A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace

Feb 15, 2011 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: phenomenal, read-2008

before: I've been having trouble picking what to read next. I tried Anna Kavan, I tried William Vollmann, I tried Fellipe Alfau. No dice. So I thought maybe some non-fiction, something a little less frivolous, a little less difficult. I kinda pulled this book without thinking, really, refusing to consider myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read almost all his books before, right? So obvs I should be a...more

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Jun 09, 2010 Books Ring Mah Bell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-shorts-n-essays, favorites, funny

This summer I got this book from the library. I started on the cruise ship story and soon realized I would want my very own copy to dogear, underline, and do other dirty booknerd things to.

David Foster Wallace, you are (were) genius! I think I may be in love with you! I love your footnotes- footnotes that range from a simple "duh!" or "!" to 2 page long footnotes that have footnotes themselves. Not a lot of authors could get away with that, but you, my love, can.
Could.
Did.
Whatever.

As I stated...more

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Jul 02, 2008 karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfictions, favorites

this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exxagerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.

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Jan 23, 2013 mark monday rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: he-said-she-said, rain-man-reviews, navel-gazin-reviews

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

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 signifie...more

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Dec 08, 2012 Stephen M rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: tears-of-beautiful-laughter

A Definitely Awesome Thing that I’ll Most Certainly Read Again

Full disclosure: I felt the smallest twinge of disappointment as I read these essays; (not because of the quality therein—there’s hardly any disappointment to be had there—but because it dawned on me that Infinite Jest, a book that I had spent the better part of February and March, slaving over and worshipping, was not in fact some work of genius that grew out of the side of DFW’s head and broke off one night in a fit of divinely insp...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Madeleine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, let-us-now-speak-of-great-men, our-libeary, mmxii, tooting-my-own-muted-horn

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 cli...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Adam Floridia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star-books, to-assign-in-creative-writing-class, being-a-human

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 repe...more 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?
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Aug 05, 2007 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: top-20, you-ll-snort-milk-thru-your-nose

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

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Apr 09, 2009 Lena rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays

This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass market cruise would mirror my own pers...more This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass market cruise would mirror my own personal version of Hell, I related particularly well to his commentary on the emotional underbelly that lurks beneath the shiny surface of the "managed fun" the cruise ship staff does its best to inflict upon its passengers. In the wake of the author's recent suicide, it was terribly sad to read some of his thoughts on the despair this situation inspired in him. At the time he wrote it, however, that despair was balanced out by an astounding sense of humor, and I am still laughing as I reflect upon sections such as the fear he inspired in innocent bystanders during his first skeet shooting attempts and the footnote in which he detailed the numerous breaches of etiquette he managed to make during Elegant Tea Time.

Other topics addressed in this collection include the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers (written long before reality television burst on the scene, leaving me wistfully wondering if he had written anything on that topic before his untimely death—if anyone knows of anything, I'd appreciate being pointed to it), observations on director David Lynch and why his films are so creepily disturbing, commentary on certain points of literary theory that was so far beyond me it came close to making my head explode (fortunately, this piece was short) and a surprisingly fascinating look at the "minor leagues" of professional tennis, those players whose names we never hear but who are the foundation upon which the TV-friendly greats all stand.

My favorite piece in this book, however, is the first one, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." It is a meditation on his own early tennis ambitions and how his understanding of math and intuitive sense of Midwestern weather allowed him to progress farther in his playing than his mediocre talent alone would have allowed. There is something so profound about the bittersweet tone of this piece and the intensity of its ending that I suspect it will stay with me for a long, long time.

David, you will be sorely missed.
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Apr 20, 2011 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 bette...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Ellen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone - but don't skip the fine print

Shelves: essays

"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...more

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Jan 23, 2013 Janet rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: colossal-disappointments, non-fiction, pop-culture, stop-sniveling-and-eat-a-bigger-bre, urban-angst-ills

I’d like to add a new category to GR called ‘read enough’ – for those books that leave you staggering to your feet wiping the blood from your mouth conceding defeat. You know the gap between to-read and read. Amazingly enough I actually finished this book but only because the final 100 pages were footnotes followed by footnotes to his footnotes. Are you kidding me?

This is a collection of essays covering everything from playing tennis in the tornado belt to television and its relationship to U.S....more

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May 14, 2010 Moira Russell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Everyone.

Shelves: favourites, 2010-50-new-books-challenge, comfort-rereads

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

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Nov 24, 2008 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2008

Entertainment Weekly recently published a hilarious (in my opinion) list of the 100 best books written between 1983 and 2008.

