Yesterday was David Lynch's birthday. That made me think of this book, and that me think of David Foster Wallace. I miss DFW so much :(

- Tanzim, 2024

What Kafka did for the judiciary system, David Foster Wallace does for a pleasure cruise.

One thing about Wallace has always caught my eye. He was probably the most self-aware person I have ever seen—including both real and fictional. This acute sense of self-awareness was a double-edged sword for Wallace. He was cursed to never be comfortable in his own skin—always jittery, always looking this way and that, always trying to figure out if someone else is looking at him, mocking him with a glance. But this cautiousness also made Wallace an excellent observer of the beast that is human society. Since he was always looking at other people, it gave him a lot of time to think about what other people thought and acted like.

This book is divided into several segments; each segment deals with a different topic. I’m going to keep my discussion mostly confined to the segment that concerns the book’s title. The ‘Supposedly Fun Thing’ is a so-called pleasure cruise that David Foster Wallace embarked upon. The cruise was advertised as one of the most luxurious experiences in existence. Indeed, the participants would be pampered every second of every day on the cruise.
And pampered they are, to almost terrifying levels. The ship’s attendants have an almost otherworldly, machinelike efficiency to them. Their competence feels nearly supernatural, especially in a sequence that seems to have come straight out of a horror movie—one that shows the ship’s crew being aware of exactly how long the passengers will be away from their cabins, even when the passengers themselves might not be sure of that fact.
Wallace was most definitely a master of words, and his writing approaches the fluid qualities of thought itself. The reader cringes every time Wallace cringed, the reader smiles every time Wallace joked to himself and the reader feels the same alienation and despair that Wallace felt at times during the cruise. Every time he wrote he put his heart, raw and still-beating, into his words. It’s almost impossible not to empathize with that kind of sincerity.
Another segment of the book deals with David Lynch, and DFW’s set visit to during the time when Lynch was making Lost Highway. This segment consists almost solely of DFW geeking out over Lynch’s genius, and since I’m a big Lynch fan too, I loved this segment as well.

I think this book is brilliant. Maybe not for everybody—but what brilliant book ever is?

Primo approccio alla lettura di David Foster Wallacen  (1)n
Mi sono trovato con una perla dell'ironia postmoderna.

Wallace è un maniaco ossessivo compulsivo delle note a piè di pagina. È possibile trovare anche note a piè di pagina dentro a note a piè di pagina, fino a occupare più del novanta percento della pagina. La cosa divertente è che, per la maggior parte, sono una risorsa quasi fondamentale: è possibile ignorarle senza perdere alcuna informazione utile per capire la storia, semmai ci fosse una "storia", ma consiglio non sottovalutarle perché molte contengono piccole idee parecchio interessantin  (2)n, a volte si limitano a spiegare alcuni dati in modo più esaustivo e ogni tanto introducono alcuni aneddoti non direttamente correlati alla storia.

L'autore analizza quella che dovrebbe essere un'esperienza piacevole: sette giorni in una crociera di lusso, con un servizio che si prende cura di ogni minimo dettaglio. Deliranti vari passaggi del racconto, dalla sua descrizione del sistema di raccolta degli asciugamani sulle sedie a sdraio sul ponte alla sua strategia di spionaggio fallita per scoprire in azione la donna incaricata di pulire la sua cabina. Tutte situazioni che usa per studiare la natura umana, il suo desiderio di chiedere sempre di più senza alcun limite e la sua semi-agorafobia e caproscopofobian  (3)n.

Leggere questo libro è una delizia, guidata da una prosa veloce e agile, travestita da testo facile e piena di metafore originali con cui Wallace ottiene immagini molto vivide e descrittive ("rapidità anfetaminica" per descrivere la velocità di un cameriere, "stato uterino di nullafacenza" come conseguenza dei vizi ricevuti o accostare la diversità etnica dell'equipaggio a una pubblicità della Benetton...)

Per farla breve, è un saggio molto divertente che include alcune riflessioni che vale la pena considerare. E, naturalmente, provoca nel lettore un rifiuto immediato di viaggiare in crociera.

