I’ve long been a fan of David Foster Wallace. At the moment, we’re in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the presentation of the new Carol Shields Prize for Women’s Fiction. The ceremony is being held in Parnassus Books, the bookstore owned by novelist and nonfiction writer Ann Patchett. In the plane on the way from Mexico, I was reading Both Flesh and Not, a book of essays by David Foster Wallace. And these disparate sentences are tied together by two signs I saw, one in the Dallas Fort Worth airport and the other in Nashville, on the same day.
This is the first time I’ve been in the U.S. since before Covid, and whether it was the idea of getting into an airplane with 200 possibly infectious people or flying into the land (and even the city) of mass shootings, I was a little nervous at the border. But I am always nervous at borders, and my nervousness usually turns out to be unwarranted. We flew from Querétaro, Mexico, to Dallas Fort Worth, where we went through Customs before connecting to our flight to Nashville. When my carry-on items went through Security, my favourite pen fell out of my jacket pocket, and the large, six-foot security guard, who looked like he played for the Dallas Cowboys in his spare time, held up the conveyor belt for ten minutes while he searched for my pen with a flashlight, and found it.
“Y’all have a good day,” he said, handing it to me. And I did.
In the airport, while waiting for our connection to Nashville, I perused the window displays of the duty-free shops. After five months in Mexico, I was surprised to see that the signs in the windows were in English. It took me a while to stop myself from saying, “Holá, buenos tardes,” to people I passed on the concourse.
In one of the shops, there was an inspirational placard for sale that read, “Less Is More.”
A while ago, I wrote a series of essays in which I questioned the wisdom of some of our more traditional sayings. I called the series “Dubious Maxims,” and examined such expressions as “Slow but steady wins the race.” Really? I asked. Is that what coaches tell their Olympic sprinters? And what about “Every cloud has a silver lining”? Has every bad thing that ever happened to you turned out in the end to be a good thing? (There are several more Dubious Maxims on my website – waynegrady.ca – if you want to read them.)
So, when I saw the placard with “Less Is More” in the Dallas Fort Worth airport, my first thought was, “Really?” This response was also fueled by my reading David Foster Wallace on the flight from Querétaro. I should mention that it had struck me early on that David Foster Wallace and Dallas Fort Worth share the same initials. As I walked about seeing the letters DFW everywhere, I felt as though I was walking around in the mind of David Foster Wallace. Like travelling from Mexico to the U.S., it seemed at first a scary thing to be doing. There was the same paradoxical blend of rebellion and appeal to authority. There was the apparent chaos, the seemingly random cascade of human movement that, upon reflection, actually had a direction and a purpose. And there was the same frustration at the inability of people caught up in that random cascade to find beauty and meaning in it.
The human DFW was self-confessedly obsessive about the proper use of words and grammar. The highest authority he recognized was the Oxford English Dictionary. There is, he felt strongly, a right way and a wrong way to use words. In his essay, “Twenty-Four Word Notes,” he cautions against the “widespread ignorance” that pervades contemporary English usage. He urged readers and writers to avoid using such words as “utilize” instead of “use”: “…its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter.” Also eschew writing “if” when you mean “whether.” And I have always waffled on whether or not to write “toward” or “towards.” DFW settles the issue: “towards” is British (and therefore Canadian); “toward” is American: when your flight to Nashville is called, move quickly toward your departure lounge. Similarly with “grey” vs “gray.” It’s the Grey Cup and the Grey jay; the uniforms of Rebel soldiers during the American Civil War were gray.
It may be that when I saw “Less Is More” on that placard, I was channelling DFW at his most pedantic. At any rate, my next thought was that here in DFW’s head, less isn’t more. Less is less. When I paid for my plane ticket to Nashville, I didn’t have more money, I had less. When the airline did not serve us a meal on the three-hour flight from Querétaro, I didn’t feel that I had had more food. And when we landed in Nashville and discovered that the airline had managed to lose our luggage, we definitely felt that we had less, not more, luggage.
Nashville turns out to be a pleasant surprise. There is something endearing about a city that votes someone named Rocky as its most popular lawyer eight years running. A town that has given up on making sidewalks. Our luggage was delivered to our hotel only twenty-four hours after we were. And, when we did a bit of light shopping at a store called Whole Foods, I was pleased to see a sign on the manager’s desk that read, “Business Is Business.”
I felt that Nashville is a town that DFW would have liked.
Loved this! And I think Less is More only works when More was actually Too Much.
Nice one, Wayne. Keep 'em coming!