Oh David. I miss you with a plangency that belies the fact that I never met you, never would have. You were and are and will always be such a serious force in my life.



I've read this two or three times, and a few weeks after DFW died I picked it up again, almost on a whim. I'd been having trouble finding something to sink my teeth into—I rejected Anna Kavan, William Vollmann, and Fellipe Alfau in short order—and I kind of pulled this book without thinking about the timing, refusing to consider myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read all his books before, right? So I should be able to revisit them whenever I want, without feeling like a scenester wannabe.

I didn't remember much about this one, except a weird snippet about playing tennis in a tornado. So try to picture my shock, in the early pages of the very first essay, when I came upon this:

On board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

Cut to me, hair blowing crazy in the wind outside my apartment, with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face.



So, you know, I don't know what to say. It really was very hard for me to get through this reading without feeling like a stupid bandwagon-jumper. It really was very hard not to notice all the despair slyly threaded throughout these essays, intermixed with the jokes, the seriousness, the brilliance. But even while doing all that noticing, I kept second-guessing and scolding myself for overemphasizing something that only now seems true, in retrospect. I mean, if he'd come out of the closet recently instead, everyone would be piecing together "clues" from his oeuvre about his homosexual tendencies, you know?

I'm having trouble explaining this, but I guess I have a serious problem with how the soul-baring-ness of the autobiographical writer leads to this tacit agreement that readers can poke their noses "between the lines" to figure out more than the writer is telling. But then WTF, these things are actually there! Right? I just kept looping myself around and around, not feeling comfortable with anything I thought about anything.

So whatever. This book is ungodly fantastic, the fact that he is gone is so goddamn devastating, the whole thing is beautiful-awful but mostly just fucking awful.



If anyone is still reading or cares, here are some thoughts on the individual essays.

The title essay and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" are spectacular. Hilarious too, which is something we sometimes forget about DFW, given how super serious & intellectual he is.

In "Greatly Exaggerated" he is so fucking smart that I couldn't even read the essay, because I am not, and never will be, his intellectual equal.

"E Unibus Pluram," on the other hand, was incredibly smart but also (for the most part) accessible to us mere mortals, and was incredibly interesting, if sadly a bit dated.

"David Lynch Keeps His Head" was a nice middle ground: incredibly obsessive-nerd-y, but it made me desperately want to watch Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks again.

I only read about half of the Michael Joyce essay because my attention span for tennis (especially its accompanying statistics and arcana) is pretty short.

"Derivative Sports in Tornado Alley" was plaintive and sad and the most 'personal' (maybe?!?!?!) of the essays, and though it was the one that stuck with me the most on my first read of this book, this time I think the images of the bovine herds of fat sweaty Mid-Easterners stuffing their faces with funnel cake and hot dogs at the State Fair will remain in my head for a long while.

God I am so depressed.

For some strange reason back in junior high school we were allowed a brief recess after lunch. The problem here is that there was very little to do during this recess. Here are the three activity choices that I remember:

1. Mill around on the concrete like inmates always do in "the yard" on those prison television shows.
2. Play a game that one of my fellow scholars evidentally invented that involved a mob of guys bouncing a tennis ball off of a wall and trying to nail each other in the testicles with said ball (Uh...yeah...that one always puzzled me too).
3. Play tennis on the courts adjacent to school.

I chose option number three, mainly because several of my buddies fancied themselves as tennis pros in training. Being a gawky, uncoordinated twelve year old and taking up tennis was probably not the best layed plan in hindsight. I also seemed to have anger management issues that only showed up on the court. The only explanation there is that I must have internalized those film clips of John McEnroe throwing one of his famous tantrums and somehow reasoned in my candy-addled kid brain that this was how tennis was supposed to be played.

