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"a Kilroyishly surreal quality"


...I fell for DFW in the footnotes.

How was I to know? I don't read footnotes. When I edited a couple of books, I told the contributors, in draconian terms, that if the information wasn't important enough to include in their main text, delete the footnote; if it was, incorporate it into the main text.

Wallace puts many of his best lines, and a lot of himself, in his footnotes. They form a sort of counter-essay, hunkering below and complicating the essay above. When I initially read the book's title essay, true to form, I skipped the footnotes. I was ready to hurl the book after the chess-match description. Repeatedly, Wallace reminds us what a good chess player he is, and offers up the information that he didn't even start playing chess until he was in his late twenties. Apparently, this late start is more genuine than that of the nine-year-old girl who defeats him. Her talent, somehow genetic and mechanical, is lifeless and urged into motion by her hateful stage mother. I wanted to yell, "Oh shut up, man up, and get over it. The little girl beat your pants off." Of course in the footnote, countering Wallace's seemingly insufferable behavior, is the comment "only Deirdre's eyes and nose clear the board's table as she sits across from me, adding a Kilroyishly surreal quality to the humiliation" (326).

This is funny stuff, and Wallace underscores his appreciation for the absurdity in a later footnote: "103 - I've sure never lost to any prepubescent females in fucking Ping-Pong, I can tell you" (328).

The alternate "footnotes' essay" of the essay entitled "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's..." beats the main essay hands down. As a former, quite crappy, tennis player, I recall watching some of the players he describes, though not Michael Joyce. That ignorance, however, does not lessen the hilarity of footnote no. 18:

Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn't seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche." (224)

And then there's this razor-sharp snapshot of McEnroe, whom I do recall watching, in footnote no. 30:

John McEnroe wasn't all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived--the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad." (230)

OTOH, Wallace's dissection of a moderately revised Ph.D. dissertation in the essay, "Greatly Exaggerated," is the sort of shooting fish in the barrel, beneath his talents' stuff that I decried in my original review below, and the title essay, though now beloved by me, is still riddled with death - from his description of the preternatural cleanliness of the ship, hiding the inevitable decay, to the disturbingly electric blue Caribbean sky.

However, I'm ready to go back to Infinite Jest, with far more loving thoughts toward DFW, a fellow agoraphobe.

...Unfortunately, I can't read the teeny font in his opus, and the print in the footnotes is even teenier. I'm accepting donations for a Kindle DX, 9.7" display, $489.

* * * * * *
original rant

David Foster Wallace may tip me over the brink. 160 or so pages into his opus, IF, I decided that the book was in jest, infinitely, and I wasn't going to participate in the joke. I've just finished the title essay from his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and while I found much of it engaging, like a high wire act, virtuoso performances engage only so long.

I'm trying to determine why DFW elicits so much irritation. He's only 33 when he writes this essay about his cruise experience, but his death is riddled throughout the narrative. I may be succumbing to what Jean-Paul Sartre said about how, once lived. we read a life backwards (I need to look this up - Sartre wrote this more eloquently).

Despite that bit of poignancy, most of the time I'd like to reach through the pages and slap DFW. His view, so often, is from on high. He looks down from the high deck at the tourists disgorging from the ship to see the sights. He takes such pains not to be one of the ridiculous American tourists he mocks, and yet, he's a little ridiculous himself - primarily camped out in Cabin 1009, with the exception of the moments he takes mental snapshots of the "others" as surely as if he used a camera, which he reminds us at least three times, he does not use, the camera being such a touristy icon and all.

Perhaps it's all this prodigious talent being wasted on taking potshots at the inanity of a cruise trip - while his snarky comments are often dead on accurate and occasionally hilarious; these glossy surfaces must have been child's play for him. He mocks the commercial-essay Frank Conroy produces for the cruise ship, but DFW may be providing only the photo-negative.

Das war genau meine Kragenweite. Ab Seite 1 habe ich mich dem Autor verbunden gefühlt. Auch ich war noch nie auf einer Kreuzfahrt. Auch ich bin lieber allein als unter Menschen. Auch ich stehe luxusorientiertem Massentourismus kritisch gegenüber. Auch ich finde betreute gute Laune oberpeinlich. Auch ich habe keinen Smoking (okay, ich bin auch eine Frau). Im Tischtennis bin ich allerdings nur Mittelmaß, da unterscheiden wir uns offenbar.

