I feel a strange nervousness writing this review, not because of the fear of castigation (that, I must admit, thrills me), but because I now join the ranks of those who say things like: "over intellectualized diatribe" (this is out of context but still) "He's too clever for me I guess, because I was alienated from the writing." (this is somewhat jaded and sarcastic but still) " I found his writing a bit pretentious, and I just don't get the feeling he's being honest in the essays" (no qualifier) " Too pretentious, too dated, too verbose." - I agree with none of these things and I must admit it worries me that no-one who doesn't like it discusses any of the content much. Now I too will indulge in this to some extent.

The first essay, about youthful tennis exploits and the wind, instantly introduces a warm and personable tone. Tennis doesn't interest me particularly (though Wimbledon is the only sporting event you'll catch me watching any of, other than the world cup, and I couldn't stomach that if it was yearly) and this did nothing to change that but once it was done I was ready to move onwards and upwards (see? summarily dismissed.)

The second essay, on Television, I would say is probably the most interesting in that it is overtly and completely an essay of ideas rather than a piece of reportage. (short fumble with the book to make sure I say something germane) Whilst skipping over the criticisms that others have of this essay, namely that it's dated (what a bastard for engaging with an ever changing present, eh?), I would question the validity of his starting point: that television presents itself as an opportunity for voyeurism. After this he begins to talk about it as a tool to deal with loneliness, a more convincing idea, but I would argue that voyeurism would not give comfort to loneliness (by proffering a false togetherness) so much as imbue the enduring isolation with a feeling of power or purpose. Basically I would say that TV offers another form of (structured) noise which comforts and lulls and distracts whilst voyeurism focuses and distracts (I should know)but I don't - DFW also differentiates between voyeurism and Television watching but only after assuming the voyeuristic aspect is implicit. There were more quibbles with the essay but on many of the major points I would agree and since he articulated his ideas well and it takes a little while to actually put my objections into words I shall move on, but possibly return at a later date.


I'm getting rather wearied with this review for now so I shall simply say that The Illinois state fair essay was not particularly interesting to me and nor was the second tennis essay, though they were written well enough. I shall also leave the essay on literary theory and Hix to be dealt with later (maybe).

The Lynch essay then is where my problems largely lay, perhaps because my interest was fully engaged and I was aware of nearly everything referred to. Since this review is effectively justifying the two star rating i will mainly keep to the negative points about the essay, though the opportunity to read a long David Lynch essay, even one I disagree with, is appreciated. I might as well number my points since they are all glancing blows, I'll skim through the essay so as to be sure to bring up all quibbles in order
1) One of the few things David Lynch has done that I had not seen is 'on the air' which DFW says is terrible, I downloaded it promptly and watched the first episode which I found actually quite hilarious (maybe once you have heard Lynch talk about how silly his sense of humour is you're more forgiving) -in much the same way that he can be funny elsewhere but this time without the overwhelming tense feeling. This first point is not really a criticism, just thought it worth mentioning.
2) The big interpretive fork, as he calls it,for Lost Highway apparently consists of three options (1)literally real within the film (2)Kafkaesque metaphor (3)all hallucination or dream. Now i have firmly entrenched Lynch views and, to be fair to DFW, they are as much informed by the films since Lost Highway as those before but (1) is, of these, the only conceivable option for me, too often (most of the time) Lynch's films are treated as puzzles that must be assembled, or reduced to an accepted base level of reality when they should simply be accepted as whole and true (if accepted at all). The idea that (2) is an alternative reading to (1) is, to me, like saying that you can interpret (thinking of workable popular film example) the large sections of frolicking with animated creatures in Mary Poppins as either literally true or as a metaphor for the influence that children's credulity and creativity can have on adults (got a bad one). I essentially think it's insulting to suggest that (2) is anything other than an interpretation, whereas (1) is the truth. (Coherence rapidly fading.) (3) is not even worth considering, DFW says as much himself but it seems silly to even mention it you may as well add (4)it's all a film.
3)losing energy now so i will simply state that i disagree with his definition of Lynchian, i shall return to this. (I may now be skipping points because i have decided not to refer to the book but just briefly mention the things I can remember)
4) I never read Richard Pryor's appearance in Lost Highway as exploitative or designed to make you think of him in his prime. I was aware he had MS, he was in the film, his character owned a Garage which I didn't find inconceivable and I didn't find it painful to watch (was I unfeeling?).
5) He accuses people of refusing to distinguish between Lynch and his films but then goes on to refer to him as 'creepy' several times. He also says he wouldn't want to be his friend several times, leading me to suspect he was rebuffed. That's a joke but I do think
saying it more than once was a bit unnecessary
6)(and last for now) His whole thing about Lynch using his wife's painting in the film, deeming it strange (possibly just 'creepy' again). Partly because he suspects it might be about their daughter (I don't think it is but I don't really think it's relevant). This seems rather naive to me, for one the little poem (or suchlike) featured in it is quite funny, if also vaguely disturbing, and he also seems to fail to grasp that the woman was married to David Lynch, was an artist and probably (judging by the poem-thing) shared a lot of Lynch's sensibilities - making her work just a fitting thing to add to the mood, rather than a violation of a trust or a perverse use of personal totems - Lynch happens to have things that work in Lynch films as props.


