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

by David Foster Wallace

billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run.

American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on. But television comes equipped with just such a handle. It’s an incredible gauge of the generic.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people.

is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.

Television offers way more than distraction. In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life.

The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.

irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function.

The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a flop as there is,

A little random to abbreviate this?

I arrived at my first professional tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance.

(in my opinion).

Right when I think he’s sounding a bit opinionated he states in my opinion.