A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Goodness gracious. As much as I revere Wallace’s fiction—his attempt to rescue American culture from the despairing morass of self-aware ironical knowingness—his nonfiction is in another league. The sheer cinematic exuberance, the “floating eye” quality of these pieces is breathtaking and wonderful, bringing the reader as deep into each experience as is textually possible, and as close to Wallace as we can be on the page.

His fiction has a ‘surgical’ quality, much like J.G. Ballard or Will Self (whose own essay style mirrors Wallace’s, though proves less compelling than his fiction), more bound up in high-wire intellectual games which only connect when the reader is complicit in the clevernesses at the heart of these stories, or serve to undo the story by adding meta-layers more about fiction writing itself. (And so metafictional by proxy. An example would be the story ‘Incarnations of Burned Children,’ which on a deeper reading is a story about narrative position/POV, not the heartrending events depicted within. So despite his work going for direct emotional shocks, it is largely trapped in the cranium).

So in this essay collection, by making the focus tangentially on Wallace himself as filtered through the Illinois State Fair, a revolting cruise ship, or a tortured TV consumer, the work has a deeply personal and directly emotional feel, and although not as ambitious as his attempt to depict the grand throbbing alive-ness of life as in Infinite Jest, the work shines and sings with a more reader-friendly humour, brio and natural warmth, as well as the stylish feats of intelligence and logical probity that is his trademark. Phew.

An essential text for any serious reader of contemporary essays.

"Questo è il fatto. Una vacanza è una tregua dalle cose sgradevoli, e poiché la coscienza della morte e della decadenza è sgradevole, può sembrare strano che la più sfrenata fantasia americana in fatto di vacanze preveda che si venga schiaffati in mezzo a una gigantesca e primordiale macchina di morte e decadenza."

A chi cerca di vendervi Foster Wallace come fuffa per hipster intellettualoidi, non credete. Anzi, prendetelo per il naso e fategli leggere questo piccolo grandissimo capolavoro di reportage “giornalistico”. Sfido, sfido chiunque a trovare umano che sappia piegare la lingua scritta così come riesce Wallace; sfido che esista o sia esistito, o esisterà – qui vaneggio, lasciatemi fare – scrittore capace di vendere ironia veramente arguta assieme ad un totalizzante senso di disperazione e sconforto, il tutto impacchettato con una delle prose più belle che abbia mai letto.
Mentre ci lasciamo trasportare da qualcosa che assomiglia a un flusso di coscienza su ciò che lo circonda (il wc con il sistema di scarico ad alto tiraggio, la digressione sugli squali, il cappello da Uomo Ragno, il volantino scritto da Conroy ecc.) e ridiamo con gusto ad alta voce con quel fare da bambini che somiglia molto al "è vero, è successo anche a me!", senza fatica alcuna Wallace sta parlando del tutto attraverso lo specchio del niente con una maestria unica nel suo genere.

This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass market cruise would mirror my own personal version of Hell, I related particularly well to his commentary on the emotional underbelly that lurks beneath the shiny surface of the "managed fun" the cruise ship staff does its best to inflict upon its passengers. In the wake of the author's recent suicide, it was terribly sad to read some of his thoughts on the despair this situation inspired in him. At the time he wrote it, however, that despair was balanced out by an astounding sense of humor, and I am still laughing as I reflect upon sections such as the fear he inspired in innocent bystanders during his first skeet shooting attempts and the footnote in which he detailed the numerous breaches of etiquette he managed to make during Elegant Tea Time.

Other topics addressed in this collection include the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers (written long before reality television burst on the scene, leaving me wistfully wondering if he had written anything on that topic before his untimely death—if anyone knows of anything, I'd appreciate being pointed to it), observations on director David Lynch and why his films are so creepily disturbing, commentary on certain points of literary theory that was so far beyond me it came close to making my head explode (fortunately, this piece was short) and a surprisingly fascinating look at the "minor leagues" of professional tennis, those players whose names we never hear but who are the foundation upon which the TV-friendly greats all stand.

My favorite piece in this book, however, is the first one, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." It is a meditation on his own early tennis ambitions and how his understanding of math and intuitive sense of Midwestern weather allowed him to progress farther in his playing than his mediocre talent alone would have allowed. There is something so profound about the bittersweet tone of this piece and the intensity of its ending that I suspect it will stay with me for a long, long time.

David, you will be sorely missed.

