A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Online
Authors: David Foster Wallace
a supposedly fun thing
i’ll never do again
“Further cements Wallace’s reputation as probably the most ambitious and prodigious literary talent of his generation, an
erupting Vesuvius of prose and ideas and intellect.”
—John Marshall,
Seattle Post Intelligencer
“The title essay is worth the price of the book… irrefutable proof of comic genius…. Yes, he’s a great writer, get used to
it.”
—Adam Begley,
New York Observer
“Wallace puts enough energy, attitude, thought, ‘fun’ (in and out of quotes) and sheer information into any single page to
wear
me
out. But they don’t…. As long as he’s willing to get down and rassle with this stuff, I’m glad to sit here and read all about
it.”
—David Gates,
Newsweek
“You don’t want to miss out on reading David Foster Wallace. Yes, he’s that good.”
—Kane Webb,
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“He has Gore Vidal’s biting wit, Christopher Hitchens’s ability to disrobe intellectual impostors, and Pynchon’s sense of
the bizarre…. Not just refreshing, it’s downright exhilarating.”
—David Daley,
Hartford Courant
“Wallace’s 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 brilliant 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 all its necessary confusions,
one must read every essay in this book.”
—James Wood,
Newsday
“Funny as all get-out…. This guy uses words like a Ninja uses throwing stars…. Wallace proves that
cutting edge
is a term that needn’t be reserved for fiction only.”
—Jef Leisgang,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“What he’s doing in these essays is rather extraordinary: Treading chin-deep in postmodern waters, he’s constructing an exceptionally
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 gleefully uninhibited writing…. Wallace is smart and funny to about the same extent that
Bill Gates is rich. He leaps exuberantly from one original observation to the next.”
—Margaret Sullivan,
Buffalo News
“This volume not only reconfirms Mr. Wallace’s stature as one of his generation’s preeminent talents, but it also attests
to his virtuosity…. His novelist’s radar for the incongruous detail and the revealing remark—along with his hyperkinetic language
and natural storytelling gifts—make him a remarkably able reporter.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
“He’s funny, actually…. 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 © 1997 by David Foster Wallace
All 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
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 Alley,” “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It All,” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again” in
Harper’s
in 1992,1994, and 1996 under the respective titles “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” “Ticket to the Fair,” and “Shipping
Out.”
“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” 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 Joyce’s 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
1
Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
2
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
3
Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All
7
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Praise for David Foster Wallace’s novel
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western
Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. 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.
In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had
been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era
Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect
property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana’s university, whose ranks swelled 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 killing whole summers being driven
through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis
Association’s Western Section (“Western” being the creakily ancient USTA’s designation for the Midwest; farther west were
the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with tennis excellence 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 everyone’s 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 ball 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.
Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The
summer heat and wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and broadleaves up through the courts’
surface by main force, the midges that feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that spawn in the fields’ furrows and in the conferva-choked
ditches that box each field, night tennis next to impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights form
a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is aflutter with spastic little shadows.
But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois’ quality of outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes
than I can summon about bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for kinds of wind than there are in
Malamut for snow. The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into
intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer’s Rule and the cross-products
of curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel
out not only driveways but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois “blizzard” starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind
begins. Most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic flags tied down over their
parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their
hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind wind etc. etc.
The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o’clock
stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so
same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity
futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football
games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo,
Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. Weather-wise, our township
is on the eastern upcurrent of what I once heard an atmospherist in brown tweed call a Thermal Anomaly. Something about southward
rotations of crisp air off the Great Lakes and muggy southern stuff from Arkansas and Kentucky miscegenating, plus an odd
dose of weird zephyrs from the Mississippi valley three hours west. Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one
big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who
know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall,
and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas
and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down
pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses. The worst was spring, boys’ high school tennis season, when the
nets would stand out stiff as proud flags and an errant ball would blow clear to the easternmost fence, interrupting play
on the next several courts. During a bad blow some of us would get rope out and tell Rob Lord, who was our fifth man in singles
and spectrally thin, that we were going to have to tie him down to keep him from becoming a projectile. Autumn, usually about
half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into
force-curves—I’d heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy,
my first high-tide wave break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles. Summers were manic and gusty, then
often around August deadly calm. The wind would just die some August days, and it was no relief at all; the cessation drove
us nuts. Each August, we realized afresh how much the sound of wind had become part of the soundtrack to life in Philo. The
sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural
glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal. It was months after I moved to western MA
before I could really sleep in the pussified whisper of New England’s wind-sound.