The final straw came on the day when I got so mad that I hurled my $2.98 racket at the sky in a high arch. The racket went over my opponents and the fence and bounced twice off of the top of it's head in the grass before coming to rest. I still remember the satisfying "wiff wiff wiff" sound that the racket made when I launched it, but GOOD GAWD I can't believe that I did not kill someone. Somewhere between the release and the bounce I suddenly realized that I hated tennis. In fact I loathed the sport with a passion, and that was the end of that.

So what the hell does that story have to do with this book? "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." contains two articles on the subject of tennis, as this sport was evidentally one of Mr. Wallace's youthful passions. I was less than enthused about this fact upon beginning this book, going so far as to think that those articles might even be a deal breaker. Ultimately, I was completely mesmerized by both of these pieces.

This was my first reading of DFW, and this book proved to me that he was a writer of awesome talent and intelligence who could probably tackle the most boring subject matter and find an angle to make the piece insanely interesting. He doesn't so much write about a subject but instead performs an autopsy on it in a very thorough and precise manner while somehow refraining from an overly belabored writing style.

There is also a certain naked honesty contained in these essays. In "David Lynch Keeps His Head", Wallace does not hesitate to lambaste the filmmaker over what could be considered past artistic miscues, yet this piece still made me want to run out and watch a few David Lynch movies for the umpteenth time. DFW does not exclude himself from his own critical eye either. The title piece revolves around a magazine financed luxury cruise trip taken by Wallace where he shares several social faux pas that he commits onboard the ship. These include such things as brushing off the pre-cruise instructions to bring a tux for formal meals and the resulting disdainful looks that he receives from the geriatric guests when he shows up wearing a tuxedo t-shirt along with an unplanned spit-take when he realizes that he has just put caviar in his mouth.

Probably my two favorite essays in this book are "E Unibus Plurum: Television and US Fiction" and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All." "E Unibus..." is probably the best cultural critique of television that I have ever read up to this point. "Getting Away..." explores the phenomenon that is the rural state fair. As someone who has "enjoyed" more than my share of these rural fairs growing up, I can say without a doubt that he completely nailed the whole bizarre spectacle. Now there's some subject matter for your next film, Mr. Lynch.

I'm usually very curmudgeonly in awarding a book that magical fifth star, as my personal perameters dictate that the book must fundamentally change my life or alter my understanding of the world in order to score that elusive star. This book may not have achieved that, but it did explode my previous notions of what could be accomplished in the realm of the non-fiction essay. It is also entertaining as hell. There is yet another reason for the five star rating that is of equally questionable validity...

A long time ago in a writing class far, far away I remember an assigned reading involving two marginal authors discussing the writing game. The more seasoned author shared the insight that writers should always just write what they know, as the reader is merely reading in order to get to know the author better anyway and ultimately every human just yearns for that connection and nothing more. I remember this so vividly because I thought that idea was essentially complete bullshit. "I'm into it for the ideas...man." Now this book has to come along and cause me some serious cognitive dissonance. It's all there: the over-analyzed social awkwardness, the off-kilter jokes, and the observations of common human ritual that can only be achieved by an outsider. I could totally go out for drinks with this guy every night. Of course he would intellectualize me under the table, but I would pick up the tab to cut down on the disparity. Unfortunately, however, that ship has sailed.

Wallace al meglio: l'america in bottiglia

Dopo un deludente "Brevi interviste a uomini schifosi" questo librino rinsalda la mia Wallafilia.

Se "Brevi interviste" m'è sembrato fine a se stesso e autoreferenziale, "Una cosa divertente" è a tratti divertente e paradossale, a tratti analitico/giornalistico, a tratti persino poetico, come nell'arrivabile ultima pagina.

Wallace al suo meglio è in grado di raccontarci la civiltà occidentale nello spazio ristretto di una libretto divertente, è grado di raccontare una storia che va ben al di là delle sue fobie.

Da quel che ho capito, l'aeroporto di Fort Lauderdale per sei giorni alla settimana è un tranquillo aeroporto di media grandezza, e poi il sabato ricorda la caduta di Saigon.

