You may be interested in this Quora answer by Venkatesh Rao. An excerpt directly relevant to your question, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
When I read a [David Foster Wallace] passage, it is like looking at a pinprick-sharp photograph, compared to my own blurry photographs. He unerringly picks words to use that simply work 100x better than my choices. It’s like he has a 15 megapixel camera and a tripod, while I am using a 3 megapixel point-and-shoot. A bigger vocabulary isn’t enough. The skill lies in matching words to needs.
In fact his language is so precise that it makes his writing almost too rich to read. I’ve never finished any of his novels because they are too rich for me. My brain can’t handle it.
And this isn’t just at the word level. His sentences, paragraphs and chapters are massively precise as well. James Joyce is another example. His prose has been described as having the precision of poetry (an amazing feat, given that typical good poetry is generally 100x more precise than typical good prose, and Ulysees is HUGE).
Here’s a sample of David Foster Wallace and of Joyce. I’m surprised not to see at least the former mentioned here already.
I can add my own example here, actually. In Infinite Jest, the character Michael Pemulis is supposed to be a maths whiz, but both times Pemulis discusses basic calculus in any detail, he screws it up. In endnote 123 he waffles about using the mean value theorem to find an average, even though the mean value theorem is only an existence proof, and in endnote 321 he screws up the derivative of x^n (“Function x, exponent n, the derivative’s going to be nx + x^n-1 for any kind of first-order rate-of-increase thing they’re going to ask you.”). (There are ways to explain these away as typos or unreliable narration but in the context I don’t find those that plausible.)
This bluffing might be one reason DFW hasn’t been mentioned already, although he does roughly fit Crux’s criteria here (at least for people, like you & I, who generally like DFW’s writing style a lot).
Okay, so it seems pretty clear that he can’t do math (or lacks a good math editor). That’s disappointing, especially since he has a degree in it.
But I don’t think either of the other two speaks to lack of conceptual precision: the Language Hat post is essentially complaining that he’s a prescriptivist, which seems conceptually fine (if possibly wrong) to me. Meanwhile the eXiled one is an extensive (and in places unbelievably hatchet-y) attack on him for I’m not quite sure what—pretending to be folksy and chummy while secretly using big words?
(I admit that I skimmed because the author didn’t seem to have a point other than rambling about how the sponsor of the guy who made a movie of a book in the same genre as Infinite Jest once did some questionable political things. So maybe I missed something.)
the Language Hat post is essentially complaining that he’s a prescriptivist, which seems conceptually fine (if possibly wrong) to me
That’s probably LH’s essential point, but some of the specific holes they pick in what DFW wrote suggest DFW had a blurry idea of what various words & phrases mean (“à clef”, “q.v.”, “bethought”, “sub” vs. “infra”), and of what people in a particular job/demographic do or say (like thinking that descriptive linguists merely describe people’s beliefs about language rather than their usage, or that a “Young Urban Black” pronounces “on” with “that NYCish oo-o diphthong”).
Meanwhile the eXiled one is an extensive (and in places unbelievably hatchet-y) attack on him for I’m not quite sure what—pretending to be folksy and chummy while secretly using big words?
(I admit that I skimmed [...]
Can’t say I blame you. The eXiled article does make a number of points, some of them cogent — Dave Eggers really is wrong to treat IJ as a flawless alien artifact with no literary precedents — and some of them silly — like Glazov complaining about pretentious language in IJ’s first chapter, which plays out from the POV of a dictionary-reading prodigy with an eidetic memory — but the cogent points are hard to get to because they’re mixed with cheap shots and the article as a whole is pretty nasty. (I usually have more of a problem with that kind of nastiness, but for some reason I don’t mind it so much in that piece. Maybe because I haven’t read Selby or Vollmann or Eggers? Dunno.)