---
n  (1)n Mi aspetta il suo "Infinite Jest" ma volevo partire da un testo più corto e decisamente più leggero.
n  (2)n E soprattutto divertenti (questa nota è veramente inutile, non ci riesco, come fa Wallace?)
n  (3)n terrore patologico di essere considerato un caprone (3a)
n  (3a)n Questa nota inserita qui, la potete trovare anche come una vera nota del libro.

La crociera, tutta una grande finta con sprazzi di verità. Wallace ci perpetrerà questo potpourri di umani consapevoli di pagare per vizi e relax che sostanzialmente gli vengono resi, dall'equipaggio, proprio per questo e non per un consapevole desiderio di vederli felici. La forza della scrittura sta nell'aggirare questa patinata viziosità uterina addentrandosi nello studio del campionario umano che rende tale la crociera, arrivando alla pacifica conclusione che si tratti di un enorme teatrino, certo messo in piedi ad arte, ma pur sempre finto.

Un appunto sulle note a piè di pagine, che poi tanto a piè di pagina non sono: veri e proprio micro-racconti geniali ed esilaranti da gustare. Un grande lascito del genio di David Foster Wallace.

This is a review not of the book, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, but the essay itself, which is contained in the book and accompanies a few other essays which I have not read.

This, hands down, the most powerful essay I have ever read. By that I mean that it resonated powerfully within me, and totally upended my conception of what first-person journalism could be. I’d already been profoundly wowed reading the account of eating lobster in his essay “Consider the Lobster” , but this, this –
One always expects a journalist to be critical. He or she are our eyes and ears in the field, there to ask the tough questions and scratch at official answers and accepted truths. David Foster Wallace here goes much, much further. Written as a memoir of a cruise vacation in the Caribbean, Wallace is as critical of himself as he is of his surroundings, and readily accepts that the surroundings themselves: the luxury, the ease, the service (oh my, the service!), the trimmings, all work terribly well in the first sense at providing an scarcely imaginable level of comfort to the people who go on these cruises. And they work on Wallace, and he graciously accepts his own weakness and malleability. But then he goes further, and shines an unforgiving light on what is being conveyed by the opulence of the ship: the subtext, that which is being picked up by his subconscious and making him sadder every day that he spends in his cabin on the Nadir and at all the myriad activities proposed for the fun and amusement of the passengers.

It’s an exploration of the self as much as the world of cruises, his self as an American tourist (that he tries unsuccessfully to escape from), his self as a self-proclaimed semi-agoraphobe, his self as a man of letters with pretensions of self-discipline incapable of foregoing cabin service…

An incredible read.

Terza rilettura per la terza estate consecutiva, DFW dalla terraferma italiana mi fa passare qualsiasi desiderio (già fondamentalmente inesistente) di ritrovarmi circondata da persone con un'età media di quarantacinque anni, ossessionate dal bingo e dal Tè in abiti formali, con i piedi sospesi da una colossale barriera galleggiante sul mare aperto per più di 24 ore (per la prima e unica volta, biasimo la gita in quinta liceo Ancona-Patrasso, che doveva essere la parte migliore del viaggio d'istruzione e che col mare mosso e la compagna di stanza che vomitò per tutta la prima notte, si rivelò essere una delle esperienze più grottesche della mia adolescenza).

Hilarante crónica en la que el genio estadounidense, a bordo de un crucero en apariencia inofensivo, destripa sin contemplaciones la cara más amarga de la industria recreativa. En manos de Foster Wallace, lo familiar se transforma en hostil, lo asombroso en terrorífico y algo que a primera vista solo tiene la finalidad de entretenerte acaba poblando tus peores pesadillas. Impregnado de esa corrosiva sátira con la que suele amenizar sus escritos, Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer supone otra inapelable prueba del superdotado instinto analítico que hizo del fallecido escritor norteamericano todo un icono de su generación.

23 May 2021

Any comments I might have made upon first reading are probably lost in the Access debacle. Quel sigh.

But, since I have it right here as I take an occasional break from reading other things to enjoy an essay, might as well capture some thoughts now.