This may all seem rather flimsy and like i can't stand any criticism of Lynch, I wouldn't say that's true I just happen to disagree with all of the above things.

The last essay was once again the type of thing that would be a veritable treat if come upon in a magazine but in the holy house of a book I didn't think it was hugely insightful or informative (it was pretty informative about the cruise ship and some of the people but nothing that I felt the need the dwell on afterwards). Oh, and was I the only one disappointed (if simultaneously relieved) that when he talked about going to play ping-pong on deck and then brought up the high winds he didn't bring it all full circle and talk about his triumph due to his tennis training in Illinois ?

In conclusion, he seems a pleasant fellow but I seem to have missed much of the humour and the huge-range of ideas, possibly i simply read about their presence too much. It was funny to the extent that if it was being related first hand to you you might, very often, smile gapingly and nod your head but I only ever laughed when he said he met 2 people called Balloon.

I will return to this review to cover the other essays and make it more level headed and clear.

DFW's classic essay (well, it's more like a lengthy reportage) about cruise ship tourism which analyzes the pathology of this type of vacationer before it was standard to find cruises cringe.

chulardo. me gustaría volver a leérmelo pero sin parar en las notas de autor para ver si cambia en algo (curiosidad, sin más). fomo terrible, necesito estar en un crucero y no pasármelo bien

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a brilliant collection of "essays and arguments". This collection was published in 1997 exactly one year after Infinite Jest and is comprised of articles previously published from 1990 to 1996 in several different publications. His topics are tennis, television, a state fair, literary theory, David Lynch, and a luxury cruise. It doesn't matter if you are especially interested in these things or not, because you will be!

1. Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (1990)
http://www.keenzo.com/showproduct.asp... [Harper's, "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes", 1992.]

Wallace writes that he was "a pretty untalented tennis player" and "could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket." But, "I was at my very best in bad conditions." And then he goes on to describe those bad conditions in detail.

2. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1990) http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf [The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993.]

"...if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television..."

3. Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All (1993) [Harper's, "Ticket to the Fair", 1994.]

Observations at the Illinois state fair.

"I suspect that part of the self-conscious-community thing here has to do with space. Rural Midwesterners live surrounded by unpopulated land, marooned in a space whose emptiness starts to become both physical and spiritual. It is not just people you get lonely for. You're alienated from the very space around you, in a way, because out here the land's less an environment than a commodity. The land's basically a factory. You live in the same factory you work in. You spend an enormous amount of time with the land, but you're still alienated from it in some way. It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it."

4. Greatly Exaggerated (1992) [Harvard Book Review, 1992].

A review of Morte d' Author: An Autopsy by H. L. Hix, which, surprise, looks at the "death of the author" argument.

"For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane. As William (anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and 'this "anonymity" may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.' "

5. David Lynch keeps his head (1995) http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere... [Premiere, 1996.]

On the set of Lost Highway; a profile of Lynch.

"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." And "For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of this 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.""

6. Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness (1995) http://www.esquire.com/features/sport... [Esquire, "The String Theory", 1996.]

Yay! more tennis.