Quattro stelline per un resoconto di viaggio che ha cimentato una mia già chiara convinzione: non metterò mai piede su una nave da crociera. Dello stile di Foster Wallace ho apprezzato sicuramente l'umorismo e la sua capacità di usare il linguaggio per descrivere alcune scene particolari con un umorismo tagliente. Ma certe descrizioni di alcuni partecipanti alla crociere o della bambina prodigio degli scacchi mi hanno fatto un po' storcere il naso.

“So con precisione quanto tempo è passato dall’ultima volta che ogni mio bisogno è stato esaudito senza possibilità di scelta da qualche forza esterna, senza che dovessi farne richiesta o addirittura ammettere di avere alcun bisogno. E anche quella volta galleggiavo nell’acqua, in un liquido salato, e caldo, ma poi nemmeno troppo – e se per caso ero cosciente, sono sicuro che non avevo paura e che mi stavo divertendo un sacco e che avrei spedito cartoline dicendo a chiunque «vorrei che fossi qui».”

E di nuovo non posso che pensare alla costante ossessione di Sylvia Plath, alla sua spasmodica fame di vita e al suo incessante desiderio di tornare strisciando nell'utero materno.
Un libro che mi ha portato dalle risate ad un pianto amaro in poche ore.
Stupendo.

“Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site….We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
‘No one sees the barn,’ he said finally.
A long silence followed.
‘Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.’
He fell silent once more.
People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.
‘We're not here to capture an image. We're here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.’
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.’
Another silence ensued.
‘They are taking pictures of taking pictures,’ he said.”

Wallace quotes this lengthy passage from Don Delillo’s White Noise in his essay on television and the use of metawatching in literature. He goes on to say, “For not only are people watching a barn whose only claim to fame is being an object of watching, but the pop-culture scholar Murray is watching people watch a barn, and his friend Jack is watching Murray watch the watching, and we readers are pretty obviously watching Jack the narrator watch Murray watching, etc. If you leave out the reader, there's a similar regress of recordings of barn and barn-watching.”

Ohje bedauerlicherweise muss ich schon wieder einen sehr berühmten Autor abmontieren - aber dieser Reisebericht tendiert mehr zu schrecklich als zu amüsant.

Was ist Foster Wallace da stilistisch eingefallen?! Grrr - Fußnoten sind dazu da, entweder Quellen zu benennen, oder kurz und knackig noch ganz schnell etwas zu erklären, aber nicht, seitenweise Inhalt der Geschichte zu transportieren. Dies geht sogar so weit, dass teilweise der Plot der Fußnote über 4 Seiten ausgewalzt wird, und man dann wieder zürückblättern muss und das nicht hin und wieder, sondern permanent. Da bekomme ich als Leserin erstens einen Drehwurm und verliere ständig den Faden, so bleibt die Geschichte extrem dekonstruiert. Weiters ist der Autor einmal sogar zu eitel ein Ausrufezeichen nach dem Satz im Text zu setzen, auch das musste dann in die Fußnote - wie widerlich präpotent!!!. Für mich scheint dieses Werk ganz schnell abgespult und unsauber dahingeschlenzt, eine lustlose Auftragsarbeit, wie auch eingangs in der Geschichte geschrieben wird, der Autor hat sich für den Leser nicht mal die Mühe gemacht, gewissse Handlungsstränge in einen richtigen Text einzubauen, sondern sie quasi im Notizstadium belassen.

Auch inhaltlich ist die Anlayse der Heppy Beppy Society und des Mirkokosmos Kreuzfahrtschiff zwar durchaus mit gutem Blick detailgenau durchgeführt, aber was analysiert wird, ist teilwiese so gähnend langweilig und lustlos dass es eben nur schrecklich und nicht amüsant ist. Da wird ausufernd der Werbeprospekt inklusive Einhaltung seiner Versprechungen zerlegt, die Technik des Schiffes, und die Hierarchiestruktur der Bediensteten, aber viel zu wenig das Verhalten der Touristen einer ethnografischen Untersuchung unterzogen, was ich mir eigentlich vorgestellt hätte.