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley Way more intriguing that I would have guessed, because generally I am not terribly interested in reading about sports, although I make an exception for horse racing and baseball. And although I have never lived in Tornado Alley, I understand enough to be awestruck. Also, I had never before considered the implications of being so familiar with and able to profit from the vagaries of venues.

Why the hell isn't the table of contents considered "product details" on a book? That seems wrong to me. If Bezos were a reader book pages at Amazon would make sense. Thank heavens for Wiki!

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Rarely do I read any real literary theory or criticism. It has its own vernacular and style and types of content, most of which I don't care for. I specialized in creative writing to keep away from it, in fact. But Wallace is erudite and emphatic. He's good at putting together an argument, but the delight is how much he enjoys messing about with words. That is, even when he's writing on a topic that bores me, discussing contemporary literature of the day that never appealed to me then or since I will happily follow along to see what words he uses in unexpected ways, and what lengths his sentences will stretch to. And his footnotes fill me with delight in general, although most of these are practical citations. Look I'm literally tone deaf, but I can understand the glory of watching Yoyo Ma play at a vaccine center. It's something so multilayered and moving, there is so much clear artistry that I can't help sitting here, mouth agape. It doesn't matter that I neither know nor care, really, what he's on about, it's just a beautiful thing to watch.

6 June 2021

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Originally published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wallace quotes George Gilder from Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life on a future in which he whole family could "give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendants from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color." Having just been through a year when those were the only birthday parties we could have, thank goodness. Foster seems to have imagined a future in which everyone stayed at home watching really good fantasies in even greater isolation from one another, rather than a world with YouTube and TikTok.

He closes with an examination of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist which I didn't like and haven't thought of since. Wallace couldn't seem to imagine a less ironic generation of writers who could succeed. Although I suppose he has explained why the tremendous popularity of Harry Potter: books for a younger audience could be naïve.

19 June 2021
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All: The observation of the state fair is extensive and detailed. Wallace spends a lot of time just passing along his observations in prose that is unique and clear and stands right the hell away from anything that evens hints at trite or cliched. There is as well a great deal of observing himself as the observer: a guy who grew up there as the child of academics, not of the farm, who got the hell out after high school to become the sort of East Coast media elite that doesn't really exist and who is acutely conscious of the prejudices and assumptions he brings to the task of explaining a midwestern state fair to an audience of exactly the same kind of East Coast media elite that no one is.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that a high percentage of the readers are probably more like he and his parents than some kind of metropolitan-limited species. Every state doesn't have a tremendous or proportional profusion of colleges and universities, but every state does have them and many of those on the student/student instructor/graduate-degree-holding tenured faculty track are far away from wherever they started and living in college towns and environs bringing a sort of metropolitan element to what ever anomalous characteristics they show in their current communities. [It's like speaking to someone from where ever one learned to talk after decades elsewhere, after reading him I just slip into a wordy and meandering sort of style that isn't specifically trying to be him, nor is it trying to make fun of him, it's more like the code switching of being among others of one's ilk, or just, a little bit drunk, too.]

So, yes, his observations are richly detailed and capture a state fair like no one else would do, and it will probably be useful in two hundred years when all of the stuff we take for granted about American society in the 1990s has changed utterly or just shifted a little but enough to be confusing to anyone who wasn't there. Because most of us don't ever describe what the people look like or how they seem unless they're weird in some way, but never just "here's what a crowd of teenagers look like on an insanely hot summer day at the fair." The descriptions preserving his observations of groups and sub-groups, and even more sub- classifications are fascinating. But his point about the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Illinois probably applies equally well to the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Hawaii or Rhode Island, or anywhere now that agriculture has become industrialized and to a large extent, monopolized. Likewise, the other cultures accreting to specific other locations within the vast entity that is a state fair. That's really the point of a state fair to attract the broadest possible swathe of a state's population with lures specific to their demographic particulars. I just think he's wrong about this somehow being a uniquely midwestern state quality. Nor do i think it is so entirely clear cut as he perceives it. The Zipper is not expected to be pulling the same fans as the pygmy goat tent or the dance competitors or the motor sports or the cow-judging, but the farmer who comes for the cow-judging is accompanied by other members of the family, none of whom were present for the conversation because of course they are all off doing other things which appeal to their hobbies and social roles and age groups. [I seriously doubt if the preceding contained a clearly articulated thesis supported by any sort of facts, but today I just have too many things to be doing to actually take the time to read back over what I've written and try to fix it into something consistent and pointed]

