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

All texts contained in Der Spaß an der Sache (the complete essays translated into German).

Tutti sappiamo di cosa parla questo libro, ovvero dell'agorafobia e delle pare mentali di David Foster Wallace alle prese con uno dei non-luoghi più strani di sempre: una nave da crociera!
Ma non tutti sanno che il titolo originale di questo reportage è "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" ovvero "Una cosa APPARENTEMENTE divertente che non farò mai più".
Perché mai è sparito questo avverbio nella versione italiana?
L'ho capito a fine lettura.
Ebbene sì, il nostro David Foster Wallace, sotto sotto, si è divertito e non apparentemente!
Ma non è un divertimento legato agli svaghi organizzati proposti a bordo della nave, è piuttosto un divertimento amaro, sarcastico, generato dall'osservazione.
Quel divertimento un po' cringe che ti assale quando ti ritrovi a sorridere dei tuoi simili e al contempo ti vergogni che siano appunto dei tuoi simili.
Una sensazione che a un certo punto si acuisce e subisce un capovolgimento di prospettiva quando DFW per dovere di cronaca decide di partecipare ad alcune attività e da osservatore diventa osservato, da giudice diventa giudicato...
Un sentirsi fuori posto che fa sorridere e rabbrividire allo stesso tempo.
Ed ecco che il titolo nella sua versione italiana assume un significato particolare, ironico, caustico.
Ma l'altra faccia della medaglia è che le aspettative che crea questo titolo privo di avverbio vengono parzialmente disattese.
Il libro è divertente sì, ma a modo suo.
Non aspettatevi grasse risate, ecco.
Io quell'APPARENTEMENTE, ad essere onesti, l'avrei lasciato.
In definitiva il libro in sé non mi è dispiaciuto ma DFW ha scritto di meglio!

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

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

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

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

David, you will be sorely missed.

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.

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.

alla fine se ne esce sempre arricchiti

Un libro di Wallace che forse può essere definito una “raccolta di saggi”, anche se questa asettica classificazione crea la falsa aspettativa di dotte disquisizioni povere di fantasia e non rende giustizia alla sequenza quasi ininterrotta di illuminazioni e suggestioni che si susseguono nelle sue pagine.

Io sono arrivato tardi a Wallace (ma sto recuperando): in tanti hanno già osservato che, di qualunque argomento scriva, l’autore riesce sempre a suscitare l’interesse del lettore, affermazione che sottoscrivo anche se preciserei che ciò avviene “nella peggiore delle ipotesi”; perché di solito, e qui ne abbiamo abbondanti esempi, oltre all’interesse vengono stimolati il sense of humour, l’ammirazione per la capacità di analisi, la cultura, lo spirito di osservazione: insomma, per farla breve, alla fine se ne esce sempre arricchiti, riconoscenti e, in qualche modo che non so spiegare, migliori, con una massa di annotazioni, di desideri di approfondire gli argomenti (rivedere il film di Lynch, capire cos’è la Fiera dell’Illinois, vedere quel match di tennis…) e, immancabile, la voglia di ricominciare da pagina 1.

I 6 chiamiamoli-saggi non sono omogenei nella loro struttura: “Invadenti evasioni” che descrive la visita alla Fiera dell’Illinois è quello che maggiormente si avvicina allo stile dell’esilarante cronaca di una crociera pubblicata in Italia a parte, “Una cosa divertente che non farò più”, che in originale faceva parte (e dava il titolo) a questa raccolta. Il pezzo sul set di David Lynch invece è un saggio di uno spessore tale da fare arrossire gran parte della critica cinematografica contemporanea (che si sia o meno un fan del regista di Blue Velvet).

Il saggio “E unibus pluram”, sul rapporto fra la tv e il suo pubblico, che probabilmente al tempo dell’uscita della raccolta era la pietra portante di quest’opera per il livello di approfondimento del tema, mi è tuttavia sembrato quello che più ha risentito del passare degli anni (e anche dell’angolazione all-american sia dell’analisi che dei riferimenti esemplificativi che Wallace porta in quantità); in altri termini mi è parso un po’ datato…

E poi ci sono i due pezzi sul tennis che sono davvero eccellenti (anche se a me questo sport non ha mai destato alcun interesse) e in cui la capacità descrittiva e analitica dell’autore raggiunge i suoi vertici.

L’osservazione ad esempio (la prima che mi viene in mente…) che il tennista M.Joyce, n.79 del ranking, che Wallace ha occasione di frequentare da vicino, “nella macchina di solito guarda fisso davanti a sé come un pendolare”, è di per sé nulla più di una divertente similitudine quasi buttata lì; però sottende sia la constatazione del prosciugamento esistenziale di tutti i pendolari sia, a uno strato ancora sottostante, la realtà di questi ammirati professionisti che vivono in uno stato semi-catatonico tale da non percepire neppure il paesaggio circostante al percorso fra l’hotel, l’aereoporto e i campi da tennis…

Più avanti W. analizza in modo più approfondito questo concetto arrivando alla conclusione che “…la radicale compressione della sua personalità gli ha permesso di praticare un’arte a un livello di trascendenza” e che Joyce “…è un uomo completo anche se in una maniera grottescamente limitata”

Considerazione normalmente interessante.

