David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Praise for David Foster Wallaces

a supposedly fun thing

ill never do again

Further cements Wal aces reputation as probably the most ambitious and prodigious literary talent of his generation, an erupting Vesuvius of prose and ideas and intel ect.

John Marshal , Seattle Post Intelligencer

The title essay is worth the price of the book

irrefutable proof of comic genius. Yes, hes a great writer, get used to it.

Adam Begley, New York Observer

Wal ace puts enough energy, attitude, thought, fun (in and out of quotes) and sheer information into any single page to wear me out. But they dont. As long as hes wil ing to get down and rassle with this stuff, Im glad to sit here and read al about it.

David Gates, Newsweek

You dont want to miss out on reading David Foster Wal ace. Yes, hes that good.

Kane Webb, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

He has Gore Vidals biting wit, Christopher Hitchenss ability to disrobe intel ectual impostors, and Pynchons sense of the bizarre. Not just refreshing, its downright exhilarating.

David Daley, Hartford Courant

Wal aces sheer verbal precocity and versatility stun.

Joan Hinkemeyer, Rocky Mountain News

DFW is smart and funny, a man from whose word processor flows a torrent of bril iant observations and hysterical wit. Do your disposition and your mind a favor: Read this book.

Steven E. Alford, Houston Chronicle

A marvelous book. Sparkling reportage. If one wants to see the zeitgeist auto-grappling, in al its necessary confusions, one must read every essay in this book.

James Wood, Newsday

Funny as al get-out. This guy uses words like a Ninja uses throwing stars. Wal ace proves that cutting edge is a term that neednt be reserved for fiction only.

Jef Leisgang, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

What hes doing in these essays is rather extraordinary: Treading chin-deep in postmodern waters, hes constructing an exceptional y funny, viable, open-minded, openhearted voice, and he gives some of the rest of us new ways to think about how to navigate our own perilous waters.

Cornel Bonca, OC Weekly (Orange County)

Engagingly bizarre thinking and gleeful y uninhibited writing. Wal ace is smart and funny to about the same extent that Bil Gates is rich. He leaps exuberantly from one original observation to the next.

Margaret Sul ivan, Buffalo News

This volume not only reconfirms Mr. Wal aces stature as one of his generations preeminent talents, but it also attests to his virtuosity. His novelists radar for the incongruous detail and the revealing remark

along with his hyperkinetic language and natural storytel ing giftsmake him a remarkably able reporter.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Hes funny, actual y. Read him.

Maureen Harrington, Denver Post

also by David Foster Wallace

The Broom of the System

Girl with Curious Hair

Infinite Jest

To Colin Harrison and Michael Pietsch

Copyright

Copyright 1997 by David Foster Wal ace

Al rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S.

Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com www.twitter.com/littlebrown

First eBook Edition: November 2009

Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The following essays have appeared previously (in somewhat different [and sometimes way shorter]

forms):

Derivative Sport in Tornado Al ey, Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It Al , and A Supposedly Fun Thing Il Never Do Again in Harpers in 1992,1994, and 1996 under the respective titles

Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes, Ticket to the Fair,

and Shipping Out.

Derivative Sport in Tornado Al ey in Michael Martone, ed., Townships (University of Iowa Press, 1993).

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

Greatly Exaggeerated in the Harvard Book Review in 1992.

David Lynch Keeps His Head in Premiere in 1996.

Tennis Player Michael Joyces Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation,

Joy,

Grotesquerie,

and

Human

Completeness in Esquire in 1996 under the title The String Theory.

ISBN: 978-0-316-09052-0

Contents

Copyright

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All

Greatly Exaggerated

David Lynch keeps his head

Tennis Player Michael JoyceS Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness

A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again Praise for David Foster Wal aces novel

derivative sport in tornado alley

When I left my boxed township of Il inois farmland to attend my dads alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I al of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. Im starting to see why this was so. Col ege math evokes and catharts a Midwesterners sickness for home. Id grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, gridsand, 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 hil y Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.

Calculus was, quite literal y, childs play.

In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a smal public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Il inois, a tiny col ection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sel crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and col ect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbanas university, whose ranks swel ed 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 kil ing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments al over Il inois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Associations Western Section (Western

being the creakily ancient USTAs designation for the Midwest; farther west were the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with tennis excel ence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent.

I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which everyones a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player. My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with a thumb and pinkie, and could hit a tennis bal no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket. What I could do was

Play the Whole Court. This was a piece of tennis truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.