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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Unavailable
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Unavailable
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Audiobook17 hours

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Written by David Foster Wallace

Narrated by Paul Garcia

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 7, 2012
ISBN9781611135169
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Author

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) wrote the novels The Pale King, Infinite Jest, and The Broom of the System, as well as the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Everything and More, and This Is Water.

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Rating: 4.1532417328094295 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have long believed that David Foster Wallace was a great writer. In his novels though, he is a good writer. His novels always make me feel that while they were painful for him to write they are more painful still for the reader to read. It is in his essays and journalism and arguments that we hear the great writer and we are extremely fortunate that rich American journals and magazines commissioned so many pieces from him some of which are collected here. Would that the UK had ever had such a healthy subset of the publishing industry.Some of these essays and arguments are very good and some are exquisite. In one notable essay DFW revisits a topic I have read him cover before and the topic where I think his writing is at it peak: professional tennis. In this piece, and some others here too, he is a modern equal of Hazlitt albeit in a more modern mode. On tennis he brings enthusiasm, knowledge, humour and awe to bear on a subject which he clearly loves. His insights on tennis technicalities, trigonometry and the signification of professional sporting achievement to society at large make this text shine like a gem. It is in every particular the equal of his famous piece on Roger Federer but benefits from focussing on a lower order player and his relationship to the elite of the professional game. It is a model essay and if you are even mildly interested in tennis then the book is worth its price for this one piece alone.In his novels DFW is wryly, cleverly witty and dryly humorous, but in most of these essays and arguments he is laugh out loud funny. In 2 I shall recall forever: one on Americans cruising the Caribbean and one on a visit to a State fair he had tears running down my face. And it gets better yet, where in his novels his penchant for copious and often overly-lengthy footnotes ( when reading Infinite Jest I had to have 4 separate bookmarks running) gets away from him to the detriment of the reader here in his essays he deploys the footnote to wonderfully digressive erudition. And best yet, his Will Self-like obsession for littering his clear and shining text with obscure vocabulary that will force almost all readers at some point to a dictionary (and a good dictionary at that) in the arguments and essays this is never the chore that it becomes in his novels.The essay as a form is as distinct from the novel as the novel is from the short story and DFW was clearly a master of the form. Would that we had more like him. Would that we had more essays if they were this good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hilarious commentary on a luxury cruise. It's his unusual way of seeing the world and his nonpareil way of describing it, that I miss his writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm not sure why this made the 100 New Classics list. I enjoyed the state fair and cruise stories.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliantly funny - I miss DFW even more now.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I cannot help but be stunned by DFWs brilliant, digressive mind, and feel so very sorry that he is gone from this world. It is a little like losing a good friend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Everyone knows that one's reading time is limited, and so if you haven't read any particular book, or even a particular author, it can't really come as too much of a surprise. When you haven't even heard of a prominent author, though, that can be rather embarrassing, and so it is to my discredit that I confess before Wallace's suicide, I'd never heard of him. There were all these outpourings of horror that such a talented figure should off himself, and I was left frantically searching to see who he was, even. So I'd decided that at some point, I should give his stuff a try, and even if it took a few years, I did get there. I'd been told starting with his essay collections first made a better intro to feeling out his style than the fiction, so I started with this, the first one.I can fairly easily say that you get into the writing fairly quickly, and that the professions of admiration for Wallace's style are not off-base. As with most of these cases, there is of course varying quality within the collection - one feels the short book review might not belong, and while the essay on television is interesting and in some ways prescient, I feel it's also rather dated, as well. Looking at it as an analysis of the state of TV at the time makes it feel more valid; after all, it's nearly 20 years past now, that essay, and it still reads well enough.I did enjoy the Lost Highway and David Lynch essay, and the playing with structure that involved, but I think my favorite pieces in the book really are the ones that can be described as almost travelogues: the piece from a Montreal tennis tournament on tennis player Michael Joyce and what it means to be very, very good and dedicated, but still never as good as one could be, the sacrifices and the gains; the post from the Illinois State Fair, with the looks at the differences in culture; the essay from the long cruise, and the changes that come over one when everything is taken care of. They're long essays, quite sizable chunks of work, and yet getting through them, footnotes and all, never feels like a chore.I guess that this is the point of Wallace, from what I know: all the desire to be rigorous, to get across all the information one can precisely, while still looking to entertain. There are some very funny passages, after all, but overall, the pleasure of the reading is from getting a different, curious viewpoint, trying to really grapple with the world around him and figure out how to fit things into coherent themes and views, without trivializing the people and experiences in front of him, even if he didn't personally enjoy them. The style of the essays, with the footnotes and the length of the sentences and the drive to connect with everyone he can wherever he is, is definitely different; it's not quite academic, which I appreciate. I do enough academic reading.On the whole, then, I did enjoy the collection. I don't think I'm as rapturous about him as many people seem to be, but I do get what the fuss is about, and I'll probably try the other big essay collection before too long. But at least I can say, as an author and a character, he's definitely worth knowing about. I'm glad I gave it a try.