About book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays And Arguments (1998)
I'm bewitched by this glorious magenta cover with yellow starfish and the peculiarly flattened and shaped white font. I don't know why it is, but whenever I purchase the British edition of a book, inevitably I aesthetically prefer its differing cover artwork, layout, colour scheme, blurb text—the whole canoodle is just presented to this set of timeworn eyes in a more attractive package than what is offered from North American publishing houses. Not to mention that they generally even smell better—and if you are one of those weirdos who doesn't sniff your book's pages, well, I'm sure I won't be the first person to inform you that you are missing out on an integral component of the entire reading experience. Bury that nose, Jack.I read the first essay Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley this morning while the fog of sleep was slowly dissipating from my brain—it was a little meatier fare than I had initially expected. Gorgeous opening paragraph, though, ending in the following wonderfully etched phrase that immediately informed me I would need to brew myself up some coffee: The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play. Then a very nice essay reflecting upon DFW's childhood amidst the corn-rich, lush black earth of the Illinois segment of the fertile American midwest, told through his formative years as a junior tennis player and framed with the mathematical boundaries of the playing court and the differentiating vectors of the omnipresent flavors of wind that live out their rich aerial life over these flat and fecund fields. Somewhat difficult in DFW's uniquely readable style that forces your mind into a slightly off-kilter rhythm, and with that humorous wit splayed throughout his self-deprecating description of his usage of an enviro-mathematical understanding of the elements—that sky dervish wind most of all—as an integral component of his tennis game, making an ally out of what bedeviled and frustrated his more talented opponents. It gains in power as it moves through its short textual life, ending with a brilliantly conceived depiction of an Alley tornado—or pseudo-tornado—that descended one day, flattening the fields like a titanic, invisible hand brutally caressing its verdant earthly lover. DFW's description of his being lifted from pursuit of the neon tennis ball, overtaking it and then, together with his playing partner and friend Gil Antitoi, being waffle-ironed into the chain-link fence in Warner Brothers fashion, makes for a pitch-perfect ending.It also took me somewhat longer to finish E Unibus Pluram than I had originally anticipated. As a fiction writer—albeit one whose work has an audience of Me, Myself, and I—I can immediately locate myself in DFW's opening description of that kind; and his commiserative outlining of what constitutes a lonely person cuts through in can-opener fashion to expose the roots of self-isolation within awareness using but a few lines of simple truth. This is one of those reading experiences that assembles myriad ideas and thoughts and analyses which one has previously encountered from different sources and writers and coheres them into a whole that is profound, which unfolds with the inevitable logic of a sunrise and casts a new light upon the shadowy world that lies before it. In addition to instilling in me a renewed avowal to tackle DeLillo's White Noise, I thought that his argument was firmly constructed: a walk-through of the way in which the Televisual has co-opted the postmodernist usage of irony, the absurd, ridicule, and self-awareness and managed to inoculate itself from the effects of such criticisms; how this post-postmodernist revolt against the revolution was a logical and foreseeable progression from the literary and artistic tropes of modernism; that one of these linkages proceeds through the cultural and existential implications of mass-communication technologies in which the evolution is from individuals comforted with the illusion of being immersed within the communal masses to that of said masses becoming individualized as unique—and uniquely superior—personalities ironically aware of the sublimating deceptions of the former state but oblivious at the important levels as to the subtle changes at work within the latter, including the immersion of the personality inside the fantasy of the Televisual screen; and that this irony, noninvolvement, and ridicule, whilst entertaining and amusing as put into action by both the Televisual and the literary authors who are endeavoring to undermine it, is ultimately a despairing and stagnant strategy whose end result seems only to be a paralysis towards societal changes. Is the answer to be found in a new generation of young writers willing to commit, to risk the backlash of scorn and mockery for penning characters with ideals and beliefs and writing about them sincerely? A backing away from the Jon Stewartization of liberal news into liberal entertainment, from knowing winks and Geddit?Geddit! nods? I think it's a step in the right direction. But it will be very difficult: in an essay in which he presented the thesis outlined above, he was unable to refrain from indulging in the same ironic awareness, the same refusal to fully commit to a claim (his two or three asides that he wasn't trying to say that television is this or the industry that), and the same (gentle) ridicule, especially present in the tweaking of George Gilder's breathless conservo-libertarian technophilia towards the end of the essay, a subtle choice by DFW, made—and acknowledged afterwards—in order to strengthen his textual argument: that this postmodernist technique has become so prevalent that even an author like this one, aware of its allure, finds it exceedingly difficult to break away from its pervasive influence. A very worthwhile essay, one which I am glad to have finally read and