Wenn ein hypersensibler, offenbar über alle Maßen begabter Schriftsteller mit geringer Toleranz für Peinlichkeiten und einem maximal genauen Blick eine Kreuzfahrt aufs Korn nimmt, dann kommt so etwas wie "Schrecklich amüsant" dabei heraus. Er sieht durchaus die Schönheiten: Die des Meers, die des Schiffs an sich. Aber er entblättert eben auch gnadenlos die hinter der Kreuzfahrt liegenden Mechanismen. Warum der Werbeprospekt aufgemacht ist, wie er eben aufgemacht ist. Warum Menschen überhaupt eine Kreuzfahrt machen. Warum dieser Überfluss bald abstumpft.

Ich habe jede Seite genossen. Das geht einfach weit über eine Reportage hinaus. Das ist Literatur.

Sehr witzig. Reicht im ICE München-Berlin aber gerade einmal bis Halle. …ein schönes Wochenende euch allen !

My God, come sapeva scrivere quest'uomo!


E' il commento che mi viene in mente dopo aver letto questa raccolta di testi: più eterogenea e squilibrata non si poteva pensare, andando da una recensione iper-specialistica di un libro di critica letteraria fino ad un fantastico reportage sulla fiera dell'Illinois, passando per le migliori pagine mai lette (almeno da me) su David Lynch e per un distillato di amore per uno sport individualistico e iper-atletico come il tennis. Quest'uomo sapeva davvero scrivere e, cosa ancora più importante, sapeva mettere questo grande talento al servizio di qualcosa di veramente importante: la possibilità di toccare le menti e i cuori delle persone, usando l'ironia, l'intelligenza e soprattutto un grande amore per le persone - tutte. L'esempio migliore credo che sia il testo dedicato a Michael Joyce: come tennista Joyce era un emulo di Agassi, che DFW odiava come tennista per una serie di ragioni che lui stesso elenca. Eppure, finisce per provare un sincero affetto e simpatia per questo ragazzone californiano: credo che, se avesse avuto la possibilità di conoscere Agassi avrebbe finito per comprendere e voler bene anche a lui. Foster Wallace poteva odiare un tennista, ma non un uomo....

Primo approccio alla lettura di David Foster Wallacen  (1)n
Mi sono trovato con una perla dell'ironia postmoderna.

Wallace è un maniaco ossessivo compulsivo delle note a piè di pagina. È possibile trovare anche note a piè di pagina dentro a note a piè di pagina, fino a occupare più del novanta percento della pagina. La cosa divertente è che, per la maggior parte, sono una risorsa quasi fondamentale: è possibile ignorarle senza perdere alcuna informazione utile per capire la storia, semmai ci fosse una "storia", ma consiglio non sottovalutarle perché molte contengono piccole idee parecchio interessantin  (2)n, a volte si limitano a spiegare alcuni dati in modo più esaustivo e ogni tanto introducono alcuni aneddoti non direttamente correlati alla storia.

L'autore analizza quella che dovrebbe essere un'esperienza piacevole: sette giorni in una crociera di lusso, con un servizio che si prende cura di ogni minimo dettaglio. Deliranti vari passaggi del racconto, dalla sua descrizione del sistema di raccolta degli asciugamani sulle sedie a sdraio sul ponte alla sua strategia di spionaggio fallita per scoprire in azione la donna incaricata di pulire la sua cabina. Tutte situazioni che usa per studiare la natura umana, il suo desiderio di chiedere sempre di più senza alcun limite e la sua semi-agorafobia e caproscopofobian  (3)n.

Leggere questo libro è una delizia, guidata da una prosa veloce e agile, travestita da testo facile e piena di metafore originali con cui Wallace ottiene immagini molto vivide e descrittive ("rapidità anfetaminica" per descrivere la velocità di un cameriere, "stato uterino di nullafacenza" come conseguenza dei vizi ricevuti o accostare la diversità etnica dell'equipaggio a una pubblicità della Benetton...)

