One of my more obsessive habits on Goodreads involves comparing books with others. If you're one of my friends, chances are I've clicked the little button on your homepage an average of three times, sometimes more if you have a particularly large library (looking at you, Hadrian/Kris/& co.) Throughout my nearly two weeks of reading this book, the prim and peppy 'currently-reading' would show up next to a record number of gleaming five stars, up near the tippy top if listed in order of rating.

In short, I am amongst good company.

It's been nearly three years since I added Infinite Jest into rank and file, almost one since I pulled the beast out of the depths of one of the massive university libraries. I read it at school, I carted it back home for the holidays, and finished in the kind of stricken rhapsody of composition that I've been chasing ever since. Said ever since included coming to terms with IJ's reputation, replete with tales of pretentious woe, ballads of fiendish glee, and the moribund crossroads between the two embodied in the form of hipster lists. It's likely that I held off for so long on coming back to DFW for fear of finding out that I really hadn't adored all that much, and it was the internalization of all that hype both laudatory and inverse that had prompted that overwhelming favoritism.

I needn't have worried.

Of course, this isn't IJ, and trust me when I say that that particular megalodon is not safe from a future reread. However, it is DFW, and this collection of nonfiction has plenty of dots connecting over to the more fictional bents: math, tennis, debilitating awareness of self, and that keen eye of tangential cross sections of life and literature that raises the age I currently live in to something not quite art, but interesting enough to hold its own against the sea of classics and other eclectica that usually fills my escapist needs.

In other words, DFW liked a lot of the things I do, and wrote about them in such a way that makes me likes liking them, which doesn't happen so often when your main interests include engineering-level calculations, sociocultural treatises, and hardcore critical theory of fictioning. The best part of DFW is he can carry across all that in a manner both big-worded and esoteric, taking the subject seriously in the complex systems rather than the ivory tower sense of the word. For example, he convinced me to try out David Lynch without ever straining my interest levels or coming off as an asshole, an achievement greatly added by his obvious enjoyment of the guy's movies. DFW may have had some extremely heavy interests, but all that academic jargoning and/or molasses with a noticeable veneer of 'you're sure you're good enough, punk'? Nada, zero, zilch. Poof. Did I mention he's hilarious, in ways ranging from erudite to funny as fuck filth? Let me say it again.

And that retention of his. I am a firm believer in his '500,000 bits of discrete information' statement, as well as his ability to contextualize anything, anywhere, at any speed seen fit. The sections in the titular essay succeeding an overindulgence in caffeine are especially demonstrative, but only by a hair. It's this hypersensitive intake valve combined with a strong desire to share that's resulting in my not giving DFW crap for throwing out the 'politically correct' word and being so white and male and American in general. Not everyone has my viciously obsessive interest in social justice, so I will simply state that he's aware when it counts and move on.

Besides, that Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction essay? Genius, in the 'my life makes so much more sense right now' gist of the word. Accuse me of favoritism, but that little piece of work made up for every niggling twinge and then some.

Finally, there remains the fact that I discovered DFW and his writing after September 12, 2008. What writings there are now are all the writings that remain for my future readings. Thus, I have decided to ration my DFW intake for one work per year, a cycle that began with IJ and will last not nearly long enough.

Here's to you, David Foster Wallace. I'll never meet you, but I will remember.

La cosa più spassosa di questo libro è immaginare David Foster Wallace aggirarsi come un pesce fuor d'acqua osservando i passeggeri della nave, partecipando alle feste formali con la sua maglietta con disegnato uno smoking, cercando di intrufolarsi nei locali dei dipendenti o tendendo agguati infruttuosi alla cameriera che rassetta la sua camera per capire come diavolo fa a sapere quando lui si assenta per più di 30 minuti. L'analisi della vita e degli animali da crociera che ne fa, invece, è così limpida da offrire una visione alquanto triste e desolante di una cosa divertente che credo non farò mai.

My woefully late introduction to David Foster Wallace came earlier this year when I noshed greedily on “The Broom of the System,” which humbled and fascinated and tickled and impressed the ever-loving shit out of me to the point where I only gave it four stars because the guy wrote it when he was younger than I am now and I have it on good faith that his later works are even better.