There are some funny juxtapositions throughout the list, but this one takes the cake:

66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)

There is more authenticity and humanity in one of DFW's footnotes than in the entirety of the book ranked below it.

I did find that a couple of the essays in this book were...more

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Mar 04, 2013 Mircalla64 (free Liu Xiaobo) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: postmoderni

una cosa divertente che rifarei all'infinito

rileggere DFW

"Perchè i datori di lavoro e i superiori costringono i loro inferiori ad
allenarsi nel Sorriso Professionale? Sono forse l'unico cliente in cui
grandi dosi di sorrisi del genere producono disperazione? Sono l'unica
persona al mondo a essere convinta che la causa del numero crescente di
fatti di cronaca in cui persone all'apparenza assolutamente normali
cominciano a sparare con pistole automatiche nei centri commerciali, nelle agenzie di assicu...more

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Dec 29, 2007 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: attempt-at-non-fiction

the essay on tv and irony and fiction: brilliant.
the title essay: occasionally laugh-out-loud.
the two tennis essays: actually interesting to a non tennis player.
the illinois state fair essay: hilarious.
the essay about literary criticism/theory: completely confusing, but respectful.
overall, this book has made me into a DFW fan. he's SO articulate, his arguments are so well-developed, his way of thinking so unique. super captivating. i need to read more.

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Mar 01, 2009 julieta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, young-americans

This is a totally enjoyable book where some of the essays talk about stuff that I would think I have no interest in, like tennis, or a cruise ship, but that are written so well I ended up laughing out loud at some points, something which I never ever do, I am usually the mute laughter sort of reader.

DFW is totally brilliant, I must confess that while reading him I always had my dicionary close by, thus adding new words to my vocabulary, while enjoying everything he writes about. It doesn’t get...more This is a totally enjoyable book where some of the essays talk about stuff that I would think I have no interest in, like tennis, or a cruise ship, but that are written so well I ended up laughing out loud at some points, something which I never ever do, I am usually the mute laughter sort of reader.

DFW is totally brilliant, I must confess that while reading him I always had my dicionary close by, thus adding new words to my vocabulary, while enjoying everything he writes about. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Anyway, why does he make it so likable? It must be his personal approach, he has a totally different way of writing essays, they are an experience, not just something to be analysed, and everything seen through his eyes is so much better for being that.

I loved the one on David Lynch, Blue Velvet, when it came out to me, living in tijuana, and crossing to san diego to see it was a life changing experience, I thought it was the coolest, most bizarre thing I had ever seen in my life, and I loved it, even while being repulsed by it. The movie the essay is about, Lost Highway, was a very strange thing for me, I came out with a big interrogation sign on my forehead, I hadn’t seen the tv series… Duh.

There is something that he says in the one about television and fiction writers, that I just loved;
“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk didisapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal; shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nidged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘oh how banal’. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisionment without law.”

Yeah, rebellion is about taking chances, about a risk, and those risks change every day, just as we do ourselves, our ways of comunicating, our way of expressing ourselves.

And the one about the cruise ship, well that was just laugh out loud funny, his portrait of the whole experience is something you don’t want to miss. Great great book by a great writer.

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Aug 08, 2011 Borbality rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Nonfiction as art. I swear this guy could make hemorrhoids delightful. Also hits a little too close to home with the cruise ship situation. Five stars alone for mention and description of THE GRAVITRON at the fair. One of my favorites.

Each year I'm forced to attend an industry gathering with my company, which is a trade magazine that puts on the conference for the sleazy men (and a handful of women) who put on all the rock concerts (and pop, and country, and classical, and monster truck rallies,...more

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Nov 21, 2008 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social comment...more Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social commentary and cultural critiques made clear. He could also drill down to subtle human quirks which, though remote, are still recognizable (after he pointed them out). I’m sure his genius extended beyond my comprehension of it, too, especially with his more philosophical musings.** Though one of his goals was to lead readers to “aha” moments of insight, he never talked down to anyone to get there.

The subjects were varied, covering topics like tennis (as a regionally ranked junior player he knew the sport well), television, the Illinois State Fair, literary theory, and cruise ship excursions. You get the feeling he could write about anything, though, and it would all be brilliant. He could vary his tone, too, alternating between professorial, sardonic, insightful, and funny. I guess in popular parlance you’d call him a hipster, but he seemed a little less edgy and a little more caring than others of that ilk. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t even try to categorize such a multifaceted and unique individual.

One passage in the book struck me as particularly good. From what I’ve seen, it was one of his recurring themes. It has to do with irony and irreverence as a rhetorical mode. Turns out, fun as it may be for a time, he views it all as ultimately unfulfilling. With an ironist’s repertoire of criticism and destruction, there’s rarely anything constructive to “replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Consistent with that, in an interview I just read he spoke disparagingly of all the arch, pomo attitude there is these days.