Per farla breve, è un saggio molto divertente che include alcune riflessioni che vale la pena considerare. E, naturalmente, provoca nel lettore un rifiuto immediato di viaggiare in crociera.

---
n  (1)n Mi aspetta il suo "Infinite Jest" ma volevo partire da un testo più corto e decisamente più leggero.
n  (2)n E soprattutto divertenti (questa nota è veramente inutile, non ci riesco, come fa Wallace?)
n  (3)n terrore patologico di essere considerato un caprone (3a)
n  (3a)n Questa nota inserita qui, la potete trovare anche come una vera nota del libro.

Premessa: oggi avevo voglia di scrivere qualcosa di sconclusionato lasciandomi guidare dal flusso di pensiero. Sempre oggi ho anche finito questo libro, quindi le cose si sono un po' fuse. Il tutto è finito su Goodreads dal momento che la chimica reattoristica degli SCR mi stava annoiando.

È settembre del 2021, un settembre afoso e noioso; sono solo e due dei miei migliori amici sono rispettivamente a Vienna e ad Innsbruck. No, non è vero, Bruno è ancora da qualche parte in Svezia, o forse Norvegia. O era Finlandia? Ho chiaramente la tendenza a confondere le cose. Strano perché mi son sempre ritenuto acuto o bravo o quanto meno erudito in geografia; eppure, non distinguo i tre paesi.

Tronfio della mia ignoranza mi perdo in pensieri ondivaghi e lapalissiani su quanto sia strana la vita, la lettura e soprattutto su quanto l’uso di del termine lapalissiano possa celare insoddisfazione o smania di protagonismo (termine altamente inflazionato nello scritto di Wallace).

Ecco, è in questo clima di strana tranquillità che, rimandando l’odioso esame di Energy Conversion mi appresto a leggere il libro di David Wallace. E arrivo anche molto lontano. Il suo stile mi piace; mi rivedo nei suoi tentativi umoristici di descrivere i virtuosismi di una sardanapalesca crociera con un punto di vista cinico. Sarà sempre così questo David? Me lo immagino seduto sul ponte, con un bel sigaro, a farsi una grassa risata pensando ai soprannomi spiritosi che sta ideando per schernire il cameriere Aragustus o il capitano Dermatitis. Geniali questi soprannomi; calzano a tal punto a pennello che credo se li sia inventati ad-hoc. Sì, chiaramente li ha inventati, non può mica riportare quelli veri e rischiare una denuncia. Sta scrivendo un articolo per conto di una rivista dopo tutto. Anche se magari questo nichilista burbero cela un lato sfrontato e antisistema; spero di no. Non perché chi è antisistema mi dia fastidio, anzi, quanto perché il caro vecchio David Wallace me lo immagino con le fattezze del David Wallace di The Office, un uomo di palazzo, insomma.

Ma veniamo al punto, perché sto perdendo il mio tempo per scrivere di un libro che sì, è interessante carino e a tratti mi ha fatto ridere parecchio, ma che ha già avuto la sua dose di argute recensioni dal 1997 ad oggi. Perché a metà libro mi son detto: diamine, devi scrivere anche tu qualcosa del genere. Odi anche tu la pomposità, il lusso, il peso psicologico di una vacanza surreale, … e anche tu potresti parlarne in toni a metà tra il criptico ed il divertito. Non sono uno scrittore (al contrario di quel che dice il mio curriculum, alludendo ad un fantomatico corso di scrittura creativa del liceo. Cosa che non cambierò, esagerare in questo modo mi diverte assai). Potrei però puntualizzare che il sottotesto di Joël Dicker ne “La verità sul caso Harry Quebert” sembra essere che uno scrittore famoso non diventi tale per la sua encomiabile preparazione, quanto per caso, fortuna o coincidenze.

