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

by David Foster Wallace

4.28 · Rating Details · 24,104 Ratings · 1,898 Reviews

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facil ...more

Paperback, 353 pages

Published February 2nd 1998 by Back Bay Books (first published 1996)

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Best Non-Fiction (non biography)

114th out of 3,969 books — 5,874 voters

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Best/Favorite Books of Essays

7th out of 386 books — 161 voters

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Community Reviews

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Oct 31, 2013 Oriana rated it really liked it

Shelves: phenomenal, read-2008

Oh David. I miss you with a plangency that belies the fact that I never met you, never would have. You were and are and will always be such a serious force in my life.

I've read this two or three times, and a few weeks after DFW died I picked it up again, almost on a whim. I'd been having trouble finding something to sink my teeth into—I rejected Anna Kavan, William Vollmann, and Fellipe Alfau in short order—and I kind of pulled this book without thinking about the timing, refusing to consider m ...more

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Jan 23, 2013 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: he-said-she-said, super-private-journal, unicorn

he picked up a book. he read the book. it was him all over. the best version of himself! and the worst.

what is postmodernism, really? is it a way to understand the world, to define the world, to separate yourself from the world... when you are actually a part of that world? a part of the so-called problem? you want to put a layer between you and the world. you are so much apart from it, right? an unwilling participant in all of those repulsive patriarchal and terminally corny signs and signifie ...more

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Jul 02, 2008 karen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfictions, favorites, dfw

this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exxagerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.

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Jun 09, 2010 Books Ring Mah Bell rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, funny, short-shorts-n-essays

This summer I got this book from the library. I started on the cruise ship story and soon realized I would want my very own copy to dogear, underline, and do other dirty booknerd things to.

David Foster Wallace, you are (were) genius! I think I may be in love with you! I love your footnotes- footnotes that range from a simple "duh!" or "!" to 2 page long footnotes that have footnotes themselves. Not a lot of authors could get away with that, but you, my love, can.
Could.
Did.
Whatever.

As I stated ...more

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Mar 26, 2011 Geoff rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This, my first experience reading David Foster Wallace, disabused me of a few prejudices that in retrospect seem shamefully naive, one of which being that objects of the American Media Hype Machine are necessarily mediocre. I believed that there had to be something vapid or cheap or sensationalist about things or persons that become loci of the intellectual-creative “next-voice-of-our-generation” ballyhoo. It’s tough not to be cynical. The whole zeitgeist of our times is cynicism, aloofness, a d This, my first experience reading David Foster Wallace, disabused me of a few prejudices that in retrospect seem shamefully naive, one of which being that objects of the American Media Hype Machine are necessarily mediocre. I believed that there had to be something vapid or cheap or sensationalist about things or persons that become loci of the intellectual-creative “next-voice-of-our-generation” ballyhoo. It’s tough not to be cynical. The whole zeitgeist of our times is cynicism, aloofness, a disdain of sensitivity bordering on neurosis (and I mean a healthy, cultured sensitivity, one nurtured in restraint and consideration and taste, not an emo-ish “horticulturally cultivated five o’clock shadow thick glasses staring pensively over a latte and word document always always in public in sight of the pretty girls” sensitivity). Fight Clubs, Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Geniuses, American Psychos,... if these are the voices of our times let me be an anachronism. In my narrow-mindedness, I lumped DFW in with these other bright young things, figuring he was another spoiled product of moneyed, media-saturated, hipper-than-thou America, wielding an a priori standoffishness as crutch and sword. It’s what I’d come to expect of popular entertainment as a whole. I don’t mean Harry Potter/Girl with the X tattoo lit. (stuff that is immensely popular but actually has redeeming factors and is based in a solid tradition of plot, earnest character development, involved drama, etc.), but stuff that was supposed to represent the intellectual undercurrents of what it is to be a living mind in America in the early twenty-first century; you know, edgy stuff. McSweeney’s has some funny t-shirts, but in the end all the irony can be fucking despairing. Contrived coolness, ultraviolence representing god knows what, involuted sexual obsessions as supposed comment on middle-class repression and ennui or some nonsense, solipsistic unearned first-person memoiric explorations of “what-am-I-in-this-crazy-work-a-day-world”- it keeps on piling up to a vomitous apogee, and I find myself saying “fuck it” and reading Proust or Walser or Pessoa or Flaubert just so I can fucking breath, just to feel someone expressing something honest and with an unmanufactured posture.