Molto divertente e agghiacciante al tempo stesso.
Forse più agghiacciante, a pensarci bene. In ogni caso ci sono tutti i temi di DFW: noia, dolore, fobie, onnipresente pulsione di morte, malattia ... ma declinati in chiave per dir così umoristica.
Ma il rumore bianco che fa da tappeto sonoro non fa ridere affatto.
"La coppia di pensionati di Chicago, ormai astuti veterani delle code, visto che è la loro quarta crociera extralusso, spintonando a destra e a manca sono molto più avanti di me. Una seconda signora addetta al Controllo Folle della Celebrity ha un megafono e continua a ripetere instancabilmente di non preoccuparci delle valigie, che ci raggiungeranno più tardi, e sono il solo, a quanto pare, a trovare la cosa agghiacciante nel suo involontario richiamo alla scena della partenza per Auschwitz di Schindler's List."

This is a totally enjoyable book where some of the essays talk about stuff that I would think I have no interest in, like tennis, or a cruise ship, but that are written so well I ended up laughing out loud at some points, something which I never ever do, I am usually the mute laughter sort of reader.

DFW is totally brilliant, I must confess that while reading him I always had my dicionary close by, thus adding new words to my vocabulary, while enjoying everything he writes about. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Anyway, why does he make it so likable? It must be his personal approach, he has a totally different way of writing essays, they are an experience, not just something to be analysed, and everything seen through his eyes is so much better for being that.

I loved the one on David Lynch, Blue Velvet, when it came out to me, living in tijuana, and crossing to san diego to see it was a life changing experience, I thought it was the coolest, most bizarre thing I had ever seen in my life, and I loved it, even while being repulsed by it. The movie the essay is about, Lost Highway, was a very strange thing for me, I came out with a big interrogation sign on my forehead, I hadn’t seen the tv series… Duh.

There is something that he says in the one about television and fiction writers, that I just loved;
“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk didisapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal; shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nidged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘oh how banal’. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisionment without law.”

Yeah, rebellion is about taking chances, about a risk, and those risks change every day, just as we do ourselves, our ways of comunicating, our way of expressing ourselves.

And the one about the cruise ship, well that was just laugh out loud funny, his portrait of the whole experience is something you don’t want to miss. Great great book by a great writer.

Mai vorrei trovarmi prigioniera di un mega hotel galleggiante, dove nessuno si conosce ma tutti si sorridono, dove migliaia d’infradito colorate sbatacchiano sul pavimento bianco fra cappelli d’ogni foggia e sciarpe che svolazzano al collo di signore eleganti. E dove gli esseri umani si dividono in due gruppi: quello che deve far divertire e quello che deve divertirsi. Il primo stimola il secondo a fare, il secondo s’impegna fino allo spasmo per non perdere neppure un’occasione. E scatta foto scatta foto, gira video gira video, passo a destra passo a sinistra giravolta su le mani giù le mani. Spettacolo serale. Il cibo abbonda, le escursioni attendono. Keep calm che poi finisce, verrebbe da dire, come motto consolatorio.
Comprensibile che il povero turista, in attesa che il pullman conduca tutti alla nave, ascolti la voce dell’addetta al Controllo Folle della Celebrity, di megafono munita che “continua a ripetere instancabilmente di non preoccuparci delle valigie, che ci raggiungeranno più tardi”, e la trovi “agghiacciante nel suo involontario richiamo alla scena della partenza per Auschwitz di Schindler’s List.”

Che la Zenith diventi Nadir, a questo punto, non è che un atto liberatorio.

A Definitely Awesome Thing that I’ll Most Certainly Read Again

Full disclosure: I felt the smallest twinge of disappointment as I read these essays; (not because of the quality therein—there’s hardly any disappointment to be had there—but because it dawned on me that Infinite Jest, a book that I had spent the better part of February and March, slaving over and worshipping, was not in fact some work of genius that grew out of the side of DFW’s head and broke off one night in a fit of divinely inspired creativity, but actually that IJ was a long, arduous work that came about as a result of years of writing and rewriting as DFW honed his craft, those winding, serpentine sentences that wrap around massive stores of information and unravel beautiful narratives covering every conceivable minutiae of a given situation, the footnotes that drag you underneath the surface of a sentence and reveal the inner-workings of a cruise ship’s maintenance crew or the social status of each individual at his dinner table and upon resurfacing from the footnote, you carry the weight of all the new information upon the sentence that you once left and when you reread the sentence, this new knowledge that you have enlivens the significance of a glance or another character’s tick; the footnote delves into that subconscious baggage that we carry around everyday that inform our judgements and preconceptions about every person and thing we encounter throughout life thus when I realized that these styles were worked towards upon reading A Supposedly Fun Thing that I’ll Never Do Again, Infinite Jest became somewhat less special in being the only book that I’ve read to have all of DFW’s stylistic tics). Thankfully, the disappointment wore off quickly. I came to appreciate the style that DFW worked so hard to hone. These essays are a display of the development of the IJ style. The footnotes become more and more involved as the essays progress. First there are only a few innocuous notes, simply to elucidate a small point, until the final titular essay in which the footnotes are used without restraint in full DFW-short-story-length-footnotes that intrude mid-sentence.

