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

by David Foster Wallace

all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.

I liked wind; or rather I at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there,

Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration.

Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

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. People affect them too strongly.

Television 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.

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.

An activity is addictive if one’s relationship to it lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and really needing it.

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.

If it’s true that many Americans are lonely, and if it’s true that many lonely people are prodigious TV-watchers, and it’s true that lonely people find in television’s 2-D images relief from their stressful reluctance to be around real human beings, then it’s also obvious that the more time spent at home alone watching TV, the less time spent in the world of real human beings, and that the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel inadequate to the tasks involved in being a part of the world, thus fundamentally apart from it, alienated from it, solipsistic, lonely.

to the extent one begins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real people, one will have commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3-D persons,

Since television must seek to attract viewers by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV’s whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory (“Joe, Joe, there’s a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture”) while reinforcing television-watching in practice (“Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV”).

Plato’s chariot

For the artistic viability of postmodernism was a direct consequence, again, not of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture.

Octavio Paz calls “Meta-irony,” 12

Pynchon and DeLillo were ahead of their time.

Today, the belief that pop images are basically just mimetic devices is one of the attitudes that separates most U.S. fiction writers under c. 40 from the writerly generation that precedes us, reviews us, and designs our grad-school curricula.

The Voltaire of Candide, for instance, uses a bisensuous irony that would do Ed Rabel proud, having Candide and Pangloss run around smiling and saying “All for the best, the best of all worlds” amid war-dead, pogroms, rampant nastiness, etc.

And let’s not even talk about Balzac.

Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49.

Apple’s Propheteers, Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, Coover’s A Night at the Movies, or You Must Remember This, William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, Stephen Dixon’s Movies: Seventeen Stories, and DeLillo’s own fictional hologram of Oswald in Libra

A. M. Homes’s 1990 The Safety of Objects features a stormy love affair between a boy and a Barbie doll.

"Lars and the real girl"

Mark Leyner’s 1990 campus smash My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, less a novel than what the book’s jacket copy describes as “a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took,”

U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging.

the only characters who get to have color and stand out from their surroundings are the pink people who become pink at the exact moment they imbibe good old Cherry 7-Up.

"Pleasantville"

a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values.

There’s about as much “choice” at work in this commercial as there was in Pavlov’s bell-kennel.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironist...

sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants.

For me, at least, it got creepy. By the time I left for college the area no longer seemed dull so much as empty, lonely. Middle-of-the-ocean lonely. You can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. It gets to you.

I wish I’d brought carrots: animals can be bought, emotionally.

mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit.

these people who ask of life only a Republican in the White House and a black velvet Elvis on the wood-grain mantel of their mobile home.

Nor, I have to say, do I understand why some people will pay money to be careened and suspended and dropped and whipped back and forth at high speeds and hung upside down until they vomit. It seems to me like paying to be in a traffic accident. I do not get it; never have.

I think it’s a matter of basic neurological makeup. I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify. I’m pretty sure I’m more frightened looking up at the Ring of Fire than the patrons are riding it.

There’s a Midwestern term, “drape,” for the kind of girl who hangs onto her boyfriend in public like he’s a tree in a hurricane.

the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around.

The best description of the carnies’ tan is that they’re somehow sinisterly tan. I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

The woman taking their money is fiftyish and a compelling advertisement for sunscreen.

Authors are monkeys who mean.

a sort of prolonged extreme-stress pre-execution hallucination à la Gilliam’s Brazil or Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five-o’clock shadow on the hillsides,

hypotenusally-angled

weltschmerzian

But then so about like

a sphincter-loosener.