Enter DFW. I can’t comment on Infinite Jest (a book for another day, when I again have surplus hours to give to a tome, hopefully soon), but A Supposedly Fun Thing... cuts through all of my above complaints like a glowingly-hot knife through butter. It has come to be the ubiquitous descriptor of Wallace, that he was “a decent guy”, and from what I can glean from this collection of essays the shoe fits (and is there really a higher compliment?)... but in addition to his essential decency (involving empathy, kindness, a bullshit detector always set on 11, the keenest eye for a telling detail I’ve encountered in books of my times), it is the way he subsumes the alienating, cheapening aspects of our culture into his vast intellect, deconstructs them into their vital parts, analyzes their components, and restructures them into a completely non-ironic, funny-as-hell, and enlightening statement about what it is to be a human being. And my god, the humor in this book! Never before have I bitten my lip to bleeding so many times attempting to restrain outright bursts of mad laughter reading this in public. And it’s consistent. And underneath the laughter is that certain lattice within modern humor at its best form (and I’m thinking of like Louis CK here, or Mitch Hedberg, or Bill Hicks) where the laughter is ringing above a potential abyss, and that humor and the transformation of creeping despair into something luminous are the only ways of redeeming contemporary things and ideas from utter degradation and fitting them back into the lineage of a culture of thorough humanist examination. Calling DFW “the last humanist” is tempting, but then I’d be falling into the same traps of cynicism these essays made me believe it is possible to free ourselves from.

Good readers go into books looking for an honest, unique interpretation of some facet of genuine experience; over the years I have found myself searching farther back into other cultures and other eras very distant from mine for that kind of fulfilling, rounded perspective. What A Supposedly Fun Thing... has shown me is that while it is still an essential component of a dedicated humanist to understand the history of thought and expression, especially in the face of the dulling, warping aspects of rudderless progress and an increasingly fragmented reality, that there are outposts of sincerity, of good-nature, representatives of the “decent guys” of the creative temperament, hard at work, chewing on the problems that haunt us, me, you, this very day, dealing with the stuff of our every days in terms that elevate them above the every day (DFW, in this book alone, elevated tennis, state fairs, David Lynch, television, a week-long cruise, the athlete, to the realm of eternal motif). They’re just working a lot harder, being driven down tougher paths, having to fortify their honesty and sensitivity and steel themselves in the face of fragmentation to a greater degree. DFW disabused me of the notion that I have to look outside of my own times for some hero of the candid, the honest, the unique, and I think he would have considered that some sort of success.

On a more depressing note, I understand now that the media hype that at first so turned me off to the David Foster Wallace machine was in a great part due to his suicide. Suicide makes everything more momentous, gives a retrospective ur-meaning to all the aspects of a life, imposes an immediate posterity on a creative human being’s works. I can’t fathom what it would have been like in 2008 had I known his work, but I can sense the immense loss to our times that his passing has meant. I mean, imagine looking forward to more Harper’s experiential essays, a complete Pale King, more laughter, more insights. Overly sensitive souls run the risk of being so sensitive that all they feel is pain, and the weird and baroque regimen of drugs Wallace was on somehow did not dull this sensitivity, this awareness (and in some perverse way made him even more representative of our times). As I said before, really insightful humor runs right along an abyss of terror, things that uplift keep a dialogue with things that destroy us, they inform and expand awareness in the other. Somewhere early in the titular essay of this book, Wallace goes on one of his famous footnote-digressions, which also happens to be quite representative of his sense of humor and mode of observation, about the despairing phenomenon of “The Professional Smile”. I’ll quote it at length:

”...the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry... You know this smile- the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/incomplete zygomatic involvement- the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Who do they think they are fooling by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e., the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.”

I’m confident David Foster Wallace was never giving us the Professional Smile. ...more

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Dec 08, 2012 Stephen M rated it it was amazing

Shelves: tears-of-beautiful-laughter

A Definitely Awesome Thing that I’ll Most Certainly Read Again

Full disclosure: I felt the smallest twinge of disappointment as I read these essays; (not because of the quality therein—there’s hardly any disappointment to be had there—but because it dawned on me that Infinite Jest, a book that I had spent the better part of February and March, slaving over and worshipping, was not in fact some work of genius that grew out of the side of DFW’s head and broke off one night in a fit of divinely insp ...more

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Sep 16, 2014 Aubrey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-star, reviewed, non-fiction, authorness, life-after-life, 1-read-on-hand, r-2013, r-goodreads

One of my more obsessive habits on Goodreads involves comparing books with others. If you're one of my friends, chances are I've clicked the little button on your homepage an average of three times, sometimes more if you have a particularly large library (looking at you, Hadrian/Kris/& co.) Throughout my nearly two weeks of reading this book, the prim and peppy 'currently-reading' would show up next to a record number of gleaming five stars, up near the tippy top if listed in order of rating One of my more obsessive habits on Goodreads involves comparing books with others. If you're one of my friends, chances are I've clicked the little button on your homepage an average of three times, sometimes more if you have a particularly large library (looking at you, Hadrian/Kris/& co.) Throughout my nearly two weeks of reading this book, the prim and peppy 'currently-reading' would show up next to a record number of gleaming five stars, up near the tippy top if listed in order of rating.

In short, I am amongst good company.

It's been nearly three years since I added Infinite Jest into rank and file, almost one since I pulled the beast out of the depths of one of the massive university libraries. I read it at school, I carted it back home for the holidays, and finished in the kind of stricken rhapsody of composition that I've been chasing ever since. Said ever since included coming to terms with IJ's reputation, replete with tales of pretentious woe, ballads of fiendish glee, and the moribund crossroads between the two embodied in the form of hipster lists. It's likely that I held off for so long on coming back to DFW for fear of finding out that I really hadn't adored all that much, and it was the internalization of all that hype both laudatory and inverse that had prompted that overwhelming favoritism.

I needn't have worried.

Of course, this isn't IJ, and trust me when I say that that particular megalodon is not safe from a future reread. However, it is DFW, and this collection of nonfiction has plenty of dots connecting over to the more fictional bents: math, tennis, debilitating awareness of self, and that keen eye of tangential cross sections of life and literature that raises the age I currently live in to something not quite art, but interesting enough to hold its own against the sea of classics and other eclectica that usually fills my escapist needs.

In other words, DFW liked a lot of the things I do, and wrote about them in such a way that makes me likes liking them, which doesn't happen so often when your main interests include engineering-level calculations, sociocultural treatises, and hardcore critical theory of fictioning. The best part of DFW is he can carry across all that in a manner both big-worded and esoteric, taking the subject seriously in the complex systems rather than the ivory tower sense of the word. For example, he convinced me to try out David Lynch without ever straining my interest levels or coming off as an asshole, an achievement greatly added by his obvious enjoyment of the guy's movies. DFW may have had some extremely heavy interests, but all that academic jargoning and/or molasses with a noticeable veneer of 'you're sure you're good enough, punk'? Nada, zero, zilch. Poof. Did I mention he's hilarious, in ways ranging from erudite to funny as fuck filth? Let me say it again.

And that retention of his. I am a firm believer in his '500,000 bits of discrete information' statement, as well as his ability to contextualize anything, anywhere, at any speed seen fit. The sections in the titular essay succeeding an overindulgence in caffeine are especially demonstrative, but only by a hair. It's this hypersensitive intake valve combined with a strong desire to share that's resulting in my not giving DFW crap for throwing out the 'politically correct' word and being so white and male and American in general. Not everyone has my viciously obsessive interest in social justice, so I will simply state that he's aware when it counts and move on.

Besides, that Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction essay? Genius, in the 'my life makes so much more sense right now' gist of the word. Accuse me of favoritism, but that little piece of work made up for every niggling twinge and then some.

Finally, there remains the fact that I discovered DFW and his writing after September 12, 2008. What writings there are now are all the writings that remain for my future readings. Thus, I have decided to ration my DFW intake for one work per year, a cycle that began with IJ and will last not nearly long enough.

Here's to you, David Foster Wallace. I'll never meet you, but I will remember. ...more

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Nov 25, 2012 B0nnie rated it it was amazing

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a brilliant collection of "essays and arguments". This collection was published in 1997 exactly one year after Infinite Jest and is comprised of articles previously published from 1990 to 1996 in several different publications. His topics are tennis, television, a state fair, literary theory, David Lynch, and a luxury cruise. It doesn't matter if you are especially interested in these things or not, because you will be!

1. Derivative Sport in Tornado ...more

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Jun 15, 2016 Roy Lotz rated it really liked it

Shelves: person-of-letters

I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

By far my favorite review of this book—and one of my favorite reviews on this site—is Geoff’s energetic paean. So I find it somewhat ironic that, setting out to write my own review, I am forced to begin with the opposite moral: do not trust the American-hype machine. This is not because everything popular is bad, nor because of any Orwellian or Adorno ...more

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Dubravka Unlike you, Lotz, I came to read DWF without knowing almost anything at all about the author (during the nineties, I was reading African, Caribbean, A ...more
updated Jul 07, 2016 11:17AM

Dubravka He's just too much for me. I started reading the first essay and gave up. I went to the essay on cruising and enjoyed it for a while, but then it real ...more
Jul 12, 2016 09:12AM

Aug 05, 2007 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: top-20, you-ll-snort-milk-thru-your-nose

David Foster Wallace is one awesomely smart guy. This is both his greatest strength and his potential Achilles heel as a writer. Personally, I will read anything this man writes, because I think he is a true genius with a rare sense of compassion, and a hilarious sense of humor. Even when his writing falls victim to its own cleverness, I still find it worthwhile - perhaps because one senses that the writer is a true mensch (not something I feel when being dazzled by the cleverness of a Dave Egge ...more

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Aug 08, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, merkins, worshipped

Goodness gracious. As much as I revere Wallace’s fiction—his attempt to rescue American culture from the despairing morass of self-aware ironical knowingness—his nonfiction is in another league. The sheer cinematic exuberance, the “floating eye” quality of these pieces is breathtaking and wonderful, bringing the reader as deep into each experience as is textually possible, and as close to Wallace as we can be on the page.

His fiction has a ‘surgical’ quality, much like J.G. Ballard or Will Self ( ...more

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Nov 21, 2008 Steve rated it really liked it

Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social comment Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social commentary and cultural critiques made clear. He could also drill down to subtle human quirks which, though remote, are still recognizable (after he pointed them out). I’m sure his genius extended beyond my comprehension of it, too, especially with his more philosophical musings.** Though one of his goals was to lead readers to “aha” moments of insight, he never talked down to anyone to get there.

The subjects were varied, covering topics like tennis (as a regionally ranked junior player he knew the sport well), television, the Illinois State Fair, literary theory, and cruise ship excursions. You get the feeling he could write about anything, though, and it would all be brilliant. He could vary his tone, too, alternating between professorial, sardonic, insightful, and funny. I guess in popular parlance you’d call him a hipster, but he seemed a little less edgy and a little more caring than others of that ilk. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t even try to categorize such a multifaceted and unique individual.

One passage in the book struck me as particularly good. From what I’ve seen, it was one of his recurring themes. It has to do with irony and irreverence as a rhetorical mode. Turns out, fun as it may be for a time, he views it all as ultimately unfulfilling. With an ironist’s repertoire of criticism and destruction, there’s rarely anything constructive to “replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Consistent with that, in an interview I just read he spoke disparagingly of all the arch, pomo attitude there is these days.

So why did he do it? To be honest I really didn’t read this looking for clues. It’s hard not to think of his fate, though, when he talked so honestly about despair, and fighting the urge to throw himself off the ship that he otherwise wrote so playfully about in the title piece. I suppose depression and bad chemistry were the clinical reasons, but it’s natural to wonder what within his outlook he might have revealed to tip his hand. Did he simply think too much and in increasingly inward ways? Was he too keenly aware of how different he was? Even his friends may not know. What I do know is that they miss him. That includes friends he never met; those he connected with through his works.

*We might also conclude that the essay format is a way to see the curse of his genius, too, with hints of alienation in a world of average intelligence and a hyper-awareness of flaws including his own.

**When an essay jumps right in saying that “In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics,” you know you’re in for a challenge.***

***You get really used to footnotes in a DFW essay. Maybe it’s just the way a really smart person’s mind works—-they can go on for hours with the asides their active noggins flit to, discursively disrupting the linear flow but in interesting ways. You get a lot of long sentences with him, too (I say hoping it's without irony as I flatter him with imitation in yet another nested aside). ...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Matt rated it it was amazing

For some strange reason back in junior high school we were allowed a brief recess after lunch. The problem here is that there was very little to do during this recess. Here are the three activity choices that I remember:

1. Mill around on the concrete like inmates always do in "the yard" on those prison television shows.
2. Play a game that one of my fellow scholars evidentally invented that involved a mob of guys bouncing a tennis ball off of a wall and trying to nail each other in the testicles ...more

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Nov 13, 2015 Teresa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: n-usa, e5, g-não-ficção

David Foster Wallace é um GÉNIO!
Tudo o que escreve é revelador de uma Inteligência e Imaginação Ilimitadas.
É assombrosa a sua capacidade de observação, análise e exposição de situações e temas que passariam despercebidas ao comum dos mortais.

Este volume contém oito ensaios - alguns baseados na sua própria experiência como repórter contratado por revistas americanas - e o único discurso que fez para finalistas de um colégio.
É uma experiência única - umas vezes triste, outras divertida - "ouvi-l ...more

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Jul 02, 2016 Melki rated it really liked it

Recommended to Melki by: BOnnie

Shelves: essays

I've read one DFW book - The Broom of the System - and I didn't much care for it. (Though I recently read that the author himself didn't like that one, so - vindication!) Imagine my amazement at how much I enjoyed this collection of essays. There's some clever and insightful commentary here. Wallace even managed to make a subject I have zero interest in - tennis - fascinating. (Well, truthfully, by the second article on the sport, my fascination was dwindling.)

Amid the forced joviality of a crui I've read one DFW book - The Broom of the System - and I didn't much care for it. (Though I recently read that the author himself didn't like that one, so - vindication!) Imagine my amazement at how much I enjoyed this collection of essays. There's some clever and insightful commentary here. Wallace even managed to make a subject I have zero interest in - tennis - fascinating. (Well, truthfully, by the second article on the sport, my fascination was dwindling.)

Amid the forced joviality of a cruise ship vacation, Wallace notices There is something bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity to them. Us, rather.

and that

Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I've decided; their legs are hairless in a way that's creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly in the calves. It's just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks?

My favorite essay detailed a visit to the Illinois State Fair where Wallace was less than impressed by the carny folk. Here he brings on the snark big time:

The operator's 24 and from Bee Branch Arkansas, and has an earring and a huge tattoo of a motorcycle w/ naked lady on his triceps. He's been at this gig five years, touring with this one here same company here.

And:

All the carny-game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying "Testing" and reciting their pitches' lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: "You got to get it up to get it in"; "Take it out and lay 'er down, only a dollar"; "Make it stand up. Two dollars five chances. Make it stand up." In the booths, rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet like game put out to cure. One barker's testing his mike by saying "Testes." It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here, and there's already a spoiled garbagey smell.

Hmm . . . some things are best experienced through the pages of a book. So very glad he's done these "fun" things so I won't ever have to do them. Though, I could actually go for a funnel cake right now.

I may have to give this man's fiction another go. ...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Madeleine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, let-us-now-speak-of-great-men, 2012, our-libeary, tooting-my-own-muted-horn, blogophilia

My woefully late introduction to David Foster Wallace came earlier this year when I noshed greedily on “The Broom of the System,” which humbled and fascinated and tickled and impressed the ever-loving shit out of me to the point where I only gave it four stars because the guy wrote it when he was younger than I am now and I have it on good faith that his later works are even better.

Reading this made me feel a lot of things -- the way it eased my unshakable sense of being lonely in a totally cli ...more

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Dec 03, 2013 Janet rated it it was ok

Shelves: urban-angst-ills, non-fiction, colossal-disappointments, pop-culture, stop-sniveling-and-eat-a-bigger-bre

I’d like to add a new category to GR called ‘read enough’ – for those books that leave you staggering to your feet wiping the blood from your mouth conceding defeat. You know the gap between to-read and read. Amazingly enough I actually finished this book but only because the final 100 pages were footnotes followed by footnotes to his footnotes. Are you kidding me?

This is a collection of essays covering everything from playing tennis in the tornado belt to television and its relationship to U.S. ...more

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Mar 03, 2010 Ellen rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Anyone - but don't skip the fine print

Shelves: essays

"a Kilroyishly surreal quality"

...I fell for DFW in the footnotes.

How was I to know? I don't read footnotes. When I edited a couple of books, I told the contributors, in draconian terms, that if the information wasn't important enough to include in their main text, delete the footnote; if it was, incorporate it into the main text.

Wallace puts many of his best lines, and a lot of himself, in his footnotes. They form a sort of counter-essay, hunkering below and complicating the essay above. When ...more

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May 14, 2010 Moira Russell rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everyone.

Shelves: favourites, 2010-50-new-books-challenge, comfort-rereads

Started rereading the titular (va-voom) essay to cheer myself up in migraine malaise. Dear God it's so fucking funny. Quite possibly the best essay ever. The spousal overunit moved into another room with his laptop to do homework because when I tried to read out sentence-paragraphs in acquiescence to the demand of 'What's so funny' I couldn't finish for giggling.

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Oct 16, 2015 Mala rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, american-writers

Recommended for: DFW naysayers.

This is gourmet meal with all the essential DFW ingredients: sparkling wit, a wicked & self-deprecatory humour, "self-consciously unself-conscious" irony, probing details but as is typical of pricey meals -- in healthy, small portions, easily digestible!
It is also very lovingly prepared in that the essays & opinion pieces here are heartfelt & personal, thus easily relatable.
I open the first chapter- 'Derivative Sport in Tornado Valley', & am stumped ...more

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Apr 20, 2011 Szplug rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I'm bewitched by this glorious magenta cover with yellow starfish and the peculiarly flattened and shaped white font. I don't know why it is, but whenever I purchase the British edition of a book, inevitably I aesthetically prefer its differing cover artwork, layout, colour scheme, blurb text—the whole canoodle is just presented to this set of timeworn eyes in a more attractive package than what is offered from North American publishing houses. Not to mention that they generally even smell bette ...more

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Apr 09, 2016 Franco Santos rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: libros-en-digital, david-foster-wallace, no-ficción

Tengo treinta y tres años y la impresión de que ha pasado mucho tiempo y que cada vez pasa más deprisa. Cada día tengo que llevar a cabo más elecciones acerca de qué es bueno, importante o divertido, y luego tengo que vivir con la pérdida de todas las demás opciones que esas elecciones descartan. Y empiezo a entender cómo, a medida que el tiempo se acelera, mis opciones disminuyen y las descartadas se multiplican exponencialmente hasta que llego a un punto en la enorme complejidad de ramificac

Tengo treinta y tres años y la impresión de que ha pasado mucho tiempo y que cada vez pasa más deprisa. Cada día tengo que llevar a cabo más elecciones acerca de qué es bueno, importante o divertido, y luego tengo que vivir con la pérdida de todas las demás opciones que esas elecciones descartan. Y empiezo a entender cómo, a medida que el tiempo se acelera, mis opciones disminuyen y las descartadas se multiplican exponencialmente hasta que llego a un punto en la enorme complejidad de ramificaciones de la vida en que me veo finalmente encerrado y atrapado en un camino y el tiempo me empuja a toda velocidad por fases de pasividad, atrofia y decadencia hasta que me hundo por tercera vez, sin que la lucha haya servido de nada, ahogado por el tiempo. Es terrorífico. Pero como son mis propias elecciones las que me encierran, me parece inevitable: si quiero ser adulto, tengo que elegir, lamentar los descartes e intentar vivir con ello.

Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer me hizo admirar al máximo la valiosa persona que era David Foster Wallace. Su capacidad para la observación, su inteligencia, su humor irónico subyacente, siempre incipiente en cada frase, y su manera de ver las relaciones humanas. Me hizo reír en muchísimas partes y en otras pensaba "Qué genio que era este tipo". Foster Wallace era un hombre al que le daría un abrazo. Y no me gustan los abrazos.

