Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer By David Foster Wallace
Foster Wallace elabora en Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer una postal gigantesca basada en su experiencia en un crucero de lujo por el Caribe. Lo que a primera vista parece ser un simple viaje «para relajarse», en manos de un humor delirante y un cinismo corrosivo acabará convirtiéndose en el horror más absoluto. Este artículo es una de las radiografías más agudas e irreverentes de la cultura americana de fin de siglo, en la que se entremezclan la familiaridad, el asombro y una mordacidad descabellada. Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer
David Foster Wallace Ê 9 Free download
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. Spanish; Castilian 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 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 and more involved as the essays progress. First there are only a few innocuous notes, simply to elucidate a small point, until the final titular essay in which the footnotes are used without restraint in full DFW-short-story-length-footnotes that intrude mid-sentence.
These essays may be the best way to come to know DFW (or at least the persona he projected). I think it sheds some light on why he has become so beloved among new generations of readers. It’s easy to come across like a pompous ass in your writing, especially if you’re a freaky genius like Dave Wallace was and you use rambling, run-on sentences and use info-dumping footnotes. It would be easy for any one of these essays to come across as the inflated pontifications of an over-educated intellectual, but there’s something about DFW that is lovable and endearing. Although it too often consumed him, it helped that he was so self-deprecating. It gave his genius the checks and balances that a lot of other genius authors lack. Thus it lessened the extent to which he cared about his (otherwise) rampant ego. He is¹ hyper-self-aware and it comes across in long descriptions of every imaginable bit of sensory detail. In his David Lynch essay, he essentially transcribes the entire rough cut of Lost Highway into a section of the essay. Apparently he found it insufficient to merely give a plot summary and instead divined the entire script, shot list and set decoration from what must have been several viewings of the rough cut.
Occasionally his writing is tedious. There were times when I got antsy. I wanted him to get to the point and cut through all that detail and rambling. He even prefaces one of his paras by saying that “this probably will be cut by the editor but. . . (insert a few pages of details)”. But any time that it became too much to handle, or when I got too bored with his work, there would be some turn of phrase, or a particular observation that would make me fall head over heels in love again. This collection is essentially “everything that Dave is into and thinks about on a day to day basis”. And for so many authors, this would be excruciating to read, boring as all hell, but listening to DFW ramble on about his interests is revelatory. How did so much intelligence and sensitivity end up in one person? He was in a class of his own.
(As I stop fellating him² and attempt at some type of objectivity)
Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
Very interesting piece. Thus begins DFW’s style of experimental non-fiction. This piece is more image and metaphor centered than would be your typical “tell the facts” style of non-fiction. There are a glut of insights into tennis, especially DFW’s own style of play which consisted of his adaptation to his environment (marked by heavy winds of the mid-west) and used it to his advantage (perhaps developing some personal motif about his chameleon-like literary experimentations of his early work). Thus when he began playing tennis indoors on nice courts, he had no inclement weather with which to use to his advantage. Ends with a cartoon-like description of being caught in a tornado while playing and smashed against the chain link fence. It is mostly devoid of the IJ trademark stylistic ticks and is almost strange to read an entire Wallace essay without footnotes.
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
This is an introduction on DFW’s thoughts about television and the strange way in which it is consciously aware of itself while dolling out the usual advertisement and banal sit-coms. This may or may not be dated given the rise of the internet (about which I wished so much that DFW could have written) and given that I hardly watch any tv (besides Bronco games on sunday) it didn’t have as much of an impact than would otherwise. I’ve also more or less known about all the ideas within the essay via all the interviews I’ve seen of DFW. It’s good to have all his thoughts about television in one place.
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
This is where DFW gained serious notoriety as a non-fictionist (and I’d almost say as a writer period, given that the majority of people who’ve read DFW have read his non-fiction as opposed to tackling the mammoth Jest; tis a shame). This is Dave at his most funny. Esquire has commissioned him to write a piece on an Illinois State Fair in bumfuck nowhere. The rural, right-wing, conservatives (which heavily populate the American mid-west) function as a comedic shooting-gallery for DFW’s socially awkward journalistic persona, describing each rural Illinois denizen with simultaneous wit and discomfort that it’s hard to hold the book still while howling in laughter.