Beh, potrei farlo anche io forse; non ho la laurea in psicologia di Wallace, né posso dire di aver frequentato e poi abbandonato Harvard ma anzi mi si potrebbe definire come un cinico ingegnere che insoddisfatto del pragmatismo schietto della sua categoria di appartenenza decide di dedicarsi a tempo perso alla lettura. Così mi immagino futuri alternativi in cui anche io, assoldato da un improbabile amico direttore di un giornale, ho la libertà ed i mezzi per dedicarmi a tempo pieno alla realizzazione di recensioni caotiche e guidate dal flusso di pensiero, senza la preoccupazione di un pubblico esigente o di una turbina sbilanciata. Chi lo sa, magari potrei scrivere allo stesso Wallace per dei consigli. Qui la mia fantasia vacilla e sembra ingarbugliarsi da sola. Per alcuni secondi si immagina Wallace rifilarmi una pletora di incoraggiamenti a credere nei miei sogni, in pieno stile sogno-americano, ma poi una seconda voce fa prevalere il carattere di Wallace, che credo di aver intuito essere orientato al nichilismo, distruggendo ogni mio sogno.

Forse dovrei davvero chiamare Wallace. Magari potrebbe seriamente rispondermi; d'altronde cosa so di lui se non che ha raggiunto il successo grazie ad una recensione di una crociera extra lusso nel 1997. Potrebbe essere una di quelle celebrità o scrittori che dopo i primi anni di sfrenata fama ha perso prima gli ammiratori, poi la vena creativa ritrovandosi dopo 20 anni a godersi una santa pace che all’apice della carriera bramava e che ora invece gli sta stretta. Non auguro nulla del genere al vero Wallace, ma se in questo modo il finto me può avere un’ipotetica e sentita conversazione tra le valli dolci dell’Iperuranio con un David felice di avere ancora un ammiratore, beh allora tutto è giustificato. Basta, devo cercare il suo numero.

Apro Wikipedia e leggo “David Foster Wallace, all'anagrafe David Wallace (Ithaca, 21 febbraio 1962 – Claremont, 12 settembre 2008), è stato uno scrittore, saggista e accademico statunitense”. David è morto. Morto suicida. Mi prede un grande scoramento. Mi sono affezionato a David; nella mia fantasia beviamo un caffè lungo americano a Yellowstone mentre mi erudisce circa l’importanza di raccontare in una brochure informativa di come il sistema di risucchio liquami di una crociera sia fondamentale e degno di nota. A me ricorda quello dei treni Italo di classe economy, tutta un’altra storia, ma sorrido ed annuisco, prendendo appunti su uno di quei taccuini alla “investigatore privato sotto copertura”.

Adesso la mia fantasia non esiste più. Non so perché ma penso che il mio io immaginario si trovi più a suo agio discorrendo con Newton o Laplace o con un intellettuale non appartenente alla sua epoca piuttosto che con qualcuno che in altre circostanze avrebbe potuto incontrare dal vivo. Ma sto costruendo città invisibili.

Questo libro non ha poi molto di speciale; mi ha divertito parecchio perché si basa su un presupposto molto semplice, ossia quello di scrivere un reportage in prima persona, senza preoccuparsi di star venendo effettivamente pagati per un lavoro del genere. A renderlo speciale è la personalità di David di cui le pagine trasudano.

O forse sto semplicemente cercando in un elaborato satirico dei segnali di quello che portò David al suicidio per mascherare il fatto che sapere della sorte dello scrittore mi mette a disagio. O quanto meno mi fa pensare.

n  Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.n

I have many quotes to share. Beautifully written, thought-provoking quotes. Clearly (such a cliche, but it's true), it's not the writer's fault, it's me. I really loved a couple of essays (amazing insights, beautiful language) but I simply couldn't connect with the rest of them. Again, I felt like a complete outsider, something that has happened to me before with other foreign writers. I may be gaining a couple of fervent enemies with this, but I really don't see the point in saying that I loved the whole book when I actually didn't.
So, those almost four stars were given according to what I felt while reading those particular essays (standing ovation to "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"). They were THAT good.

March 2, 14
* Also on my blog.

23 May 2021

Any comments I might have made upon first reading are probably lost in the Access debacle. Quel sigh.

But, since I have it right here as I take an occasional break from reading other things to enjoy an essay, might as well capture some thoughts now.

