Ramiform Reading #5
A regularly (well, sort of) published list inspired by Dave Pell’s superlative Next Draft.
This reading draws on our current unit, specifically the legacy of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Here is the essay again:
Below is a single text by David Foster Wallace, after which you’ll find two excerpts. Focus on those, but consider carving out enough time to tackle Wallace in full; he’s worth whatever time you can give him, and what you can glean from his essay, “Tense Present,” will help with your current writing work.
① Issues that are both vexed and highly charged
Your suggested ETA work for this essay is simple: For each of the following excerpts, figure out the central idea and then pull apart some of the syntax and diction.
That’s entry-level analysis, of course, and I’d draw your attention back to our recent discussion of the distinction between good ETA work and over-analysis — between what Wallace himself called “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty” and the granular analysis necessary for emulation.
Excerpt #1: A Democratic Spirit
A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.
This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit’s constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.
I submit, then, that it is indisputably easier to be dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged. I submit further that the issues surrounding “correctness” in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and that the fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be “worked out” instead of simply found.
Excerpt #2: This is How It Is
The second excerpt is a bit longer. Load a PDF version of it here:
Miscellanea
If you are interested, you might read the original pages of Wallace’s essay. You can also poke around this site to see some of the other writings he produced. I think every single one of them, read carefully, will help you learn how to write.
You might also enjoy reading two essays that deal with the legacy of “Tense Present” in some way:
