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

Author: David Foster Wallace

Rating: ⭐ 4/5

Date Read: 2013/09/19

Pages: 353

Having recently conquered Infinite Jest, I’m finding it elucidating to read David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction, which I believe benefits from being relatively more explicit, and also from having fewer Quebecois separatist assassins in wheelchairs. I’m keeping this running commentary to review the entire book, starting with the outside. The cover is super nineties in that incredibly busy way that only nineties graphic designers loved. They pretty much started out with a excreta-inspired monochromatic palette, then added text the same way a teenage girl would: by cutting it out and laying it around in a mostly haphazard fashion. The result reminds me of the cover of the Barenaked Ladies album “Stunt” and is something of which Jony Ive would likely not approve.

On DFW on Youth Tennis: A nice introduction to DFW’s style (if you have not yet been introduced to his style), and also his history with tennis. I mostly find tennis to be boring, although it seems that it would be fun to actually play, plus the outfits are cute. As a kid, I was a competitive figure skater, so I resonated with being obsessed with something only to kind of peak early, but to ultimately be okay with it because intellectual pursuits are far more stimulating. Also, there’s a fair bit of math talk in this section, which is exciting, especially compared with the dull tennis stuff.

On DFW on Television: It’s always interesting to read an essay about “today’s culture” written over twenty years ago. Apparently, in 1990’s, the “cool” thing to do was to bad-mouth the mostly inane television shows while still watching 6 (6!!!) freaking hours of television per day. Obviously, the television landscape has changed, as I don’t know anyone who even still has cable (at least, not anyone in their twenties. People’s parents still have cable, and also probably people who live in the suburbs, which makes sense because when the options are to stay in and watch Kim Kardashian presents the Las Vegas edition of America’s Next Top Slut, or to go out and have a nice meal at the Olive Garden, well, actually the only solution is to gouge out one’s eyes and curse oneself for one’s irrational desire to live in a single family home with over 1000 square feet on a cul-de-sac. Culs-de-sac are overrated, people).

Which is to say that talking about television as if it’s somehow a universally important influence in American culture feels very, very dated. Interestingly, DFW pokes fun at the idea that literature shouldn’t date itself, because things that seem frivolously new now become ingrained in the culture in future generations. I guess what he assumed was that the graph of the importance of television would begin as an exponential function and then asymptote somewhere between the points on the y-axis that denote “quite important” and “extremely important.” Really, though, it’s a negative parabolic function that has already peaked and is now rapidly returning to the point on the y-axis that denotes “not so important,” kind of like atomic bomb terror and those pet rock things.

There are also some amusingly dated statements about what it will be like when we have digital, networked computers. DFW did not anticipate that we would all be spending our time watching and creating amateur videos starring our cats, for which I can’t begrudge him. DFW says some smart, thought-provoking stuff about “cool” irony and the danger of so much TV, so I’m not dinging any points because he wasn’t particularly prescient. Anyway, this section reads like a time capsule.

On DFW on the Illinois State Fair: I live in Illinois, but it’s really better to say that I live in Chicago. I don’t really know anything about the rest of the state beyond a few of the northern suburbs and this one southern suburb where I saw Radiohead once. Actually, I only recognize the names of towns like Decatur from the Sufjan Stevens album. I’m sure lifelong Illinoisians (that’s not a word….hmm…Illini? I think that’s a football team. Wikipedia tells me Illinoisans, so I’m going with that). Anyway, I’m sure lifelong Illinoisans are not particularly happy that my vote counts just as much as theirs.

The Illinois State Fair sounds approximately as expected: the overweight masses in t-shirts with inane sayings (think “I used to be schizophrenic but we’re okay now,” which was on constant rotation at Spencer’s Gifts and which betrays a complete lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness in general, and schizophrenia in particular) take time off from their busy Kmart shopping schedules to watch car races while eating 100% soybean-fried corn dogs. The purpose of this article is probably to give city dwellers such as myself some colorful anecdotes to recount over some micro greens and lobster foam, so that we can feel superior (for the same reason, we’ll also complain that foam has become a fallback dish for lazy chefs, and we’d rather see it off the menu, hopefully replaced by some house-cured charcuterie). I can only assume that this article is what Fox News anchors are talking about when they talk about elitism.