Reading this made me feel a lot of things -- the way it eased my unshakable sense of being lonely in a totally cliched existential sort of way that I feel like I maybe should have grown out of by now being one of the biggies; most of said feelings were staggeringly positive -- but the most persistent and lingering one was this quiet sadness. The dates imprinted on a lot of these pieces (the early to mid-‘90s, not one predating my exit from elementary school) are just long ago enough to start taking on the sheen of gauzy quaintness that I'm beginning to understand and is plain fucking weird while also being an unpleasantly vague reminder that since time stops for no man, death comes for everyone. (Interestingly, the offerings herein don't come off as dated -- cell phones as shiny new things that only the elite few possess! the rise of irony in popular culture! the advent of the internet! Rather, they serve as one big time capsule for a great mind reacting to really strange times. It was so weird (and rad as hell, too) to read about a very smart and very aware adult reflecting about a present I can only recall from a child's long-ago vantage point.)

And it was thinking like that, in the moments I stopped reading this collection to process the range of thoughts it reflected, the ideas it proposed and feelings it gave rise to because I was so dazzled by how DFW made me care about things I’d never had two shits to rub together in regard to before, how he had a wicked knack for turning a simple observation into an unobtrusively significant moment, how he didn’t so much observe as understand the intangibles that were the driving forces of these pieces, that just made me sad that someone with a unique grasp on the human condition and inner workings of everything isn’t around to keep pointing out the unassuming but ever-present imperatives of absolutely all the things, including the pants-shittingly terrible experience that is putting oneself at the mercy of (or simply considering) a Midwestern state fair's death-trap carnival rides. And that I didn’t know to mourn DFW's passing until much later, leaving me to feel like my newly hatched enthusiasm for his brilliance is somehow insincere in its belatedness, however genuine I know it to be.

It also forced me to (very unwillingly, because my brain stops at this station a lot and I kind of hate it, even if it is something made of pure conjecture) think about what terms would drive me to check out early, too. Such things are worth mentioning because someone as willing as DFW was to look deep inside everything's inner workings to find their true meaning, to me, deserves the same kind of respectful concern. Rather than turning me off entirely, though, that train of thought made me even more willing to take DFW's careful deliberations to heart and try to see things as he does in the pieces comprising "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

I know it sounds like a cop-out but each one of these essays and arguments brings something different to the table, which made it hard for me to decide whether or not I have a favorite piece in the collection. But I also don’t think that’s fair because each of the seven pieces has a different intention. (Get ready for the oncoming wall of text!)

It’s terrifying to see the dangers of mindless consumption via television’s manipulation addressed almost two decades ago -- the way advertisers always knew how to create a selling image for a blindly consumer-happy, image-obsessed American audience, the way societal conventions change television archetypes every so often, how all alternative trends eventually become bastardized into some mass-produced dross -- and fascinating to retrace the path of Metafiction's influence on today's entertainment in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The nod to New Journalism in “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” and the way DFW turns his experiences and observations at the ’93 Illinois State Fair into something bigger and more universal than it appears while capturing what exactly makes it such a unique beast should sound cynical and self-involved but doesn't. “Greatly Exaggerated,” or deconstructing a literary trend that is all about deconstructing previously accepted literary trends, was the headiest of the pieces; if I thought my ever-growing love for postmodernism in all its flavors was the only thing that made me appreciate the piece, then I would have entirely missed the points of both “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (DFW’s own forays into high-school tennis, the success of which he owed to a mental rather than athletic prowess that he seems unnecessarily apologetic about, the way someone who’s really good at something but is humbled rather than bolstered by it is) and “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” which does address all those things (and more!) in relation to Joyce’s unflappable straightforwardness and tennis philosophy and has quite a bit to say about the nature and sacrifices of professional athletes and other applicable-to-everyone’s-lives truths. “David Lynch Keeps His Head” may have began as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the birth of "Lost Highway” but winds up examining Lynch’s catalog and pinpointing all the ways he thoroughly messes with American moviegoers’ expectations and gets labeled as “sick” or “inaccessible” because of it (let me tell you something, “Mulholland Drive” made a hell of a lot more sense than it had any right to after reading this, which kind of freaked me out). Lastly, the piece that shares its title with this collection, a dissertation on the crises, implications and microcosmic representations of the id’s insatiable demand to get back the fuck into the womb for the relief of helpless indulgence via the luxury of Caribbean cruises, might just be the most thought-provoking and metaphorically successful vacation piece ever wrought. Ever.

So, yeah, there’s some varied stuff here but commonalities do emerge. One of the other things I'm liking best about DFW's stuff is that I absolutely have to read every single word and perform a few mental gymnastics to accommodate both the accessible-but-high-minded assertions and the asides that layer his writings with brilliance: It creates a kind of focus that has helped me retain more of his works than more simply written fare. Intentional or not, that same kind of keen attention appeared to be what DFW wanted to coax from his readers, imploring the audience to go forth and value the little things for their unique place in the world in order to better understand (or deconstruct, if you like) and appreciate them. Because nothing is just one thing: Everything comprises lots of unnoticed little things, and appreciating that makes it all worth the effort.