Greatly Exaggerated
Here, Mr. Wallace flexes his erudition and reviews a piece of lit theory that criticizes the post-modern death-of-the-author theorists like Derrida, Barthes, et al. At this point it becomes clear that this collection of essays is more of a grab-bag of his musings and interests and opposed to anything with clear structure or links. But this is all wonderful, because it seems as though he was one of those people who had several, disconnected interests and but studied each one of them exhaustively. He brings all his knowledge of literature theory to bear upon questions of authorship and structuralism. A great insight into some of his attitudes towards these topics.
David Lynch Keeps His Head
Another item on the list of things that make David-san tick, the work of David Lynch. This essay is one part exposé of a trip to the set of Lost Highway, one part cataloging of all things “lynchian” and one part defense of the body of Lynch’s work against ignoramuses, critics and otherwise. This essay has everything that one could love about DFW in one continuous piece of writing: awkward social interactions; acute observations of human beings in their natural habitat; self-deprecating humor of the gut-busting and tear-inducing variety; brilliant musings on aesthetics and the state of pop-culture; and a passionate discussion of medium of film, its capacity to influence the audience���s mind like no other medium. If you only want to read one essay, read this one.
Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Profession Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
To be honest this essay was the least interesting. In his interview with Charlie Rose, he talks about this essay in particular. He says that the project began with his interest in the up and coming Michael Joyce and his career, but of course, the essay ended up being about himself. And although, of course, you end up writing about yourself in every writing venture, in this instance, it detracted from the piece instead of adding to it. In other essays, especially the titular one, DFW’s persona makes it hilarious and relatable but here, it drags the essay in two directions, one side pulling toward Michael Joyce, and the other pulling towards DFW’s digressions and personal asides. There’s a healthy balance to be had—in fact all of writing seems to be a balancing act. I sometimes wonder how DFW pulls it off, given how long-winded he can be. But here, it is apparent that it doesn’t always work in ever instance. What can you do? It makes me like him even more because it shows he’s human. Not a robot but a ghost.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
My opinions of this piece are scattered about this entire review, because it is, in many ways a culmination of all the pieces that come before it. It is the culmination of DFW’s style, as we know it from IJ, as well as a culmination of his thoughts and ideas as a writer. But it’s still worth noting a few things. First, I’ve heard of accusations that DFW made up the people (not just changed their names) that are in this piece. I first wonder how one would ever know that—actual interviews with the people themselves?—but even more important, who cares? If your main concern is the literal content of this book, or the literal content of any book for that matter, and your main concern is the truth values of the author’s statements, then I’m sorry to say you’ve sorely missed the point of this book and the point of reading (literature reading at least). The interactions with other people in this piece do not even take up most of it. It is DFW’s own internal state and his musings on all that is going on around him. What’s important is the way in which DFW uses this socially-awkward, hyper-sensitive persona to write a devastating critique of american consumerism. He (the persona and author) has/d this uncanny ability to deconstruct any situation. His self-awareness is not just focused inward, but outward too. There’s hardly anything that flies over D’s radar, hardly anything that he isn’t consciously aware of and analyzing. What average person would notice and reflect upon the time intervals upon which the maids clean his room? DFW did. He also (in a section that earns multiple “lol”s in the absolute literal sense of the phrase) tests the maids’ cleaning habits by leaving his room at random times during the day and noticing the exact amount of time it takes for him to be gone until they clean. He notices the fact that it takes exactly 30 minutes (no more and no less) for the maids’ to begin straightening his room. This leads him to reflect upon the absurd, possible ways that the boat could ever know how long any of its tenants are gone, and more so, the kind of hegemonic rulership the maids must be under to maintain such constant vigilance to clean. He compares and contrasts their working conditions to his own pampering and toddler-like state that he’s been thrown into on this cruise. He notices the strong disconnect between the servers and those that are served. This illustrates the stark divide between the two classes of people, how one become like pampered, spoiled children and the other are stiff, unemotional alienated workers. See what we’re dealing with here? Any other person would shrug off such observations, effectively cutting off his or her ability to reflect at all on the frightening implications of such capitalistic excess. This ought to be a wake up call for any person with such introspective, hyper-sensitive tendencies. For a great deal of such sensitive, analytical people are racked with insecurities due to the propensity for constant self-judgement and analysis. We should know and appreciate the fact that those people are an essential part of a society if it is to be aware of itself and change itself for the better. There must be people like DFW, lest it continue to walk blindly, unaware.