"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that's three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables—for example, a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent's own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he's sent you to hit are factored in. No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange—smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e. by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art".


7. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again [Harper's , "Shipping Out", 1996.]

Wallace goes on a cruise and discovers that "there is something about a mass-market luxury cruise that's unbearably sad."

One of his acquaintances on board is a spoiled teen named Mona, who has the "tiny delicate pale unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll". Could this be her?
http://youtu.be/vN2WzQzxuoA?t=31s

These essays are fun, sad, tender, snarky, intellectual, strange, ordinary. Flawed and perfect. Always entertaining, and always human.

By the end of this book, I had the same feeling that David Foster Wallace had about cruise ships in the title essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing, I’ll Never Do Again.” On the surface, AMAZING, but by the end, just wanted to get out.

Wallace writes dazzling, brilliant sentences, paragraphs, pages. Yet I had the same problem with all of these essays. I started each one being hugely impressed, but as I continued, felt clobbered, smothered, exhausted by the over-the-top excess of his verbiage. And then I was compelled to skim until I was struck by another dazzling paragraph. I don’t know how to rate this book since my experience ranged from 1 star to 5 stars. This was not a mediocre collection but I’m giving it 3 stars.

I've read one DFW book - The Broom of the System - and I didn't much care for it. (Though I recently read that the author himself didn't like that one, so - vindication!) Imagine my amazement at how much I enjoyed this collection of essays. There's some clever and insightful commentary here. Wallace even managed to make a subject I have zero interest in - tennis - fascinating. (Well, truthfully, by the second article on the sport, my fascination was dwindling.)

Amid the forced joviality of a cruise ship vacation, Wallace notices There is something bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity to them. Us, rather.

and that

Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I've decided; their legs are hairless in a way that's creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly in the calves. It's just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks?

My favorite essay detailed a visit to the Illinois State Fair where Wallace was less than impressed by the carny folk. Here he brings on the snark big time:

The operator's 24 and from Bee Branch Arkansas, and has an earring and a huge tattoo of a motorcycle w/ naked lady on his triceps. He's been at this gig five years, touring with this one here same company here.

And:

All the carny-game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying "Testing" and reciting their pitches' lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: "You got to get it up to get it in"; "Take it out and lay 'er down, only a dollar"; "Make it stand up. Two dollars five chances. Make it stand up." In the booths, rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet like game put out to cure. One barker's testing his mike by saying "Testes." It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here, and there's already a spoiled garbagey smell.

Hmm . . . some things are best experienced through the pages of a book. So very glad he's done these "fun" things so I won't ever have to do them. Though, I could actually go for a funnel cake right now.

I may have to give this man's fiction another go.

I'm bewitched by this glorious magenta cover with yellow starfish and the peculiarly flattened and shaped white font. I don't know why it is, but whenever I purchase the British edition of a book, inevitably I aesthetically prefer its differing cover artwork, layout, colour scheme, blurb text—the whole canoodle is just presented to this set of timeworn eyes in a more attractive package than what is offered from North American publishing houses. Not to mention that they generally even smell better—and if you are one of those weirdos who doesn't sniff your book's pages, well, I'm sure I won't be the first person to inform you that you are missing out on an integral component of the entire reading experience. Bury that nose, Jack.

I read the first essay n  Derivative Sport in Tornado Alleyn this morning while the fog of sleep was slowly dissipating from my brain—it was a little meatier fare than I had initially expected. Gorgeous opening paragraph, though, ending in the following wonderfully etched phrase that immediately informed me I would need to brew myself up some coffee: The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play. Then a very nice essay reflecting upon DFW's childhood amidst the corn-rich, lush black earth of the Illinois segment of the fertile American midwest, told through his formative years as a junior tennis player and framed with the mathematical boundaries of the playing court and the differentiating vectors of the omnipresent flavors of wind that live out their rich aerial life over these flat and fecund fields. Somewhat difficult in DFW's uniquely readable style that forces your mind into a slightly off-kilter rhythm, and with that humorous wit splayed throughout his self-deprecating description of his usage of an enviro-mathematical understanding of the elements—that sky dervish wind most of all—as an integral component of his tennis game, making an ally out of what bedeviled and frustrated his more talented opponents. It gains in power as it moves through its short textual life, ending with a brilliantly conceived depiction of an Alley tornado—or pseudo-tornado—that descended one day, flattening the fields like a titanic, invisible hand brutally caressing its verdant earthly lover. DFW's description of his being lifted from pursuit of the neon tennis ball, overtaking it and then, together with his playing partner and friend Gil Antitoi, being waffle-ironed into the chain-link fence in Warner Brothers fashion, makes for a pitch-perfect ending.