DFW infuses all of his topics with the same careful dissection (and flurry of pitch-perfect, lovingly applied ten-dollar words, which deserves mention for being delightful in its own word-nerd right), approaching an understanding devoid of all judgement, which is what appealed to me the most about this collection. It's so hard to approach a topic without bringing any sort of preconceived notions to the table -- like, DFW acknowledges the possibility of being perceived as an East Coast snob throughout his state-fair peregrinations, negating the impression of such a thing (to the reader, at least) with his conscious honesty -- but none of that lives here. There is no depressed acceptance of the way things are in his intellectual explorations; instead, he finds a way to break down the necessary humanity behind everything, bringing them to a wholly sympathetic, neutral at worst/misunderstood necessity at best sort of light. He analyzes social situations with a mathematical precision, offering a rational discourse instead of a detached report. He wants to pick things apart to achieve not reductive meaningless but sincere realization and factual certainty of a thing's nature and composition and intent.

In this way, he's a champion of eliminating the false veneer of fantasy that shrouds so many unattainable-by-normal-people things in seductive mystery -- that also drives the average Joe to the depths of jealousy and deluded despair. Breaking down the misconception that lies between the behind-the-scenes reality and the polished final dream, looking behind the curtain to understand the hard work and sacrifices of those in the public eye (writers to an extent but mostly film-industry professionals and celebrity athletes) makes them less scary, more systematic, and far, far less enviable.

One of the hallmarks of a genius, to me, is the ability to inspire curiosity and critical thinking in others, which is exactly what this collection does. I don't care if I'm betraying my terminally uncool tardy-to-the-party over-eagerness in this review; I do, however, care that DFW made me give an earnest fuck about tennis. Twice.

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/H7HqCZikxuA

Recommended for: DFW naysayers.

This is gourmet meal with all the essential DFW ingredients: sparkling wit, a wicked & self-deprecatory humour, "self-consciously unself-conscious" irony, probing details but as is typical of pricey meals -- in healthy, small portions, easily digestible!
It is also very lovingly prepared in that the essays & opinion pieces here are heartfelt & personal, thus easily relatable.
I open the first chapter- 'Derivative Sport in Tornado Valley', & am stumped! Tennis again! ( it proved to be my bane in IJ). But this time it's different, I am touched by this wryly poignant account of why, despite a very promising start; the writer couldn't pursue a tennis career. Well, tennis' loss was literature's gain!

The next one, 'E Unibus Pluram', one of DFW's seminal essays; examines the dumbing down of American culture via television where an average American family watches telly for an average of 6hrs per day! Turning viewers into "sweaty, slack-jawed voyers" & how for fiction writers tv can never be a substitute for real life.Television's "mirror hall of illusions is both medicine and poison." The same idea is revisited in 'Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko' in 'Brief Interviews...'.
The essay left me with mixed feelings: the very assumption that fiction writers are getting their material from telly-watching is atrocious!
It's like the Lady of Shalott, cursed to view the world outside only as reflected through an enchanted mirror-- you know it can't last - reality can't only be reflected through a glass surface of any kind; whatever be one's social awkwardness, reality has to be confronted first hand. So that's that.

But the next, long essay 'Getting Away from Already Pretty much Being Away From It All', amply made up for it: it took me back in time to the childhood fairs with their rides & endless food stalls. Of course, it was nothing like the Illinois State Fair that Wallace describes here, piling such minutiae into the narrative that the very sights, sounds & even the smells come alive! His "Native Companion" is a hoot! It's a celebration of community living, ironically though, this "community" itself has subdivisions!

Already in a good mood, I was even more delighted to find that Wallace was a "fanatical follower" of David Lynch! How gratifying to see DFW gushing over Lynch just as we gush over him here!  Says he:

"For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of their 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."  

Now you know when Wallace tortures his readers by going off at tangents, all those unexplainable strange stories, it's David Lynch's fault! 'Cause true "artists" don't give a damn about what people think about them, they just stay true to their "personal vision".
In a footnote, Wallace even advises men never to date girls with "Lynchian background."!
This opinion piece was so persuasive & detailed that I ended up watching some old favs like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead & some unseen ones, so make sure you have the movies ready 'cause like me you'll also get sidetracked.