En "Deporte derivado en el corredor de los tornados" Wallace nos remite a su infancia, más exactamente a su época de jugador de tenis. Este trabajo me gustó. Es entretenido, sugestivo y tiene un final con impacto. Me dejó un buen rato como un estafermo con una tristeza incómoda desarrollándose en mi interior.

El mejor ensayo es, por lejos, "E unibus pluram". Me arriesgo a decir que es el mejor ensayo que escribió Wallace. Su análisis de la televisión y el espectador y la ironía como destructora de una sociedad sojuzgada por la imagen es extraordinario. Un texto que todos deberían leer.

El segundo mejor ensayo es el que le da el título al libro. Brillante, divertido, un artículo como solo Wallace podía escribir.

Con respecto a los demás ensayos, me resultaron muy aburridos. Algo que alimentó mi inquina fue que Wallace trató temas que no me interesaban. Si los hubiera narrado de una manera amena y fluida los hubiera disfrutado. Pero no fue así.

"Dejar de estar bastante alejado de todo" empieza bastante bien, sin embargo, conforme iba avanzando el relato empezaba a tener efectos soporíferos. Wallace sobredimencionando detalles superfluos me hicieron querer meter la cabeza dentro de un microondas en funcionamiento.

Con respecto a los ensayos sobre David Lynch y Michael Joyce: ni los pude terminar. No me vi ninguna película de ese director y tampoco pienso ver ninguna. El tenis me gusta, lo practicaba, de hecho, pero no me agradó que Wallace lo haya tratado a través de un tenista que no me importa. (Está de más decir que también son supinamente pesados). ...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Adam Floridia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-star-books, to-assign-in-creative-writing-class, being-a-human

Consistently laugh out loud inducing, heartwarming, thoughtful and sincere, relateable, and difficult to put down. Holistically much better than "Consider the Lobster."

As with “Lobster,” the title essay in this collection was probably my favorite. Since reading while traveling prevented me from writing brief reflections on each piece upon completion, I will use my two hour lay-over in Minneapolis to consider the “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” essay.

First of all, I loved it and repe Consistently laugh out loud inducing, heartwarming, thoughtful and sincere, relateable, and difficult to put down. Holistically much better than "Consider the Lobster."

As with “Lobster,” the title essay in this collection was probably my favorite. Since reading while traveling prevented me from writing brief reflections on each piece upon completion, I will use my two hour lay-over in Minneapolis to consider the “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” essay.

First of all, I loved it and repeatedly laughed aloud both with a single booming “HA!” or a more drawn out, nasal “hehehehe”; each of these was then followed by the nudging of my wife and the directive to “read this, read this!”

However, rather than laud the essay ad nauseum, I want to try to convey one thing that bothered me. It obviously didn’t ruin the essay for me, but it just stayed in the back of my mind and…well, bothered me. Wallace’s experiential essay depicts and depends upon his own experience(s) aboard a megacruise. As such, he is the main “character” in the essay and we, the readers, get to see everything only from his perspective. And but so these perspectives are obviously skewed/biased/one man’s opinion/whatever. No complaints yet, especially since one of Wallace’s major strengths is describing his experiences in such a way that the reader can almost always say “Yeah…I know what he’s talking about” or “Ohhhh, I hate those kind of people” etc. et al. My complaint (f.n. that’s not really the right word since dissatisfaction is sort of inherent in the denotation, but it will have to do from here on out) is about the level to which Wallace deliberately shapes himself as a character and (mis)represents (?) his experiences to serve the narrative. I’m not so new to literature that I confound the narrator with the author; however, I guess I am naïve enough to expect an experiential essay’s narrator to be its author. With a little minor deconstruction of this essay, it seems pretty clear David Foster Wallace (author) and David Foster Wallace (narrator) are quite different entities and that the latter is largely a rhetorical conjuration.

To try to explain with general examples: DFW (f.n. from here on, unless otherwise noted, “DFW” will refer to DFW as character/narrator not DFW as author) is carefully constructed to be a semi-bumbling, endearing goof: kind of like Mr. Bean or Pnin. Examples: he wears a dorky Spiderman hat (the exciting story behind which is mentioned only as “there’s a story behind this that I don’t want to get into”), he has a childish fascination with sharks, he wears a tuxedo shirt to a very formal tea party, he’s afraid of getting sucked down the toilet, etc. In addition, DFW has a “fatal flaw” that makes him all the more human. Namely: his semi-agoraphobia limits his ability to confidently interact with those around him. Then there are the other “loveable loser”-type things about him: he can’t shoot a gun at all, he fumbles self-consciously in conversation with the maid (right term?) whom he loves, he's paranoid and undertakes some brief, but hilarious counter-surveillance measures, he loses to a nine year old girl at chess. Could all of this be one hundred percent god’s honest truth? Sure it could. But it just seems too contrived. Portraying DFW in this light makes it easy to ignore some of his very harsh (and cruel) assessments of the ship’s crew and of other passengers; after all, he’s the weak everyman, the underdog whom we can relate to (f.n. to further my theory of this essay as carefully constructed narrative is the fact that David Foster Wallace (author) also goes out of his way to include a villain in his story: the ship’s captain who is unkindly dubbed Dermatitis. (Not to mention that most of the Greek crew are at least antagonists if not insidious enemies.) This gives our hero a slightly persecuted quality and give us, the readers, someone that we can root against…or, at the very least, easily overlook the myriad unkindnesses that our hero levels against his enemies). DFW also is never prepared, sometimes scribbling notes on small napkins with a bleeding highlighter. While this makes him more likeable (f.n. it would be interesting to analyze why this is the case) than the professional reporter always prepared to meticulously jot down every note, it makes his story a little less likely to be completely accurate. Plus, all of the above also makes it easy for the reader not to disdain this character for some “questionable” comments: the ease with which one can look up a woman’s skirt when ascending the stairs, the description of a child (albeit wearing a toupee) as a grotesquerie, and other such stuff.

My Real Question(s!): Does any of this matter? Based on the nature of this essay, does DFW (author) have a greater responsibility to the truth? How much of this essay is completely contrived? Is it more about truthiness than truth? What is truth? Is it just about entertainment? Is he as much of a “sell out” as Frank Conroy who admittedly “prostitute[d] [him]self” when writing his experiential essay about a cruise ship? Or is this just what any writing—fiction, non-fiction, and everything in-between—is all about: writing for a specific audience and shaping your narrative to achieve a purpose? Can one ever be truly objective?
...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Lena rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays

This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass market cruise would mirror my own pers This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass market cruise would mirror my own personal version of Hell, I related particularly well to his commentary on the emotional underbelly that lurks beneath the shiny surface of the "managed fun" the cruise ship staff does its best to inflict upon its passengers. In the wake of the author's recent suicide, it was terribly sad to read some of his thoughts on the despair this situation inspired in him. At the time he wrote it, however, that despair was balanced out by an astounding sense of humor, and I am still laughing as I reflect upon sections such as the fear he inspired in innocent bystanders during his first skeet shooting attempts and the footnote in which he detailed the numerous breaches of etiquette he managed to make during Elegant Tea Time.

Other topics addressed in this collection include the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers (written long before reality television burst on the scene, leaving me wistfully wondering if he had written anything on that topic before his untimely death—if anyone knows of anything, I'd appreciate being pointed to it), observations on director David Lynch and why his films are so creepily disturbing, commentary on certain points of literary theory that was so far beyond me it came close to making my head explode (fortunately, this piece was short) and a surprisingly fascinating look at the "minor leagues" of professional tennis, those players whose names we never hear but who are the foundation upon which the TV-friendly greats all stand.

My favorite piece in this book, however, is the first one, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." It is a meditation on his own early tennis ambitions and how his understanding of math and intuitive sense of Midwestern weather allowed him to progress farther in his playing than his mediocre talent alone would have allowed. There is something so profound about the bittersweet tone of this piece and the intensity of its ending that I suspect it will stay with me for a long, long time.

David, you will be sorely missed.
...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Ned Rifle rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I feel a strange nervousness writing this review, not because of the fear of castigation (that, I must admit, thrills me), but because I now join the ranks of those who say things like: "over intellectualized diatribe" (this is out of context but still) "He's too clever for me I guess, because I was alienated from the writing." (this is somewhat jaded and sarcastic but still) " I found his writing a bit pretentious, and I just don't get the feeling he's being honest in the essays" (no qualifier ...more

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Jan 10, 2013 René rated it it was amazing

This is a review not of the book, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, but the essay itself, which is contained in the book and accompanies a few other essays which I have not read.

This, hands down, the most powerful essay I have ever read. By that I mean that it resonated powerfully within me, and totally upended my conception of what first-person journalism could be. I’d already been profoundly wowed reading the account of eating lobster in his essay “Consider the Lobster” , but this, ...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: david-foster-wallace, essays

A piece which critically engages with DFW's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," an essay which I think is central to understanding DFW and yet each time I've read it, most recently in its Both Flesh And Not incarnation, leaves me wondering if many of us DFWites have actually gotten around to understanding what he's saying there. So but this piece which I'll link to shortly, by Daniel Green and published over there at thereadingexperience, is the kind of critical engagement whi A piece which critically engages with DFW's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," an essay which I think is central to understanding DFW and yet each time I've read it, most recently in its Both Flesh And Not incarnation, leaves me wondering if many of us DFWites have actually gotten around to understanding what he's saying there. So but this piece which I'll link to shortly, by Daniel Green and published over there at thereadingexperience, is the kind of critical engagement which is of the kind which it's time to get around to again once we can sweep aside all the biographical fallacies which have been recently nurtured by Max's book, I mean to say, to paraphrase Husserl, "To the Work itself!"

