SubscribeThere’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.Yes kids that is a single sentence. This sort of thing is why I found Infinite Jest unreadable.
(And anyone who's read Mr. Wallace before knows to skip the footnotes.)The number of ways in which this comment is stupid is actually kind of impressive. I mean that's a lot of different aspects of a writer's work to utterly misunderstand. Congrats!
Mefi#1: "I hate DFW, he's pretentious."For fans of DFW, the frustration in exchanges of this type is that the first mistake - "he's pretentious" - is a crippling one.
Mefi#2: "You're stupid and obviously don't understand him."
Mefi#1: "I understand him, but his prose annoys me."
Mefi#2: "His prose only annoys you because you couldn't write so fluently in your wildest dreams, you frustrated hack."
According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’s backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine...a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child’s question — the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn’t be grotesque?...which pays off here, in the last footnote:
By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.Reading that footnote again I can't remember whether the repetition of the word 'grotesque' pulled me out of the flow of the text or registered only retroactively, and now I can't decide whether I like it or find it mannered. Regardless of which it's difficult to uncry tears (what if you could?!), so worries about mannerism sort of take second place in the wake of that awesome first paragraph. No one reads this man's writing for big words anymore than people read Bret Easton Ellis because they're fond of goddamn brand names.
every school of writing I have ever paid any attention to has told me that you do not write 284 word sentencesMay well be true, but enforced mediocrity isn't the point here. Long sentences aren't conceited, they're just long. The average school of writing would probably have told Melville to skip the cetology chapters of that big whale book, or recommended that Pynchon cut those stupid limericks goddamnit from that one World War Two book. Hemingway and his clipped macho bullshit. Gaddis and the whole unattributed-dialogue 'I hate my readers' thing, never mind it's holy-shit laugh-out-loud funny. Woolf with the weird all-those-voices thing in The Waves. This overlong abstract 'To be or not to be' speech in the middle of basically a detective-in-the-family procedural in which almost nothing actually happens. Ellis with the run-on sentences, oy gevalt. Didion, learn to actually give a shit about something. Hoban can't you just tell your story without making up this ridiculous ironic I'm-so-clever private language, you and that Burgess fellow. And Joyce, you ignorant self-hating mick: what's with the last chapter here? I only see like eight periods over several dozen pages! (But Joyce was actually conceited, of course, he was just good enough at storytelling and otherworldly enough in his use of language to get away with it.) Irrelevant. The average school of writing should be attended, passed, and then forgotten. It matters to genius only in violation.
« Older Maybe you heard the song Living Next Door to Alice... | Mobile saunas from around the ... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
one trick pony.
posted by wbm$tr at 11:06 AM on August 20, 2006