The Best Writing on Writing

The Best Writing on Writing by Jack Heffron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This collection of essays from 1993 by poets, writers, and academics offers a rich variety of criticism and meditations on the art of writing.

I confess to skipping a few of the essays in the book (mostly the drier academic ones like Adrienne Rich's "Someone is Writing a Poem" or Carolyn G. Heilbrun's "Women and Biography"). The most accessible essays were from literary magazines and newspapers: Donald Hall's "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality" for the New York Times Book Review, or the funny "The Screenwriter's Lexicon" by David Freeman from The New Yorker. Another I especially enjoyed was "Mistakes People Make About Poetry" by James Fenton.

There's a fair amount of pretentious fluff, but you may find a few gems here about the slippery, hard-to-describe craft of writing. There are many, many wonderful essay collections out there for fans of the genre. Two of my favorites are A Passion for Books edited by Harold Rabinowitz, and the The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

So Quotable:

"Depressed over my probable brevity, I find my reading mocked by my own acquisitiveness. Part of my pleasure in reading has always been pride in accumulation. I read to use what I read, for understanding and for writing; take away that future use and my reading mocks me: if I am not to live more than a wretched year or two, what am I reading for? I should be able to read for the joy of a book's beauty but  I cannot." - Donald Hall, "The Books Not Read, the Lines Not Written: A Poet Confronts His Mortality"

"The impulse, at least for someone of the writerly persuasion, is not to bemoan this condition but to remark it in detail. Initially, one's motives for translating happenstance into acts of language may be quite private. Catastrophe tends to be composed not of a monolithic event but of a welter of little incidents, many of which bear no apparent relationship to one another, and language, in ordering these into recognizable patterns, counteracts disorientation and disintegration. This process of making sense of a flood of random data also produces the impression - generally quite groundless - of control, which may save one's sanity even though it can't save one's own or anyone else's life." - Nancy Mairs, "The Literature of Personal Disaster"

"Womjep: A woman in jeopardy; sometimes called femjep. It's a hardy perennial among movie plots, from 'The Perils of Pauline' to 'Slumber Party Massacre.' The fems in jep were once beautiful and helpless and had torn clothes. They're still beautiful, but now they're often surgeonsor architects in torn clothes." - David Freeman, "The Screenwriter's Lexicon"

"The bottom line on character invention: people in fiction must have intelligible, supportable reasons for what they do and say, which is possible only if their behavior is motivated by factors a reader can understand and verify from evidence in the story. Unlike flesh-and-blood humans, story personae, however weird, must behave in ways that make some kind of sense; if they don't, their 'mystery' stays unsolved, unsolvable, pointless." - Ben Nyberg, "Why Stories Fail"

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This keenly observed series of essays encompasses tennis in Tornado Alley, television's effect on fiction, the films of David Lynch, the Illinois State Fair, and a superbly snide summary of a supposedly fun Caribbean cruise.

If you read nothing else in this collection, read the title essay to see David Foster Wallace (DFW) at his best. "A Supposedly Fun Thing" takes on the cruise industry with hilarious observation. DFW promptly rechristens his ship the Nadir, finds his liberal sensibilities tested by benefiting from the servitude of the cruise staff, wonders at the on-board entertainment, and makes witty and crushing observations about his fellow passengers in his trademark footnotes. He's erudite and clever, and it's easy to see how he earned his towering literary reputation.

In "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All," DFW turns a supercilious eye toward the Illinois State Fair. His self-consciously acquired distance from his home state is punctured by the refreshing (and too-brief) presence of his foul-mouthed friend, whom he refers to only as Native Companion. His account of a dangerous baton-twirling competition is especially funny and worthwhile, and I think this is the second best of the lot.

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" does what the very best essays do - blend two seemingly disparate topics with panache. You can lose yourself in his virtuoso language, which effortlessly blends ten-dollar words with expletives for humorous effect.

The essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head", which documents the making of Lost Highway, is strongest when DFW steers clear of film criticism (his tastes tend to the obscure and overly arty) and simply details the oddities of a Hollywood movie set (I mostly enjoyed reading about DFW's disdain for actor Balthazar Getty, which seemed pettily personal but in keeping with DFW's writing persona).

I find DFW's East Coast hyper-referentialism and snark sometimes off-putting (the worst offender, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", also feels dated, penned before the cable boom enriched TV and started trends toward more serialized storytelling), but his pose of detachment and gift for ironic observation makes it worthwhile to wade through the pretentious bits. However, I rarely find his worldview as compelling or as deep as his prose.

DFW is at his most powerful when aiming his formidable vocabulary at people and places: his true talent is in describing and classifying people with the precision of an lepidopterist with a flock of butterflies. He is much less interesting when venturing into analyses of art or literature - it's easy to get lost in his school-of-criticism buzzwords and East Coast irony. For essay lovers who are already fans of Annie Dillard's peerless Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, or Joyce Carol Oates' excellent anthology The Best American Essays of the Century, you shouldn't overlook David Foster Wallace.

So Quotable:

"I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts, and a kind of stoic cheer that I was regarded as a physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit the everliving shit out of every round object that came within his ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I was a Slug." - "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"

"They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration." - "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"

"Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." - "E Unibus Pluram"

"Indifference is actually just the '90s' version of frugality for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it." - "E Unibus Pluram"

"I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells likes spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as 'Mon' in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide." - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"