A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (52 page)

2045h.

CELEBRITY SHOWTIME

Celebrity Cruises Proudly Presents

HYPNOTIST

NIGEL ELLERY

Hosted by your Cruise Director Scott Peterson

PLEASE NOTE:
Video and audio taping of all shows is strictly prohibited
. Children, please remain seated with your parents during shows. No children in the front row.

CELEBRITY SHOW LOUNGE

Other Celebrity Showtime headline entertainments this week have included a Vietnamese comedian who juggles chain saws, a husband-and-wife team that specializes in Broadway love medleys, and, most notably, a singing impressionist named Paul Tanner, who made simply an enormous impression on Table 64’s Trudy and Esther, and whose impressions of Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and particularly Perry Como were apparently so stirring that a second Popular Demand Encore Performance by Paul Tanner has been hastily scheduled to follow tomorrow night’s climactic Passenger Talent Show.
¹³⁴

Stage-hypnotist Nigel Ellery is British
¹³⁵
and looks uncannily like 1950s B-movie villain Kevin McCarthy. Introducing him, Cruise Director Scott Peterson informs us that Nigel Ellery “has had the honor of hypnotizing both Queen Elizabeth II and the Dalai Lama.”
¹³⁶
Nigel Ellery’s act combines hypnotic highjinks with a lot of rather standard Borscht Belt patter and audience abuse. And it ends up being such a ridiculously apposite symbolic microcosm of the week’s whole 7NC Luxury Cruise experience that it’s almost like a setup, some weird form of journalistic pampering.

First off, we learn that not everyone is susceptible to serious hypnosis—Nigel Ellery puts the C.S.L.’s whole 300+ crowd through some simple in-your-seat tests
¹³⁷
to determine who in the C.S.L.’s crowd is “suggestibly gifted” enough to participate in the “fun” to come.

Second, when the six most suitable subjects—all still locked in complex contortions from the in-your-seat tests—are assembled onstage, Nigel Ellery spends a long time reassuring them and us that absolutely nothing will happen that they do not wish to have happen and voluntarily submit to. He then persuades a young lady from Akron that a loud male Hispanic voice is issuing from the left cup of her brassiere. Another lady is induced to smell a horrific odor coming off the man in the chair next to her, a man who himself believes that the seat of his chair periodically heats to 100°C. The other three subjects respectively flamenco, believe they are not just nude but woefully ill-endowed, and are made to shout “Mommy, I want a wee-wee!” whenever Nigel Ellery utters a certain word. The audience laughs very hard at all the right times. And there is something genuinely funny (not to mention symbolically microcosmic) about watching these well-dressed adult cruisers behave strangely for no reason they understand. It is as if the hypnosis enables them to construct fantasies so vivid that the subjects do not even know they are fantasies. As if their heads were no longer their own. Which is of course funny.

Maybe the single most strikingly comprehensive 7NC symbol, though, is Nigel Ellery himself. The hypnotist’s boredom and hostility are not only undisguised, they are incorporated kind of ingeniously into the entertainment itself: Ellery’s boredom gives him the same air of weary expertise that makes us trust doctors and policemen, and his hostility—via the same kind of phenomenon that makes Don Rickles a big star in Las Vegas, I guess—is what gets the biggest roars of laughter from the lounge’s crowd. The guy’s stage persona is extremely hostile and mean. He does unkind imitations of people’s U.S. accents. He ridicules questions from both the subjects and the audience. He makes his eyes burn Rasputinishly and tells people they’re going to wet the bed at exactly 3:00
A.M
. or drop trou at the office in exactly two weeks. The spectators—mostly middle-aged, it looks like—rock back and forth with mirth and slap their knee and dab at their eyes with hankies. Each moment of naked ill will from Ellery is followed by an enormous circumoral constriction and a palms-out assurance that he’s just kidding and that he loves us and that we are a simply marvelous bunch of human beings who are clearly having a very good time indeed.

For me, at the end of a full day of Managed Fun, Nigel Ellery’s act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining—but neither is it depressing or offensive or despair-fraught. What it is is weird. It’s the same sort of weird feeling that having an elusive word on the tip of your tongue evokes. There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it. All six subjects are now lined up doing syncopated Rockette kicks, and the show is approaching its climax, Nigel Ellery at the microphone getting us ready for something that will apparently involve furiously flapping arms and the astounding mesmeric illusion of flight. Because my own dangerous susceptibility makes it important that I not follow Ellery’s hypnotic suggestions too closely or get too deeply involved, I find myself, in my comfortable navy-blue seat, going farther and farther away inside my head, sort of Creatively Visualizing a kind of epiphanic Frank Conroy-type moment of my own, pulling mentally back, seeing the hypnotist and subjects and audience and Celebrity Show Lounge and deck and then whole motorized vessel itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, visualizing the m.v.
Nadir
at night, right at this moment, steaming north at 21.4 knots, with a strong warm west wind pulling the moon backwards through a skein of clouds, hearing muffled laughter and music and Papas’ throb and the hiss of receding wake and seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old
Nadir
complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial… yes, this: like a palace: it would look like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible, to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, a man overboard, treading water, out of sight of all land. This deep and creative visual trance—N. Ellery’s true and accidental gift to me—lasted all through the next day and night, which period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and various rinds all around me, feeling maybe a little bit glassy-eyed but mostly good—good to be on the
Nadir
and good soon to be off, good that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—and so I stayed in bed. And even though the tranced stasis caused me to miss the final night’s climactic P.T.S. and the Farewell Midnight Buffet and then Saturday’s docking and a chance to have my After photo taken with Captain G. Panagiotakis, subsequent reentry into the adult demands of landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of Absolutely Nothing had led me to fear.

