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Sports|Ethics|Literature
09.23.2016
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• Born 1962 in Ithaca, NY
• Father was an analytical philosophy professor; mother was an award-winning
high school English teacher who was obsessed with grammar
• Youth tennis player in Illinois, regionally ranked
• Stopped playing seriously when he discovered pot and math
• Went to Amherst College (‘85) and majored in philosophy and English
• His undergraduate theses got published as a novel (The Broom of the
System, 1987), and Fate, Time, and Language
• Most well-known for Infinite Jest (1996) and “This is Water” (2005)
• Struggled throughout his life with addiction, depression, dependencies
• Died at age 46 in 2008
• Recently the subject of a film, The End of the Tour
* In between creative writing projects, Wallace took on a
number of non-fiction essay projects where he presented
himself as “schmucky” and called his observational writing
style like being “a giant floating eyeball”
* “Big Red Son” – AVN Awards
* “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” – rural midwestern town
after 9/11
* “Consider the Lobster” – Maine Gourmet Food Festival
* “Aboard the Straight Talk Express” – John McCain presidential
campaign
* “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” – luxury cruise
* Wallace was an editor’s nightmare, demanding lengthy
footnotes, near-complete control over his writing style, and
threatening to pull pieces unless he got what he wanted
* He was also a fact checker’s nightmare: many of the things
that he wrote simply could not be verified, and he took to
calling his essays “creative non-fiction”
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* “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (1990)
* Short version published as “Tennis, Trigonometry,
Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood” in Harper’s
* Supposedly a memoir about Wallace’s
experiences as a “near-great” junior tennis
player in windy, flat Illinois
* Suggests Wallace had a style of “craven retrieval”
where “acceptance is its own verve”
* Tells an anecdote about practicing when a sudden
tornado comes down and launches he and his
partner pinwheeling through the air
* Ultimately, it’s only something he dreams as he
practices
* A sort of “shaggy dog story” that offers justifications
for why Wallace never became a great tennis player
* Suggests Wallace never had the focus or the physical
skills to become an elite tennis player
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* “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” (1992)
* Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer
* In his archives at the University of Texas, this
critique of the sports memoir was originally about
three athletes (Kirby Puckett and Spencer Haywood
were the other two), but he narrowed it down to
focus on just Austin
* He’s more of a specialist on tennis, of course, but
the critique of the “vapidity of her narrative mind”
now has a bit of a gendered component to it
* Continues his thesis about how the athlete has to be
able to shut down conscious thought in order to be
great
* But, in the process, gives a new and important role
to the spectator—but perhaps himself most of all, as
a former “near-great” tennis player himself
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* “Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a
Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice,
Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and
Human Completeness” (1995)
* Originally published as “The String Theory” in
Esquire
* First “ethnographic” essay on tennis
* In his notebooks on Joyce, he describes much more
about Joyce talking about sex and sports gambling
* Why doesn’t he include any of this in his essay?
* Why Joyce at all, and not some other highly ranked
played?
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* “Democracy and Commerce at the US Open”
(1996) – Tennis magazine
* A lengthy critique of professional sports events as
being all about “consumption”
* We might think sports as gladiatorial fields of
democracy, but look around and see how much
money is being spent.
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* “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” (2006) –
NYTM: Play
* Basically the last writing that gave Wallace any pleasure,
as he was struggling mightily with depression at this point
in his life
* One of the lines from this book to describe Federer, as
both “flesh and, somehow, light,” became the title of the
posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Light
* Federer a continuation of traditional forms of tennis
combined with the evolution in racquet technology is
“like whistling Mozart at a Metallica concert”
* Thesis about the “kinetic beauty” of Federer, in a scene
also made poignant by the child cancer patient flipping
the coin, “reconciling” humans to the fact that they have
bodies that are mortal and will die
* Ultimately suggesting, perhaps, that not only will Federer
inspire future tennis players, but that he inspires Wallace
himself
* Wallace tries to capture the form of tennis—the way it is
played—in the stylistic form of his own writing
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