2021 July 17

Greatly Exaggerated: A review of a book I can't imagine that I would ever be interested in reading making an argument on the literary criticism concept of the author as something other than just a person who wrote a book. While criticism rarely appeals to me because so often it doesn't seem to be about anything except other literary criticism and is so removed from the experience of reading or writing a book, but instead seems intended as a philosophical exercise in semantic wankery, it is a valid topic for Wallace. He appears to comprehend the point of the book in question, to have his own opinions on that point, and also, to recognize that the book's potential audience is small. There just aren't a lot of writers who could write such a book critique that would be interesting and would leave me with the impression that I in any way understood the argument. No doubt my face had the same expression while reading as I would have listening to anyone explaining some equally specific but devoid-of-context concept, possibly one relying heavily on being able to visualize, for example the interior of a carburetor as affected by the introduction of some, again, highly specific substance or force which is also devoid of context for me, like oh, just making up nonsense here, the asymetrically charged particles of dilithium crystallins after exposure to magnetic lattice salicylics. Well, I recognize English sentence structure, and have encountered the words before, but none of this means anything, and truly, I couldn't explain any of it back to you. But I was nodding along because as I read the words it seems clear to me.


David Lynch Keeps His Head: Wallace explained to me why I thought Dune was awful, but cool, and Blue Velvet was awful but interesting, and Twin Peaks was fascinating the first season, and why after that I lost all interest in David Lynch. Well, I think he's write about the appeal of seeing the darkness exposed. But then after a while I realized that he can't actually resolve a mystery and that seeing pretty images of grotesque acts and concepts isn't all that appealing to me.


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


A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:

En este ensayo DFW analiza el concepto de diversión y recompensa, asociado al turismo de masas, tomando el caso de un crucero por el Caribe. A medio camino entre el periodismo y el ensayo, nos relata su experiencia como pasajero, que ya viene resumida en el título - pedazo de spoiler :)

Analiza - es más, radiografía - cada detalle, cada objeto, cada actividad, la actitud del personal de a bordo y de los pasajeros, sus propios sentimientos, en resumen: todo. Y siempre desde una perspectiva poco convencional y llena de humor, una mirada sardónica que pone de relieve todos los absurdos del ocio masivo y, por elevación, de la estructura social. En realidad, tengo la impresión de que desde su punto de vista, cualquier evento puede quedar reducido a cenizas, lo cual nos proporciona una lucidez que puede llegar a ser excesiva. DFW es demoledor, pero te hace reír tanto y escribe tan bien que leerlo es una paradójica delicia. Aunque te esté caricaturizando a ti, a tu modo de vida y a todo lo que te rodea.

El barco estaba tan blanco y limpio como si lo hubieran hervido.

El tema fundamental no es sólo el crucero en concreto, sino el concepto mismo de ocio en nuestra sociedad, como un bien de consumo crucial que debemos adquirir a toda costa, para 'compensarnos' de nuestros esfuerzos, porque es algo que 'merecemos'. El turista se convierte así en una especie de niño malcriado y desconsiderado, que siempre exige más y al que se embrutece con un exceso de lujo y 'cuidados'. El resultado según DFW es:

Contemplar desde una gran altura a tus compatriotas caminando como patos con sandalias caras por puertos azotados por la pobreza no es uno de los momentos más divertidos de un Crucero de Lujo 7NC. Hay algo ineludiblemente bovino en un turista americano avanzando como parte de un grupo. Hay cierta placidez codiciosa en ellos. En nosotros, mejor dicho. En puerto nos convertimos automáticamente en Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamikaner. La Gente Fea.

Este turismo de masas es también un agravio a los países más pobres y DFW relata anécdotas sobre los trabajadores que sirven a los turistas en el barco en condiciones de quasi esclavitud.

