A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll
Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, David Foster Wallace
Read: 14 September to 6 October 2012
5 / 5 stars
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 cliched existential sort of way that I
feel like I maybe should have grown out of by now being one of the
biggies; most of said feelings were staggeringly positive -- but the
most persistent and lingering one was this quiet sadness. The dates
imprinted on a lot of these pieces (the early to mid-‘90s, not one
predating my exit from elementary school) are just long ago enough to
start taking on the sheen of gauzy quaintness that I'm beginning to
understand and is plain fucking
weird while also being an
unpleasantly vague reminder that since time stops for no man, death
comes for everyone. (Interestingly, the offerings herein don't come off
as dated -- cell phones as shiny new things that only the elite few
possess! the rise of irony in popular culture! the advent of the
internet! Rather, they serve as one big time capsule for a great mind
reacting to really strange times. It was so weird (and rad as hell, too)
to read about a very smart and very aware adult reflecting about a
present I can only recall from a child's long-ago vantage point.)
And
it was thinking like that, in the moments I stopped reading this
collection to process the range of thoughts it reflected, the ideas it
proposed and feelings it gave rise to because I was so dazzled by how
DFW made me care about things I’d never had two shits to rub together in
regard to before, how he had a wicked knack for turning a simple
observation into an unobtrusively significant moment, how he didn’t so
much observe as understand the intangibles that were the driving forces
of these pieces, that just made me
sad that someone with a
unique grasp on the human condition and inner workings of everything
isn’t around to keep pointing out the unassuming but ever-present
imperatives of absolutely all the things, including the pants-shittingly
terrible experience that is putting oneself at the mercy of (or simply
considering) a Midwestern state fair's death-trap carnival rides. And
that I didn’t know to mourn DFW's passing until much later, leaving me
to feel like my newly hatched enthusiasm for his brilliance is somehow
insincere in its belatedness, however genuine I know it to be.
It also forced me to (very unwillingly, because my brain stops at this station
a lot
and I kind of hate it, even if it is something made of pure conjecture)
think about what terms would drive me to check out early, too. Such
things are worth mentioning because someone as willing as DFW was to
look deep inside everything's inner workings to find their true meaning,
to me, deserves the same kind of respectful concern. Rather than
turning me off entirely, though, that train of thought made me even more
willing to take DFW's careful deliberations to heart and try to see
things as he does in the pieces comprising
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll
Never Do Again.
I know it sounds like a cop-out but each one of
these essays and arguments brings something different to the table,
which made it hard for me to decide whether or not I have a favorite
piece in the collection. But I also don’t think that’s fair because each
of the seven pieces has a different intention. (Get ready for the
oncoming wall of text!)
It’s terrifying to see the dangers of
mindless consumption via television’s manipulation addressed almost two
decades ago -- the way advertisers always knew how to create a selling
image for a blindly consumer-happy, image-obsessed American audience,
the way societal conventions change television archetypes every so
often, how all alternative trends eventually become bastardized into
some mass-produced dross -- and fascinating to retrace the path of
Metafiction's influence on today's entertainment in “E Unibus Pluram:
Television and U.S. Fiction." The nod to New Journalism in “Getting Away
from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” and the way DFW turns
his experiences and observations at the ’93 Illinois State Fair into
something bigger and more universal than it appears while capturing what
exactly makes it such a unique beast should sound cynical and
self-involved but doesn't. “Greatly Exaggerated,” or deconstructing a
literary trend that is all about deconstructing previously accepted
literary trends, was the headiest of the pieces; if I thought my
ever-growing love for postmodernism in all its flavors was the only
thing that made me appreciate the piece, then I would have entirely
missed the points of both “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (DFW’s own
forays into high-school tennis, the success of which he owed to a
mental rather than athletic prowess that he seems unnecessarily
apologetic about, the way someone who’s really good at something but is
humbled rather than bolstered by it is) and “Tennis Player Michael
Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about
Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,”
which
does address all those things (and more!) in relation to Joyce’s unflappable straightforwardness and tennis philosophy
and
has quite a bit to say about the nature and sacrifices of professional
athletes and other applicable-to-everyone’s-lives truths. “David Lynch
Keeps His Head” may have began as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the
birth of "Lost Highway” but winds up examining Lynch’s catalog and
pinpointing all the ways he thoroughly messes with American moviegoers’
expectations and gets labeled as “sick” or “inaccessible” because of it
(let me tell you something,
Mulholland Drive made a hell of a lot more
sense than it had any right to after reading this, which kind of
freaked me out). Lastly, the piece that shares its title with this
collection, a dissertation on the crises, implications and microcosmic
representations of the id’s insatiable demand to get back the fuck into
the womb for the relief of helpless indulgence via the luxury of
Caribbean cruises, might just be the most thought-provoking and
metaphorically successful vacation piece ever wrought. Ever.
So,
yeah, there’s some varied stuff here but commonalities do emerge. One of
the other things I'm liking best about DFW's stuff is that I absolutely
have to read every single word and perform a few mental gymnastics to
accommodate both the accessible-but-high-minded assertions and the
asides that layer his writings with brilliance: It creates a kind of
focus that has helped me retain more of his works than more simply
written fare. Intentional or not, that same kind of keen attention
appeared to be what DFW wanted to coax from his readers, imploring the
audience to go forth and value the little things for their unique place
in the world in order to better understand (or deconstruct, if you like)
and appreciate them. Because nothing is just one thing: Everything
comprises lots of unnoticed little things, and appreciating that makes
it all worth the effort.
DFW infuses all of his topics with the
same careful dissection (and flurry of pitch-perfect, lovingly applied
ten-dollar words, which deserves mention for being delightful in its own
word-nerd right), approaching an understanding devoid of all judgement,
which is what appealed to me the most about this collection. It's so
hard to approach a topic without bringing any sort of preconceived
notions to the table -- like, DFW acknowledges the possibility of being
perceived as an East Coast snob throughout his state-fair
peregrinations, negating the impression of such a thing (to the reader,
at least) with his conscious honesty -- but none of that lives here.
There is no depressed acceptance of the way things are in his
intellectual explorations; instead, he finds a way to break down the
necessary humanity behind everything, bringing them to a wholly
sympathetic, neutral at worst/misunderstood necessity at best sort of
light. He analyzes social situations with a mathematical precision,
offering a rational discourse instead of a detached report. He wants to
pick things apart to achieve not reductive meaningless but sincere
realization and factual certainty of a thing's nature and composition
and intent.
In this way, he's a champion of eliminating the
false veneer of fantasy that shrouds so many
unattainable-by-normal-people things in seductive mystery -- that also
drives the average Joe to the depths of jealousy and deluded despair.
Breaking down the misconception that lies between the behind-the-scenes
reality and the polished final dream, looking behind the curtain to
understand the hard work and sacrifices of those in the public eye
(writers to an extent but mostly film-industry professionals and
celebrity athletes) makes them less scary, more systematic, and far, far
less enviable.
One of the hallmarks of a genius, to me, is the
ability to inspire curiosity and critical thinking in others, which is
exactly what this collection does. I don't care if I'm betraying my
terminally uncool over-eagerness in this review; I
do, however, care that DFW made me give an earnest fuck about tennis. Twice.
Honorable Mention: The Giants have in-seat service for Ghirardelli hot fudge sundaes as well as hot chocolate on a seasonal basis.
