30 May 2023
The book is titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 1997; I read it with my book group.
Favorites are *’d
* Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
Harpers, 1990 — 3
A nice essay. A lot of good bits of description and nice turns of phrase. Discusses Foster’s ‘career’ as a ‘near-great’ high school tennis player, something which he made interesting to me in spite of the topic. I thought the beginning was brilliant, making a connection between the midwestern landscape and geometry, which is then further pursued in tennis. Here’s a sample from the beginning:
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.
—David Foster Wallace, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, 3
E Pluribus Unum: Television and US Fiction
Harpers, 1990 — 21
Didn’t engage me. Not surprising given my tv illiteracy.
* Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from it All
Harpers, 1993 — page 83
This is an account of a visit to the Illinois State Fair. It was my favorite essay, I think, though I thought ‘Derivative Sport’ was more elegantly written. This felt a bit long and overwhelming, but that is actually appropriate for its subject matter. As I am coming to recognize with Wallace, he excels at descriptions of people, places and events that are both apt and unusual, like this one:
The Fairgrounds are a St. Vitus’s dance of blacktop footpaths, the axons and dendrites of mass spectation, connecting buildings and barns and corporate tents.
—David Foster Wallace, Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from it All, 102
The essay often feels a bit elitist – an ethnographer giving an account of the crude but robust vitality of midwesterners – but at least he sometimes acknowledged the elitism. He is also elf-deprecating in places, which was a nice counterbalance to the elitism, and there was one point where he showed genuine appreciation for something:
But clogging has now miscegenated with square dancing and honky-tonk boogie to become a kind of intricately synchronized, absolutely kick-ass country tap dance.
—David Foster Wallace, Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from it All, 123-124
[…]
The routines have some standard tap-dance moves – sweep, flare, chorus-line kicking. But it’s fast and sustained and choreographed down to the last wrist-flick. And square dancing’s genes can be seen in the upright, square-shouldered postures on the floor, a kind of florally enfolding tendency to the choreography, some of which features high-speed promenades. But it’s adrenaline-dancing, meth-paced and exhausting to watch because your own feet move; and it’s erotic in a way that makes MTV look lame.
He advances a theory – encapsulated in the title – that midwesterners, because they dwell in wide open spaces that are essentially factories, ‘get away’ from things by coming to places like the fair where they can be in crowds.
Greatly Exaggerated
Harvard Book Review, 1992 — 138
A well-written and occasionally amusing book review of H. L. Hixs’ critique of postmodern literary theory. Not being a fan of lit crit it didn’t really engage me, but since he did do a good job of briefly describing the book and its key arguments, I’ll at least give it a mild thumbs up.
David Lynch Keeps his Head
Premier, 1995 — 146
Subject matter didn’t engage me. Written in question/answer form, which I also don’t care for. But other members of the group, who are more into this milieu, liked it.
Tennis Player’s Michael Joyces…
Esquire, 1995 — 213
I skipped this, not being into tennis. Other members of the group enjoyed this. .
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Harpers, 1995 — 256
An account of taking a cruise on a luxury liner. Not without interest, but marred by his unrelenting negative take on just about all aspects of it. Everyone seemed like a caricature, and alienated from just about everyone and everything.