Seven Essays Edition

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
by David Foster Wallace

More than anything else, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again–the collection of seven essays and articles that David Foster Wallace wrote during 1990-1995–makes one wonder how much editing goes on when a writer submits a piece to a magazine. For instance, take the Harper’s article “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” of which this collection is named after, about a seven night Caribbean cruise that Wallace went on and reported about: it clocks in at ninety seven pages. Obviously, it could just be that the writer in question simply writes more than your average freelance journalist but it definitely got me wondering whether or not a novel or an article makes for the better window into a writer’s mind.

I am completely presuming here that A Supposedly Fun Thing was released in 1997 because of the success of Infinite Jest. I could be completely wrong but I don’t think I am. And I say that because these seven essays, after reading Infinite Jest, gave me a better understanding of Wallace’s influences and thoughts leading up to the publishing of his post-modern magnum opus. It is actually rather hard to escape if you have read the novel first than move on to this collection. For instance, an excerpt from a review titled “Greatly Exaggerated” from the Harvard Review in 1992:

“[...] writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.”

These forty eight words not only, to me, perfectly summarize the elastic nature of writing w/r/t the author and the audience, but it also kind of perfectly describes what I imagine was Wallace’s mindset while writing his opus–itself a completely abstract and malleable work that could be dissected and rearranged in a variety of ways w/r/t the reader. “I’m not going to make this easy for them but if they really want it, they’ll figure it out,” is what I imagine Wallace subconsciously thinking to himself while writing some of the tennis and Arizona scenes in Infinite Jest. But this is just an on-the-surface observation; something that jumped out at me more out of proximity to finishing the previous work than a calculated attempt by the publisher to get one to look for deeper meaning I am sure. The more static observations of this book are more in tune with the piece as a cohesive whole and that is: David Foster Wallace is one of the most insightful writers I have read.

In “Derivative Sport In Tornado Alley,”^[1] Wallace recounts what it was like growing up in the Midwest and as a high-ranking junior tennis player. The introductory paragraph sets the tone:

“When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma matter in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids–and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.”

Later on, he accurately sums up perfectly (from the perspective of others) what it is like to live in certain parts of Illinois and then closes the summation of what really defines it if you live in the area where he grew up in.

“The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o’clock stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football game with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo, Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. [...] Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meterologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.”

This is his setup that leads in to how his tennis ranking was high because he knew how to play the wind and the court. That, when playing in Central Illinois, he was a force to be reckoned with and could make his opponent miss shots or gradually degenerate into a frustrated pile of emotions and hormones because of how well he knew how to play with the swirling wind. But, whenever he played outside of this area–the nicely manicured courts of Chicago, the calmer environs of Iowa or Arizona–his weaknesses would inevitably be exposed.

The other works in this book are an article about David Lynch (“David Lynch Keeps His Head”), an article about the Illinois State Fair (“Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All”), the aforementioned “Greatly Exaggerated,” a review of H.L. Hix’s Morte d’Author: An Autopsy–a book about literary criticism, an essay about TV and U.S. fiction (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”) and the problems that TV causes for prospective fiction writers, an article about pro tennis player Michael Joyce (“Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry As A Paradigm Of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, And Human Completeness”), and the aforementioned article about the seven night cruise that Wallace took for Harper’s.

It’s probably fair to assume that David Foster Wallace is not for everyone. Even if his legacy grows as a result of his decision to kill himself while still young, his works will almost always attract a certain kind of reader first and foremost: the high school- or college-aged reader who voraciously seeks out something New and Important. To which these circles of people will doubtlessly promote Wallace’s works as masterful and ensure that his legacy never falters. It is a cycle that I have full confidence will only grow so long as people read Infinite Jest. So, to the outsiders–the ones who aren’t voraciously looking for Important New things to ingest: I understand completely any reluctance to pick up and plumb through Mr. Wallace’s works. To be honest, five years ago I would have most certainly passed on all of it myself. If anything, though, his nonfiction begs to be discovered. In a world where news and entertainment are not mutually exclusive; where the print media is hemorraging because its classified sections aren’t being used by customers anymore, yet they, the print media, believe that they’re failing because A) people are stupid or B) because people would rather peruse free news rather paying for it (both examples equally rendering the print media as an entity that would rather dole out contempt at its customers rather than trying to fix their problems); where to be truthful has become synonymous with non-denial denials–it is refreshing to read someone’s thoughts that originate from a place in which the writer wants nothing more than to prove to you that every possible facet of his opinion and outlook is seen all the way through. You may not care about David Lynch but Wallace’s insight and writing about Lynch is outlined so thoroughly that you may want to rent Blue Velvet afterwards.

Finally, when speaking about New Important things it is easy to fall under the guise that all that is being written is too intellectual. David Foster Wallace was smart enough to realize that humor can make it easier to transition between the heavy stuff. For example, this excerpt from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in which Wallace describes some of the things he has seen and heard on the ship and for which I shall end this review with:

“[...] I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and menstural-pink sportcoats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to run over to their table and spend every last nickel you’ve got playing blackjack. I have heard upscale adult US citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.”

[1] Published as “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” in 1992 for Harper’s.