¹unsure whether to use the present tense “is” to refer to the narrative persona of DFW, the de facto tense usage of any literary paper to immortalize the author via that mysterious, vaguely defined persona of the text or whether to use the past tense “was” to refer to DFW the person, who tragically passed away and thus referred to in the past tense. I suppose the present tense will do, not only to stay true to lit paper norms but also to dupe myself (on some unconscious level) that he is actually still alive and his death is some illuminati conspiracy because actually he’s currently being held captive in some underground government facility, commissioned to write confidential reports of the government’s most clandestine operations, the first of which was a disaster, as the report was some 100 pages over the maximum limit, and included a particularly long digression on the correct MLA method of citation of confidential military reports, as presented in sub-clause 23a of an already over-long footnote.
²barely capable of keeping my gushing love for him under wraps here. I have come to be known as the DFW guy at the local bookstore. And in fact, upon my visit to pick up this book, it provided the fodder for small talk with the attractive girl at the register. We shot the shit about DFW, literature and writing and the conversation ended with me taking her number, as well the book, home with me. And but so in typical DFW socially awkward fashion, we have only managed since then to effectively out awkward one another upon every encounter, half-starting conversations, repeating questions, and running into one another just after having said goodbye; it's good to know that I can live my life in all ways Wallace, including failed propositions for dates, cringe-inducing attempts at conversation, and protracted sessions of post-hoc self-deprecation. Spanish; Castilian DNF. Definitivamente los ensayos y las autobiografías no son para mí.
En el fondo tenía el presentimiento de que esto iba a pasar. No puedo juzgar este libro porque he leído muy poco y tampoco puedo hacerlo porque el error ha sido mío, al forzarme a leer algo que sabía que no me gustaría. Mis experiencias con este género nunca han sido buenas, y generalmente no logro llegar a la mitad del contenido en estos textos; textos, que me disgustan porque me aburren y me dan la sensación de que estoy perdiendo el tiempo; pero también, porque pienso que los ensayos son usados para que el autor intente a la fuerza, convencer al lector de sus ideas. Sí, obviamente habrán ensayos donde no, pero da la casualidad que en los cinco que intenté leer anteriormente ese fue uno de los factores comunes: En cada uno de ellos se reiteraba la misma idea muchas veces, esto, para que nuestro subconsciente la aceptara forzosamente. No me gusta que usen sus propias vidas o sus ideas, para sugerir lo que debemos hacer con nuestras vidas. Cada uno debe encontrar su propio camino, no perseguir el decretado por los demás.
En cuanto a lo poco que leí reconozco que el primer capítulo sí me interesó, pero fue debido a que se contaba sobre el tenis y sobre la historia de un joven que en su niñez fue muy bueno en este deporte, al aprovechar su inteligencia para usar los factores externos a su favor: El viento, los defectos de la cancha, etc. Sin embargo, al crecer esos trucos dejaron de servirle porque los demás tenían mayores capacidades físicas y empezaron a vencerlo fácilmente. Este fragmento, más que gustarme, me recordó mi vida porque eso mismo me ocurrió con la velocidad. En mi infancia fui el niño más bajito pero más rápido de todos, pero cuando pasaron los años yo no crecí tanto como los demás y entonces todos se volvieron más rápidos que yo, pero debido a la potencia que les ofrecía su cuerpo desarrollado. Pero a pesar de ese buen inicio abandoné la historia porque no soporté el siguiente fragmento que me pareció eterno, donde se hablaba sobre la televisión y la cultura popular americana. Si fuera de Estados Unidos y entendiera todas sus referencias quizás lo toleraría, pero que me cuente sin explicarme sobre series, personajes y capítulos que jamás he visto en mi vida me pareció muy fastidioso: Sin mentir, me dormí sentado en la mitad del capítulo. Cuando desperté, leí páginas al azar, saltándome el orden, y noté que de ahí en adelante todo el libro era igual, así que no encontré motivos para continuar este libro. Lo importante fue que lo intenté. Spanish; Castilian 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, the first part of this book I read was A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do again. What a delectable read! Your gift for detail - so rich, crisp, clear, hilarious, delicious, repulsive, INCREDIBLE! I'm so smitten with you it's unbelievable. I'd leave my husband for you! (1)
I never in my days wanted to go to a state fair, but I willingly went with you in this book and was amazed. Without your guidance through the fairgrounds, I would have never gone. And without stepping foot there, I could smell the livestock, the sweaty masses of people, the greasy food. Your detail rocks my world. Your amazing observations... you make me tingle! And I enjoyed the hell out of my trip to the fair. Thank you.
