A supposedly fun thing I'll do again and again
I'm sure somebody else has made that joke already
I consider David Foster Wallace to be one of my favorite writers, yet I have not read his most famous work. You know the one. Like everybody else, I was obsessed with taking up new hobbies during the pandemic (you need some banana bread, I’m your guy) and one of my frivolous Amazon purchases included a copy of Infinite Jest. I tried. Maybe I got ninety pages in. If you include footnotes, that’s over one-hundred. I’m gearing up for another attempt in the summer. Right now, I’m 1 in 0, which is a pretty respectable record.
Wallace’s non-fiction work is another matter entirely. I have bought multiple copies of Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I have aped Wallace’s pseudo-journalistic style1 for school projects. As an angsty teenager, I elected David Foster Wallace as one of my many kindred spirits. I even wrote a song about the guy. I’ll tell you about it at the end. If you’re good. All you need to know for now is that I crushed hard on Wallace on the strength of his essays, not his fiction.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Wallace’s most famous essay is not a masterpiece of investigative journalism. It is not an exposé of the seedy underbelly of American cruise liners. The 7NC Luxury Cruise company comes out pretty well. No, the reason this essay remains engaging thirty years on is that Wallace created a compelling public version of himself: the neurotic, naïve overthinker, baffled at the fun everybody else seems to be having. This is not an essay about a cruise or consumerism or tourism or what have you. This is an essay about David Foster Wallace, pure and simple.
Playing the Fool
David Foster Wallace was smarter than most people on the planet, at least verbally, so any claims to ignorance should be taken with a grain of salt. In one scene, Wallace partakes in skeet shooting with his fellow passengers. He is the only novice in the line. He struggles to understand the advice of the pros, but his confusion is intelligent:
A lot of the advice…boils down to exhortations to “lead” the launched skeet, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun’s barrel should move across the sky with the skeet or should instead lie in a sort of static ambush along some point in the skeet’s projected path.
He is of course too scared to ask.
Tears of a Clown
ASFTINDA is a funny piece. Hilarious, in fact. Yet there are moments where Wallace’s tormented emotional state pop out. I don’t want to read and think about his tragic end, but it is hard not to. Early on, he pours out his fear of getting older (at the grand old age of 33) and life’s possibilities gradually narrowing down. No other writer would have such a paragraph in the middle of a commissioned article:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosure multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’ s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
Wallace is a believer in free will, and is overwhelmed by the responsibility. He likes being pampered on the cruise because decisions are taken out of his hands. He hates himself for liking it.
(the cruise liner’s attempts to push existential angst from their customer’s minds only increases it in Wallace)
Relative Poverty
ASFTINDA does not really have an arc and that’s okay because Wallace is such a fun writer it would be worth hearing about his weekly grocery trip. With a bit re-jigging however, the arc could have been: man goes on cruise, likes it for a while, then realizes that pleasure does not bring happiness. Wallace’s epiphany comes strangely early in the piece:
By Ides Wednesday I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent in my cabin hisses (loudly), and that though I can turn off the reggae Muzak coming out of the speaker in the cabin I cannot turn off the even louder ceiling-speaker out in the 10-Port hall. By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get quite all the crumbs.
That is the stuff that closing paragraphs are made of. It feels like Wallace is coming to his point. Yet, the article settles back into vignette-land, very entertaining, but not that meaningful in a macro sense. The actual ending is a bit rushed. The cruise ends. Phew.
The Anxiety of Influence
Wallace’s style is addictive and infectious. Right now, I’m trying not to sound like him. 2 If you’re thinking of doing the footnote thing, trust me, don’t. John Green ditched the trick after his first novel and look how that worked out for him.
But worse than writers trying to sound like Wallace is young people who claim him as a hero. I was one of those young people. Yes, it’s time to talk about the song I wrote about David Foster Wallace. I said you’d get it if you were good and you were.
I don’t remember every single word, but I remember large chunks. The opening verse went:
when I first read David Foster Wallace
I was sixteen and my life was in bits
I was so lonely and extremely self-conscious
I opened a page and found that he was the same.
Given that I wrote this song when I was sixteen, I don’t know why I was singing as if I was sixteen a long time ago. I remember the next section too:
I fell in love, I worshipped him,
After reading his stuff, I couldn’t keep away from a pen,
The first thing I read was “Brief Interviews”
I laughed and I cried and I screamed: THIS IS MONUMENTAL!
It’s all coming back now. I was deep in a Walden phase and had decided to shun conventional society and move into a shed in my backyard with a notebook and a bunch of books. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was one of them.
My memory of my magnum opus is a little sketchier from here on out. I do remember in the second verse, referring to my discovery of Wallace’s suicide with one of the worst lines in musical history:
then one day my family got Google….
Finally, as a rousing coda, I screamed at the top of my lungs:
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD GENIUSES
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD GENIUSES
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD GENIUSES
SO WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ME???
And that was repeated, like a Hey Jude kind of thing, and then it was supposed to fade out. I just sang it quieter and quieter.
Look, a footnote!
I’m too tired to think of a rambling anecdote for down here