholarly ethos to this), I envision Wallace originally wanting to cut the footnote, but not being able to stifle the subtle joke that his footnote about dead herring was a red herring.
Everything and More Preparation Notebooks
These were three one-subject spiral-bound notebooks full of Wallace’s annotations as he read books about math and infinity in preparation for his own book on infinity. The overall message: all that stuff your English teacher told you about the value of annotating is correct. If it worked for Wallace, it will work for you.
1. Again, the guy liked learning and was clearly having fun. While reading Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind for what was probably several days, one of the later pages of notes is entitled “Ruckerama.”
2. He titled each page with some distinction of book/author. To the left would be the page number that he was reading, and to the right would be a summary of the author’s point. 95+% of these notebooks are merely putting someone else’s words into his own. You can view these notebooks as a method for how to read hard stuff. Every page takes work. If you can’t put it in your own words, you don’t know it. This too, is very inspiring to me because as far as I can tell, there was nothing magic about Wallace’s methods. He read with a dictionary nearby (and actually bothered to learn the words he didn’t know), he line-edited, and he annotated. That’s nothing beyond what I tell my high school students.
3. Every once and a while the reading would inspire an original thought, which he would circle and write his initials next to. One of my favorites:
These paradoxes fuck with the certainty of math. Paradoxes humble math.
That he would come to that conclusion is telling of Wallace’s ethical preoccupations. His aesthetic concerns become fundamentally ethical (see the last paragraph of “Consider the Lobster”).
“This is Water”
1. This piece went through at least eight drafts. His approach to speech-writing was to include everything he wanted and then figure out the time limit afterward. He realized after reading his initial notes aloud that the thing was already about five times too long. This means that even though it feels complete and is undeniably complete, the version we know is really a splintered, radically attenuated mish-mash of what it once was.
2. Originally, the speech told the old Sunday School parable about the difference between heaven and hell: hell is ten emaciated people, sitting around a table laden with a feast. The problem is everybody has a five-foot long spoon, so it’s impossible to get the food to their mouth, thus torturing them. But heaven is the same thing, table with five-foot long spoons, but the people realize that they can feed each other. Continuing that motif, the original last line of the speech was “Bon Appétit.”
3. Remember that section where he lists all the problems with things you can worship? Worship money, and you’ll never have enough – worship intelligence and you’ll always feel dumb, etc.? Originally, there was an additional warning:
Worship a wife, a lover, a parent: you will be deformed, stunted, and disappointed.
Why would he cut that one out of all the others? My guess is that it was a little too close to home. He wrote the speech in the first few months of his marriage to Karen Green (unless he started writing it WAY before commencement, and even then, it would have been some point during his courtship). They married on December 27, 2004, and the speech was delivered on May 21, 2005. As a newlywed, maybe he found himself disagreeing with that one. Or maybe he cut it because he didn’t want to dwell on it.
4. The water motif is the only remaining one of several that were cut. In addition to cutting the spoon parable of heaven and hell, he also cut a Buddhist parable, which I’ll let Philip Seymour Hoffman paraphrase for us:
You can see how the parable relates to Wallace’s idea about the value of mindset – how you can choose how you respond to a certain situation.
BTW – Wallace didn’t rip off Charlie Wilson’s War. The film came out two years after the speech.
5. There’s a section in the speech when he gives the example of getting groceries after a hard day at the office and everything is frustrating. In the speech he says “et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony.” I looked for the skipped section, and it really wasn’t very long. There’s just another line or two about “glacially slow” geriatrics and children with Attention Deficit Disorder.
There are other snippets all around that he did cut in later drafts. Continuing on the grocery example, there’s a line about not knowing what to do with the paper bags after you unpack your groceries.
6. The speech gives a few seconds to Wallace’s thoughts on the genre of commencement speeches. In other drafts, that section continued for a few pages. He remarks that the only person to ever remember a commencement speech is the person who delivers it, that it is a narcissistic free-for-all because you have a captive audience.
He comments that a diploma is “just an eviction notice in Latin,” which is a line from his roommate, Mark Costello.
7. One of my favorite cut sections was a description of college being “the last bits of childhood about to be over.” He gives a long list of the stuff college kids haven’t had to think about (someone cleans their dishes for them, etc.). He claims that if you think you can continue to skip the mundane parts of life by marrying someone who will graciously take care of them for you, then you suffer from:
a whole separate set of delusions and fantasies that pretty much any married person can instantly set you straight on.
8. A few comments on the spiritual sections –
- When he lists the religions to which you can ascribe (JC, Wiccan Mother Goddess, Four Noble Truths) he originally concluded the list with “some ecumenical twelve-step help program.” Considering his past and the story of Infinite Jest, that was an interesting choice to cut.
- Another quote worth sharing: “Lao Tzu and Plato and Christ and all the real teachers keep saying it’s more about awareness than about knowledge.”