I could kiss you, DFW! (2) Instead, I'll read everything of yours I can get my hands on! Then, I'll push it on any of my friends and family until they are sick of me raving about you! And, once I have read everything you wrote I'll read them again! and again! (3)
Yet, in all these stories there's this underlying stench of depression and loneliness that truly breaks my heart. Maybe, having been visited by the black cloud of depression myself, I feel you more. (4)
I'm so very sorry you left the world.
I'm so very glad you left us with something amazing.
(1) only if my husband left me first (1a)
(1a) and if you weren't dead.
(2) but I can't because you are dead, you sonofabitch!
(3) because your punk ass had to commit suicide and there will be no more DFW stuff out there, you jerk! (3a)
(3a) I find this depressing as hell, thank you very much! (3b)
(3b) Not because you care, David Foster Wallace, because you are dead. (3c)
(3c) Now I'm mad at you! (3d)
(3d) But I still love you.
(4) Oh, and feel you I would... if you were still breathing!
Spanish; Castilian There are two essays on tennis. And I suspect his perspective on tennis is unique in the history of the world. It's when he's examining the micro mechanics of tennis that you realise just what a rare and perilous place his delicately tuned mind was. And just how interwoven are madness and genius.
He goes on a cruise and makes it seem like a dress rehearsal for a nursing home. A tightly formulated series of happy clapping rituals. Your desires not only anticipated and micromanaged but formulated for you. Rebellion would be required daily to genuinely have a good time. Not necessarily a bad starting state of mind when you awake of a morning. One thing's certain, a cruise would provide great material for a comic novel. For one thing it contains elements of a dystopian world. I'm surprised no one has ever written this novel. JG Ballard?
An agricultural fair provides a good deal of comedy. But his comedy is generally kind, rarely cruel. And boy is he brilliant at making you laugh!
There's an essay on television in which he argues it's futile to feel superior to television because television only pretends to be stupid. One of its directives to help its audience feel superior which is a feeling people like. I wasn't familiar with any of the programmes he mentions so a lot of this essay went over my head.
(I'm still mostly locked out of my account and can't make or reply to comments. Apologies.) Spanish; Castilian
IL TENNIS È COME GIOCARE A SCACCHI CORRENDO
Un’esperienza religiosa
Cosa significa tenere una racchetta da tennis in mano, cosa si può fare ma anche creare colpendo una palla con la racchetta da tennis, lo sforzo la fatica la genialità e l’arte di questo sport. Chi lo ha spiegato e raccontato meglio di David Foster Wallace? Qui, ma ancora meglio in quell’altro suo breve saggio su Roger Federer come esperienza religiosa.
Lo stesso Wallace praticava questo sport in modo notevole, a livello agonistico. Due, o quattro combattenti, la racchetta come strumento, ciascuno metà del campo, una rete a separare gli avversari (ché di avversari si tratta) senza mai venire a contatto. Metafora della competizione sociale e professionale, della lotta della vita.
E neppure troppo sotto, l’analogia tra tennis e scrittura letteraria: entrambi giochi solitari, fondati sul talento e sull’estro, attività basate su piccoli colpi, agilità improvvise e eventi minuscoli che cambiano il corso di un’intera partita, o di un romanzo. Per David Foster Wallace (e Federer) il tocco (lo stile) è tutto.
Sui sei ‘pezzi’ qui raccolti, due sono sul tennis.
Uno (magnifico) è dedicato a David Lynch, il suo cinema e la morale americana.
Altro brano magnifico è quello sull’influenza della televisione sugli scrittori americani.
Con il reportage sulla fiera in Illinois, reportage olfattivo scritto col naso (mucche, cavalli, galline, granoturco…) siamo dalle parti di quello mitico Considera l’aragosta: è l’America rurale, quella repubblicana.
E poi una disquisizione sulla “morte dell’autore.”
Il tutto immerso nella sua solita salsa a base di intelligenza e ironia, sorrisi assicurati, umanità ed empatia, e la sensazione che il proprio personale acume si espanda a ogni pagina (purtroppo è solo una sensazione).