So why did he do it? To be honest I really didn’t read this looking for clues. It’s hard not to think of his fate, though, when he talked so honestly about despair, and fighting the urge to throw himself off the ship that he otherwise wrote so playfully about in the title piece. I suppose depression and bad chemistry were the clinical reasons, but it’s natural to wonder what within his outlook he might have revealed to tip his hand. Did he simply think too much and in increasingly inward ways? Was he too keenly aware of how different he was? Even his friends may not know. What I do know is that they miss him. That includes friends he never met; those he connected with through his works.

*We might also conclude that the essay format is a way to see the curse of his genius, too, with hints of alienation in a world of average intelligence and a hyper-awareness of flaws including his own.

**When an essay jumps right in saying that “In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics,” you know you’re in for a challenge.***

***You get really used to footnotes in a DFW essay. Maybe it’s just the way a really smart person’s mind works—-they can go on for hours with the asides their active noggins flit to, discursively disrupting the linear flow but in interesting ways. You get a lot of long sentences with him, too (I say hoping it's without irony as I flatter him with imitation in yet another nested aside).(less)

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Mar 26, 2011 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

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 d...more 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.(less)

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Apr 13, 2009 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So guess what: I still like David Foster Wallace. Funny, serious, attention to detail - what more could I want of creative non-fiction? I didn't even know I was interested in post-modernism and modern television, or why David Lynch films (which I've never seen) are creepy, or what cruises say about American culture.

On Lynch: "I submit that we also, as a audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff becau...more

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Jul 25, 2008 Patrick O'Neil rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Somewhere I’ve heard it said that a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting. David Foster Wallace is such a writer, a good writer, and he does, at times, seem to write about anything. Although sometimes he seems to endlessly write about anything and then at the same time about everything else but the subject that he is supposedly writing about.

However, if I may be so bold as to make a small analogy here, most of the time he appears to be flogging a live horse until it is de...more Somewhere I’ve heard it said that a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting. David Foster Wallace is such a writer, a good writer, and he does, at times, seem to write about anything. Although sometimes he seems to endlessly write about anything and then at the same time about everything else but the subject that he is supposedly writing about.

However, if I may be so bold as to make a small analogy here, most of the time he appears to be flogging a live horse until it is dead, then flogs the dead horse until it is way beyond dead. Takes a lunch break – during which he describes what he is eating and where – then goes back to flogging the dead horse until he turns it around and describes how it feels to be flogging a dead horse. Somewhere around page 207 of the same essay he explores the sociological ramifications of flogging a dead horse while simultaneously expounding on the socioeconomics of horse flogging while footnoting his resentments against those who have issues against horse flogging, dead or not. Needless to say I am somewhat mentally exhausted after reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

I knew there was going to be trouble when I started skipping pages in the second essay “E Unibus Pluram” as I only engage in that sort of behavior when I really, and I do mean really, hate whatever it is that I am reading. Three of his other essays: “Greatly Exaggerated”, “David Lynch Keeps His Head” and “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” I found pretty much unreadable – with the Michael Joyce essay I started to choke just trying to digest the title. There were moments, especially in the David Lynch essay, that I wanted to scream and toss the book across the room – and frequently did. “E. Unibus Pluram”, Wallace’s seemingly coherent and over intellectualized diatribe on network television unfortunately, or fortunately contained a lot of material that was lost on me as I don’t watch television, especially not sit-coms and though I seem to remember the shows that he was referring to I still never partook in their viewing so I really couldn’t get the cynical references to their influences on society.

However “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” and “A Supposed Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” are, in my opinion, nothing short of brilliant and the saving graces for the book. Ignoring Wallace’s perchance to inject lengthy footnotes whenever and wherever possible I breezed through all three of these “chapters” enjoying Wallace enjoy himself celebrating his aloofness while infusing his phobia-ridden angst in every situation that he could. Maybe it was the subject matter, maybe it was that almost familiar uncomfortable-ness that Wallace flawlessly portrays that we can all relate to oh so well – I don’t know. But I can safely say that I didn’t toss the book across the room once when I was thoroughly engrossed reading those three essays.