- When DFW gives the example of the atheist talking to the religious guy about being saved from the blizzard by the Eskimos, an earlier draft had the atheist say he was saved by “goddamn” Eskimos, which adds more verbal irony. But dropping GD on “alumni-friendly quads” doesn’t work so well.
- Some parts of the earlier drafts were in bullet form. I guess those represented things he liked but didn’t have a place for. This was one of them:Spirit: must decide what it is and what role it plays in your life. And not just abstractly. If you cannot cultivate a part of you that can stand, silent and attentive, and observe the crazy opera of thoughts and feelings that occur inside you, then you will be a slave to yourself.
The Pale King: Free-Write Portion
I don’t have too much to report on this because The Pale King as we know it is basically just a compilation from the notes Wallace left after his death. If you read that, you saw what I saw. However, there were a few things I’d like to point out.
1. This writing was not fun for him. Many other places will describe how hard a time Wallace had writing this book. One annotation:
Free writing means Nothing.
2. He took notes on characters as he wrote about them. The free writing helped him figure out who his characters were. One annotation gives some background:
This guy ran out on pregnant girlfriend.
3. This section was handwritten, single spaced in green ink. He wrote in slanted print, so tiny that he only filled up half of the space for a line – single-spaced looked like double-spaced. He had to have had his face right up against the paper.
The Vocabulary Lists
Jonathan Franzen claimed Wallace had one of the largest vocabularies in the Western Hemisphere. From what I could tell DFW kept track of all the new words he found as he read. Every year had its own list. To give you a sense of how much he read and how difficult, in 1989, he had 91 new words by April.
1. Occasionally a word in the list was underlined. I guess he thought those were the cool ones. Sprachgefühl was underlined.
2. You could also see how Wallace was playful with language. Here’s one listing:
Deckle: frame for turning world pulp into paper Name: Deckle
Vocabulary was not drudgery for him. He thought about how he could relate words to potential characters. He used the vocabulary as a source for inspiration.
Teaching Materials
Wallace won a teaching award while in his twenties after Broom of the System came out and he had a gig teaching creative writing. I looked at a few syllabi, teaching notes, surveys, and quizzes. For background, here is a great essay about what it was like to be a student in the last creative writing course he offered.
1. His e-mail address at Pomona College was ocapmycap@ca.rr.com. I have to think that someone, somewhere on the internet will appreciate knowing that detail.
2. On one of his syllabi, “Alacrity of Carriage” was worth 20% of the grade.
3. He had an entire sheet entitled “Selected Student Swifties” that was filled with horrific one-liners, such as:
“I put my sandwich in the bag,” she said gladly.
They were all of that nature.
4. He seemed to enjoy himself making the useless handouts and quizzes that teachers have to make. In particular, he enjoyed messing with paper headings. Occasionally he wrote “Gnomos” instead of “Name” at the top. One quiz was entitled “El Quizzo” and another, over C. S. Lewis, was entitled “Adventures in the Enchanted Land of Quiznia.”
5. Like every good teacher, he gave surveys. One introductory survey asked students to list 2-3 pieces of fiction they liked, what was good/not good about past classes, what they wanted to get out of the class (with special direction to be honest) and examples of teaching methods that were helpful and unhelpful.
Others’ Findings
Other people have made the same pilgrimage, which highlight different findings. You can read more here,here, or here.
Conclusions
I wish I could have spent more time sifting through the papers. Especially after just finishing the D. T. Max biography, I’m fascinated by how much this man was able to live in the short time he was with us. To have experienced such drastic highs and lows – you wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but you have to consider the monumental difference between someone who gets married and settles down to a suburban life versus the man who ultimately chooses the same life, but only after having experienced and transcended crippling addiction to fame, success, egotism, drugs, alcohol, and sex. That’s got to be one of those journey-not-destination-type tropes. It makes me wonder how much needs to happen before you can really give justification for the decisions you’ve made.
Then again, I’m glad I only had one morning in the Ransom Center. As I was knee-deep in the notebooks, I realized the potential danger of what I was doing. One of the snares of writers is the crucial distinction between writing and talking about writing à la the bohemians in cafes who never actually did any work. Similarly, I wondered how healthy it is for writers to fixate on the lives of other writers. I caught myself wondering if I something I did was Wallacey-enough. That’s not good.
From studying his sources, I did glean a couple of ideas/habits worth thinking about: what it is to enjoy your work genuinely, and to give it the time it deserves. He worked as though he had all the time in the world. The staggering level of attention he gave to the most mundane details of his work caused me to realize how much I rush in my own habits. The guy could cathect on anything he wanted — and with gusto. How much have I cast aside simply because the task seemed like it would take too much time? How much more will I be able to see if I don’t have to justify the level of time devoted to it?