Il punto è che in questo libro ve ne sono letteralmente migliaia!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This, my first experience reading David Foster Wallace, disabused me of a few prejudices that in retrospect seem shamefully naive, one of which being that objects of the American Media Hype Machine are necessarily mediocre. I believed that there had to be something vapid or cheap or sensationalist about things or persons that become loci of the intellectual-creative “next-voice-of-our-generation” ballyhoo. It’s tough not to be cynical. The whole zeitgeist of our times is cynicism, aloofness, a disdain of sensitivity bordering on neurosis (and I mean a healthy, cultured sensitivity, one nurtured in restraint and consideration and taste, not an emo-ish “horticulturally cultivated five o’clock shadow thick glasses staring pensively over a latte and word document always always in public in sight of the pretty girls” sensitivity). Fight Clubs, Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Geniuses, American Psychos,... if these are the voices of our times let me be an anachronism. In my narrow-mindedness, I lumped DFW in with these other bright young things, figuring he was another spoiled product of moneyed, media-saturated, hipper-than-thou America, wielding an a priori standoffishness as crutch and sword. It’s what I’d come to expect of popular entertainment as a whole. I don’t mean Harry Potter/Girl with the X tattoo lit. (stuff that is immensely popular but actually has redeeming factors and is based in a solid tradition of plot, earnest character development, involved drama, etc.), but stuff that was supposed to represent the intellectual undercurrents of what it is to be a living mind in America in the early twenty-first century; you know, edgy stuff. McSweeney’s has some funny t-shirts, but in the end all the irony can be fucking despairing. Contrived coolness, ultraviolence representing god knows what, involuted sexual obsessions as supposed comment on middle-class repression and ennui or some nonsense, solipsistic unearned first-person memoiric explorations of “what-am-I-in-this-crazy-work-a-day-world”- it keeps on piling up to a vomitous apogee, and I find myself saying “fuck it” and reading Proust or Walser or Pessoa or Flaubert just so I can fucking breath, just to feel someone expressing something honest and with an unmanufactured posture.

Enter DFW. I can’t comment on Infinite Jest (a book for another day, when I again have surplus hours to give to a tome, hopefully soon), but A Supposedly Fun Thing... cuts through all of my above complaints like a glowingly-hot knife through butter. It has come to be the ubiquitous descriptor of Wallace, that he was “a decent guy”, and from what I can glean from this collection of essays the shoe fits (and is there really a higher compliment?)... but in addition to his essential decency (involving empathy, kindness, a bullshit detector always set on 11, the keenest eye for a telling detail I’ve encountered in books of my times), it is the way he subsumes the alienating, cheapening aspects of our culture into his vast intellect, deconstructs them into their vital parts, analyzes their components, and restructures them into a completely non-ironic, funny-as-hell, and enlightening statement about what it is to be a human being. And my god, the humor in this book! Never before have I bitten my lip to bleeding so many times attempting to restrain outright bursts of mad laughter reading this in public. And it’s consistent. And underneath the laughter is that certain lattice within modern humor at its best form (and I’m thinking of like Louis CK here, or Mitch Hedberg, or Bill Hicks) where the laughter is ringing above a potential abyss, and that humor and the transformation of creeping despair into something luminous are the only ways of redeeming contemporary things and ideas from utter degradation and fitting them back into the lineage of a culture of thorough humanist examination. Calling DFW “the last humanist” is tempting, but then I’d be falling into the same traps of cynicism these essays made me believe it is possible to free ourselves from.

Good readers go into books looking for an honest, unique interpretation of some facet of genuine experience; over the years I have found myself searching farther back into other cultures and other eras very distant from mine for that kind of fulfilling, rounded perspective. What A Supposedly Fun Thing... has shown me is that while it is still an essential component of a dedicated humanist to understand the history of thought and expression, especially in the face of the dulling, warping aspects of rudderless progress and an increasingly fragmented reality, that there are outposts of sincerity, of good-nature, representatives of the “decent guys” of the creative temperament, hard at work, chewing on the problems that haunt us, me, you, this very day, dealing with the stuff of our every days in terms that elevate them above the every day (DFW, in this book alone, elevated tennis, state fairs, David Lynch, television, a week-long cruise, the athlete, to the realm of eternal motif). They’re just working a lot harder, being driven down tougher paths, having to fortify their honesty and sensitivity and steel themselves in the face of fragmentation to a greater degree. DFW disabused me of the notion that I have to look outside of my own times for some hero of the candid, the honest, the unique, and I think he would have considered that some sort of success.

On a more depressing note, I understand now that the media hype that at first so turned me off to the David Foster Wallace machine was in a great part due to his suicide. Suicide makes everything more momentous, gives a retrospective ur-meaning to all the aspects of a life, imposes an immediate posterity on a creative human being’s works. I can’t fathom what it would have been like in 2008 had I known his work, but I can sense the immense loss to our times that his passing has meant. I mean, imagine looking forward to more Harper’s experiential essays, a complete Pale King, more laughter, more insights. Overly sensitive souls run the risk of being so sensitive that all they feel is pain, and the weird and baroque regimen of drugs Wallace was on somehow did not dull this sensitivity, this awareness (and in some perverse way made him even more representative of our times). As I said before, really insightful humor runs right along an abyss of terror, things that uplift keep a dialogue with things that destroy us, they inform and expand awareness in the other. Somewhere early in the titular essay of this book, Wallace goes on one of his famous footnote-digressions, which also happens to be quite representative of his sense of humor and mode of observation, about the despairing phenomenon of “The Professional Smile”. I’ll quote it at length:

”...the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... You know this smile- the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/incomplete zygomatic involvement- the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Who do they think they are fooling by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e., the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.”

I’m confident David Foster Wallace was never giving us the Professional Smile.