Im Prinzipt tendiert das Werk schon zu 2,5 Punkten aber auf mir sträuben sich tatsächlich alle Nackenhaare hier aufzurunden, weshalb ich es auch unterlasse, ist schließlich mein Account und meine Review. :D

Fazit: Ich hoffe der Autor ist in seinen hochgelobten epischen Werken nicht auch so schlampig und unambitioniert, denn sonst muss ich laut den Untertitel aussprechen nämlich "aber in Zukunft ohne mich!"

A tratti geniale.
Chili di note a pié pagina. E note delle note.
Pieno di informazioni stupendamente inutili e momenti esilaranti.
Scrittura che boh, avercene! [77/100]

Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social commentary and cultural critiques made clear. He could also drill down to subtle human quirks which, though remote, are still recognizable (after he pointed them out). I’m sure his genius extended beyond my comprehension of it, too, especially with his more philosophical musings.** Though one of his goals was to lead readers to “aha” moments of insight, he never talked down to anyone to get there.

The subjects were varied, covering topics like tennis (as a regionally ranked junior player he knew the sport well), television, the Illinois State Fair, literary theory, and cruise ship excursions. You get the feeling he could write about anything, though, and it would all be brilliant. He could vary his tone, too, alternating between professorial, sardonic, insightful, and funny. I guess in popular parlance you’d call him a hipster, but he seemed a little less edgy and a little more caring than others of that ilk. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t even try to categorize such a multifaceted and unique individual.

One passage in the book struck me as particularly good. From what I’ve seen, it was one of his recurring themes. It has to do with irony and irreverence as a rhetorical mode. Turns out, fun as it may be for a time, he views it all as ultimately unfulfilling. With an ironist’s repertoire of criticism and destruction, there’s rarely anything constructive to “replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Consistent with that, in an interview I just read he spoke disparagingly of all the arch, pomo attitude there is these days.

So why did he do it? To be honest I really didn’t read this looking for clues. It’s hard not to think of his fate, though, when he talked so honestly about despair, and fighting the urge to throw himself off the ship that he otherwise wrote so playfully about in the title piece. I suppose depression and bad chemistry were the clinical reasons, but it’s natural to wonder what within his outlook he might have revealed to tip his hand. Did he simply think too much and in increasingly inward ways? Was he too keenly aware of how different he was? Even his friends may not know. What I do know is that they miss him. That includes friends he never met; those he connected with through his works.

*We might also conclude that the essay format is a way to see the curse of his genius, too, with hints of alienation in a world of average intelligence and a hyper-awareness of flaws including his own.

**When an essay jumps right in saying that “In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics,” you know you’re in for a challenge.***

***You get really used to footnotes in a DFW essay. Maybe it’s just the way a really smart person’s mind works—-they can go on for hours with the asides their active noggins flit to, discursively disrupting the linear flow but in interesting ways. You get a lot of long sentences with him, too (I say hoping it's without irony as I flatter him with imitation in yet another nested aside).

Ironico e malinconico.
Le note sono impagabili.

Consistently laugh out loud inducing, heartwarming, thoughtful and sincere, relateable, and difficult to put down. Holistically much better than "Consider the Lobster."

As with “Lobster,” the title essay in this collection was probably my favorite. Since reading while traveling prevented me from writing brief reflections on each piece upon completion, I will use my two hour lay-over in Minneapolis to consider the “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” essay.

First of all, I loved it and repeatedly laughed aloud both with a single booming “HA!” or a more drawn out, nasal “hehehehe”; each of these was then followed by the nudging of my wife and the directive to “read this, read this!”