The mini cine retrospective over, I come back to the book-- more tennis follows!
I skip this side dish & turn to the dessert: 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' —I must make my husband read this one: he is forever pestering me to join him on a cruise ship to Antarctica or some other such godforsaken place! Imagine the vastness of the ocean & where will you run if you don't quite like the experience? (Remember Polanski's 'Bitter Moon'?).
Can there be something as too much of a good thing? Apparently there is - Wallace's sensitive mind rebels against the micromanagement of his time,where you are not only told that you are going to enjoy the experience but also what your reactions are going to be! There is something touchingly naive about his idealism which expects "a personal touch" in the obsessive housekeeping of his cabin, "a business smile" to reach the eyes!
You know such a temperament is programmed to be unhappy: a mind that puts a premium on integrity in not only itself but in everyone that it comes across!
Nathan "N.R." was right- DFW is there in his writings—here is the man in his own words; how much more up close & personal can you get? Grab the opportunity, grab the book.
I guess the 5* rating says it all, still I'll say- wow just wow!

* 'David Lynch Keeps His Head' - '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". But with 'postmodern' or 'pornographic', Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that's definable only ostensively- i.e. we know it when we see it.'

Goodness gracious. As much as I revere Wallace’s fiction—his attempt to rescue American culture from the despairing morass of self-aware ironical knowingness—his nonfiction is in another league. The sheer cinematic exuberance, the “floating eye” quality of these pieces is breathtaking and wonderful, bringing the reader as deep into each experience as is textually possible, and as close to Wallace as we can be on the page.

His fiction has a ‘surgical’ quality, much like J.G. Ballard or Will Self (whose own essay style mirrors Wallace’s, though proves less compelling than his fiction), more bound up in high-wire intellectual games which only connect when the reader is complicit in the clevernesses at the heart of these stories, or serve to undo the story by adding meta-layers more about fiction writing itself. (And so metafictional by proxy. An example would be the story ‘Incarnations of Burned Children,’ which on a deeper reading is a story about narrative position/POV, not the heartrending events depicted within. So despite his work going for direct emotional shocks, it is largely trapped in the cranium).

So in this essay collection, by making the focus tangentially on Wallace himself as filtered through the Illinois State Fair, a revolting cruise ship, or a tortured TV consumer, the work has a deeply personal and directly emotional feel, and although not as ambitious as his attempt to depict the grand throbbing alive-ness of life as in Infinite Jest, the work shines and sings with a more reader-friendly humour, brio and natural warmth, as well as the stylish feats of intelligence and logical probity that is his trademark. Phew.

An essential text for any serious reader of contemporary essays.

3.5 ⭐️

Avete mai fatto una crociera?
Pensate possa piacervi?

Foster Wallace, in crociera, ci arriva da giornalista e sotto mentite spoglie. In crociera non c’è mai stato, è la sua prima volta, e noi vediamo attraverso i suoi occhi tutto ciò che, con sguardo bambino, gli sembra esilarante.

È un po’ assurdo, il modo di viaggiare che gli si presenta davanti: tutto sembra a uso e consumo degli ospiti, i turisti sembrano una massa indistinta di corpi che si muovono e pensano in egual modo, e la nave extralusso, oltre ad avere un equipaggio molto disponibile, sembra brillare per la sua impeccabilità. I primi giorni, uno spasso. Ma poi?

Andare in crociera è come tornare neonati, dice Wallace: il rollio della nave è una culla, le attività serrate sono l’assenza di autonomia; si è viziati e si è coccolati, e ogni capriccio, persino inconscio, è soddisfatto. Ci prenderemo cura di voi, dicono: non dovrete pensare a niente. Ma è davvero quello di cui si ha bisogno per riposare?

Le crociere le ho sempre trovate un po’ assurde, e dopo questa lettura sono certa che sia così. È stato divertente seguire la penna abile di Wallace, lasciarmi trasportare dal suo sguardo. Perché un reportage dipende dall’approccio che lo scrittore ha nei confronti della vita, e Wallace, sebbene a volte pecchi di autocompiacimento, mi è piaciuto. Il finale non mi ha fatto impazzire, ma l’analisi, nel suo complesso, ha soddisfatto la mia curiosità.

Come viaggiate, di solito? Crociere, viaggi organizzati, oppure all’avventura? Io sono da cammino e tenda al seguito, con tutte le incertezze che ne derivano!

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.

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

La crociera, tutta una grande finta con sprazzi di verità. Wallace ci perpetrerà questo potpourri di umani consapevoli di pagare per vizi e relax che sostanzialmente gli vengono resi, dall'equipaggio, proprio per questo e non per un consapevole desiderio di vederli felici. La forza della scrittura sta nell'aggirare questa patinata viziosità uterina addentrandosi nello studio del campionario umano che rende tale la crociera, arrivando alla pacifica conclusione che si tratti di un enorme teatrino, certo messo in piedi ad arte, ma pur sempre finto.

