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.