This Is Perfect, since I just finished this book as well, off your rec. So. The Television essay was actually my least favorite, aside from, of course, the Greatly Exaggerated, which, come on, but I just felt like it (E Unibus) used exactly the sort of hifalutin language and cold academic tone that, in other essays, DFW condemns.

You don't have to read more than a few pages of this guy to realize he's pretty much a genius. Or, if you're less gaga-in-love with him than I, at least pretty smart. What's so great about his writing, though, is that it's so accessible. Everyone thinks Infinite Jest is this crazy grueling abstruse tome, and sure it's 1000+ pages long, but it's a SUPER easy read, and incredibly funny and incredibly moving, but mostly just very accessible. It's like when Larry David meets some guy named John Tyler on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and starts going off about the eponymous US president or when Ricky Gervais starts name-dropping philosophers, and you're like Oh man, this person is so funny you wouldn't necessarily guess that they're particularly intelligent, but they obviously ARE, just not pretentiously or overtly so. DFW gets criticized a lot for I guess his diction being pretentious, but you can't fault a guy for having a crazy and sprawling vocabulary slash understanding of the English language. Anyway, I've always defended him (in my own pathetic fanboy head at least) as being Totally UNpretentious and Accessible and Just Really Smart and But Totally Accessible.

In short, the television essay was, I thought, borderline pretentious. And not in and of itself, but just because I thought it was a little hypocritical in its tone (though it was written a long time ago, when the author maybe had different scruples or whatever whatever). It was definitely interesting, but just not what I look for in a DFW piece.

This book did make me want to place more tennis.

The title essay though, good God. It's funny as shit. This is probably just a case of one person being annoyed by a writer's voice and another wanting to trade his penis in for a womb so that he can have the writer's babies, but I doubt I've ever laughed harder from reading something, and I've read this one 2x. Probably just an opinion thing, so I won't go on. A shame though, because it makes me wonder whether you'd like Infinite Jest as much as I did, or as much as I've been assuming you would.

In any case, this collection is more consistent, I thought, than Consider the Lobster, which has some even better essays (less funny, more serious), but also some real clunkers. Some reeeeeeeal clunkers. It's just fun to say that. Some reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal clunkers. The title essay is almost exactly the same as the Fair one in Supposedly, only he goes to a Maine Lobster Fest instead of a State Fair, but the best, and my favorite of his ever, and I digress, and but a piece which has pretty much made him My Hero, is one called "Authority and American Usage," which is real good. It's reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal good.

It really is.

You're right, the guy is phenomenally accessible. There were times when I would be reading pretty dense sections on Lynch's films or postmodern fiction, and feeling pretty damn good about myself - jesus, I'm flying through this, I must be brilliant - and then slowly realizing that it had far more to do with his writing ability than my intellectual prowess. It makes you wish everyone could take a magic pill to be able to write as well as DFW, because every subject you were ever remotely interested in, no matter how arcane, would become instantly accessible. So I neglected to give him props for that.

And yeah, the television essay was interesting, because many of his issues with postmodern writers I found him to be guilty of to, though to a lesser extent. But regardless of whether he's hypocritical or not, the central point of the essay, that irony is the central theme of almost all serious fiction now and that irony is a tool that is only capable of destroying rather than creating, was really illuminating for me. It felt like it crystalized my distaste for a lot of the stuff I've read in McSweeny's and elsewhere - stuff so referential that there lacked a core, and there was nothing being created, only referenced. And I don't really know how you make that point without getting a little pedantic, as you're basically forced to geek out over books for an entire essay and develop ideas that take time to develop.

I will read Infinite Jest someday.