Quien esté interesado en la obra de DFW pero le dé respeto empezar con obras más extensas, este breve ensayo es una buena puerta de entrada a su filosofía y a su escritura. Es lo que me sucedía a mí - gracias Hy por la recomendación, ha sido una muy buena lectura!

Recommended for: DFW naysayers.

This is gourmet meal with all the essential DFW ingredients: sparkling wit, a wicked & self-deprecatory humour, "self-consciously unself-conscious" irony, probing details but as is typical of pricey meals -- in healthy, small portions, easily digestible!
It is also very lovingly prepared in that the essays & opinion pieces here are heartfelt & personal, thus easily relatable.
I open the first chapter- 'Derivative Sport in Tornado Valley', & am stumped! Tennis again! ( it proved to be my bane in IJ). But this time it's different, I am touched by this wryly poignant account of why, despite a very promising start; the writer couldn't pursue a tennis career. Well, tennis' loss was literature's gain!

The next one, 'E Unibus Pluram', one of DFW's seminal essays; examines the dumbing down of American culture via television where an average American family watches telly for an average of 6hrs per day! Turning viewers into "sweaty, slack-jawed voyers" & how for fiction writers tv can never be a substitute for real life.Television's "mirror hall of illusions is both medicine and poison." The same idea is revisited in 'Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko' in 'Brief Interviews...'.
The essay left me with mixed feelings: the very assumption that fiction writers are getting their material from telly-watching is atrocious!
It's like the Lady of Shalott, cursed to view the world outside only as reflected through an enchanted mirror-- you know it can't last - reality can't only be reflected through a glass surface of any kind; whatever be one's social awkwardness, reality has to be confronted first hand. So that's that.

But the next, long essay 'Getting Away from Already Pretty much Being Away From It All', amply made up for it: it took me back in time to the childhood fairs with their rides & endless food stalls. Of course, it was nothing like the Illinois State Fair that Wallace describes here, piling such minutiae into the narrative that the very sights, sounds & even the smells come alive! His "Native Companion" is a hoot! It's a celebration of community living, ironically though, this "community" itself has subdivisions!

Already in a good mood, I was even more delighted to find that Wallace was a "fanatical follower" of David Lynch! How gratifying to see DFW gushing over Lynch just as we gush over him here!  Says he:

"For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of their weird "irony of the banal"* has affected the way I see and organize the world. I've noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures—flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances."  

Now you know when Wallace tortures his readers by going off at tangents, all those unexplainable strange stories, it's David Lynch's fault! 'Cause true "artists" don't give a damn about what people think about them, they just stay true to their "personal vision".
In a footnote, Wallace even advises men never to date girls with "Lynchian background."!
This opinion piece was so persuasive & detailed that I ended up watching some old favs like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead & some unseen ones, so make sure you have the movies ready 'cause like me you'll also get sidetracked.

The mini cine retrospective over, I come back to the book-- more tennis follows!
I skip this side dish & turn to the dessert: 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' —I must make my husband read this one: he is forever pestering me to join him on a cruise ship to Antarctica or some other such godforsaken place! Imagine the vastness of the ocean & where will you run if you don't quite like the experience? (Remember Polanski's 'Bitter Moon'?).
Can there be something as too much of a good thing? Apparently there is - Wallace's sensitive mind rebels against the micromanagement of his time,where you are not only told that you are going to enjoy the experience but also what your reactions are going to be! There is something touchingly naive about his idealism which expects "a personal touch" in the obsessive housekeeping of his cabin, "a business smile" to reach the eyes!
You know such a temperament is programmed to be unhappy: a mind that puts a premium on integrity in not only itself but in everyone that it comes across!
Nathan "N.R." was right- DFW is there in his writings—here is the man in his own words; how much more up close & personal can you get? Grab the opportunity, grab the book.
I guess the 5* rating says it all, still I'll say- wow just wow!

* 'David Lynch Keeps His Head' - 'An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter". But with 'postmodern' or 'pornographic', Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that's definable only ostensively- i.e. we know it when we see it.'