1995

The following people helped make various of the foregoing better than they (i.e., various of the foregoing) would have been
otherwise and are hereby thanked:

Mary Ann Babbe, Will Blythe, Mark (“Action Boy”) Costello, Will Dana, Richard Ellis, Jonathan (“This Isn’t Nearly as Bad as
One Might Have Expected”) Franzen, K. L. Harris, Colin (“Let’s Explore Once Again Why This Doesn’t Quite Work”) Harrison,
Jack Hitt, Jay (“I’m Suffering Right Along With You”) Jennings, Steve Jones, Glenn (“The Mollifier”) Kenny, Nora Krug, Michael
Martone, Mike Mattil, Bill McBride, Michael Milburn, Steve Moore, Bonnie Nadell, Linda Perla, Michael Pietsch, Erin Poag,
Ellen Rosenbush, Greg Sharko, Lee (“What, Aren’t All Page Proofs Set in Tocharian B?”) Smith, David Travers, Paul Tough, Kristin
(“The Blunt Machete”) von Ogtrop, Amy (“Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here, Exactly?”) Wallace Havens,
Sally F. Wallace, Deborah Wuliger.

David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels
Infinite Jest
and
The Broom of the System
, as well as the story collection
Girl with Curious Hair
. His writings have appeared in
Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Playboy, Premiere, Tennis
, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris
Review Prize for humor, and an O Henry Award. He lives in Bloomington, Illinois.

INFINITE
JEST

“The next step in fiction…. Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty…. Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.”

—Sven Birkerts,
Atlantic Monthly

“Uproarious…. It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly
do anything.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times

“What weird fun
Infinite Jest
is to read…. Truly remarkable.”

—David Gates,
Newsweek

“A virtuoso display…. There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page.”

—R. Z. Sheppard,
Time

“A blockbuster comedy of substance abuse, family dysfunction, and tennis, set in the postmillennial future…. No other writer
now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow.”

—Gerald Howard,
Elle

“A work of genius…. A grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century
as
Ulysses, The Recognitions
, and
Gravity’s Rainbow
.”

—Paul D. Colford,
Seattle Times

“Exhilarating, breathtaking…. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the
face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature.”

—Dan Cryer,
Newsday

“Infinitely readable, even better than its hype…. It shows signs, in fact, of being a
genuine
work of genius.”

—Will Blythe,
Esquire

“Spectacularly good…. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on
Jeopardy!
”

—Walter Kirn,
New York

“Brilliant…. Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless.”

—David Eggers,
San Francisco Chronicle

“So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain….
Infinite Jest
is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition…. Wallace offers huge entertainment.”

—Steven Moore,
Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Bigger, more ambitious, and better than anything else being published in the U.S. right now….
Infinite Jest
unerringly pinpoints how Americans have turned the pursuit of pleasure into addiction.”

—David Streitfeld,
Details

“Brashly funny and genuinely moving….
Infinite Jest
will confirm the hopes of those who called Wallace a genius.”

—Bruce Allen,
Chicago Tribune

¹
This, and thus part of this essay’s title, is from a marvelous toss-off in Michael Sorkin’s “Faking It,” published in Todd
Gitlin, ed.,
Watching Television,
Random House/Pantheon, 1987.

²
Quoted by Stanley Cavell in
Pursuits of Happiness
, Harvard U. Press, 1981; subsequent Emerson quotes ibid.

³
Bernard Nossiter, “The F.C.C.’s Big Giveaway Show,”
Nation,
10/26/85, p. 402.

⁴
Janet Maslin, “It’s Tough for Movies to Get Real,”
New York Times
Arts & Leisure Section, 8/05/90, p. 9.

⁵
Stephen Holden, “Strike The Pose: When Music Is Skin-Deep,” ibid., p. 1.

⁶
Sorkin in Gitlin, p. 163.

⁷
Daniel Hallin, “We Keep America On Top of the World,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 16.

⁸
Barbara Tuchman, “The Decline of Quality,”
New York Times Magazine
, 11/02/80.

⁹
M. Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, Vintage, 1945 edition, pp. 57 and 73.

¹⁰
I didn’t get this definition from any sort of authoritative source, but it seems pretty modest and commonsensical.

¹¹
Don DeLillo,
White Noise
, Viking, 1985, p. 72.

¹²
Octavio Paz,
Children of the Mire
, Harvard U. Press, 1974, pp. 103–118.

¹³
This professor was the sort of guy who used “which” when the appropriate relative pronoun was the less fancy “that” to give
you an idea.

¹⁴
If you want to see a typical salvo in this generation war, look at William Gass’s “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense”
in the 10/11/87
New York Times Book Review
.

¹⁵
In Bill Knott’s
Love Poems to Myself, Book One
, Barn Dream Press, 1974.

¹⁶
In Stephen Dobyns’s
Heat Death
, McLelland and Stewart, 1980.

¹⁷
In Bill Knott’s
Becos
, Vintage, 1983.

¹⁸
White Noise
, pp. 12–13.

¹⁹
Martone,
Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List
, Indiana U. Press, 1990, p. ix.

²⁰
Leyner,
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
, Harmony/Crown, 1990, p. 82.

²¹
Mark Crispin Miller, “Deride and Conquer,” in Gitlin’s anthology, p. 193.