Spanish; Castilian this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exaggerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.
come to my blog! Spanish; Castilian I used to think I was pretty smart. I did the gifted program in elementary school, took advanced classes in high school, went to college, graduated with honors. Watched critically acclaimed films, read critically acclaimed novels, even took in the occasional play. Smart stuff. But mere months after graduation, I was plagued with worry and self-doubt. If I was really so smart, why wasn't I going places? Why did I feel so lost, so aimless, so adrift in adulthood? Why was I just getting by and no longer exceeding expectations?
Fact is, once you leave the safe harbor of formal schooling, there simply are no more expectations. There are no more instructors to impress, no more audiences to wow. The carefully constructed world of education turns out to be a lie, a proxy, a hall of mirrors. It's a sickening sensation that can very well drive you crazy, when you realize that you have to go it alone out there, by the seat of your pants, with no road map and no grading scale and no external carrots or sticks to motivate you or keep you on task.
*
This guy. This fucking Wallace guy. This guy who shows up and makes it all look easy, who writes circles—make that rectilinear perimetrics—around the competition. Sharp, precise, entertaining and thought-provoking. Crisp, clean, expansive.
I want to write like that. I want to BE like that.
*
Wallace and I have a lot in common. Both raised in Illinois, both spent time in Arizona. Both burdened with anxiety and substance abuse issues. Both overactive in the mind, always wondering and forever worrying what everything is about.
*
Wallace and I have nothing in common. He made big waves, I made not a splash. He became the voice of a generation, I am but an echo of other people's opinions.
He used his fame to hit on women. He stalked, he threatened, he objectified. I'm happily monogamous (at least, I am now - my ex-wife surely would say otherwise, and she'd be right).
He killed himself, I'm a suicide survivor.
I don't want to live like that. I don't want to BE like that.
He wrote books, but I brought flesh and blood children into this world. He inspired thousands superficially, I have two little ones to raise and provide for and love more deeply than anything. So I can't begrudge him his success, since we really weren't playing at the same game after all - and where our experiences DO overlap, by some accounts I'm the one who's come out ahead.
*
Wallace is a mirror and a cautionary tale. A tremendous talent, to be sure, but also a grave warning that talent isn't everything. An extraordinary success, but a reminder that the greatest success is found in mastering the ordinary. What Wallace does is to examine a small subject in minute, nitpicking detail (tennis, grammar, luxury cruise trips) and expand it to contain the whole universe of human experience. He is good at this, better than anyone else I'm aware of, and this skill is on display here with shocking clarity.
5 stars. Nearly perfect essay-writing from a grossly imperfect man. Spanish; Castilian 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 myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read all his books before, right? So I should be able to revisit them whenever I want, without feeling like a scenester wannabe.
I didn't remember much about this one, except a weird snippet about playing tennis in a tornado. So try to picture my shock, in the early pages of the very first essay, when I came upon this:
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 of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
Cut to me, hair blowing crazy in the wind outside my apartment, with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face.
So, you know, I don't know what to say. It really was very hard for me to get through this reading without feeling like a stupid bandwagon-jumper. It really was very hard not to notice all the despair slyly threaded throughout these essays, intermixed with the jokes, the seriousness, the brilliance. But even while doing all that noticing, I kept second-guessing and scolding myself for overemphasizing something that only now seems true, in retrospect. I mean, if he'd come out of the closet recently instead, everyone would be piecing together clues from his oeuvre about his homosexual tendencies, you know?
I'm having trouble explaining this, but I guess I have a serious problem with how the soul-baring-ness of the autobiographical writer leads to this tacit agreement that readers can poke their noses between the lines to figure out more than the writer is telling. But then WTF, these things are actually there! Right? I just kept looping myself around and around, not feeling comfortable with anything I thought about anything.
So whatever. This book is ungodly fantastic, the fact that he is gone is so goddamn devastating, the whole thing is beautiful-awful but mostly just fucking awful.
If anyone is still reading or cares, here are some thoughts on the individual essays.
The title essay and Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All are spectacular. Hilarious too, which is something we sometimes forget about DFW, given how super serious & intellectual he is.
In Greatly Exaggerated he is so fucking smart that I couldn't even read the essay, because I am not, and never will be, his intellectual equal.
E Unibus Pluram, on the other hand, was incredibly smart but also (for the most part) accessible to us mere mortals, and was incredibly interesting, if sadly a bit dated.
David Lynch Keeps His Head was a nice middle ground: incredibly obsessive-nerd-y, but it made me desperately want to watch Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks again.