However, rather than laud the essay ad nauseum, I want to try to convey one thing that bothered me. It obviously didn’t ruin the essay for me, but it just stayed in the back of my mind and…well, bothered me. Wallace’s experiential essay depicts and depends upon his own experience(s) aboard a megacruise. As such, he is the main “character” in the essay and we, the readers, get to see everything only from his perspective. And but so these perspectives are obviously skewed/biased/one man’s opinion/whatever. No complaints yet, especially since one of Wallace’s major strengths is describing his experiences in such a way that the reader can almost always say “Yeah…I know what he’s talking about” or “Ohhhh, I hate those kind of people” etc. et al. My complaint (f.n. that’s not really the right word since dissatisfaction is sort of inherent in the denotation, but it will have to do from here on out) is about the level to which Wallace deliberately shapes himself as a character and (mis)represents (?) his experiences to serve the narrative. I’m not so new to literature that I confound the narrator with the author; however, I guess I am naïve enough to expect an experiential essay’s narrator to be its author. With a little minor deconstruction of this essay, it seems pretty clear David Foster Wallace (author) and David Foster Wallace (narrator) are quite different entities and that the latter is largely a rhetorical conjuration.

To try to explain with general examples: DFW (f.n. from here on, unless otherwise noted, “DFW” will refer to DFW as character/narrator not DFW as author) is carefully constructed to be a semi-bumbling, endearing goof: kind of like Mr. Bean or Pnin. Examples: he wears a dorky Spiderman hat (the exciting story behind which is mentioned only as “there’s a story behind this that I don’t want to get into”), he has a childish fascination with sharks, he wears a tuxedo shirt to a very formal tea party, he’s afraid of getting sucked down the toilet, etc. In addition, DFW has a “fatal flaw” that makes him all the more human. Namely: his semi-agoraphobia limits his ability to confidently interact with those around him. Then there are the other “loveable loser”-type things about him: he can’t shoot a gun at all, he fumbles self-consciously in conversation with the maid (right term?) whom he loves, he's paranoid and undertakes some brief, but hilarious counter-surveillance measures, he loses to a nine year old girl at chess. Could all of this be one hundred percent god’s honest truth? Sure it could. But it just seems too contrived. Portraying DFW in this light makes it easy to ignore some of his very harsh (and cruel) assessments of the ship’s crew and of other passengers; after all, he’s the weak everyman, the underdog whom we can relate to (f.n. to further my theory of this essay as carefully constructed narrative is the fact that David Foster Wallace (author) also goes out of his way to include a villain in his story: the ship’s captain who is unkindly dubbed Dermatitis. (Not to mention that most of the Greek crew are at least antagonists if not insidious enemies.) This gives our hero a slightly persecuted quality and give us, the readers, someone that we can root against…or, at the very least, easily overlook the myriad unkindnesses that our hero levels against his enemies). DFW also is never prepared, sometimes scribbling notes on small napkins with a bleeding highlighter. While this makes him more likeable (f.n. it would be interesting to analyze why this is the case) than the professional reporter always prepared to meticulously jot down every note, it makes his story a little less likely to be completely accurate. Plus, all of the above also makes it easy for the reader not to disdain this character for some “questionable” comments: the ease with which one can look up a woman’s skirt when ascending the stairs, the description of a child (albeit wearing a toupee) as a grotesquerie, and other such stuff.

My Real Question(s!): Does any of this matter? Based on the nature of this essay, does DFW (author) have a greater responsibility to the truth? How much of this essay is completely contrived? Is it more about truthiness than truth? What is truth? Is it just about entertainment? Is he as much of a “sell out” as Frank Conroy who admittedly “prostitute[d] [him]self” when writing his experiential essay about a cruise ship? Or is this just what any writing—fiction, non-fiction, and everything in-between—is all about: writing for a specific audience and shaping your narrative to achieve a purpose? Can one ever be truly objective?

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/H7HqCZikxuA