2021 Update:
*small soapbox rant*
I've moved my rating from 4 to 5, as I'm starting to feel like I shouldn't 'downrate' writing I find excellent, innovative and necessary, just because I think it has a limited audience. I'm starting to trust my own opinion more because I'm starting to distrust the popular public opinion, and so my reviews from 2021 onwards are going to cater more to whoever likes what I read, rather than to what I think the general public will actually read.

Following the death of Harold Bloom, I am now beginning to question the sociopolitical factors affecting how we appreciate fiction and regard classic fiction. We are living in an age where educators are shunning classics and literary fiction as a genre for political/cultural reasons (#disrupttexts), leading to younger adults doing the same. We now have an all-time low of adults reading at all, and a declining number of people reading anything other than YA/Fantasy/NA. Postmodern writers like DFW might not be accessible, but it absolutely does not mean they are not relevant and important to the time we are living in.
*ok rant over*

Small thing I forgot to mention, is that reading this shortly before a marketing survey about brand advertisement for an academic journal made the interviewers HIGHLY interested in what I was saying. It was funny, I paraphrased E Unibus Pluram and they started focusing more on my comments than other interviewees, despite the fact I'd never used the service.

——
2017 Reflection:

Rating Breakdown & Summary

1. Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley =5/5 #3.
About DFW's tennis years.

2. E Unibus Pluram =5/5* #1. *Highly recommended*
About the psychological effects of TV and advertisement.

3. Getting Away from... =3/5 #7.
About a (boring) town fair.

4. Greatly Exaggerated =4/5 #6.
About an academic perspective of the role of the author.

5. David Lynch Keeps His Head = 4/5 #4.
About visiting the set of Lost Highway.

6. Tennis Player Michael Joyce's... = 4/5 #5.
About interviewing a cool tennis guy.

7. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again =5/5 #2.
About being on a cruise ship.


Easier to read style to read than in Infinite Jest as these were journalistic pieces meant for magazines. The title is a bit silly, as DFW doesn't really ever make any arguments but he does write very well about what might at first seem to be non-noteworthy observations. 5/5 quality all-round, perhaps even better than his fiction quality. I've given this 4/5 as I would not recommend this to just any reader. DFW's personality is so deeply embedded in all the writing and I can see how this may be unenjoyable for some readers (especially in essay 3). DFW is so good at writing that you the parts you will dislike here are just the parts of him that you dislike. I found myself not enjoying the fair essay because he was scared or allergic to almost everything.

E Unibus Pluram is probably the best essay I have ever read to date, and I would highly recommend picking up the collection just to read this essay to become consciously aware of the role of TV and advertising. There are quotes from it on the separate listing for it on GoodReads that will give you a good idea on why I am so heavily recommending it.

Mai vorrei trovarmi prigioniera di un mega hotel galleggiante, dove nessuno si conosce ma tutti si sorridono, dove migliaia d’infradito colorate sbatacchiano sul pavimento bianco fra cappelli d’ogni foggia e sciarpe che svolazzano al collo di signore eleganti. E dove gli esseri umani si dividono in due gruppi: quello che deve far divertire e quello che deve divertirsi. Il primo stimola il secondo a fare, il secondo s’impegna fino allo spasmo per non perdere neppure un’occasione. E scatta foto scatta foto, gira video gira video, passo a destra passo a sinistra giravolta su le mani giù le mani. Spettacolo serale. Il cibo abbonda, le escursioni attendono. Keep calm che poi finisce, verrebbe da dire, come motto consolatorio.
Comprensibile che il povero turista, in attesa che il pullman conduca tutti alla nave, ascolti la voce dell’addetta al Controllo Folle della Celebrity, di megafono munita che “continua a ripetere instancabilmente di non preoccuparci delle valigie, che ci raggiungeranno più tardi”, e la trovi “agghiacciante nel suo involontario richiamo alla scena della partenza per Auschwitz di Schindler’s List.”

Che la Zenith diventi Nadir, a questo punto, non è che un atto liberatorio.

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.

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

David Foster Wallace is one awesomely smart guy. This is both his greatest strength and his potential Achilles heel as a writer. Personally, I will read anything this man writes, because I think he is a true genius with a rare sense of compassion, and a hilarious sense of humor. Even when his writing falls victim to its own cleverness, I still find it worthwhile - perhaps because one senses that the writer is a true mensch (not something I feel when being dazzled by the cleverness of a Dave Eggers, for instance).

Oh hell, I want to be seated next to DFW on a long transpacific flight subject to major delays, OK? I have an enormous intellectual crush on this man. And when I cavil, it is done out of love, pure and simple.

But when discussing this book of his, caviling would simply be out of place. It contains two of the funniest essays I have ever read in my life (the descriptions of his experiences on a cruise liner and at the state fair, respectively). I think you should buy your own copy, because I certainly am not going to loan you mine.