"Just Plain Doomed"
by Daniel Green
Dec 2012

Ultimately I have to think that Wallace himself knew that as literary criticism/history this essay wouldn't stand up to serious scrutiny. Or perhaps he was so wary, as someone otherwise receptive to what was "neat and valuable" about "idealistic" postmodernism but also bathed in the noxious "cultural atmosphere" exuded by television, of succumbing to the debilitating irony of television he was not able to make these distinctions. Nevertheless, however much "E Unibus Pluram" might provide us insights into Wallace's intentions as a fiction writer, it doesn't really provide many insights into the actual nature and history of postmodernism.

http://noggs.typepad.com/thereadingex...

[and to be relevant, I wonder what the analysis contain in DFW's essay would imply in regard to the common readerly ironic perspective from which many Reviews on goodreads are written. the irony which DFW might characterize as insufferable in his "E Unibus" essay feels rather rampant on goodreads]

_____________
And so but a goodwill-type store yesterday provided me, for the low low price of US$2.99, with a 1st/1st of this delectable collectifacation of DFW lore. It is in acceptable, but not brilliant, condition. Will they have 1st/1st's next week of Broom and Girl at lower-than-Walmart prices too? ...more

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Mar 01, 2014 Florencia rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, funny-and-ish

Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear

...more

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Oct 18, 2015 Alexandra rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: belletristik, humor, usa

Ohje bedauerlicherweise muss ich schon wieder einen sehr berühmten Autor abmontieren - aber dieser Reisebericht tendiert mehr zu schrecklich als zu amüsant.

Was ist Foster Wallace da stilistisch eingefallen?! Grrr - Fußnoten sind dazu da, entweder Quellen zu benennen, oder kurz und knackig noch ganz schnell etwas zu erklären, aber nicht, seitenweise Inhalt der Geschichte zu transportieren. Dies geht sogar so weit, dass teilweise der Plot der Fußnote über 4 Seiten ausgewalzt wird, und man dann wie Ohje bedauerlicherweise muss ich schon wieder einen sehr berühmten Autor abmontieren - aber dieser Reisebericht tendiert mehr zu schrecklich als zu amüsant.

Was ist Foster Wallace da stilistisch eingefallen?! Grrr - Fußnoten sind dazu da, entweder Quellen zu benennen, oder kurz und knackig noch ganz schnell etwas zu erklären, aber nicht, seitenweise Inhalt der Geschichte zu transportieren. Dies geht sogar so weit, dass teilweise der Plot der Fußnote über 4 Seiten ausgewalzt wird, und man dann wieder zürückblättern muss und das nicht hin und wieder, sondern permanent. Da bekomme ich als Leserin erstens einen Drehwurm und verliere ständig den Faden, so bleibt die Geschichte extrem dekonstruiert. Weiters ist der Autor einmal sogar zu eitel ein Ausrufezeichen nach dem Satz im Text zu setzen, auch das musste dann in die Fußnote - wie widerlich präpotent!!!. Für mich scheint dieses Werk ganz schnell abgespult und unsauber dahingeschlenzt, eine lustlose Auftragsarbeit, wie auch eingangs in der Geschichte geschrieben wird, der Autor hat sich für den Leser nicht mal die Mühe gemacht, gewissse Handlungsstränge in einen richtigen Text einzubauen, sondern sie quasi im Notizstadium belassen.

Auch inhaltlich ist die Anlayse der Heppy Beppy Society und des Mirkokosmos Kreuzfahrtschiff zwar durchaus mit gutem Blick detailgenau durchgeführt, aber was analysiert wird, ist teilwiese so gähnend langweilig und lustlos dass es eben nur schrecklich und nicht amüsant ist. Da wird ausufernd der Werbeprospekt inklusive Einhaltung seiner Versprechungen zerlegt, die Technik des Schiffes, und die Hierarchiestruktur der Bediensteten, aber viel zu wenig das Verhalten der Touristen einer ethnografischen Untersuchung unterzogen, was ich mir eigentlich vorgestellt hätte.

Im Prinzipt tendiert das Werk schon zu 2,5 Punkten aber auf mir sträuben sich tatsächlich alle Nackenhaare hier aufzurunden, weshalb ich es auch unterlasse, ist schließlich mein Account und meine Review. :D

Fazit: Ich hoffe der Autor ist in seinen hochgelobten epischen Werken nicht auch so schlampig und unambitioniert, denn sonst muss ich laut den Untertitel aussprechen nämlich "aber in Zukunft ohne mich!"

...more

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Jan 06, 2016 M. Sarki rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star-wonders, to-read-again-soon-before-dying

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1367737...

David Foster Wallace has done for cruise ship essays what Cormac McCarthy did for the novel. Really, every essay written by Wallace rings true and frighteningly real. Though still a novice Wallace reader, I have tackled in no particular order "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (the unbelievably good essay on cruising); "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (a trip to the Illinois State Fair); "Big Red Son" (a brilliant po ...more

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About David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it fe ...more

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“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.” — 408 likes

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