I used to think I was pretty smart. I did the "gifted" program in elementary school, took advanced classes in high school, went to college, graduated with honors. Watched critically acclaimed films, read critically acclaimed novels, even took in the occasional play. Smart stuff. But mere months after graduation, I was plagued with worry and self-doubt. If I was really so smart, why wasn't I going places? Why did I feel so lost, so aimless, so adrift in adulthood? Why was I just "getting by" and no longer exceeding expectations?

Fact is, once you leave the safe harbor of formal schooling, there simply are no more expectations. There are no more instructors to impress, no more audiences to wow. The carefully constructed world of education turns out to be a lie, a proxy, a hall of mirrors. It's a sickening sensation that can very well drive you crazy, when you realize that you have to go it alone out there, by the seat of your pants, with no road map and no grading scale and no external carrots or sticks to motivate you or keep you on task.

*

This guy. This fucking Wallace guy. This guy who shows up and makes it all look easy, who writes circles—make that rectilinear perimetrics—around the competition. Sharp, precise, entertaining and thought-provoking. Crisp, clean, expansive.

I want to write like that. I want to BE like that.

*

Wallace and I have a lot in common. Both raised in Illinois, both spent time in Arizona. Both burdened with anxiety and substance abuse issues. Both overactive in the mind, always wondering and forever worrying what everything is about.

*

Wallace and I have nothing in common. He made big waves, I made not a splash. He became the voice of a generation, I am but an echo of other people's opinions.

He used his fame to hit on women. He stalked, he threatened, he objectified. I'm happily monogamous (at least, I am now - my ex-wife surely would say otherwise, and she'd be right).

He killed himself, I'm a suicide survivor.

I don't want to live like that. I don't want to BE like that.

He wrote books, but I brought flesh and blood children into this world. He inspired thousands superficially, I have two little ones to raise and provide for and love more deeply than anything. So I can't begrudge him his success, since we really weren't playing at the same game after all - and where our experiences DO overlap, by some accounts I'm the one who's come out ahead.

*

Wallace is a mirror and a cautionary tale. A tremendous talent, to be sure, but also a grave warning that talent isn't everything. An extraordinary success, but a reminder that the greatest success is found in mastering the ordinary. What Wallace does is to examine a small subject in minute, nitpicking detail (tennis, grammar, luxury cruise trips) and expand it to contain the whole universe of human experience. He is good at this, better than anyone else I'm aware of, and this skill is on display here with shocking clarity.

5 stars. Nearly perfect essay-writing from a grossly imperfect man.

Prosa brillante y desternillante la de mi muy admirado David Foster Wallace en este fantástico libro que, entre chascarrillos colmos de ingenio, se acerca de forma profunda y lúcida a las desasosegantes paradojas del hombre moderno.
El autor forma ya parte de los escritores a los que profeso una extraña forma de devoción, porque, al igual que Primo Levi o Thomas Merton, habla de la pobreza infinita del hombre y logra, sin embargo, contrarrestar el doloroso efecto de su discurso con el brillo insuperable de su belleza interior y su inteligencia.
En este libro compruebo (con el mismo asombro que otras veces) cómo Wallace consigue plasmar en papel una radiografía muy mejorada y amplificada de mis propios sentimientos respecto a ciertas situaciones; es como si los rescatase de un remoto almacén común, los desempolvase y luego los adornase con la gracia, viveza y perspicacia que le son propias. De hecho, yo también hice un crucero de lujo hace muchos años, y de la pluma de Wallace descubro que yo también desarrollé un respeto casi reverencial (cuando no amor romántico) por mi camarero, que sentí euforia y náuseas a partes iguales, que la nada primordial del océano me hacía sentir asustada y diminuta y, sobre todo, que quise creerme la “Fantasía Vacacional Suprema” (que consistió en pensar que el lujo y el placer iban a conseguir hacer callar mi parte Infantil, que a día de hoy, a pesar de las arrugas acumuladas, sigue si quedar saciada...).
A golpe de carcajadas, Wallace nos hace recorrer sin excesivos temores un peliagudo itinerario de cuestiones más bien graves, tales como el miedo a la muerte, las crisis de desesperación, la tendencialmente obsesiva necesidad de recibir cuidados y la insaciabilidad del ego. Confieso que no puedo evitar reflexionar a menudo sobre estos asuntos, pero les juro que cuando lo hago no consigo pasármelo bien. Con Wallace es distinto; con él ambas cosas son perfectamente compatibles. No sé cómo lo hace, pero, en mi opinión, quien hablando de lo triste consigue hacerte reír, se merece que lo quieran. Y eso hago.

