david foster wallace 1997 collection of essays

Review by LAURA MILLERPublished: March 16, 1997MANY readers young and old (but especially the young and media-saturated) regarded David Foster Wallace's mammoth novel, ''Infinite Jest,'' with suspicion. Jaded by too many middling writers heralded as the Next Big Thing, they wondered if, as its title intimated, this daunting tome wasn't just a big joke. ''Infinite Jest'' itself didn't quite clear things up. Messy, demanding and stubbornly unresolved, it was also frequently brilliant. Yet Mr. Wallace's penchant for pointed satire and flashy tricks often obscured the book's passion. Ultimately, ''Infinite Jest'' felt noncommittal, leaving some readers unconvinced that Mr. Wallace offered anything more than a lot of energy and a dazzling but heartless cleverness.''A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again'' should settle the matter at last. This collection of ''essays and arguments'' -- originally published in Harper's, Esquire and Premiere, among other magazines -- reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that his fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about ''serious'' art, and as a mensch.The most outright amusing pieces here are Mr. Wallace's two journalistic forays into Middle American culture: ''Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,'' about a visit to the Illinois State Fair, and the title essay, in which Mr. Wallace takes a seven-day luxury cruise to the Caribbean. These vivid, hilarious essays attracted much attention when they were originally published, but they also made Mr. Wallace vulnerable to accusations, as a friend of mine put it, of ''sneering at ordinary people.'' Rereading them lays such reservations to rest. The primary butt of Mr. Wallace's humor is himself, and if he seizes upon his experiences to reveal ugly aspects of the American character.
CHAPTER ONE A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Little, Brown and Company Read the Review derivative sport in tornado alley When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater 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. In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana's university, whose ranks swelled enough in the flush 1960s to make outlying non sequiturs like farm and bedroom community lucid. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers' and dentists' kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At.
In this interview, David Foster Wallace discusses many of the essays in his collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Interviewed by Michael.
A Definitely Awesome Thing that I’ll Most Certainly Read AgainFull 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 inspired creativity, but actually that IJ was a long, arduous work that came about as a result of years of writing and rewriting as DFW honed his craft, those winding, serpentine sentences that wrap around massive stores of information and unravel beautiful narratives covering every conceivable minutiae of a given situation, the footnotes that drag you underneath the surface of a sentence and reveal the inner-workings of a cruise ship’s maintenance crew or the social status of each individual at his dinner table and upon resurfacing from the footnote, you carry the weight of all the new information upon the sentence that you once left and when you reread the sentence, this new knowledge that you have enlivens the significance of a glance or another character’s tick; the footnote delves into that subconscious baggage that we carry around everyday that inform our judgements and preconceptions about every person and thing we encounter throughout life thus when I realized that these styles were worked towards upon reading A Supposedly Fun Thing that I’ll Never Do Again, Infinite Jest became somewhat less special in being the only book that I’ve read to have all of DFW’s stylistic tics). Thankfully, the disappointment wore off quickly. I came to appreciate the style that DFW worked so hard to hone. These essays are a display of the development of the IJ style. The footnotes become more.
First edition hardcover A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments is a 1997 collection of nonfiction writing by David Foster Wallace. In the title essay, originally published in Harper's as Shipping Out , Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean aboard the cruise ship MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir. He is ironically displeased with the professional hospitality industry and the fun he should be having and explains how the indulgences of the cruise turn him into a spoiled brat, leading to overwhelming internal despair. Wallace uses footnotes extensively throughout the piece for various asides. Another essay in the same volume takes up the vulgarities and excesses of the Illinois State Fair. This collection also includes Wallace's influential essay E Unibus Pluram on television's impact on contemporary literature and the use of irony in American culture. Contents 1 Essays 2 In popular culture 3 References 4 External links Essays[edit] Essays collected in the book: Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (Harper's, December 1991, under the title Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes ) An autobiographical essay about Wallace's youth in the Midwest, his involvement in competitive tennis, and his interest in mathematics. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993) Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All (Harper's, 1994, under the title Ticket to the Fair ) Wallace's experiences and opinions on the 1993 Illinois State Fair, ranging from a reports on competitive baton twirling to speculation on how the Illinois State Fair is representative of Midwestern culture and its subsets. Greatly Exaggerated (Harvard Book Review, 1992) A review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy by H. L. Hix, including Wallace's personal opinions on the role of the author in literary critical.