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley Way more intriguing that I would have guessed, because generally I am not terribly interested in reading about sports, although I make an exception for horse racing and baseball. And although I have never lived in Tornado Alley, I understand enough to be awestruck. Also, I had never before considered the implications of being so familiar with and able to profit from the vagaries of venues.

Why the hell isn't the table of contents considered "product details" on a book? That seems wrong to me. If Bezos were a reader book pages at Amazon would make sense. Thank heavens for Wiki!

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Rarely do I read any real literary theory or criticism. It has its own vernacular and style and types of content, most of which I don't care for. I specialized in creative writing to keep away from it, in fact. But Wallace is erudite and emphatic. He's good at putting together an argument, but the delight is how much he enjoys messing about with words. That is, even when he's writing on a topic that bores me, discussing contemporary literature of the day that never appealed to me then or since I will happily follow along to see what words he uses in unexpected ways, and what lengths his sentences will stretch to. And his footnotes fill me with delight in general, although most of these are practical citations. Look I'm literally tone deaf, but I can understand the glory of watching Yoyo Ma play at a vaccine center. It's something so multilayered and moving, there is so much clear artistry that I can't help sitting here, mouth agape. It doesn't matter that I neither know nor care, really, what he's on about, it's just a beautiful thing to watch.

6 June 2021

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Originally published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wallace quotes George Gilder from Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life on a future in which he whole family could "give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendants from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color." Having just been through a year when those were the only birthday parties we could have, thank goodness. Foster seems to have imagined a future in which everyone stayed at home watching really good fantasies in even greater isolation from one another, rather than a world with YouTube and TikTok.

He closes with an examination of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist which I didn't like and haven't thought of since. Wallace couldn't seem to imagine a less ironic generation of writers who could succeed. Although I suppose he has explained why the tremendous popularity of Harry Potter: books for a younger audience could be naïve.

19 June 2021
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All: The observation of the state fair is extensive and detailed. Wallace spends a lot of time just passing along his observations in prose that is unique and clear and stands right the hell away from anything that evens hints at trite or cliched. There is as well a great deal of observing himself as the observer: a guy who grew up there as the child of academics, not of the farm, who got the hell out after high school to become the sort of East Coast media elite that doesn't really exist and who is acutely conscious of the prejudices and assumptions he brings to the task of explaining a midwestern state fair to an audience of exactly the same kind of East Coast media elite that no one is.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that a high percentage of the readers are probably more like he and his parents than some kind of metropolitan-limited species. Every state doesn't have a tremendous or proportional profusion of colleges and universities, but every state does have them and many of those on the student/student instructor/graduate-degree-holding tenured faculty track are far away from wherever they started and living in college towns and environs bringing a sort of metropolitan element to what ever anomalous characteristics they show in their current communities. [It's like speaking to someone from where ever one learned to talk after decades elsewhere, after reading him I just slip into a wordy and meandering sort of style that isn't specifically trying to be him, nor is it trying to make fun of him, it's more like the code switching of being among others of one's ilk, or just, a little bit drunk, too.]

So, yes, his observations are richly detailed and capture a state fair like no one else would do, and it will probably be useful in two hundred years when all of the stuff we take for granted about American society in the 1990s has changed utterly or just shifted a little but enough to be confusing to anyone who wasn't there. Because most of us don't ever describe what the people look like or how they seem unless they're weird in some way, but never just "here's what a crowd of teenagers look like on an insanely hot summer day at the fair." The descriptions preserving his observations of groups and sub-groups, and even more sub- classifications are fascinating. But his point about the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Illinois probably applies equally well to the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Hawaii or Rhode Island, or anywhere now that agriculture has become industrialized and to a large extent, monopolized. Likewise, the other cultures accreting to specific other locations within the vast entity that is a state fair. That's really the point of a state fair to attract the broadest possible swathe of a state's population with lures specific to their demographic particulars. I just think he's wrong about this somehow being a uniquely midwestern state quality. Nor do i think it is so entirely clear cut as he perceives it. The Zipper is not expected to be pulling the same fans as the pygmy goat tent or the dance competitors or the motor sports or the cow-judging, but the farmer who comes for the cow-judging is accompanied by other members of the family, none of whom were present for the conversation because of course they are all off doing other things which appeal to their hobbies and social roles and age groups. [I seriously doubt if the preceding contained a clearly articulated thesis supported by any sort of facts, but today I just have too many things to be doing to actually take the time to read back over what I've written and try to fix it into something consistent and pointed]

