Le mot juste

I began my recent isthmus.com piece on the state fair with musings on an essay the Gen-X wunderkind novelist David Foster Wallace wrote about the Illinois State Fair. I enthusiastically commend to you his very funny article, which he wrote for Harper's and which is in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).

But when I cited the title of Wallace's article, "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All," something didn't seem right. Would Harper's really run that title? So I looked at the copyright page of the book and found that, sure enough, in the magazine the story was called, simply, "Ticket to the Fair."

I checked the other titles and discovered a pattern: The piece "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" appeared in Harper's as "Shipping Out," and how did Esquire title the story that in the book is called "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"?

"The String Theory."

I can't say that Wallace's titles improve on what the magazine editors did. But it's all in keeping with his writing philosophy: never use one word when 50 will do, plus eight footnotes.