Quack This Way

by David Foster Wallace and Bryan Garner

This book transcribes an hour-long conversation between DFW and BAG from February 2006, mostly about usage. I read it in a couple of hours.

DFW views a “draft” as a complete document. With computers, people just keep changing things until they are happy with it. (31)

Writing as “expressing yourself” vs. communicating. The reader doesn’t care about you, is self-interested. “Never forget there’s someone on the end of the line.” (34) “I am not, in and of myself, interesting to a reader.” (38)

A list of writers with “beautiful, alive, urgent, crackling-with-voltage prose” (60):

• William Gass
• Don DeLillo
• Cynthia Ozick
• Louise Erdrich
• Cormac McCarthy

About McCarthy, he went on:

Cormac McCarthy, particularly in a book like Blood Meridian, is writing an English very remote from our own. It's more like the King James Bible on acid, right? It's not any sort of way you or I could write. And yet what he is able to do with it and the effects he's able to create with it simply blow your hair back. (60)

On pages 63-64, they make fun of the 45 year old who doesn’t know what he likes. I think what they are making fun of is someone still on a journey of self discovery or something, so fair enough. But I have said even this week to Karianne that I sometimes don’t know what I like (where would I like to eat? What kind of vacation do I want to go on? etc.). I like whatever makes the people around me happy, for the most part. Something I’ve been thinking about…

Re: a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a usage dictionary: “It’s like if all of English is a treasure and this is the chest that it’s in." (74)

Like Karianne does, DFW hated the use of “gifted.” (95) Using a noun as a verb is called “functional shift.” He later used “utilize” vs. “use” as an example of a Genteelism (trying to sound fancy), which is an example that has long bothered me.

“People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.” (99) People speak and write in officialese especially when they are speaking not as themselves but for some corporation, institution, or bureaucracy. Officialese “is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity.”

Vocab

• lapidary - polished, as a stone (44)
• lugubrious - looking sad and dismal (15)
• pellucid - clear in style or meaning
• turgid - ornate, grandiloquent, bloated