2021 July 17

Greatly Exaggerated: A review of a book I can't imagine that I would ever be interested in reading making an argument on the literary criticism concept of the author as something other than just a person who wrote a book. While criticism rarely appeals to me because so often it doesn't seem to be about anything except other literary criticism and is so removed from the experience of reading or writing a book, but instead seems intended as a philosophical exercise in semantic wankery, it is a valid topic for Wallace. He appears to comprehend the point of the book in question, to have his own opinions on that point, and also, to recognize that the book's potential audience is small. There just aren't a lot of writers who could write such a book critique that would be interesting and would leave me with the impression that I in any way understood the argument. No doubt my face had the same expression while reading as I would have listening to anyone explaining some equally specific but devoid-of-context concept, possibly one relying heavily on being able to visualize, for example the interior of a carburetor as affected by the introduction of some, again, highly specific substance or force which is also devoid of context for me, like oh, just making up nonsense here, the asymetrically charged particles of dilithium crystallins after exposure to magnetic lattice salicylics. Well, I recognize English sentence structure, and have encountered the words before, but none of this means anything, and truly, I couldn't explain any of it back to you. But I was nodding along because as I read the words it seems clear to me.


David Lynch Keeps His Head: Wallace explained to me why I thought Dune was awful, but cool, and Blue Velvet was awful but interesting, and Twin Peaks was fascinating the first season, and why after that I lost all interest in David Lynch. Well, I think he's write about the appeal of seeing the darkness exposed. But then after a while I realized that he can't actually resolve a mystery and that seeing pretty images of grotesque acts and concepts isn't all that appealing to me.


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


A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:

Why novelist David Foster Wallace’s books are arduous and what he wants in return for giving you joy using only words.


A book that I thought will take me less time than Infinite jest. Infinite jest is considered as a door stopper, as a brick, as a thing you can kill something or someone with. All it took me to complete infinite jest 52 days. This lil bastard, ‘A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again’? Took me way more than that. Why? We don’t know that. Many people say to start your David Foster Wallace journey from here, but now I get why many have failed and never get into attempting the Mont Blanc of books.° There are many reviews that talk about what things have been discussed in the book, so I’ll not do that, I’ll just point out one thing and that is DFW LOVED tennis, that’s for sure. There are 2 essays on just tennis.°

Reading some pages of this book in a plane° with an empty seat nearby made me feel like Jesse Eisenberg from the movie, ‘The end of the tour’ sitting beside DFW himself (I imagined him sitting next to me) and him talking unpremeditatedly with me about whatever comes to his mind. I learned two things:

The first thing I learned, take a DFW or any book you are having a hard time to read on a plane, do not download anything on your phone before stepping on the plane, ignore the inflight entertainment°, play some music and stare outside with the book on the tray table or at your book. Stare at the difficult piece of shit in your hand. Maybe due to the embarrassment of people seeing you just staring at the cover or by some inner motivation, you will end up reading it, maybe the introduction maybe one page, maybe two. But at least something.

The second thing I learned is of reading David Foster Wallace (by not just reading this one book, but after reading 3 books [this one included as well] by him) is that it tires your brain. Pick up a book by Lee Child (Jack Reacher series) you can easily read it in a day, or 2 if you have other things to do. But DFW writes books that are hard to digest. After reading for 40-60 mins, you will think that you have easily read around 50 pages, but in reality you might’ve only read around 20 pages. Sure you can rush and read 100 pages in 60 minutes, but have you absorbed anything? Probably not. DFW is a substance you have to inject in yourself slowly.
Reading DFW is like digging a hole, you keep on digging and digging and after a while you see how much you have dug and it’s very less for the amount of energy you have used. In short, reading DFW is arduous. Sure DFW is fun, I agree, but it’s not like a book from the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ series. DFW wants to you make some efforts and read his books, he will make you laugh but in return he wants you to provide something in return, what is that something? Your attention. Your time. Your entire focus.


The last essay of this book that shares the same name as its title, is best to understand how a cruise travel really is or maybe the best way to put it would be, how a cruise travel really is when you are David Foster Wallace, a genius in your field° and yet a schmo when it comes to social interaction and formal wear°.
The essay about the fair didn’t capture DFW’s character as how the last essay did, it felt like reading his diary or being on a call with him.


I will pick up Infinite Jest on a whim if someone asks me to be their buddy read. But if someone asks me if I’ll ever read this book again, my answer for sure will be: “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.”°




1°. I say Mont Blac, and not Everest because there are more books difficult than this (‘The Man Without Qualities’ and ‘Ulysses’ to name a few), and if you are a mountaineer or one who has knowledge about mountains, you’d know that Mont Blac is also not an easy journey, many novices have died.

2°. The second essay on tennis, ‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness’ is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read. I used to play tennis, but it’s a sport that I’ve not loved a lot, you will not find me watching tennis for fun or as a way to pass time, and still I was very much hooked while reading this essay. DFW had a way to capture people with his writing. Wish he was still here with us.

3°. I read ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head’ while having very little idea of who David Lynch is, I’ve heard of him and all I wanted to do in that damn airplane was to search how David Lynch looks like and have I ever seen a movie that he has directed. I forgot as soon as the plane landed, and while coming back I read and completed this essay once again in a plane, and once again all I wanted to do was search who the hell he is.

4°. Which 90% of time sucks.

5°. Writing, using big words, teaching.

6°. Please just go and read it and you will get what I mean by “Formal Wear”.

7°. I remember laughing loudly at a small note about a cap that DFW is wearing in this essay.

Bello, divertente e scritto bene.
Buongiorno vita da crociera

Ohje bedauerlicherweise muss ich schon wieder einen sehr berühmten Autor abmontieren - aber dieser Reisebericht tendiert mehr zu schrecklich als zu amüsant.

Was ist Foster Wallace da stilistisch eingefallen?! Grrr - Fußnoten sind dazu da, entweder Quellen zu benennen, oder kurz und knackig noch ganz schnell etwas zu erklären, aber nicht, seitenweise Inhalt der Geschichte zu transportieren. Dies geht sogar so weit, dass teilweise der Plot der Fußnote über 4 Seiten ausgewalzt wird, und man dann wieder zürückblättern muss und das nicht hin und wieder, sondern permanent. Da bekomme ich als Leserin erstens einen Drehwurm und verliere ständig den Faden, so bleibt die Geschichte extrem dekonstruiert. Weiters ist der Autor einmal sogar zu eitel ein Ausrufezeichen nach dem Satz im Text zu setzen, auch das musste dann in die Fußnote - wie widerlich präpotent!!!. Für mich scheint dieses Werk ganz schnell abgespult und unsauber dahingeschlenzt, eine lustlose Auftragsarbeit, wie auch eingangs in der Geschichte geschrieben wird, der Autor hat sich für den Leser nicht mal die Mühe gemacht, gewissse Handlungsstränge in einen richtigen Text einzubauen, sondern sie quasi im Notizstadium belassen.

Auch inhaltlich ist die Anlayse der Heppy Beppy Society und des Mirkokosmos Kreuzfahrtschiff zwar durchaus mit gutem Blick detailgenau durchgeführt, aber was analysiert wird, ist teilwiese so gähnend langweilig und lustlos dass es eben nur schrecklich und nicht amüsant ist. Da wird ausufernd der Werbeprospekt inklusive Einhaltung seiner Versprechungen zerlegt, die Technik des Schiffes, und die Hierarchiestruktur der Bediensteten, aber viel zu wenig das Verhalten der Touristen einer ethnografischen Untersuchung unterzogen, was ich mir eigentlich vorgestellt hätte.

Im Prinzipt tendiert das Werk schon zu 2,5 Punkten aber auf mir sträuben sich tatsächlich alle Nackenhaare hier aufzurunden, weshalb ich es auch unterlasse, ist schließlich mein Account und meine Review. :D

Fazit: Ich hoffe der Autor ist in seinen hochgelobten epischen Werken nicht auch so schlampig und unambitioniert, denn sonst muss ich laut den Untertitel aussprechen nämlich "aber in Zukunft ohne mich!"

Now I see what all the fuss is about.

This is my first David Foster Wallace and, while I'd been meaning to read him for sometime, it was his well known essay on cruising that finally led me to close the deal.

I recently went on a Caribbean cruise with a buddy of mine who is an absolutely cruise fiend. He'd been urging me for years to come with him and I finally agreed.

I hated it.

Sharing my hatred with numerous individuals often resulted in their saying, "Have you read that DFW essay on cruising? You'd love it!"

And I did. You might consider it a bit lengthy for an essay, at 100 pages it's the longest in this collection, but there is not a page included that does not deserve to be there.

The most amazing thing, really, is how little cruising has changed. Wallace wrote this essay back in 1995, but he could have been describing the cruise experience in 2020. There are a couple indicators of course, DFW's unfamiliarity with the term "GPS," for example, but all the things that I, and it appears, DFW, hate about the American service industry have remained consistent over time.

But while I loved the title essay, the one from this collection I actually came away with liking the most is "Getting away from already pretty much being away from it all," about DFW's time at the Illinois State Fair.

Now I've never been to a state fair, but Wallace renders it pretty much exactly as I imagine it would be. To the point that I actually sort of want to go see the tacky horror of it all for myself.

Every single page features absolutely hilarious anecdotes and examples, from the booth with t-shirts featuring various absurd slogans to Wallace's depiction of the carnies. I loved it all.

Two of the essays concern tennis, and you don't have to be a tennis fan in order to enjoy them. Though one of these two, "Derivative sport in tornado alley," is less about tennis than it is a look at DFW's upbringing, with a tornado thrown in for good measure.

Another essay, "David Lynch keeps his head," sees DFW on the set of the 1995 David Lynch film "Lost Highway."

I took a film class back in my freshman year of college in the fall of 2004. The professor was young, mistaken by nearly all of us for a student when he first walked in, and resembled Kurt Cobain. What a class that was ... one of my classmates was blind (yes, a blind girl in a film class) and her condition required that she be accompanied everywhere with a dog, Lila. The dog's birthday happened to fall on the Friday before our midterm exam, and the professor carted out a birthday cake made entirely of liver (being as it was, for the dog) and announced to the class that he would give extra credit to those who ate a slice. Of the 30 or so students, I and two others were alone in accepting the offer.

It tasted about how you'd expect liver cake to. Which is to say, disgusting.

The following day, Professor Holiday joked that "I can't really do that, so I've brought a birthday card for the dog and if the rest of you just write something witty inside, I'll give you extra credit too."

Yes, I was outraged, but what could I do?

That little story was merely a detour on my way to saying that the first time I ever saw the film "Lost Highway," or anything by David Lynch for that matter, was in that class. I rewatched it for the first time since then while reading DFW's essay and, yes, it's still pretty bad. Interesting, but bad.

But like DFW, I truly admire David Lynch and concur that other, more "popular" directors, like Quentin Tarantino, have borrowed from Lynch to such a heavy extent that they owe their success largely to him.

Also the third season of "Twin Peaks" is the best thing that's ever aired on TV, period.

"E unibus plurum: television and U.S. fiction" is largely about television advertising and how an ad can never, ever, be considered art. It's a depressing, but illuminating, look into the industry and the ways it manages to manipulate the populace.

I didn't love every essay — "Greatly Exaggerated," a look into post-structuralism and obscure (for me, anyway) literary theory wasn't quite my cup of tea — but I loved or very much liked the rest.

Now comes the obligatory note on how we have been unfortunately deprived of DFW's fantastic mind, and that is heartrending indeed. It's clear in this, his first collection, that he was a truly fabulous writer. Fortunately, I have other unread works of his to check out, including his fiction, but the mind can't help but ponder on what such a truly insightful individual would have had to say about all the things that make up our chaotic modern times.