The most relevant bit here is the blockquote with a list of a dozen drug bloopers, which I reckon shows DFW puffed up his drug knowledge with old drug manuals and memories of his alcoholism. DFW mixed up millilitres & milligrams, made a mushy reference to “lightweight tranqs” that doesn’t seem to map to pharmacological reality, didn’t know what is or isn’t a benzodiazepine, and didn’t know the abuse potential (or effects) of antipsychotics.
To me, the Language Hat and eXiled posts indicate DFW suffered from conceptual imprecision about language & drugs respectively, just as the Everything and More flubs and IJ’s calculus errors indicate fuzziness about mathematical ideas.
You may be interested in this Quora answer by Venkatesh Rao. An excerpt directly relevant to your question, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
Here’s a sample of David Foster Wallace and of Joyce. I’m surprised not to see at least the former mentioned here already.
I’d add that DFW’s precision doesn’t extend to conceptual precision: he engaged in a fair amount of bluffing in his writing.
I can add my own example here, actually. In Infinite Jest, the character Michael Pemulis is supposed to be a maths whiz, but both times Pemulis discusses basic calculus in any detail, he screws it up. In endnote 123 he waffles about using the mean value theorem to find an average, even though the mean value theorem is only an existence proof, and in endnote 321 he screws up the derivative of x^n (“Function x, exponent n, the derivative’s going to be nx + x^n-1 for any kind of first-order rate-of-increase thing they’re going to ask you.”). (There are ways to explain these away as typos or unreliable narration but in the context I don’t find those that plausible.)
This bluffing might be one reason DFW hasn’t been mentioned already, although he does roughly fit Crux’s criteria here (at least for people, like you & I, who generally like DFW’s writing style a lot).
Okay, so it seems pretty clear that he can’t do math (or lacks a good math editor). That’s disappointing, especially since he has a degree in it.
But I don’t think either of the other two speaks to lack of conceptual precision: the Language Hat post is essentially complaining that he’s a prescriptivist, which seems conceptually fine (if possibly wrong) to me. Meanwhile the eXiled one is an extensive (and in places unbelievably hatchet-y) attack on him for I’m not quite sure what—pretending to be folksy and chummy while secretly using big words?
(I admit that I skimmed because the author didn’t seem to have a point other than rambling about how the sponsor of the guy who made a movie of a book in the same genre as Infinite Jest once did some questionable political things. So maybe I missed something.)
That’s probably LH’s essential point, but some of the specific holes they pick in what DFW wrote suggest DFW had a blurry idea of what various words & phrases mean (“à clef”, “q.v.”, “bethought”, “sub” vs. “infra”), and of what people in a particular job/demographic do or say (like thinking that descriptive linguists merely describe people’s beliefs about language rather than their usage, or that a “Young Urban Black” pronounces “on” with “that NYCish oo-o diphthong”).
Can’t say I blame you. The eXiled article does make a number of points, some of them cogent — Dave Eggers really is wrong to treat IJ as a flawless alien artifact with no literary precedents — and some of them silly — like Glazov complaining about pretentious language in IJ’s first chapter, which plays out from the POV of a dictionary-reading prodigy with an eidetic memory — but the cogent points are hard to get to because they’re mixed with cheap shots and the article as a whole is pretty nasty. (I usually have more of a problem with that kind of nastiness, but for some reason I don’t mind it so much in that piece. Maybe because I haven’t read Selby or Vollmann or Eggers? Dunno.)
The most relevant bit here is the blockquote with a list of a dozen drug bloopers, which I reckon shows DFW puffed up his drug knowledge with old drug manuals and memories of his alcoholism. DFW mixed up millilitres & milligrams, made a mushy reference to “lightweight tranqs” that doesn’t seem to map to pharmacological reality, didn’t know what is or isn’t a benzodiazepine, and didn’t know the abuse potential (or effects) of antipsychotics.
To me, the Language Hat and eXiled posts indicate DFW suffered from conceptual imprecision about language & drugs respectively, just as the Everything and More flubs and IJ’s calculus errors indicate fuzziness about mathematical ideas.