On DFW on Literary Criticism: As an undergraduate English major I was always partial to New Criticism, because I could close-read the text without bringing in materials beyond the text. This freed up a fair amount of time for beer pong. My problem with post-structuralists is that you can never win an argument against them, because they can always argue back that the concept of winning is really just an arbitrary social construct. Anyway, if you’ve ever spent a balmy August day trying to figure out how to apply Foucault’s idea of a historico-critical ontology of the self to The Rape of the Lock, then you’ll likely find this short section amusing.

On DFW on David Lynch: As a first-year undergraduate, I took a survey course on film in which we screened Eraserhead. I had no idea what to expect, but I certainly did not expect what I got, which was honestly a little terrifying. While I biked back to my dorm room, all I could think about was that creepy baby. Lynch freaks me out a little less now, but only because his films are generally brilliant even if they have creepy babies in them. You know, except for the ones that suck, but I haven’t seen those (except Dune, which I’m going to forget happened).

DFW seems to really like Lynch, whereas I just generally like him but still blame him for terrifying me with that baby. There’s a lot of stuff in this section to auteurs and hollywood and filmmaking, which is interesting if you’re into that kind of thing. He also manages to badmouth Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty, which I found amusing. I’m not sure if I like Lynch more or less after reading this section, but I definitely have the itch to watch Lost Highway.

On DFW on Tennis (again): I can’t comment on this essay because, after Infinite Jest and the first essay on tennis, I’ve definitely reached my quota on how much I can think about tennis this year. This essay is fine.

On DFW on Cruises: A couple of years ago, I went on a cruise to the Bahamas with two of my friends after we finished our masters degrees. The cruise ship looked like this:



We ended up having a fun time, but here are three reasons why I would never, ever step foot on a cruise ship ever again.

1) The food. Which was pretty bad. I guess if you were one of those aforementioned suburbanites who occasionally dines at The Olive Garden, the “asian inspired” tuna tartare wouldn’t seem quite so boring and obvious. However, if you’re consulting the Michelin Guide to plan your dinners, you’re going to think the food is pretty freaking mediocre (although you would have kind of figured that out beforehand, like I did, because they use the word “gourmet” constantly on their promotional materials, which usually means anything but).

2) The nightlife. I was imagining an all night party. To some extent, there was an all night party, except the party goers were pustule-ridden teenagers and their corpulent middle-aged parents (alright, I’m being an asshole and leaving out some information, so I’ll just be honest and say that some of the teenagers were corpulent too). Next time I want an all night party, I’m just going to Vegas, where the people are pretty and the restaurants are pretty decent (if you can sift through the subpar celebrity chef endorsed crap).

3) Cruising as a “culture-lite” experience. To me, the whole point of traveling is experiencing a culture that’s different than your own, so I find it infuriating that one could go to a foreign country and never actually meet a foreigner. Thinking about the best experiences of my travels, I go back to the young Parisian girl who offered everyone cigarettes (which she rolled and consumed right at the bar), the sharply dressed Japanese business woman who spoke no English but was able to help me order lunch from a vending machine, and the Costa Rican driver who told me in Spanish that tomatoes are a lot like butterflies: they start off looking the same and transform into many different varieties (at least, that’s what I think he said, if my rusty Spanish it to be trusted). Sadly, I can’t tell you a thing about the Bahamas or the Bahamian people, except that they seem to sell a lot of alcoholic beverages served in coconuts.

Either I’m more of a snob than DFW or I’m doing it wrong, because he describes his cruising experience as upscale. I lean towards the latter, because no island native offered me any weed (however, this may be explained by the fact that my cruise did not take me near Jamaica). Anyway, DFW captures a lot of the “bovineness” of the tourists and the ridiculousness of the forced pleasurable activities and comments on the absurdity in a way that only he could. This essay is the best of the bunch.

I’m being longwinded, so I’ll wrap this up by saying I quite liked the collection of essays. I liked it more than I liked Infinite Jest.