I only read about half of the Michael Joyce essay because my attention span for tennis (especially its accompanying statistics and arcana) is pretty short.
Derivative Sports in Tornado Alley was plaintive and sad and the most 'personal' (maybe?!?!?!) of the essays, and though it was the one that stuck with me the most on my first read of this book, this time I think the images of the bovine herds of fat sweaty Mid-Easterners stuffing their faces with funnel cake and hot dogs at the State Fair will remain in my head for a long while.
God I am so depressed. Spanish; Castilian 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 signifiers, things that disgust you, it's not fair, just because you happen to have the misfortune to be born straight & white & male and, as they say, privileged. you need the distance, the alienation, the angst of being someone, something, anything, apart... because you know you are different. right? you just know it. you enjoy things and yet you don't enjoy them, you enjoy not enjoying them, your layer of hipster irony protects you and maybe fulfills you. and you will never admit that. you self deprecate, in your own egotistical way. you are the boss of you; no one can take that away. everything is so corny and full of bullshit, surely they must see that. and yet there must be truth there, if you look for it. you tell yourself that. you write a book, a great book about life and love and living and loving, etc. you write a book, or imagine yourself writing a book. it is not this book. this book is all about the unimportant things, the annoying things, the fake shit and all the bullshit. does it satisfy you? not really. so you read a book. you feel better. let the irony take over, it comforts you. you are not angry, not angry at all. you laugh at all that fake shit, all the bullshit. angry is a hot emotion. you don't feel those, at least not anymore.
you go to a movie set. Lost Highway. you try to keep an open mind but it is all fake, it is all bullshit. there are too many assholes in the world! and yet the director at the center of it all is not fake, he is not bullshit, he's not an asshole. does he understand something about life that you do not? what does he understand, what does he know? you want to know. he is just being himself, and you don't understand that. or maybe you do. it all makes you deeply uncomfortable.
you go to a fair; you go on a cruise. both are depressing. but funny! the kind of funny that you can only sheepishly admit. perhaps you are a part of the problem; it is people who look just like you who created this world that you despise. you try to enjoy the fair. you try to enjoy the cruise. you take enjoyment from your lack of enjoyment. you write a book, a collection of short works, at times even a personal narrative. that's the phrase, right? you personally inject yourself into the narrative, into this ridiculous world. you feel better! but not really. fuck this life. fuck this earth. there is only one way to live in this life and that is through the glass of irony, a postmodern form of protection, the strongest barrier, it will protect you, just breathe, you know you can do it, it's not so bad,
.
my name is mark. i'm not white, not really, only half-white, does that count as white? i don't feel white, however that feels. i am bisexual, no really. i veer gay if that it makes it easier to swallow. oh and i wasn't born in this country, this U.S. of fucking A. and hey, what's money? i've never had it; i'll never get it. and who the fuck is David Foster Wallace? i dunno. he's some dude that everyone jacks off to, apparently.
i have a friend named Benji - a golden lad (at least in my mind; i look at him through the lense of my very first impression, forever ingrained). he is nothing like DFW. once he talked about how he doesn't see race or class or sexuality, because he's never had to. he was raised by good progressives; he was raised to love life. nice life! he talked about how he wished everyone could be like him, not white or straight or a guy or from money or whatever, but able to look at things like they were and not let all the bullshit get them down, and so just live. not assign guilt or blame, just to understand, or try to, and then move on. not judge. you know, it should be easy, life should be easy, why isn't it? i listened to him say these things and i thought i wish. i wish i could be that way. you are so naive, Benji. i fucking hate you. i fucking love you. DFW is the opposite of Benji. and yet, and yet... is the difference merely a question of awareness? of critical distance? i can't imagine being a person like Benji, being that blithe. now Benji could enjoy a county fair, an awful cruise, he could enjoy it without irony i think. certainly without that underlying feeling of sadness and, yep, i won't pretend, without the condescending irritation at the futility of all these fucking gestures, the fake shit and the bullshit, the power imbalances, the need to make form equal meaning. i love Benji but i'm not sure i understand him. so why do i understand David Foster Wallace? he is nothing like me. he is like Benji. straight white male; money: not a problem. what do i have in common with David Foster Wallace? nothing. the idea is ludicrous. and yet, and yet... why do i read him and feel like i am reading my own thoughts, right there on the page? my own thoughts, staring back at me. Spanish; Castilian
