A few years ago, when I was either just finishing being a student or just starting being an employee at Pomona (I don't remember which), the people with connections to the English department were all atwitter at our acquisition of Mr. David Foster Wallace the Famous Author, who became the new professor of Creative Writing. I paid little attention, not because of any fault of Mr. Foster Wallace, but more because of certain annoying people that were on the Search Committee and spent the whole semester talking about the Very Exciting News that they were just dying to tell us sorry outsiders, but couldn't, because it would be a grave violation of the sacred trust that was placed in them as non-voting irrelevant student representatives on the Committee. (I was on more than one Search Committee myself.)

But I did always want to get one of his books and read it somewhere out of sight, so that if I understood none of it, I could destroy the evidence and pretend it never happened. That was finally accomplished about a month ago, with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I understood most of it, I think. (Otherwise I would be pretending it never happened.) I did have to look up words from time to time, of which I found only one worth remembering: "belletristic," which describes much of the writing going on in this book, and truth be told, much of the writing going on right here as well.¹

Some of the essays I liked. There were others that I did not need to read, and in case you find yourself in the same situation, I shall now provide Cliffs Notes containing everything I took away from them:

• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley: David Foster Wallace used to play tennis. Illinois is windy.
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness:² Professional tennis players are good at tennis.
• Greatly Exaggerated:D. F. Wallace knows a lot of very long words.

I would recommend David Lynch Keeps His Head if you want to know a lot about how David Lynch made Lost Highway. As David F.W. says, David L.'s movies don't make a lot of sense, and if things not making sense is going to bother you, the best solution is to not watch them. I liked Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All, in which he has been engaged to do "pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish," namely the Illinois State Fair. He notices and writes about all the things that you have noticed and forgotten about, if you are somebody like me, who has only ever seen an animal raised for food at just such a Fair. It's not unlike what I had to say about my Ellensburg Rodeo, if you can imagine me writing 56 pages about it and being a much better and Famous Author.

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction was interesting to me too. In this case I felt like the pith-helmeted anthropological reporter myself, since it is all about the six-point-however-many hours of TV we are all said to watch every day, and how this informs our relationships and entire worldview, to which I mostly don't relate since I don't have a TV anymore.

I don't assert that this makes me morally superior. I used to have one, but I got tired of moving it, and once I had money to spend I bought a projector which I now use to watch movies or play on the Wii.³ The total loss of TV was just a side effect of the fact that there is no TV tuner in a projector. I feel like I have to explain this because many people assume that living without a TV must be some kind of intensely principled moral or ascetic position that I have taken, when it's not. If there's any principle involved, it's just the fact that I don't have time to do everything I might like, and lots of things have to go, and TV is one of the things I miss the least.

I have noticed that once people are reassured that I don't believe the Bible forbids me from watching the sinful devil-box or something, they are then unable to really process or accept the idea that I don't watch TV. Ever. If you have ever had a long power outage at home, maybe you have experienced this phenomenon, where your brain has taken electricity for granted for so long that the mere cognitive understanding that the power is out isn't enough to make you actually change your behavior. You want the camping lantern which is in the attic, so you go up there and turn on the light, except oh yeah, the power is out. Then you want to know how much longer the storm is going to last, so you get up to go look online, except oh yeah, the power is out. It's kind of like that when somebody asks if I saw Heroes yesterday, and I say I don't have a TV. As often as not, their next question will be, oh, well did you watch Lost, then? They can't attach "no TV" to their mental model of me. I think the model has no place to attach it.

The other article that was most interesting to me was A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, in which the supposedly fun thing is a 7 Night Luxury Cruise of the Caribbean. This was the reason I bought the book, having run across a mention of it somewhere and surmising from the title that he felt about the same about his Luxury Cruise as I did about the one I went on a few years ago, which was thankfully a few days shorter.⁴ I didn't like all the micromanaged fun either, and I could not possibly take seriously the idea of putting on a tuxedo to go down the hall from basically a dressed-up hotel room to a dressed-up dining hall.

And I was majorly put off by the practice of sticking you with fully half the bill in the form of "tips" which are of course completely at your discretion, but if you want to make any adjustments to the "recommended" total of about $60 per person per day, you have to go to wait in line at the cashier's office on the last day when you would rather be getting off and going home, which you were given the distinct impression was not going to be made a pleasant experience. At least, that was my cynical reading of the final Cruise News, which said something like, "We ask you to visit the Cashier so that you can let us know how we failed to meet your expectations, to give us the opportunity to serve you better on your next trip with us!"

So, a supposedly fun thing that I'll probably never do again.

2007

¹ And if you want to know what it means now, you have to look it up too!

² I notice that everything I think I learned from this essay can be expressed in about 1/2 as many words as its title. Mr. Foster Wallace did not get an Onion article for nothing.

³ In this way, I sometimes do watch some TV shows. I came out of high school liking The Simpsons and X Files, but after that, everything I have watched has been chosen by letting it incubate for a few years first, then if I hear consistently from multiple people that I trust that it is worth watching, I will get the DVDs from the beginning. This is how I came to watch The West Wing in 2005, Cowboy Bebop in 2006, and recently The Wire, in 2007.

⁴ Especially "thankfully" because the person I went with was seasick the whole time, except for the day she took Dramamine, and was then asleep.

04 Jun 2007 23:53 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment