The title story is about--what else?--taking a Caribbean cruise. Shortly after reading the story, I took a cruise of my own (it was a family thing, not my choice), and guess what? David Foster Wallace absolutely nailed the sheer weirdness of the experience. Highly recommended.

David Foster Wallace é um GÉNIO!
Tudo o que escreve é revelador de uma Inteligência e Imaginação Ilimitadas.
É assombrosa a sua capacidade de observação, análise e exposição de situações e temas que passariam despercebidas ao comum dos mortais.

Este volume contém oito ensaios - alguns baseados na sua própria experiência como repórter contratado por revistas americanas - e o único discurso que fez para finalistas de um colégio.
É uma experiência única - umas vezes triste, outras divertida - "ouvi-lo falar":
sobre a sua visão da vida;
sobre a sua paixão pelo ténis;
sobre a televisão e a sua influência nos escritores americanos;
sobre o cinema de David Lynch;
sobre a crueldade a que são sujeitos os animais com que nos alimentamos;
sobre o Horror do dia 11 de Setembro;
sobre a pornografia e os problemas "do pau" dos actores;
sobre as viagens de cruzeiro e a forma perfeita (e ridícula) como tudo está organizado para mimar e divertir o viajante.

Um dia não terei mais nada para ler de David Foster Wallace. Talvez porque o mundo dos vivos seja demasiado pequeno para os Seres Superiores...

"Dois peixes novitos vão a nadar e, por acaso, cruzam-se com um peixe mais velho, a nadar na direcção oposta, que os cumprimenta com um aceno da cabeça e diz: Bom dia, rapazes. Que tal a água?
E os dois peixes novitos continuam a nadar durante um bocado e, por fim, há um que olha para o outro e pergunta: Que raio é que é a água?"

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

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

this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exaggerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.

come to my blog!

I am in awe of the fact that I wouldn't have been as charitable about the experience DFW had on this "fun thing". I KNOW I would have hated it, and made use of the vomitorium for quite different reasons than overeating. This essay convinced me that people who consider David on the spectrum…(btw, I have this urge to call him "David" or even "Dave" if that's okay….just because I feel like he's my age, one of the guys who grew up in my neighborhood in Illinois, and rolled his eyes with me up in the Utopian treehouse world we could have built , at the world surrounding us…he doesn't feel like one of those stuffy authors who you identify by last name and use footnotes to codify). But I digress. Anyway, this essay convinced me that Dave has enough facial/emotive recognition skills to not be labeled "on the spectrum."

Well, now I am laughing to myself that my typing program red-squiggles "vomitorium"--apparently not a concept it is familiar with……recognitional, neither.

I love how he just finds cool stuff to notice everywhere, even on the boring ocean, the boring tropics (made contemptuous to me due to familiarity--as I live within a stones throe of the setting). Like noticing the degree of whiteness in the competing cruise lines, the varieties, from lime green to peach to various shades of blue-blue-green to mimic the changes in the Caribbean waters. I like how he doesn't dwell on the inanity of the passengers--they must be a bit inane: they are on a luxury cruise and watch the onboard talent with enthusiasm!, and even come back for 2nd, 3rd, season passes to cruise!!! Instead he describes the ship employees--much more interesting, although sometimes a bit garish themselves, especially the captains and administrative staff...

I love this kind of humor. It makes me feel less alone in a world full of rich, or at least upper-middle class, spoiled pampered Americans who distain Wonder Bread and expect the Artisan loaf, who find Ivory Soap "drying" and must use Orange Oil and Orchid infused body wash instead, who haven't eaten canned Campbell's soup--despite it's Warholian iconography, for well over 15 years! And favor aged Asiago over Kraft American processed cheese--well, who doesn't!! Let's not even discuss coffee….

Different books beget different sorts of literary relationships. My relationship with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, for example, is one of shame (for not reading it frequently enough) and dread (of actually reading it). By contrast, my ménage with respect to A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was typified by shame and desire. Desire: because I found this book to be incredibly entertaining, sagacious and guffaw-producing. But also shame: because I should really have been reading the Kant...

This collection of essays is arranged chronologically, and it's quite apparent how David Foster Wallace develops as an author over the course of these several-hundred pages. Indeed, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" is turgid and all things considered really rather boring. This particular species of turgidity—the bad sort of directionless, fluffy turgidity that you so often find in academically-affiliated lit journals—also kind of bleeds into "E Unibus Pluram" and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All." That being said, "E Unibus..." is nevertheless one of the most insightful examinations of irony that I've ever had the pleasure of reading. And "Getting Away..." contains some truly guffaw-producing moments (e.g., the baton-twirling and the zipper/seedy carnies/disassociation scenes).

But the writing gets better (at least stylistically speaking), and in the latter half of the book the reader is confronted with some really quite excellent essays. "David Lynch Keeps His Head" constitutes a curious example of historical irony, such that DFW circa 1995 was essentially an unknown and in fact so unknown that this essay finds him too afraid to even approach Mr. Lynch on the set of Lost Highway (Infinite Jest would be published only one year later, effectively catapulting Wallace into the world of literary "superstardom"). Instead, DFW sort of lurks around the movie-set, observing and judging and advancing some neat theoretical accounts of what it means for something to be "Lynchian."

Despite its annoying title, "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" actually made me want to attend a live tennis match. And fortunately, there is no bad turgidity within the essay itself. (Another instance of historical irony: once again, DFW is timorous and insecure about interviewing a person who is arguably a master in his field [here, Tennis Player Michael Joyce]; however, if you take a jaunt over to Joyce's [extremely succinct] Wikipedia page, one of the few tidbits of biographical information that it furnishes is that the guy has been immortalized in a David Foster Wallace essay.)

Of course, the star of the show is "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which Chuck Klosterman once referred to as the essay about luxury cruises. I have trouble talking about things that I actually utterly love, so I won't say a lot here (in fact, why not simply ignore this review and let the man speak for himself). But it's hilarious and evocative and by the end it kind of (like) seamlessly develops into an astute socio-psychological investigation w/r/t the nature and effects of excessive pampering. Fucking brilliant.

Una disamina ironica e dissacrante sulle crociere extralusso nei caraibi. Punti deboli e punti di forza diversamente da come si legge su TripAdvisor.

Un senso di vuoto

È quello che provo nel leggere un saggio così tanto brillante e arguto e nel pensare che non ci saranno più altre parole.

(23/08/2010)
Finito dopo quasi due anni: intendiamoci, non è che siano necessari due anni per leggere questa raccolta di saggi di DFW, è solamente che sia che si parli di tornado (intesi come vortici d'aria e non come caccia bombardieri!) che di tennis, o di David Lynch, o di tv, oppure di critica letteraria, DFW costringe ad accendere tutti i neuroni e ad attivare le sinapsi presenti nel nostro cervello.
E questo è un bene, naturalmente, ma non sempre si è disposti o si ha la voglia di farlo: il risultato, in ogni caso - a lettura ultimata - è quello di sentirsi di una sensibilità, di un'intelligenza e di una capacità critica e di osservazione, nonché di analisi, di un livello (facciamo finta che i livelli siano solamente due!) nettamente inferiore a quello dell'autore: non sempre si ha voglia di sentirsi così.
A questo punto sono stupita di aver impiegato solo due anni per finirlo!

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.

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

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

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

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



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

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley

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

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

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

Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All

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

Greatly Exaggerated

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

David Lynch Keeps His Head

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

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

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

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

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




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

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

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.

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!