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

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

23 May 2021

Any comments I might have made upon first reading are probably lost in the Access debacle. Quel sigh.

But, since I have it right here as I take an occasional break from reading other things to enjoy an essay, might as well capture some thoughts now.

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley Way more intriguing that I would have guessed, because generally I am not terribly interested in reading about sports, although I make an exception for horse racing and baseball. And although I have never lived in Tornado Alley, I understand enough to be awestruck. Also, I had never before considered the implications of being so familiar with and able to profit from the vagaries of venues.

Why the hell isn't the table of contents considered "product details" on a book? That seems wrong to me. If Bezos were a reader book pages at Amazon would make sense. Thank heavens for Wiki!

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Rarely do I read any real literary theory or criticism. It has its own vernacular and style and types of content, most of which I don't care for. I specialized in creative writing to keep away from it, in fact. But Wallace is erudite and emphatic. He's good at putting together an argument, but the delight is how much he enjoys messing about with words. That is, even when he's writing on a topic that bores me, discussing contemporary literature of the day that never appealed to me then or since I will happily follow along to see what words he uses in unexpected ways, and what lengths his sentences will stretch to. And his footnotes fill me with delight in general, although most of these are practical citations. Look I'm literally tone deaf, but I can understand the glory of watching Yoyo Ma play at a vaccine center. It's something so multilayered and moving, there is so much clear artistry that I can't help sitting here, mouth agape. It doesn't matter that I neither know nor care, really, what he's on about, it's just a beautiful thing to watch.

6 June 2021

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction: Originally published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wallace quotes George Gilder from Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life on a future in which he whole family could "give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendants from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color." Having just been through a year when those were the only birthday parties we could have, thank goodness. Foster seems to have imagined a future in which everyone stayed at home watching really good fantasies in even greater isolation from one another, rather than a world with YouTube and TikTok.

He closes with an examination of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist which I didn't like and haven't thought of since. Wallace couldn't seem to imagine a less ironic generation of writers who could succeed. Although I suppose he has explained why the tremendous popularity of Harry Potter: books for a younger audience could be naïve.

19 June 2021
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All: The observation of the state fair is extensive and detailed. Wallace spends a lot of time just passing along his observations in prose that is unique and clear and stands right the hell away from anything that evens hints at trite or cliched. There is as well a great deal of observing himself as the observer: a guy who grew up there as the child of academics, not of the farm, who got the hell out after high school to become the sort of East Coast media elite that doesn't really exist and who is acutely conscious of the prejudices and assumptions he brings to the task of explaining a midwestern state fair to an audience of exactly the same kind of East Coast media elite that no one is.

It doesn't seem to occur to him that a high percentage of the readers are probably more like he and his parents than some kind of metropolitan-limited species. Every state doesn't have a tremendous or proportional profusion of colleges and universities, but every state does have them and many of those on the student/student instructor/graduate-degree-holding tenured faculty track are far away from wherever they started and living in college towns and environs bringing a sort of metropolitan element to what ever anomalous characteristics they show in their current communities. [It's like speaking to someone from where ever one learned to talk after decades elsewhere, after reading him I just slip into a wordy and meandering sort of style that isn't specifically trying to be him, nor is it trying to make fun of him, it's more like the code switching of being among others of one's ilk, or just, a little bit drunk, too.]

So, yes, his observations are richly detailed and capture a state fair like no one else would do, and it will probably be useful in two hundred years when all of the stuff we take for granted about American society in the 1990s has changed utterly or just shifted a little but enough to be confusing to anyone who wasn't there. Because most of us don't ever describe what the people look like or how they seem unless they're weird in some way, but never just "here's what a crowd of teenagers look like on an insanely hot summer day at the fair." The descriptions preserving his observations of groups and sub-groups, and even more sub- classifications are fascinating. But his point about the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Illinois probably applies equally well to the point of a state fair to a bunch of isolated farmers in Hawaii or Rhode Island, or anywhere now that agriculture has become industrialized and to a large extent, monopolized. Likewise, the other cultures accreting to specific other locations within the vast entity that is a state fair. That's really the point of a state fair to attract the broadest possible swathe of a state's population with lures specific to their demographic particulars. I just think he's wrong about this somehow being a uniquely midwestern state quality. Nor do i think it is so entirely clear cut as he perceives it. The Zipper is not expected to be pulling the same fans as the pygmy goat tent or the dance competitors or the motor sports or the cow-judging, but the farmer who comes for the cow-judging is accompanied by other members of the family, none of whom were present for the conversation because of course they are all off doing other things which appeal to their hobbies and social roles and age groups. [I seriously doubt if the preceding contained a clearly articulated thesis supported by any sort of facts, but today I just have too many things to be doing to actually take the time to read back over what I've written and try to fix it into something consistent and pointed]


Greatly Exaggerated:


David Lynch Keeps His Head:


Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness:


A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:

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