Added on edit: so, I've noticed that goodreads seems to order books listed by review according to the wordcount of the reviews in question, from longest to shortest. A result of this has been that my negative review of DFW's ill-starred "Everything and More" shows up ahead of my 5-star review of this collection. This pains me enormously, as I really admire this writer's prodigious talent immensely - even his occasional misfires beat the pants off many a less talented author's best efforts. So I am shamelessly adding this paragraph in a transparent effort to game the system - the desired result being that my positive review of this quirky, talented author show up before the negative review.

I am guessing that the preceding paragraph will have been sufficient to accomplish my devious ends, so will curtail my empty babbling here. Let's see if I'm right in this conjecture.

Dico solo una cosa: le note <3

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.

Molto divertente e agghiacciante al tempo stesso.
Forse più agghiacciante, a pensarci bene. In ogni caso ci sono tutti i temi di DFW: noia, dolore, fobie, onnipresente pulsione di morte, malattia ... ma declinati in chiave per dir così umoristica.
Ma il rumore bianco che fa da tappeto sonoro non fa ridere affatto.
"La coppia di pensionati di Chicago, ormai astuti veterani delle code, visto che è la loro quarta crociera extralusso, spintonando a destra e a manca sono molto più avanti di me. Una seconda signora addetta al Controllo Folle della Celebrity ha un megafono e continua a ripetere instancabilmente di non preoccuparci delle valigie, che ci raggiungeranno più tardi, e sono il solo, a quanto pare, a trovare la cosa agghiacciante nel suo involontario richiamo alla scena della partenza per Auschwitz di Schindler's List."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

n   Tengo treinta y tres años y la impresión de que ha pasado mucho tiempo y que cada vez pasa más deprisa. Cada día tengo que llevar a cabo más elecciones acerca de qué es bueno, importante o divertido, y luego tengo que vivir con la pérdida de todas las demás opciones que esas elecciones descartan. Y empiezo a entender cómo, a medida que el tiempo se acelera, mis opciones disminuyen y las descartadas se multiplican exponencialmente hasta que llego a un punto en la enorme complejidad de ramificaciones de la vida en que me veo finalmente encerrado y atrapado en un camino y el tiempo me empuja a toda velocidad por fases de pasividad, atrofia y decadencia hasta que me hundo por tercera vez, sin que la lucha haya servido de nada, ahogado por el tiempo. Es terrorífico. Pero como son mis propias elecciones las que me encierran, me parece inevitable: si quiero ser adulto, tengo que elegir, lamentar los descartes e intentar vivir con ello.n

Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer me hizo admirar al máximo la valiosa persona que era David Foster Wallace. Su capacidad para la observación, su inteligencia, su humor irónico subyacente, siempre incipiente en cada frase, y su manera de ver las relaciones humanas. Me hizo reír en muchísimas partes y en otras pensaba "Qué genio que era este tipo". Foster Wallace era un hombre al que le daría un abrazo. Y no me gustan los abrazos.

En "Deporte derivado en el corredor de los tornados" Wallace nos remite a su infancia, más exactamente a su época de jugador de tenis. Este trabajo me gustó. Es entretenido, sugestivo y tiene un final con impacto. Me dejó un buen rato como un estafermo con una tristeza incómoda desarrollándose en mi interior.

El mejor ensayo es, por lejos, "E unibus pluram". Me arriesgo a decir que es el mejor ensayo que escribió Wallace. Su análisis de la televisión y el espectador y la ironía como destructora de una sociedad sojuzgada por la imagen es extraordinario. Un texto que todos deberían leer.

El segundo mejor ensayo es el que le da el título al libro. Brillante, divertido, un artículo como solo Wallace podía escribir.

Con respecto a los demás ensayos, me resultaron muy aburridos. Algo que alimentó mi inquina fue que Wallace trató temas que no me interesaban. Si los hubiera narrado de una manera amena y fluida los hubiera disfrutado. Pero no fue así.

"Dejar de estar bastante alejado de todo" empieza bastante bien, sin embargo, conforme iba avanzando el relato empezaba a tener efectos soporíferos. Wallace sobredimencionando detalles superfluos me hicieron querer meter la cabeza dentro de un microondas en funcionamiento.

Con respecto a los ensayos sobre David Lynch y Michael Joyce: ni los pude terminar. No me vi ninguna película de ese director y tampoco pienso ver ninguna. El tenis me gusta, lo practicaba, de hecho, pero no me agradó que Wallace lo haya tratado a través de un tenista que no me importa. (Está de más decir que también son supinamente pesados).

Started rereading the titular (va-voom) essay to cheer myself up in migraine malaise. Dear God it's so fucking funny. Quite possibly the best essay ever. The spousal overunit moved into another room with his laptop to do homework because when I tried to read out sentence-paragraphs in acquiescence to the demand of 'What's so funny' I couldn't finish for giggling.

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.