A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

“08/15/0840h. A Macy's-float-sized inflatable Ronald, seated and eerily Buddha-like, presides over the north side of the Club Mickey D's tent. A family is having their picture taken in front of the inflatable Ronald, arranging their little kids in a careful pose. Notebook entry: ‘Why?'”

Brilliant collection of 7 essays ranging from erudite meditations on irony and television to in-depth tennis talk to the absurdity of a midwestern State Fair to the works of David Lynch to the Luxury Cruise Experience™

God he was truly just an incredible writer

I've wanted to read David Foster Wallace for a while now, ever since I read a course syllabus he wrote in a set of famous authors' essays posted in... Slate? The Atlantic? Something like that. He's most famous for Infinite Jest, of course, but I'm a little intimidated by that. I finally found someone who's actually read him and asked how to get started. They recommended either Infinite Jest (if I wanted fiction) or this (if I didn't).

This is a collection of seven essays, widely varied in topic and tone. Included, among others, are some experiential travelogues, musings on David Lynch's film career, and literary metacriticism. The travelogues remind me a bit of a better-written David Sedaris not written by a fuckup; the others have more to do with exploring the point of other creative expressions. Consistent throughout is DFW's smart writing.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. DFW has a couple other essay collections, and I will probably seek them out. Nota bene: DFW has a penchant for, shall we say, uncommon word choices. I enjoyed it because (a) I rarely encounter words with which I'm not acquainted, and kind of like it when I do, because I am a dork; and (b) I was reading an ebook version and thus had a dictionary a highlight away. Not everyone will share both of these traits. Favorite new word: “otiose.”

I have to admit that I cheated a bit by skipping the second essay on tennis. I'd say I tried, but that's not exactly true. I read about three pages and then realized that life is too short to spend it reading essays on a sport that I neither play nor watch. Overall, amusing, though not really as funny or as insightful as I'd hoped.

Two of the better pieces involve DFW commenting on an event where he clearly does not belong (one is the IL State Fair, the other a seven-day stint on a cruise ship), which were amusing in a this-is-a-quintessential-Harper's article sort of way. Perhaps there's something infectious about DFW's sort of academic navel-gazing which made me sort of self-conscious about my own narrow life/world views, and then a sort of mental claustrophobia sets in, which kind of limits some of the potential enjoyment.

There was a David Lynch piece, which I thought was quite good. (Although it did reveal that DFW was, at the time of its writing, a little clueless about Robert Rodriguez, which is a little odd since it's not like Rodriguez was that complex a director to start with.) A couple of other pieces, one about authorial intent and whether authors are really dead (in a lit crit sense) and one about literary responses to television, were just kind of blah. The first was a review of a book I was not familiar with and so didn't really stand well on its own. The second just felt dated, as if it documented an inconsequential cultural conflict that had long been superseded.

I guess, overall, I felt like there was a lot of talent and intelligence on display in these essays, but aside for a few moments, they just left me feeling cold–sort of, why should I care?

I've always had a weird fascination with David Foster Wallace since the moment I first listened to “This is Water”. The way he so astutely and brilliantly confronts the everyday banalities and does it in such a hilarious fashion that you sometimes don't know whether he's acting funny or simply telling the truth. This collection of essays would be a good introduction to his works, albeit you can skip some parts.

All right, so I did skip parts of a couple of essays, but I was going cross-eyed.

‰ЫПDevoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. ‰Ы_ A majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people‰ЫЄs attention.‰Ыќ ‰ЫУ In any group, I‰ЫЄd rather watch and listen than participate, and since I was a kid and to this day I tend, in any company, to get hot and red-faced and stuttery if more than one pair of eyes is focused on me. Born to write fiction, pals.

DFW is always a delight to read. He has an incredible vocabulary and I always walk away from his novels/essays/short stories in awe of how smart he is. Some of the essays in this book are starting to feel VERY dated - particularly the one about US television consumption. The thesis of which seemed to be: people watch an average of six hours of television per day to feel like voyeurs even though the things they are watching are typically scripted (published in 1990, I believe). With the advent of the internet and reality television, he's absolutely on-theme with general horror that can translate to present-day, but he gets far enough in the weeds that it can feel like a bit much for a topic which is no longer 100% applicable. I didn't like this as much as “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” but it could also be that I tend to prefer fiction. Overall, worth my while and incredibly humbling.