which, it seems to me, has only become more relevant in this new century.At first glance, Greatly Exaggerated doesn't strike one as the kind of essay that would appeal to very many reader's tastes, being a relatively brief review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy, the commercial print of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted by the enchantingly named H. L. Hix, whom Wallace describes as appearing to have arrived at about the ripe old age of twelve according to the jacket photo. Hix had positioned himself as an adjudicator for the estranged and bifurcated camps of the rather turgid world of literary criticism: the predominantly continental Pro-Death gang—holding the author to be an effect of the text—and the principally Anglo-American Anti-Death crowd, who deem the author to be the cause. I've never taken a university course in my life, nor read any books about literary theory—which, come to think of it, might go a ways towards explaining the content and style of my Goodreads reviews—and what little I've come across describing the strangled arguments of these Poststructuralist and New Critical positions has struck me as labyrinthine and rather immaterial—though Jeff Goldstein, of the US conservative blog Protein Wisdom, had written some very interesting and clarifying posts—before he suffered a meltdown he has never fully recovered from—arguing for the Intentionalist point-of-view. DFW, in the space of a mere eight pages, stakes the positions of the various camps, the combinatory attempt by Hix to reconcile these bickering critical standpoints, delivers a good number of enlightening lines and amusing digs about the entire affair, and closes with a quote from William Gass that seems particularly apropos. Typical to my experience so far with this book of essays, Wallace possesses the arrhythmic ability to switch on a dime from easy, bantering prose to one laden with unfamiliar and daunting words that block the stream and hobble one's pace, jarring the reader out of his comfort zone and forcing him to regroup and concentrate anew upon what Wallace is saying. It can sometimes make for a slower reading experience, but, ultimately, one more enriching. Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Argle-Bargle-Too-Long-To-Type is my favorite essay thus far. I truly love the manner in which DFW writes about tennis, the combination of detached observation, passionate advocacy, breezy and witty analogy, and acute deconstruction of what is taking place both on and off the court that he brings to the task—and the fact that he once attained the ranking of 17th as a junior within the Midwest Division gives him an insider's knowledge of the mechanics of the game—the requisite functional computation of angles and tactics on the run whilst dealing with all of the mental and physical pressures placed upon and within the human frame in trying to chase down and whack a tangerine-sized ball and dealing with an opponent skilled in the same conscious and unconscious calculations and reactions in pursuit of the same seamed neon spheroid—that only adds depth and veracity to his reportage. When Wallace categorically states that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is I admit to full agreement—allowing myself, of course, the hedge of declaring that it shares that summit with ice hockey and football (soccer to us North American philistines); but the latter two are team games, and as far as solo sporting endeavors are concerned, tennis is firmly placed at the aesthetic acme. It was Wallace, after all, who described Roger Federer's mesmerizingly beautiful forehand as a great liquid whip, which is of such an apt, exquisite perfection that it will forever spring to mind when I spy the Mighty Fed cracking winners. Wallace's awe and appreciation of the power and grace, the speed and dexterity, the patience and endurance that intertwine within the world-class tennis professional shine through whenever he writes about tennis, and especially in this essay, in which the then-79th-ranked-and-22-years-old American Michael Joyce, a sturdy, prematurely-balding power baseliner, built in the mold of Agassi—whom DFW loathed—serves as the locus for Wallace's musings about the action underway during the 1995 Canada Masters in Montréal, with a particular focus upon the Qualifying Tournament that preceded the main event, a struggle between sixty-four pros without sufficient ranking to guarantee entry to receive one of the eight available qualifier placements. The few niggardly quibbles I had—in describing the career arc of singles' journeyman Jakob Hlasek, he entirely omitted the latter's fine results in doubles tennis, in which he won the 1992 French Open and reached four other Grand Slam semifinals; his unawareness that each year Toronto and Montréal swap locations for the ATP Men's and WTA Women's events respectively; his much-too-harsh condemnation of John McEnroe becoming a tennis color commentator—are minor ones indeed; this is a wonderfully written tour of the world of men's tennis circa 1995. His descriptions of the tour's players are spot-on and brilliant; his relation of the tawdriness and excitement of the event amusingly excellent; his understanding and analysis of the type of psyches required, the drive of both parent and child to produce such a sleek, athletic automaton, both deep and convincing; his details of the peripatetic lifestyle, the challenges and chill lonelinesses of the low-paid, struggling tennis would-be-stars commiserative and informatory; and his assessment of the newly-emergent and -dominant style of the Power Baseliner—which, by 2004, had effectively eliminated the serve-and-volley game, that of personal favorites such as Sampras, McEnroe, Ivanisevic, Becker, and Edberg, from professional tennis—absolutely nails it, especially his perceptive observation of it as awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. Preach it, brother.
