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

by David Foster Wallace

Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster w/pictures.

But the truth is that there’s some complex high-dose psychic transaction between TV and Audience whereby Audience gets trained to respond to and then like and then expect trite, hackneyed, numbing television shows, and to expect them to such an extent that when networks do occasionally abandon time-tested formulas Audience usually punishes them for it by not watching novel shows in sufficient numbers to let them get off the ground.

Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.

there’s something sad about the fact that David Leavitt’s short stories’ sole description of some characters is that their T-shirts have certain brand names on them. But the fact is that, for most of Leavitt’s educated young readership, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is,

In one of the graduate workshops I went through, a certain gray eminence kept trying to convince us that a literary story or novel should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” 13 because “serious fiction must be Timeless.”

And let’s not even talk about Balzac.

Ball sack?

But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with.

All this is so much more exaggerated with social media influencers, etc

Commercials targeted at the ’80s’ upscale Boomers, for example, are notorious for using processed versions of tunes from the rock culture of the ’60s and ’70s both to elicit the yearning that accompanies nostalgia and to yoke purchase of products with what for yuppies is a lost era of genuine conviction.

Except for being sillier (e.g. products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals),

This is particularly true when the viewer is armed with a remote-control gizmo: Joe B. is still getting his six total hours of daily TV, but the amount of his retinal time devoted to any one option shrinks as he remote-scans a much wider band.

Precursor to the modern doom scrolling

it’s not really choice that the commercial is selling Joe Briefcase on, “but the total negation of choices.

early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to a ridiculous world.

Kesey’s black parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were often crazier than their patients;

One flew over tbe cuckoo's nest is one of my favourite books and also movie.

For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world.”

Very predictive, except the "furniture" fits in your pocket now

Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color.

Now these same ideas are being promised with VR

The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal.

all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for something.

the John Birch Society (we’ll be checking out that tent for sure).

Any pale horses in here???

No idea what the Poultry Barn smelled like because I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Traumatically pecked once, as a child, at the Champaign County Fair, I have a longstanding phobic thing about poultry.

I was going to say that Dave was chicken of chicken, he fly's from fowl

The horses’ faces are long

What? Are we in a bar?

Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,”

One of my fav's

sort of the way you’d ignore a child’s alfresco peeing.

Reminds me of my son peeing at the beach when he was a toddler. We told him to go inro the water to pee. He walked in up to his ankles, pulled his swim suit down and pissed to the hilarity of everyone there