It also took me somewhat longer to finish n  E Unibus Pluramn than I had originally anticipated. As a fiction writer—albeit one whose work has an audience of Me, Myself, and I—I can immediately locate myself in DFW's opening description of that kind; and his commiserative outlining of what constitutes a lonely person cuts through in can-opener fashion to expose the roots of self-isolation within awareness using but a few lines of simple truth. This is one of those reading experiences that assembles myriad ideas and thoughts and analyses which one has previously encountered from different sources and writers and coheres them into a whole that is profound, which unfolds with the inevitable logic of a sunrise and casts a new light upon the shadowy world that lies before it. In addition to instilling in me a renewed avowal to tackle DeLillo's White Noise, I thought that his argument was firmly constructed: a walk-through of the way in which the Televisual has co-opted the postmodernist usage of irony, the absurd, ridicule, and self-awareness and managed to inoculate itself from the effects of such criticisms; how this post-postmodernist revolt against the revolution was a logical and foreseeable progression from the literary and artistic tropes of modernism; that one of these linkages proceeds through the cultural and existential implications of mass-communication technologies in which the evolution is from individuals comforted with the illusion of being immersed within the communal masses to that of said masses becoming individualized as unique—and uniquely superior—personalities ironically aware of the sublimating deceptions of the former state but oblivious at the important levels as to the subtle changes at work within the latter, including the immersion of the personality inside the fantasy of the Televisual screen; and that this irony, noninvolvement, and ridicule, whilst entertaining and amusing as put into action by both the Televisual and the literary authors who are endeavoring to undermine it, is ultimately a despairing and stagnant strategy whose end result seems only to be a paralysis towards societal changes. Is the answer to be found in a new generation of young writers willing to commit, to risk the backlash of scorn and mockery for penning characters with ideals and beliefs and writing about them sincerely? A backing away from the Jon Stewartization of liberal news into liberal entertainment, from knowing winks and Geddit?Geddit! nods? I think it's a step in the right direction. But it will be very difficult: in an essay in which he presented the thesis outlined above, he was unable to refrain from indulging in the same ironic awareness, the same refusal to fully commit to a claim (his two or three asides that he wasn't trying to say that television is this or the industry that), and the same (gentle) ridicule, especially present in the tweaking of George Gilder's breathless conservo-libertarian technophilia towards the end of the essay, a subtle choice by DFW, made—and acknowledged afterwards—in order to strengthen his textual argument: that this postmodernist technique has become so prevalent that even an author like this one, aware of its allure, finds it exceedingly difficult to break away from its pervasive influence. A very worthwhile essay, one which I am glad to have finally read and which, it seems to me, has only become more relevant in this new century.

At first glance, n  Greatly Exaggeratedn doesn't strike one as the kind of essay that would appeal to very many reader's tastes, being a relatively brief review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy, the commercial print of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted by the enchantingly named H. L. Hix, whom Wallace describes as appearing to have arrived at about the ripe old age of twelve according to the jacket photo. Hix had positioned himself as an adjudicator for the estranged and bifurcated camps of the rather turgid world of literary criticism: the predominantly continental Pro-Death gang—holding the author to be an effect of the text—and the principally Anglo-American Anti-Death crowd, who deem the author to be the cause. I've never taken a university course in my life, nor read any books about literary theory—which, come to think of it, might go a ways towards explaining the content and style of my Goodreads reviews—and what little I've come across describing the strangled arguments of these Poststructuralist and New Critical positions has struck me as labyrinthine and rather immaterial—though Jeff Goldstein, of the US conservative blog Protein Wisdom, had written some very interesting and clarifying posts—before he suffered a meltdown he has never fully recovered from—arguing for the Intentionalist point-of-view. DFW, in the space of a mere eight pages, stakes the positions of the various camps, the combinatory attempt by Hix to reconcile these bickering critical standpoints, delivers a good number of enlightening lines and amusing digs about the entire affair, and closes with a quote from William Gass that seems particularly apropos. Typical to my experience so far with this book of essays, Wallace possesses the arrhythmic ability to switch on a dime from easy, bantering prose to one laden with unfamiliar and daunting words that block the stream and hobble one's pace, jarring the reader out of his comfort zone and forcing him to regroup and concentrate anew upon what Wallace is saying. It can sometimes make for a slower reading experience, but, ultimately, one more enriching.

n  Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Argle-Bargle-Too-Long-To-Typen is my favorite essay thus far. I truly love the manner in which DFW writes about tennis, the combination of detached observation, passionate advocacy, breezy and witty analogy, and acute deconstruction of what is taking place both on and off the court that he brings to the task—and the fact that he once attained the ranking of 17th as a junior within the Midwest Division gives him an insider's knowledge of the mechanics of the game—the requisite functional computation of angles and tactics on the run whilst dealing with all of the mental and physical pressures placed upon and within the human frame in trying to chase down and whack a tangerine-sized ball and dealing with an opponent skilled in the same conscious and unconscious calculations and reactions in pursuit of the same seamed neon spheroid—that only adds depth and veracity to his reportage. When Wallace categorically states that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is I admit to full agreement—allowing myself, of course, the hedge of declaring that it shares that summit with ice hockey and football (soccer to us North American philistines); but the latter two are team games, and as far as solo sporting endeavors are concerned, tennis is firmly placed at the aesthetic acme. It was Wallace, after all, who described Roger Federer's mesmerizingly beautiful forehand as a great liquid whip, which is of such an apt, exquisite perfection that it will forever spring to mind when I spy the Mighty Fed cracking winners. Wallace's awe and appreciation of the power and grace, the speed and dexterity, the patience and endurance that intertwine within the world-class tennis professional shine through whenever he writes about tennis, and especially in this essay, in which the then-79th-ranked-and-22-years-old American Michael Joyce, a sturdy, prematurely-balding power baseliner, built in the mold of Agassi—whom DFW loathed—serves as the locus for Wallace's musings about the action underway during the 1995 Canada Masters in Montréal, with a particular focus upon the Qualifying Tournament that preceded the main event, a struggle between sixty-four pros without sufficient ranking to guarantee entry to receive one of the eight available qualifier placements. The few niggardly quibbles I had—in describing the career arc of singles' journeyman Jakob Hlasek, he entirely omitted the latter's fine results in doubles tennis, in which he won the 1992 French Open and reached four other Grand Slam semifinals; his unawareness that each year Toronto and Montréal swap locations for the ATP Men's and WTA Women's events respectively; his much-too-harsh condemnation of John McEnroe becoming a tennis color commentator—are minor ones indeed; this is a wonderfully written tour of the world of men's tennis circa 1995. His descriptions of the tour's players are spot-on and brilliant; his relation of the tawdriness and excitement of the event amusingly excellent; his understanding and analysis of the type of psyches required, the drive of both parent and child to produce such a sleek, athletic automaton, both deep and convincing; his details of the peripatetic lifestyle, the challenges and chill lonelinesses of the low-paid, struggling tennis would-be-stars commiserative and informatory; and his assessment of the newly-emergent and -dominant style of the Power Baseliner—which, by 2004, had effectively eliminated the serve-and-volley game, that of personal favorites such as Sampras, McEnroe, Ivanisevic, Becker, and Edberg, from professional tennis—absolutely nails it, especially his perceptive observation of it as awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. Preach it, brother.

DFW, what’s not to like? Zeven heerlijk hilarische, lang uitgesponnen essays, in een taal die zo rijk is dat je er letterlijk van gaat duizelen en nagenoeg elke zin traag voor een tweede keer leest om zeker te zijn dat je alles goed meehebt en langzaam kan laten indringen. Onvergetelijk en onvergelijkbaar.

Io e DFW non ci siamo piaciuti. C'est la vie...

[4.5]

Questo libro mi ha fatto MORIRE dalle risate.
Esilarante.