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.
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This, my first experience reading David Foster Wallace, disabused me of a few prejudices that in retrospect seem shamefully naive, one of which being that objects of the American Media Hype Machine are necessarily mediocre. I believed that there had to be something vapid or cheap or sensationalist about things or persons that become loci of the intellectual-creative “next-voice-of-our-generation” ballyhoo. It’s tough not to be cynical. The whole zeitgeist of our times is cynicism, aloofness, a disdain of sensitivity bordering on neurosis (and I mean a healthy, cultured sensitivity, one nurtured in restraint and consideration and taste, not an emo-ish “horticulturally cultivated five o’clock shadow thick glasses staring pensively over a latte and word document always always in public in sight of the pretty girls” sensitivity). Fight Clubs, Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Geniuses, American Psychos,... if these are the voices of our times let me be an anachronism. In my narrow-mindedness, I lumped DFW in with these other bright young things, figuring he was another spoiled product of moneyed, media-saturated, hipper-than-thou America, wielding an a priori standoffishness as crutch and sword. It’s what I’d come to expect of popular entertainment as a whole. I don’t mean Harry Potter/Girl with the X tattoo lit. (stuff that is immensely popular but actually has redeeming factors and is based in a solid tradition of plot, earnest character development, involved drama, etc.), but stuff that was supposed to represent the intellectual undercurrents of what it is to be a living mind in America in the early twenty-first century; you know, edgy stuff. McSweeney’s has some funny t-shirts, but in the end all the irony can be fucking despairing. Contrived coolness, ultraviolence representing god knows what, involuted sexual obsessions as supposed comment on middle-class repression and ennui or some nonsense, solipsistic unearned first-person memoiric explorations of “what-am-I-in-this-crazy-work-a-day-world”- it keeps on piling up to a vomitous apogee, and I find myself saying “fuck it” and reading Proust or Walser or Pessoa or Flaubert just so I can fucking breath, just to feel someone expressing something honest and with an unmanufactured posture.Enter DFW. I can’t comment on Infinite Jest (a book for another day, when I again have surplus hours to give to a tome, hopefully soon), but A Supposedly Fun Thing... cuts through all of my above complaints like a glowingly-hot knife through butter. It has come to be the ubiquitous descriptor of Wallace, that he was “a decent guy”, and from what I can glean from this collection of essays the shoe fits (and is there really a higher compliment?)... but in addition to his essential decency (involving empathy, kindness, a bullshit detector always set on 11, the keenest eye for a telling detail I’ve encountered in books of my times), it is the way he subsumes the alienating, cheapening aspects of our culture into his vast intellect, deconstructs them into their vital parts, analyzes their components, and restructures them into a completely non-ironic, funny-as-hell, and enlightening statement about what it is to be a human being. And my god, the humor in this book! Never before have I bitten my lip to bleeding so many times attempting to restrain outright bursts of mad laughter reading this in public. And it’s consistent. And underneath the laughter is that certain lattice within modern humor at its best form (and I’m thinking of like Louis CK here, or Mitch Hedberg, or Bill Hicks) where the laughter is ringing above a potential abyss, and that humor and the transformation of creeping despair into something luminous are the only ways of redeeming contemporary things and ideas from utter degradation and fitting them back into the lineage of a culture of thorough humanist examination. Calling DFW “the last humanist” is tempting, but then I’d be falling into the same traps of cynicism these essays made me believe it is possible to free ourselves from.Good readers go into books looking for an honest, unique interpretation of some facet of genuine experience; over the years I have found myself searching farther back into other cultures and other eras very distant from mine for that kind of fulfilling, rounded perspective. What A Supposedly Fun Thing... has shown me is that while it is still an essential component of a dedicated humanist to understand the history of thought and expression, especially in the face of the dulling, warping aspects of rudderless progress and an increasingly fragmented reality, that there are outposts of sincerity, of good-nature, representatives of the “decent guys” of the creative temperament, hard at work, chewing on the problems that haunt us, me, you, this very day, dealing with the stuff of our every days in terms that elevate them above the every day (DFW, in this book alone, elevated tennis, state fairs, David Lynch, television, a week-long cruise, the athlete, to