DFW--AGAIN!

[TERRY CAESAR]

       I probably won't get round to reading IJ until the next century, but in
the meantime it's possible to read the author's journalism with pleasure and
profit. Item: the long piece on tennis in the current Esquire. Very cleverly
constructed. You don't have to like tennis as much as DFW does in order to
appreciate the comparison of John McEnroe serving to "a figure on an Egyptian
frieze" or to chuckle at the spectacle of the once-great player doing "stiff
lame truistic color commentary" made comparable to "watching Faulkner do a
Gap ad." 
       The problem with IJ, it seems, is that what you get is hundreds of pages
of this sort of thing--and (often) nothing more than the sensibility expressing
it all. If so, then I'll bide my fateful time until IJ contentedly, grateful
for the journalism as it appears. The first Harper's piece on the Illinois
state fair was wonderful stuff. Not so wonderful, IMO, was the next one on 
carribean cruises, but only by DFW's own standards. 
       One problem (looking back) was that by the second Harper's piece Those
Footnotes started appearing in great profusion. Now here in Esquire there are
even more of them. It's sometimes like reading the winsome Nicholas Baker gone
mad. Yet others times it's like reading Jacques Derrida gone raffish--I don't
see why Wallace with his footnotes can't be compared to Derrida with his (in
"Living On," and elsewhere). In each, there's the same provocation of the
supplement. Take his footnotes away from DFW and my guess is you'd just have
another William Vollman.
       But enough. This is just to recommend the Esquire piece. There's also
in this issue one of those fine stories by Robert Stone, glittering with
incipient violence and baffled politics. Stone is the sort of writer who never
gets mentioned much here. Yet he counts. All sorts do, which is, I think, 
my point.

                    Truistically,

                        Terry