These essays may be the best way to come to know DFW (or at least the persona he projected). I think it sheds some light on why he has become so beloved among new generations of readers. It’s easy to come across like a pompous ass in your writing, especially if you’re a freaky genius like Dave Wallace was and you use rambling, run-on sentences and use info-dumping footnotes. It would be easy for any one of these essays to come across as the inflated pontifications of an over-educated intellectual, but there’s something about DFW that is lovable and endearing. Although it too often consumed him, it helped that he was so self-deprecating. It gave his genius the checks and balances that a lot of other genius authors lack. Thus it lessened the extent to which he cared about his (otherwise) rampant ego. He is¹ hyper-self-aware and it comes across in long descriptions of every imaginable bit of sensory detail. In his David Lynch essay, he essentially transcribes the entire rough cut of Lost Highway into a section of the essay. Apparently he found it insufficient to merely give a plot summary and instead divined the entire script, shot list and set decoration from what must have been several viewings of the rough cut.

Occasionally his writing is tedious. There were times when I got antsy. I wanted him to get to the point and cut through all that detail and rambling. He even prefaces one of his paras by saying that “this probably will be cut by the editor but. . . (insert a few pages of details)”. But any time that it became too much to handle, or when I got too bored with his work, there would be some turn of phrase, or a particular observation that would make me fall head over heels in love again. This collection is essentially “everything that Dave is into and thinks about on a day to day basis”. And for so many authors, this would be excruciating to read, boring as all hell, but listening to DFW ramble on about his interests is revelatory. How did so much intelligence and sensitivity end up in one person? He was in a class of his own.



(As I stop fellating him² and attempt at some type of objectivity)

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley

Very interesting piece. Thus begins DFW’s style of experimental non-fiction. This piece is more image and metaphor centered than would be your typical “tell the facts” style of non-fiction. There are a glut of insights into tennis, especially DFW’s own style of play which consisted of his adaptation to his environment (marked by heavy winds of the mid-west) and used it to his advantage (perhaps developing some personal motif about his chameleon-like literary experimentations of his early work). Thus when he began playing tennis indoors on nice courts, he had no inclement weather with which to use to his advantage. Ends with a cartoon-like description of being caught in a tornado while playing and smashed against the chain link fence. It is mostly devoid of the IJ trademark stylistic ticks and is almost strange to read an entire Wallace essay without footnotes.

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

This is an introduction on DFW’s thoughts about television and the strange way in which it is consciously aware of itself while dolling out the usual advertisement and banal sit-coms. This may or may not be dated given the rise of the internet (about which I wished so much that DFW could have written) and given that I hardly watch any tv (besides Bronco games on sunday) it didn’t have as much of an impact than would otherwise. I’ve also more or less known about all the ideas within the essay via all the interviews I’ve seen of DFW. It’s good to have all his thoughts about television in one place.

Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All

This is where DFW gained serious notoriety as a non-fictionist (and I’d almost say as a writer period, given that the majority of people who’ve read DFW have read his non-fiction as opposed to tackling the mammoth Jest; tis a shame). This is Dave at his most funny. Esquire has commissioned him to write a piece on an Illinois State Fair in bumfuck nowhere. The rural, right-wing, conservatives (which heavily populate the American mid-west) function as a comedic shooting-gallery for DFW’s socially awkward journalistic persona, describing each rural Illinois denizen with simultaneous wit and discomfort that it’s hard to hold the book still while howling in laughter.

Greatly Exaggerated

Here, Mr. Wallace flexes his erudition and reviews a piece of lit theory that criticizes the post-modern death-of-the-author theorists like Derrida, Barthes, et al. At this point it becomes clear that this collection of essays is more of a grab-bag of his musings and interests and opposed to anything with clear structure or links. But this is all wonderful, because it seems as though he was one of those people who had several, disconnected interests and but studied each one of them exhaustively. He brings all his knowledge of literature theory to bear upon questions of authorship and structuralism. A great insight into some of his attitudes towards these topics.

David Lynch Keeps His Head

Another item on the list of things that make David-san tick, the work of David Lynch. This essay is one part exposé of a trip to the set of Lost Highway, one part cataloging of all things “lynchian” and one part defense of the body of Lynch’s work against ignoramuses, critics and otherwise. This essay has everything that one could love about DFW in one continuous piece of writing: awkward social interactions; acute observations of human beings in their natural habitat; self-deprecating humor of the gut-busting and tear-inducing variety; brilliant musings on aesthetics and the state of pop-culture; and a passionate discussion of medium of film, its capacity to influence the audience’s mind like no other medium. If you only want to read one essay, read this one.

Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Profession Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness

To be honest this essay was the least interesting. In his interview with Charlie Rose, he talks about this essay in particular. He says that the project began with his interest in the up and coming Michael Joyce and his career, but of course, the essay ended up being about himself. And although, of course, you end up writing about yourself in every writing venture, in this instance, it detracted from the piece instead of adding to it. In other essays, especially the titular one, DFW’s persona makes it hilarious and relatable but here, it drags the essay in two directions, one side pulling toward Michael Joyce, and the other pulling towards DFW’s digressions and personal asides. There’s a healthy balance to be had—in fact all of writing seems to be a balancing act. I sometimes wonder how DFW pulls it off, given how long-winded he can be. But here, it is apparent that it doesn’t always work in ever instance. What can you do? It makes me like him even more because it shows he’s human. Not a robot but a ghost.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

My opinions of this piece are scattered about this entire review, because it is, in many ways a culmination of all the pieces that come before it. It is the culmination of DFW’s style, as we know it from IJ, as well as a culmination of his thoughts and ideas as a writer. But it’s still worth noting a few things. First, I’ve heard of accusations that DFW made up the people (not just changed their names) that are in this piece. I first wonder how one would ever know that—actual interviews with the people themselves?—but even more important, who cares? If your main concern is the literal content of this book, or the literal content of any book for that matter, and your main concern is the truth values of the author’s statements, then I’m sorry to say you’ve sorely missed the point of this book and the point of reading (literature reading at least). The interactions with other people in this piece do not even take up most of it. It is DFW’s own internal state and his musings on all that is going on around him. What’s important is the way in which DFW uses this socially-awkward, hyper-sensitive persona to write a devastating critique of american consumerism. He (the persona and author) has/d this uncanny ability to deconstruct any situation. His self-awareness is not just focused inward, but outward too. There’s hardly anything that flies over D’s radar, hardly anything that he isn’t consciously aware of and analyzing. What average person would notice and reflect upon the time intervals upon which the maids clean his room? DFW did. He also (in a section that earns multiple “lol”s in the absolute literal sense of the phrase) tests the maids’ cleaning habits by leaving his room at random times during the day and noticing the exact amount of time it takes for him to be gone until they clean. He notices the fact that it takes exactly 30 minutes (no more and no less) for the maids’ to begin straightening his room. This leads him to reflect upon the absurd, possible ways that the boat could ever know how long any of its tenants are gone, and more so, the kind of hegemonic rulership the maids must be under to maintain such constant vigilance to clean. He compares and contrasts their working conditions to his own pampering and toddler-like state that he’s been thrown into on this cruise. He notices the strong disconnect between the servers and those that are served. This illustrates the stark divide between the two classes of people, how one become like pampered, spoiled children and the other are stiff, unemotional alienated workers. See what we’re dealing with here? Any other person would shrug off such observations, effectively cutting off his or her ability to reflect at all on the frightening implications of such capitalistic excess. This ought to be a wake up call for any person with such introspective, hyper-sensitive tendencies. For a great deal of such sensitive, analytical people are racked with insecurities due to the propensity for constant self-judgement and analysis. We should know and appreciate the fact that those people are an essential part of a society if it is to be aware of itself and change itself for the better. There must be people like DFW, lest it continue to walk blindly, unaware.




¹unsure whether to use the present tense “is” to refer to the narrative persona of DFW, the de facto tense usage of any literary paper to immortalize the author via that mysterious, vaguely defined persona of the text or whether to use the past tense “was” to refer to DFW the person, who tragically passed away and thus referred to in the past tense. I suppose the present tense will do, not only to stay true to lit paper norms but also to dupe myself (on some unconscious level) that he is actually still alive and his death is some illuminati conspiracy because actually he’s currently being held captive in some underground government facility, commissioned to write confidential reports of the government’s most clandestine operations, the first of which was a disaster, as the report was some 100 pages over the maximum limit, and included a particularly long digression on the correct MLA method of citation of confidential military reports, as presented in sub-clause 23a of an already over-long footnote.

²barely capable of keeping my gushing love for him under wraps here. I have come to be known as the "DFW" guy at the local bookstore. And in fact, upon my visit to pick up this book, it provided the fodder for small talk with the attractive girl at the register. We shot the shit about DFW, literature and writing and the conversation ended with me taking her number, as well the book, home with me. And but so in typical DFW socially awkward fashion, we have only managed since then to effectively "out awkward" one another upon every encounter, half-starting conversations, repeating questions, and running into one another just after having said goodbye; it's good to know that I can live my life in all ways Wallace, including failed propositions for dates, cringe-inducing attempts at conversation, and protracted sessions of post-hoc self-deprecation.

Bello, divertente e scritto bene.
Buongiorno vita da crociera