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"a Kilroyishly surreal quality"


...I fell for DFW in the footnotes.

How was I to know? I don't read footnotes. When I edited a couple of books, I told the contributors, in draconian terms, that if the information wasn't important enough to include in their main text, delete the footnote; if it was, incorporate it into the main text.

Wallace puts many of his best lines, and a lot of himself, in his footnotes. They form a sort of counter-essay, hunkering below and complicating the essay above. When I initially read the book's title essay, true to form, I skipped the footnotes. I was ready to hurl the book after the chess-match description. Repeatedly, Wallace reminds us what a good chess player he is, and offers up the information that he didn't even start playing chess until he was in his late twenties. Apparently, this late start is more genuine than that of the nine-year-old girl who defeats him. Her talent, somehow genetic and mechanical, is lifeless and urged into motion by her hateful stage mother. I wanted to yell, "Oh shut up, man up, and get over it. The little girl beat your pants off." Of course in the footnote, countering Wallace's seemingly insufferable behavior, is the comment "only Deirdre's eyes and nose clear the board's table as she sits across from me, adding a Kilroyishly surreal quality to the humiliation" (326).

This is funny stuff, and Wallace underscores his appreciation for the absurdity in a later footnote: "103 - I've sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking Ping-Pong, I can tell you" (328).

The alternate "footnotes' essay" of the essay entitled "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's..." beats the main essay hands down. As a former, quite crappy, tennis player, I recall watching some of the players he describes, though not Michael Joyce. That ignorance, however, does not lessen the hilarity of footnote no. 18:

Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn't seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche." (224)

And then there's this razor-sharp snapshot of McEnroe, whom I do recall watching, in footnote no. 30:

John McEnroe wasn't all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived--the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad." (230)

OTOH, Wallace's dissection of a moderately revised Ph.D. dissertation in the essay, "Greatly Exaggerated," is the sort of shooting fish in the barrel, beneath his talents' stuff that I decried in my original review below, and the title essay, though now beloved by me, is still riddled with death - from his description of the preternatural cleanliness of the ship, hiding the inevitable decay, to the disturbingly electric blue Caribbean sky.

However, I'm ready to go back to Infinite Jest, with far more loving thoughts toward DFW, a fellow agoraphobe.

...Unfortunately, I can't read the teeny font in his opus, and the print in the footnotes is even teenier. I'm accepting donations for a Kindle DX, 9.7" display, $489.

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original rant

David Foster Wallace may tip me over the brink. 160 or so pages into his opus, IF, I decided that the book was in jest, infinitely, and I wasn't going to participate in the joke. I've just finished the title essay from his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and while I found much of it engaging, like a high wire act, virtuoso performances engage only so long.

I'm trying to determine why DFW elicits so much irritation. He's only 33 when he writes this essay about his cruise experience, but his death is riddled throughout the narrative. I may be succumbing to what Jean-Paul Sartre said about how, once lived. we read a life backwards (I need to look this up - Sartre wrote this more eloquently).

Despite that bit of poignancy, most of the time I'd like to reach through the pages and slap DFW. His view, so often, is from on high. He looks down from the high deck at the tourists disgorging from the ship to see the sights. He takes such pains not to be one of the ridiculous American tourists he mocks, and yet, he's a little ridiculous himself - primarily camped out in Cabin 1009, with the exception of the moments he takes mental snapshots of the "others" as surely as if he used a camera, which he reminds us at least three times, he does not use, the camera being such a touristy icon and all.

Perhaps it's all this prodigious talent being wasted on taking potshots at the inanity of a cruise trip - while his snarky comments are often dead on accurate and occasionally hilarious; these glossy surfaces must have been child's play for him. He mocks the commercial-essay Frank Conroy produces for the cruise ship, but DFW may be providing only the photo-negative.