What is it about David Foster Wallace that makes everyone so anxious to have an opinion about him?

Good article in yesterday's NYT.  Ex-reader of Derrida-turned-lawyer lays blame for imprecise language, imprecise thinking, and imprecise morals at feet of famous writer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Fresh off a recent jaunt up into the northernmost parts of NPR land (but really, it's a mental geography, isn't it?), I take her point about "sort of"/"kind of," and I would add to the list another pathetic temporizer, "way in which."  

Now, the writer is a lawyer, and she embeds a personal story in this piece in which she narrates her conversion from theory to the "plain language" of the law, noting a corresponding change in literary tastes to the bluntness of Mark Twain.  (Now, anyone should know that Twain's blunt tone holds loads of irony far more acid than Wallace's, and why she should imply that bluntness somehow arrests the dizzying motion of irony is beyond me.)  She replicates some nostrums about deconstruction that are far too common in NYT/New Yorker land, that it was an excess of the 80s and 90s, that it's tra-la-la Gallic and ridiculous, that it's an age-appropriate phase for 20-year-olds, and that like college grads who go to law school, we should all outgrow it and get back to realist novels.  (Which explains why a shitbag artist manque like Franzen can be held up as the savior of the novel.) 

All deconstruction is is a way of reading that follows what's already in text, and what poets have always known, that despite a writer's best intentions he or she can't pin down their work to a single meaning because langauge always says more than we think it does.  Which is just to say, words have echoes and connotations that we can't forsee in advance.  The problem with deconstruction isn't that it's a recipe for immorality (though people treat it phobically as a symptom of decline and fall) but that it's obvious and should go without saying.

I realized on a long run this weekend that my hip flexors need strengthening, and I'm going to start doing this exercise to work on that: get into push up position, then pull your right knee up to your right elbow, repeat with left, and do this for a minute.  Tried it this morning after 80 minute run and it felt good.  Weak hip flexors keeping my turnover and speed from being what it could be.  Tried to inject three marathon-pace miles (miles 14-16)  into a 22 mi long run, and broke down at 2.5.  Was fine aeorobically, but my hips were cashed...finished run at around 6:45 pace.

a few random thoughts

Haven't blogged in a while, but here are a few things I've been thinking about, including a household hint.

Begun in July, the no sugar diet has been a success so far, with only one exception made for a piece of wedding cake that it would have been rude to turn down.  Avoiding both obvious and hidden sugars (and hidden sugars abound), I've been able to get pretty near racing weight while being able to eat enough good calories to fuel intense training through high quality carbs, protein, and fat.  Basically, this means lots of fruits and vegetables, plenty of whole grain bread (watching the ingredients for hidden corn syrup and trying not to eat bread with ingredients I've never heard of), eggs, peanut butter, meat and fish (but not processed lunch meats), cheese, milk, frozen burritos, more-than-occasional slices of pizza, and frequent trips to Chipotle (high in sodium, a little austere and unwelcoming in decor, but otherwise a perfect combo of runner macronutrients).  To get all the way down to racing weight, I'll just give up the cheese, pizza, burritos, and eating out for the month of September and to the extent possible, eat only home-cooked meals, no cheese.  I've strugged to get to race weight for prior marathons and have basically done it by going light on dinner for three weeks before a race, but this doesn't work all that well for be and has frequently been punctuated by lots cookies and snacking the whole day through.  Why not eat an afternoon box of cookies if you're going to suffer through roasted onions and asparagus, light on the olive oil, at dinner?  

Quick household hint: Regular peanut butter adds lots of sugar so I've switched to the natural kind.  But natural peanut butter is gross and oily and a pain in the ass to open and stir and ultimately makes you appreciate the miracles of modern industrial food processing.  What to do?  When you get home from the grocery store, simply turn the jar of peanut butter upside down--the oil will separate, but at the bottom of the jar and the peanut butter will be less oily, and you can open it without a mess.   

On an unrelated note, Tammi and I watch a lot of TV-on-the-internet, including, lately, old episodes of Sex and the City, season four most recent.  Two quick observations:

1) Sex and the City provides an archaeology of communications technology, an index of how many new gadgets have penetrated our lives since the show's run from 1998-2004.  There's one episode where Carrie wrestles with whether to get AOL and when she does, how to communicate with the estranged Aiden.  The old cell phones, of course, are great too.  Related to this is Carrie's seemingly now obsolete profession as a columnist (by 2005 she would've been a blogger, by 2008 a Tweeter) and the show's now obsolete conceit of voice-over diary.  Writing on your clunky mac in a sweatshirt and your underpants is more akin to Doogie Howser (which pioneered the computer diary voiceover) than anything we know today.  To us, computers and private thoughts just don't mix; in the form of blogs (which are now obsolete), journals record not solitary voices recollecting emotions in tranquility but snipe violently at the world, in increasingly shorter form, projecting more than introspecting.  This isn't good or bad, it's just a measure of how SATC, ten years on, dates. 

2)  What's up with Miranda?  I never realized what a poisinous, censorious bitch she is.  All the other characters are charitable, good listeners, open to new kinds of experiences.  Miranda's phobic, sarcastic, paranoid, and constantly demeans others.  They write the show as if she and Carrie and closest, but I can see no reason why Carrie's friendship with Miranda wouldn't become a burden over the years.  Miranda affirms nothing, praises no one, brings the group down like the out-of-tune alto in a bad sax quartet playing Christmas music in front of TJ Maxx.  And she's another instance of how the entertainment industry always makes redheads evil.