David Foster Wallace’s Turns of Phrase

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Shane.

Hi, Shane.

I’m calling from Dallas.

Well, welcome to the show.

Hi, Shane.

Hey, how’s it going?

All right.

Going well.

What’s going on?

What can we do for you?

Well, thanks.

I appreciate the time.

I’m actually calling.

It was a unique situation.

I’m in and have hosted a book club where I’m at in Dallas for the better part of six years, and we tackle a lot of interesting classics as well as sometimes unique and interesting new things.

And so, but we finally have put it off for long enough, and we’ve finally gotten around to tackling Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

And I’m not sure how familiar you are with all of his work, but there were several things that have come up in the course of reading just the first half of it so far.

And I wanted to pose to you both an interesting set of questions as it relates to some of his describers and things that he does.

Oh, right. Let’s see.

The one that most recently I think did a really good job of describing something without necessarily saying exactly what it was was the words nose-pore-close.

In fact, he was referencing it as a part of a meeting that was happening.

And instead of saying he just sat at the front of the room, he said he was nose-pore-close.

And I thought that was just a fun way of describing something that’s littered throughout his writing.

I wanted to know if you all had any sort of favorites as it relates to a description that doesn’t necessarily say exactly what it is,

but it gives you a really good idea of what they’re talking about.

I don’t have anything that comes to mind, but I did have the good fortune to work with David on a writer’s thesaurus, Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

This is a number of years ago.

In the first edition, I know for sure in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, you can find usage notes that he wrote in his particular fashion.

And they have such flavor and character about them that I think that anybody who’s read DFW’s work would probably recognize the tone, the quality, and the precision that’s there.

It’s one of those secrets that people are surprised to hear about.

If you go onto a Macintosh computer and you open up the sasaurus or the dictionary and there’s a usage note, there may be initials at the end of it.

You may find his initials, and that’s something that he wrote.

And you might have it on your computer giving you advice on how to be a better writer,

which I think is a perfect great use of his talent and skill to be there kind of suddenly and silently waiting until called upon,

and then there he is at the moment of rescue.

Excellent. Yeah, that’s good to know.

In fact, I didn’t know that you had worked with him, and I’m curious.

Do you all get questions about his writing and or his descriptions or his verbiage often?

A lot of listeners and writers we know really love his work.

I love the idea of somebody being within nose-pore range.

If you’re that close to somebody, then you’re seeing the pores, right, in their nose.

Have you gotten to the part where he talks about the howling fantods?

Oh, I don’t know if I’ve gotten there yet.

That sounds interesting as well, though.

Yeah, fantods is a word that’s been around for a long time.

That sort of means, you know, upset or, you know, that gives me the fantods.

It makes me jittery or upset.

And he’s used the term the howling fantods.

And even if you don’t know what that term means, you can kind of get the idea.

In that book, I think he’s got a line about roaches give him the howling fantods.

And you just know from the context what it is.

It’s like the heebie-jeebies, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a couple of other ones I thought were somewhat interesting.

At least as it relates to visually, he called something toad belly white, which I thought gave me a very clear sense of what the color he was looking for, as well as the part where he’s talked about a Cerberus horned dilemma as it relates to sort of a triple bind.

And I really hadn’t even thought about it like that, where you’re familiar with the Cerberus, but I had not thought about it in terms of any other context of it, just it being what it is, right?

But he was able to sort of relate it to something that was, you know, like an executive issue, like we’ve got three big problems, and yet he found a way to pull something from history that I thought was pretty cool as a describer.

Syveris, the three-headed dog, right? Or monster, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Hound of Hades, I think they referenced that.

Yeah, and there’s something about that that just catches your eye and your ear, right?

I mean, he could have said it was as white as a toad’s belly, but instead he said toad belly white.

That sort of compression is poetry itself, right?

Yeah, I totally agree.

But as it relates to you, Martha, had you had, since it sounds like you read it, were there any phrases like that that you felt besides the howling phantods that really stood out to you and gave you something maybe that you’ve used since then in your regular day-to-day speech?

Well, I did like his use of the term greebles.

Have you gotten to that part yet?

If I have, I probably missed that one.

But greebles, is that what you said?

Yeah, he talks about rubbing around a light switch with a Kleenex, like a dirty area, rubbing with a wet Kleenex until it disintegrates into greebles.

And again, you don’t know necessarily what the word is, but you can kind of figure it out.

Greebles.

So this is the wet particles of the tissue as it’s disintegrated?

Yeah.

Isn’t that great?

Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Shane, I know that we’ll have a bunch of listeners to respond to this.

I’m glad to hear Infinite Jest in particular being discussed and read as a literary work.

Now it’s about 20 years old.

Because for a while there, it was just kind of the joke book that people had and didn’t read.

And I think it deserves more attention than that.

Props to you all for pushing through that.

And thanks for sharing your thoughts about this.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, maybe check back in with us after you finish.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It’ll probably be March of next year.

Okay, sounds good.

Bye-bye.

All right, thank you all.

All right, bye-bye.

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