Un appunto sulle note a piè di pagine, che poi tanto a piè di pagina non sono: veri e proprio micro-racconti geniali ed esilaranti da gustare. Un grande lascito del genio di David Foster Wallace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

he picked up a book. he read the book. it was him all over. the best version of himself! and the worst.

n  n

what is postmodernism, really? is it a way to understand the world, to define the world, to separate yourself from the world... when you are actually a part of that world? a part of the so-called problem? you want to put a layer between you and the world. you are so much apart from it, right? an unwilling participant in all of those repulsive patriarchal and terminally corny signs and signifiers, things that disgust you, it's not fair, just because you happen to have the misfortune to be born straight & white & male and, as they say, privileged. you need the distance, the alienation, the angst of being someone, something, anything, apart... because you know you are different. right? you just know it. you enjoy things and yet you don't enjoy them, you enjoy not enjoying them, your layer of hipster irony protects you and maybe fulfills you. and you will never admit that. you self deprecate, in your own egotistical way. you are the boss of you; no one can take that away. everything is so corny and full of bullshit, surely they must see that. and yet there must be truth there, if you look for it. you tell yourself that. you write a book, a great book about life and love and living and loving, etc. you write a book, or imagine yourself writing a book. it is not this book. this book is all about the unimportant things, the annoying things, the fake shit and all the bullshit. does it satisfy you? not really. so you read a book. you feel better. let the irony take over, it comforts you. you are not angry, not angry at all. you laugh at all that fake shit, all the bullshit. angry is a hot emotion. you don't feel those, at least not anymore.

n  n

you go to a movie set. Lost Highway. you try to keep an open mind but it is all fake, it is all bullshit. there are too many assholes in the world! and yet the director at the center of it all is not fake, he is not bullshit, he's not an asshole. does he understand something about life that you do not? what does he understand, what does he know? you want to know. he is just being himself, and you don't understand that. or maybe you do. it all makes you deeply uncomfortable.

you go to a fair; you go on a cruise. both are depressing. but funny! the kind of funny that you can only sheepishly admit. perhaps you are a part of the problem; it is people who look just like you who created this world that you despise. you try to enjoy the fair. you try to enjoy the cruise. you take enjoyment from your lack of enjoyment. you write a book, a collection of short works, at times even a "personal narrative". that's the phrase, right? you personally inject yourself into the narrative, into this ridiculous world. you feel better! but not really. fuck this life. fuck this earth. there is only one way to live in this life and that is through the glass of irony, a postmodern form of protection, the strongest barrier, it will protect you, just breathe, you know you can do it, it's not so bad,

n  n.

my name is mark. i'm not white, not really, only half-white, does that count as white? i don't feel white, however that feels. i am bisexual, no really. i veer gay if that it makes it easier to swallow. oh and i wasn't born in this country, this U.S. of fucking A. and hey, what's money? i've never had it; i'll never get it. and who the fuck is David Foster Wallace? i dunno. he's some dude that everyone jacks off to, apparently.

n  n

i have a friend named Benji - a golden lad (at least in my mind; i look at him through the lense of my very first impression, forever ingrained). he is nothing like DFW. once he talked about how he doesn't see race or class or sexuality, because he's never had to. he was raised by good progressives; he was raised to love life. nice life! he talked about how he wished everyone could be like him, not white or straight or a guy or from money or whatever, but able to look at things like they were and not let all the bullshit get them down, and so just live. not assign guilt or blame, just to understand, or try to, and then move on. not judge. you know, it should be easy, life should be easy, why isn't it? i listened to him say these things and i thought i wish. i wish i could be that way. you are so naive, Benji. i fucking hate you. i fucking love you. DFW is the opposite of Benji. and yet, and yet... is the difference merely a question of awareness? of critical distance? i can't imagine being a person like Benji, being that blithe. now Benji could enjoy a county fair, an awful cruise, he could enjoy it without irony i think. certainly without that underlying feeling of sadness and, yep, i won't pretend, without the condescending irritation at the futility of all these fucking gestures, the fake shit and the bullshit, the power imbalances, the need to make form equal meaning. i love Benji but i'm not sure i understand him. so why do i understand David Foster Wallace? he is nothing like me. he is like Benji. straight white male; money: not a problem. what do i have in common with David Foster Wallace? nothing. the idea is ludicrous. and yet, and yet... why do i read him and feel like i am reading my own thoughts, right there on the page? my own thoughts, staring back at me.