A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - 4 stars:

After my third book by David Foster Wallace, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

1. He loves tennis in a way that’s hard to overstate.
2. He seems to deliberately restrain his sense of humor—perhaps because he found it distasteful or not “serious” enough.
3. He uses 100 words where 10 would do.
4. His nonfiction is great; his fiction, more hit or miss.

On the essays:

• “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”: Beautiful, honest, and evocative.
• “E Unibus Pluram”: I know it’s a well-known piece, but I almost DNF’d the book because of it. Exhausting, monotone, and seemingly endless. Just when you think it’s over, another tirade begins.
• “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”: Fun, well-written, and eye-opening—a glimpse into a part of America I had completely ignored.
• “Greatly Exaggerated”: Didn’t leave much of an impression.
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head”: Deep, original, and thought-provoking. Made me see Lynch in a completely new light.
• “Tennis Player Michael Joyce...”: The true standout. A brilliant dive into the soul of tennis, written with deep knowledge and an open mind.
• “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”: The most accessible piece. Finally, some less constrained humor and a lighter tone—a well-deserved breather at the end of a remarkable, if often exhausting, collection.

Another fun and interesting collection of essays (which makes me think that maybe I like essays, even though I'm most often not in the mood for one). Favorites: "E Unibus Pluram" (of course), "Getting Away from Being Pretty Much Away from It All", and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again".

I'm glad I read this after Consider the Lobster, that was a much lighter read that helped ease me into this collection of slightly denser essays.

Makes me want to watch more David Lynch and, strangely, take a luxury cruise.

A sensitive boy
smartest man on the cruise ship
total creepazoid.

“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

My first soirée into DFW leaves me both a little put off but also wanting more.

The title essay is brilliant and hilarious. I have tried to read Wallace's fiction before and always found it a bit depressing. I think his nonfiction is more grounded in reality and there doesn't go to the same dark places that his fiction does. I got to appreciate his style more, and I think this will encourage me to revisit his other books.

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.

Essays that I could relate to - the state fair, the cruise - were fantastic. Others that I felt less of a connection to - tennis, TV, David Lynch - contained great writing and a lot of interesting ideas, but also felt like they went on too long. I think I'm ready for his fiction now.

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.

This is kind of Infinite Jest Lite, which is to say it is definitely DFW (for better or for worse), and while you might rightfully expect a collection of essays to be a bit more palatable than IJ in its entirety... well, don't expect easily-digestible, bite-sized, sit-back-and-enjoy-it kind of Entertainment, because you won't find it here.

Similar to IJ, this collection mixes the mindblowing (on TV/media/irony or David Lynch, which contained bits I was reading/sharing with anyone who would listen), the impenetrably academic (on postmodern literature), the humorous (the titular essay), and the incredibly-dull-and-superhumanly-detailed-but-still-inexplicably-captivating (on tennis competitions or a rural state fair).

If you want to find out whether you will love or hate IJ, this is probably a good litmus test. I do personally think he was, if not a genius, an absolutely incredible intellect and one of the most brilliant writers in recent history.

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.”

One of my favorite reads of the last year.

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?

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.