A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (5 page)

essays and arguments

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

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To Colin Harrison and Michael Pietsch

Copyright © 1997 by David Foster Wallace

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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.”

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallace, David Foster.

      A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again: essays and arguments / David Foster Wallace.—1st ed.

            p. cm.

      ISBN 978-0-316-91989-0

      I. Title.

PS3573.A425635S86   1997

814′.54—dc20                                                      96-42528

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

RRD-IN

Printed in the United States of America

table of contents

a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again

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.

To your average outsider, Central Illinois looks ideal for sports. The ground, seen from the air, strongly suggests a board
game: anally precise squares of dun or khaki cropland all cut and divided by plumb-straight tar roads (in all farmland, roads
still seem more like impediments than avenues). In winter, the terrain always looks like Mannington bathroom tile, white quadrangles
where bare (snow), black where trees and scrub have shaken free in the wind. From planes, it always looks to me like Monopoly
or Life, or a lab maze for rats; then, from ground level, the arrayed fields of feed corn or soybeans, fields furrowed into
lines as straight as only an Allis Chalmers and sextant can cut them, look laned like sprint tracks or Olympic pools, hashmarked
for serious ball, replete with the angles and alleys of serious tennis. My part of the Midwest always looks laid down special,
as if planned.

The terrain’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Because the land seems so even, designers of clubs and parks rarely bother
to roll it flat before laying the asphalt for tennis courts. The result is usually a slight list that only a player who spends
a lot of time on the courts will notice. Because tennis courts are for sun- and eye-reasons always laid lengthwise north-south,
and because the land in Central Illinois rises very gently as one moves east toward Indiana and the subtle geologic summit
that sends rivers doubled back against their own feeders somewhere in the east of that state, the court’s forehand half, for
a rightie facing north, always seems physically uphill from the backhand—at a tournament in Richmond IN, just over the Ohio
line, I noticed the tilt was reversed. The same soil that’s so full of humus farmers have to be bought off to keep markets
unflooded keeps clay courts chocked with jimson and thistle and volunteer corn, and it splits asphalt courts open with the
upward pressure of broadleaf weeds whose pioneer-stock seeds are unthwarted by a half-inch cover of sealant and stone. So
that all but the very best maintained courts in the most affluent Illinois districts are their own little rural landscapes,
with tufts and cracks and underground-seepage puddles being part of the lay that one plays. A court’s cracks always seem to
start off to the side of the service box and meander in and back toward the service line. Foliated in pockets, the black cracks,
especially against the forest green that contrasts with the barn red of the space outside the lines to signify fair territory,
give the courts the eerie look of well-rivered sections of Illinois, seen from back aloft.