JC / Railbird

Readings Archive

David Foster Wallace, RIP

Reported by Edward Champion, confirmed by the LA Times:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

This is so sad and senseless. A suicide.

I am stunned. To say that Wallace was a literary hero and that his work had a profound effect on how I write, read, think about the world is an understatement. There was a time in my life before racing, when literature and writing were central, when talking about the oppressiveness of the ironic mode and the purpose of fiction and the merits of hysterical realism all seemed very important, because these were not only questions of literature, but of life and meaning. Wallace was an inescapable, but not unwelcome influence, the young writer who best captured the messy modern world, with its distractions and digressions, all of which required navigating with a sort of conscious uncertainty if one was really ever to experience anything. (And if that all sounds quite jejune, well, I was in my 20s and fresh out of a liberal arts college then.)

Wallace wrote with charm and intelligence on grammar, tennis, talk radio, taking a cruise, irony, infinity, etc. He had po-mo groupies, was adored by grad students, attracted his share of skeptics. The 1,079 page “Infinite Jest” was the dystopian, clever novel that made him famous; he became known for his footnotes (and was parodied for same). He was innovative, playful (with a gift for the absurd), and often hilarious, but never light — “he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence.” His work still had potential; the best was possibly still ahead.

Horse racing was not a subject that drew Wallace’s attention, but he was a former athlete and a sports fan, and he wrote beautifully of what it is about sports that inspires passion in his essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”:

Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere — fastest, strongest — and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

Plus, they’re beautiful. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.

“Writers. They always break your heart.” Not unlike horses.

Posted in Readings on September 13, 2008

Readings: Kling

“In former days, if a business man was known to be a horse player, his credit was immediately cut off. The office boy who was caught reading a racing paper was fired on the spot. Nowadays, however, the business man not only plays the races, but owns horses as well, and the office boy gets a raise if he can pick some good tips for the boss.” — From “Stuff About Steeds,” by Ken Kling (Maywood, 1941)

Posted in Readings on January 3, 2008

Goodbye, Tom Ainslie

“Richard Carter, a newspaper journalist and author who wrote on crime, medicine and baseball but was best remembered for his books on racetrack handicapping under the pseudonym Tom Ainslie, died last Saturday in New City, N.Y. He was 89″ (New York Times).

Among the books Carter wrote as Ainslie are “The Compleat Horseplayer” (excerpt), “Ainslie’s Encyclopedia of Thoroughbred Handicapping,” and “Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing,” a now classic handicapping primer. “Before him, there was a widespread assumption that the only thing a horseplayer would want to read was a pamphlet with some quickie system in it,” said Andrew Beyer of the author. “He was the first person to really write literately and intelligently about handicapping” (DRF).

More from Bill Finley: “Anyone who has ever written a handicapping book, enjoyed a handicapping book or profited from reading a handicapping book owes thanks to Dick Carter.”

Posted in Readings on September 8, 2007

Pandora’s Box

From one of the new additions to the Railbird library, found at Lyrical Ballad in Saratoga — which, along with Robin Bledsoe’s Cambridge bookshop, keeps me well-stocked in racing books:

“The new horseplayer opening Pandora’s Box: A Box loaded with disappointment and spirited fun, and always chock full of treasure for lucky guys and dolls.” — From “A Primer for Eastern Racing,” by Norman Kisamore (Dodd & Mead, 1963). Note disappointment comes first, ahead of fun and treasure. The game hasn’t changed so much in the last 40 years …

Posted in Readings on August 26, 2007