As for the aforementioned footnote issue: Wallace’s near obsessive use of footnotes at times felt like he was thumbing his nose at his editor, or more likely his past editor(s), as almost all of these pieces are extended articles/essays that he was hired to write for various magazines/publications. Maybe just maybe one or two of his editors also felt as I do that Wallace tends to go off on a tangent and tried to reel him in and now here he is given near carte blanche to expound like a maniac and given that these original pieces do work he didn’t want to ruin their “flow” and just tagged on his footnotes like blurting out his opinions, though in a somewhat more controlled manner. Not being a real big academic/research reader myself the footnotes felt awkward and were not really a lot of help to me as I tend to not like having to stop reading, refer to a number, and then look to the bottom of the page for the further details – yes, I’m going to blame it on ADD and a low attention span. For me it breaks the rhythm of the essays up and as I’ve already stated I think Mr. Wallace is rather long winded and his use of footnotes only extends and complicates his work even further.

As for what Wallace was trying to accomplish grouping this collection of essays together I really have no idea. Other than now I am pretty much convinced that Mr. Wallace is a self-obsessed neurotic who tends to want us to sense that he is out of place everywhere that he goes and is too smart for his own good. That he can intellectualize the hell out of anything, no matter how small or trivial it may seem, taking what little fun or enjoyment that anyone else may have had out of the equation.

Although I’ve also heard it said that we tend to not like seeing some of ourselves in others and maybe this is why I object to Wallace’s over opinionated, self-absorbed, cynical-as-hell, judgmental, angst-driven, phobia-ridden and at times better than attitude. Of course all of those, ah, er, qualities of mine I deserve because, well, I'm better than the rest of you. Just kidding, sorta… No really I am, about the better than deal, not about Wallace – who, as they say, is all of those things and a bag of chips.
(less)

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Sep 17, 2011 Joy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays

Oh- THAT'S what I've been missing out on. How many culture references have I missed by not having read this book? More importantly, Wallace is just a great writer- funny, subtle, graceful. All the essays are lovely, but the one on Television and U.S. fiction is amazing and, like, important (this is the one where he dissects what he calls the "tyranny of irony" in contemporary literary and televisual expression). Much like Murakami and the short story, it strikes me that Wallace is most at home i...more

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Dec 27, 2011 Sarah Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: tennis nerds

Shelves: nonfiction

Things about David Foster Wallace that I found endearing while reading these essays:

1. Deathly afraid of chickens.
2. Wore size 11 Keds.
3. Placed 3rd in a Men's Legs Competition on board a Caribbean Cruise.
4. Was excellent at ping-pong, but was beaten by a 9yr old at chess.
5. Used the word creepy too much.
6. Compared Andre Agassi to the devil.
7. His endnotes have endnotes.
8. Described himself as 'semi agoraphobic.'
9. Deathly afraid of amusement park rides. (These fears go on ad infinitum)
10. Pa...more

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Mar 05, 2008 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2008

This is the kind of writing that makes you CUOL (crack up out loud) super hard, so that like three sentences later you remember the part that made you CUOL three sentences ago and you start CUOLing again, but so much that you can't just go on, you have to go and read that part over again that made you CUOL in the first place and then you just hold your place with your thumb and let the book fall closed and you shut your eyes and let yourself just CUOL for however long you need.

Also you sort of...more

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Jan 03, 2013 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub, 2013

The writing is superb. My interest in each individual essay depended on my interest in the topic, which is generally how nonfiction goes for me. The state fair essay is brilliant, I loved it. Also loved the essay about the supposedly fun thing he'll never do again (go on a cruise!).

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Aug 15, 2007 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've read this collection of essays enough times to know them all pretty much by heart, but I know I'll end up reading it again in a month or two. Just too damned funny, in that typically condescending, snobby, over-educated and under-experienced DFW way.

Picture, if you will:

1) Country boy-turned-Effete East Coaster returns prodigally to the State Fair where he was born!

2) Same effete East Coaster goes on a cruise with the morbidly obese, the morbidly stupid, and the morbidly American!

3) Effete...more

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Sep 25, 2007 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The eponymous essay is one of the funniest things I've ever read. I had it read to me for the first time while driving down the 95 in New Jersey. I literally had to pull off to the side because I was laughing so hard. He manages to be both critical and humane, existentially tortured (in a way I relate to) and culturally insightful (in a way I aspire to). My favorite line, after an exhaustive list of the various types of skin ailments and the like he has seen on the cruise: "In short, I have seen...more

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Jun 19, 2008 Maya Lang rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was both in awe of and incredibly annoyed by how ridiculously smart David Foster Wallace shows himself to be in these essays. One reviewer described him as using words the way a ninja uses throwing stars. I guess it's a thing of beauty to see someone so adept and skilled, but it can also be irritating to a bystander, watching the words whiz by. And to top it all off, he was a ranked Junior level national tennis player. Ugh! Anyway, his essay on the cruise trip he took (the title essay) was rid...more

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