Category Odds & Ends

The brilliant and challenging writer David Foster Wallace, gone from the world since his suicide in 2008 at age 46, left behind a critically acclaimed body of work that included short stories, essays, magazine journalism, and three novels. Two of those novels, Infinite Jest (1996) and the posthumously published The Pale King (2012), figure prominently on university reading lists and remain in wide circulation.

But in this digital age, Wallace is likely far better known and more widely seen and heard in his 2005 commencement address at liberal artsy Kenyon College in Ohio, the speech now having been watched hundreds of thousands of times in a variety of iterations on You Tube, and made into a rather remarkable short film (available here).

The speech runs barely over 20 minutes, with its essence boiled down to 10 minutes in the film mentioned above...

I was really worried about that Abby Wambach! Thirty-five years old now, holder of two Olympic gold medals, the all-time leading goal scorer in the history of professional soccer, the international women’s soccer player of the year in 2012.

But she’d never won a World Cup championship, and the titanic match against Japan last Sunday was her final shot!

Talk about high stakes!! Millions of people around the world were, as her mother told an L.A. Times reporter, “praying for her.” I wasn’t quite going that far, there being a few more pressing causes on my prayer list. If I had such a prayer list, that is, since I tend not to pray for specific causes or outcomes in this world but rather focus my prayerful attention simply on attending to the people and scenes in front of me in all appropriate concern, awe and gratitude.

In any case, of all the narrative threads weaving their way through the World Cu...

This season of commencement speeches and their exhortations to live your dreams, follow your bliss, etc. is usually accompanied by jaundiced responses from newspaper columnists about how tiresome it is to hear commencement speeches and their exhortations to live your dreams, follow your bliss, etc.

Granted, we have heard these messages of hope and idealism a time or two before. But I would ask these columnists what general theme they would propose commencement speakers embrace instead. Maybe something along the lines of:

“Lower your expectations! Dampen your hopes, scuttle your dreams, it’s just a bunch of hooey, you won’t even be able to change yourself, much less the world, give it up before you even start! Just say ‘No!’ to life!”

I suspect that message wouldn’t cause graduates to launch their mortarboards joyfully into the air or parents with moist eyes to look with gladdened hearts upon their ...

I’ve never been much of a front runner. Too much vulnerability out there alone, everyone focused on your back as they draft along behind you, ready to pounce when you’ve grown tired from all the attention and headwinds that you’ve fought on your own.

Better to tuck in mid-pack for most of the race, unobserved, one of the crowd, carried along en masse, never at the rear but careful about spending too much, too soon and having nothing left when the race takes its final shape and the true leaders emerge.

In a mile race with its perfect four laps, each with its own strategy and tasks, my preference has always been to launch a long acceleration at the end of lap three, picking off those who have foolishly gone out too fast while discouraging those behind from even thinking about mounting a final frantic sprint that will demand too much of them.

So here I am, right about at that point in my life, coming in...

What could I have been thinking? It’s a question we ask ourselves with regularity when we have acted like dunderheads, making some half-baked decision on a purchase or a course of action, a relationship, a career move or a business deal. It can apply when we have done something we shouldn’t have or not done something we should have, and it can always apply—probably more easily, given how we’d rather point the finger outward than at ourselves—to others.

What were they thinking? (Bush and Cheney invading Iraq, Clinton with Monica, every person who consents to being grilled on 60 Minutes, all karaoke singers everywhere…)

It’s a beautiful question, so aptly and succinctly does it frame, with a dose of sardonic humor, the human tendency to act really, really stupidly on occasion. And no one is immune.

Shrewd and worldly, lowly and dim, middle class midwest or upper class upper east side: you’d need ...