the realm of eternal motif). They’re just working a lot harder, being driven down tougher paths, having to fortify their honesty and sensitivity and steel themselves in the face of fragmentation to a greater degree. DFW disabused me of the notion that I have to look outside of my own times for some hero of the candid, the honest, the unique, and I think he would have considered that some sort of success.On a more depressing note, I understand now that the media hype that at first so turned me off to the David Foster Wallace machine was in a great part due to his suicide. Suicide makes everything more momentous, gives a retrospective ur-meaning to all the aspects of a life, imposes an immediate posterity on a creative human being’s works. I can’t fathom what it would have been like in 2008 had I known his work, but I can sense the immense loss to our times that his passing has meant. I mean, imagine looking forward to more Harper’s experiential essays, a complete Pale King, more laughter, more insights. Overly sensitive souls run the risk of being so sensitive that all they feel is pain, and the weird and baroque regimen of drugs Wallace was on somehow did not dull this sensitivity, this awareness (and in some perverse way made him even more representative of our times). As I said before, really insightful humor runs right along an abyss of terror, things that uplift keep a dialogue with things that destroy us, they inform and expand awareness in the other. Somewhere early in the titular essay of this book, Wallace goes on one of his famous footnote-digressions, which also happens to be quite representative of his sense of humor and mode of observation, about the despairing phenomenon of “The Professional Smile”. I’ll quote it at length:”...the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... You know this smile- the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/incomplete zygomatic involvement- the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?Who do they think they are fooling by the Professional Smile?And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e., the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.”I’m confident David Foster Wallace was never giving us the Professional Smile.
—Geoff
I feel a strange nervousness writing this review, not because of the fear of castigation (that, I must admit, thrills me), but because I now join the ranks of those who say things like: "over intellectualized diatribe" (this is out of context but still) "He's too clever for me I guess, because I was alienated from the writing." (this is somewhat jaded and sarcastic but still) " I found his writing a bit pretentious, and I just don't get the feeling he's being honest in the essays" (no qualifier) " Too pretentious, too dated, too verbose." - I agree with none of these things and I must admit it worries me that no-one who doesn't like it discusses any of the content much. Now I too will indulge in this to some extent. The first essay, about youthful tennis exploits and the wind, instantly introduces a warm and personable tone. Tennis doesn't interest me particularly (though Wimbledon is the only sporting event you'll catch me watching any of, other than the world cup, and I couldn't stomach that if it was yearly) and this did nothing to change that but once it was done I was ready to move onwards and upwards (see? summarily dismissed.)The second essay, on Television, I would say is probably the most interesting in that it is overtly and completely an essay of ideas rather than a piece of reportage. (short fumble with the book to make sure I say something germane) Whilst skipping over the criticisms that others have of this essay, namely that it's dated (what a bastard for engaging with an ever changing present, eh?), I would question the validity of his starting point: that television presents itself as an opportunity for voyeurism. After this he begins to talk about it as a tool to deal with loneliness, a more convincing idea, but I would argue that voyeurism would not give comfort to loneliness (by proffering a false togetherness) so much as imbue the enduring isolation with a feeling of power or purpose. Basically I would say that TV offers another form of (structured) noise which comforts and lulls and distracts whilst voyeurism focuses and distracts (I should know)(view spoiler)[but I don't (hide spoiler)]
—Ned Rifle
MyFleshSingsOut wrote: "My mind often drifts to the DFW v. Little Girl chess match when thinking about the essay. Or chess."Maybe it's because Salinger's been more at the forefront of my mind since his death but I can't help noticing the resemblances - not just the italics or the minutely reported speech patterns or the devastating in-goes-the-pin descriptions ('basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste,' OW, David) but the kind of struggle I was talking about over in Ellen's review - _not_ to be super-ironic, not to critically dissect everything to nothing all the time, not to become 'either a goddamn seer or a human hatpin.' Even to the interest in Zen ('this is water', &c).
—Moira Russell