*A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again*

This is not much of a review, but rather me jotting down some of my thoughts on the titular essay.

It’s probably strange that when I read this essay, what I felt was a lot of sadness and grief. Even when I chuckled, the sadness lurkded somewhere in my unconsciousness.

I sometimes feel awfully embarrassed by how much emotion I experience when I read. In this instance, it’s a freaking essay about a luxury cruise that I was reading, not some tear-jerking work of fiction (which rarely manages to induce any tears in me if there is heavy-handed emotional manipulation). This time, I actually felt embarrassed for the embarrassment, too, as I once promised myself that I would stop feeling bad or embarrassed about my abundant emotions.
Now I do wonder if that’s one of the reasons I like DFW so much. You see, I do get his self-consciousness (in this particular essay e.g., the part about ordering cabin service, the part about being perceived as one of the “bovine” American tourists, etc.).

I started feeling sad after I read his discussion on despair and his association of the ocean with dread and death (the part he predicted would be cut by the editor).

“There is something about a mass-market luxury cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: 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.”

I mean, this is probably one of the saddest things I have ever read, especially considering how DFW ended his own life.

Then I felt sadder realizing how much he must have craved authenticity and sincerity, and how the lack of it caused him despair (e.g., the Frank Conroy essaymercial and the “badness” in its deceptive placement, the “pampering” from the cruise staff and its lack of genuine care).
* The essaymercial part reminds me of the political pundits or certain pseudointellectuals,who under the pretence of disseminating opinions, are actually running a business. And the badness of such lies cannot be underestimated. It also causes despair.

Another thing that stood out for me was how alienated he must have felt during the whole ordeal. (Yes, I am using the word “ordeal.” When even the flushing of the toilet seemed so sinister and caused existential dread, it can’t be anything other than an ordeal.) He remained an outsider and observer, the only one seeing through the infantilizing farce in a crowd of vacationers; he alone didn’t have a camera. How did it feel to be in his shoes on that ship? Or how did it feel to be *him*, experiencing alienation and existential dread at levels regular people could not begin to comprehend?
Yes, thinking about that also made me sad.

I loved reading this essay, despite how sad it made me feel. I still feel the same way as when I read Infinite Jest; reading DFW is like listening to a beloved friend talk, and I’d listen to this friend talk about just anything.

Oh and of course, I, someone who has never really considered going on cruises, will never go on cruises, however luxurious, after this essay.

*E UNIBUS PLURAM television and U.S. fiction *
DFW starts his essay by examining fictional writers’ nature as watchers and observers (voyeurs), who generally hate to be watched themselves , and TV seems to be great in that it does a lot of “ predatory research “ for them and they can remain watchers in front of TV. though watching TV is different than the “voyeurism” ( loved this discussion:
“This self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the real door to TV’s whole mirror-hall of illusions, and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.”)
It then goes on to discuss the futility of the current criticism of TV (“What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it.”, “Those of us born in, say, the ’60s were trained by television to look where it pointed, usually at versions of “real life” made prettier, sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.”)
The next section talks about Metafiction and TV : “the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious irony.”
(Some quotes that I particularly loved from this section:
“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.”
“Despite the unquestioned assumption on the part of pop-culture critics that television’s poor old Audience, deep down, “craves novelty,” all available evidence suggests, rather, that the Audience really craves sameness but thinks, deep down, that it ought to crave novelty. “
“Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.”)
The discussion then goes to the pop imagery in fiction. Loved the quote and analysis of White Noise.
(“The use of Low references in a lot of today’s High literary fiction, on the other hand, serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so “comment” on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.”)
The final sections on image-fiction or post-postmodernism and irony are the part I like and resonate with the most ( though tbh I liked all of what he wrote and I probably highlighted 1/3 of the 60 page essay )
(“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”)
I mostly agreed on his stance on irony, however, what really resonated with me the most is the following part:
“Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”
“What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second answer to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.”
This reminds me of some of the discussions I had with friends after watching the movie The Lobster byYorgos Lanthimos,, which I consider a (primarily) metaphor of the tyranny of the convention and the establishment as well as that of the anti-establishment/ the rebellion ( once it reaches a certain point it becomes “anti-establishment as the establishment” and can be as oppressive). We see it too often in artistic movements: the once avant- guard would inevitably become the old school that stifles.
“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.”
All this also reminds me of Win Wenders essay where he considers Wyeth a "radical" for defending realism when it was out of fashion as well as my own penchant for the artists who do their own thing and stay out of the conventions/ rebellions of the day.
( I typed this up sitting at an airport, it probably doesn’t even make sense, but I need to get it off my chest so the thoughts won’t haunt me during my flight lol)

* Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All*
Quote:
“Not so in the rural Midwest. Here you’re pretty much Away all the time. The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction. Even in comparatively citified Springfield, see how much farther apart the homes are, how broad the yards—compare with Boston or Philly. Here a seat to yourself on all public transport; parks the size of airports; rush hour a three-beat pause at a stop sign. And the farms themselves are huge, silent, mostly vacant space: you can’t see your neighbor. Thus the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight- toward. Thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd. To see something besides land and corn and satellite TV and your wife’s face. Crowds out here are a kind of adult nightlight. Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event. High school football, church social, Little League, parades, Bingo, market day, State Fair. All very big, very deep deals. Something in a Mid-westerner sort of actuates at a Public Event. You can see it here. The faces in this sea of faces are like the faces of children released from their rooms. Governor Edgar’s state spirit rhetoric at the Main Gate’s ribbon rings true. The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us. The proud displays and the paths between them and the special-treat booths along the paths are less important than the greater-than-sum We that trudge elbow to elbow, pushing strollers and engaging in sensuous trade, expending months of stored-up attention. A neat inversion of the East-Coast’s summer withdrawal. God only knows what the West Coast’s like.”

* David Lynch Keeps His Head*

Really loved essay. David Lynch has been talked about a lot and several documentaries have been made about him/his art, however I still find DFW’s writing refreshing.
I might add more about this essay later, however, for now I want to say that I find this bit extremely interesting:
“For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this 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.”
I find it interesting not only because I often times feel this way too at bus terminals ( not limited to those hours stated here though), but also because I have seen his way of “ organizing the world “ at work in his other essays in this collection and of course in Infinite Jest.

This summer I got this book from the library. I started on the cruise ship story and soon realized I would want my very own copy to dogear, underline, and do other dirty booknerd things to.

David Foster Wallace, you are (were) genius! I think I may be in love with you! I love your footnotes- footnotes that range from a simple "duh!" or "!" to 2 page long footnotes that have footnotes themselves. Not a lot of authors could get away with that, but you, my love, can.
Could.
Did.
Whatever.

As I stated, the first part of this book I read was "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do again". What a delectable read! Your gift for detail - so rich, crisp, clear, hilarious, delicious, repulsive, INCREDIBLE! I'm so smitten with you it's unbelievable. I'd leave my husband for you! (1)

I never in my days wanted to go to a state fair, but I willingly went with you in this book and was amazed. Without your guidance through the fairgrounds, I would have never gone. And without stepping foot there, I could smell the livestock, the sweaty masses of people, the greasy food. Your detail rocks my world. Your amazing observations... you make me tingle! And I enjoyed the hell out of my trip to the fair. Thank you.

I could kiss you, DFW! (2) Instead, I'll read everything of yours I can get my hands on! Then, I'll push it on any of my friends and family until they are sick of me raving about you! And, once I have read everything you wrote I'll read them again! and again! (3)

Yet, in all these stories there's this underlying stench of depression and loneliness that truly breaks my heart. Maybe, having been visited by the black cloud of depression myself, I "feel" you more. (4)

I'm so very sorry you left the world.

I'm so very glad you left us with something amazing.


(1) only if my husband left me first (1a)
(1a) and if you weren't dead.
(2) but I can't because you are dead, you sonofabitch!
(3) because your punk ass had to commit suicide and there will be no more DFW stuff out there, you jerk! (3a)
(3a) I find this depressing as hell, thank you very much! (3b)
(3b) Not because you care, David Foster Wallace, because you are dead. (3c)
(3c) Now I'm mad at you! (3d)
(3d) But I still love you.
(4) Oh, and feel you I would... if you were still breathing!