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    DISCLAIMER: I only read the essay about David Lynch.Really 3 essays in one: an on-the-set report about Lost Highway, satirical expose about the production of a Hollywood film, and a personal account of the significance of Lynch's work in Wallace's own life. The piece was not helped by is tripartite nature. The stench of Hollywood sleaze was nothing new, nor was the analysis of Lynch's oeuvre, myself being a long time Lynch fan. Wallace's perception of the particular production he was assigned to cover was interesting though. He seemed to have high hopes and foresee positive things about Lost Highway which went on to become one of Lynch's most maligned films.Was it entertaining? Yes, but I'm in love with the subject matter. Was it enthralling? Hardly. With an editor it could have been easily turned into a run of hill production report. Not that it was poorly written, but it was self-indulgent and didn't make me want to read any of Wallace's novels.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The more I read David Foster-Wallace's output the more uncertain I become in my opinion of him. If The Broom of the System was a very funny debut then the short stories in Girl With The Curious Hair were mostly a self-indulgent bore. The Pale King was an unfinished husk of a book, but that didn't mean there weren't brilliant parts to it. This non-fiction collection is a similarly mixed bad. It's a grab all of DFW's early essays and articles and as a result it feels uneven throughout. The near-biographical Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, a PhD thesis review and the titular article about Wallace's experience on a luxury cruise ship all sit alongside each other in an uncomfortable way. It makes for a slightly disjointed read.DFW's writing is good, of course, and unusually focused because of the constraints of the format and various different editors. For better or for worse Wallace allows a lot of his character to seep through in this pieces. Often it's funny and sometimes he pinpoints something that's quite startling but that you never actually considered before. However, occasionally you wish his neuroses took a back seat though because some of these articles end up becoming as much about Wallace as their intended subject. Perhaps this is just a side effect (on my part) since the study his character has undergone after his suicide or maybe it's just "new journalism" in general; but at times I did wish Wallace focused more on putting his intellect to work on probing what he saw instead of telling us about his slight agoraphobia or how he dislikes scary theme park rides.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It is probably a petty thing to do to make a point of directly disagreeing with a clearly honest and thoughtful negative review, but it feels like the best place to start my own attempt to put some words down about this collection. What I want to respond to in particular is the argument made in the preceding post that Wallace's consideration of the question of audience is somehow lacking or incomplete, and that his writing is too self-directed to ever be concerned with what the reader is thinking or feeling or getting from his (Wallace's) prose. My interpretation of a lot of what happens in this and others of his books has to do with precisely this anxiety over how he is perceived. You can observe this anxiety and think that it comes from a kind of solipsistic obsessiveness, but if you are like me you probably also feel like we live in a pretty judgmental world, and that it is hard not to participate in judgmentality, and that every time you form an opinion about something (another person, a celebrity figure, an experience) you wonder about the degree to which people do the same for you. In other words, if the world Wallace is creating is a world in which many people are a) constantly judgmental and b) constantly in fear of how they are being judged, then that is a world that this collection brings me deeply into.And this is probably a root of the tone of Us/Them that works its way through this collection, but I think lots of Wallace critics make the mistake of assuming that his sensitivity to how he is different from the people around him is used by him as a justification for, as the previous reviewer says, "the always-better-than-you-socially-intellectually-politically-ethically-morally-in-every-way-possible" mentality. It might be worth considering that his anxieties about what makes him separate from other people are a weakness, that he understood them as making him socially and emotionally weak, and that he saw them in other people as well. (I think there is evidence for this in this book, like during the cruise ship essay when the author traps himself between his own decision not to get off of the docked boat, so as not to be seen by the locals as a typical "bovine" American, and the reality that his fear of being perceived as typical and American is not only preventing him from what could very well be an enjoyable experience, but also that it comes from an assumption that everyone around him will be looking at and thinking about him as if he were important, which, he admits to himself, he is relatively not). So much of his writing is pointed toward moments of compassion and interpersonal connection that never come; I object to the interpretation that they never come because no one can rise to his intellectual level.Please respond to me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Quite simply one of the best collections of recent nonfiction period. Each essay is packed with ideas.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book is a series of essays, with the ones about TV, the Ill. state fair, and the Caribbean cruise being my favorites. They're full of insightful observations about the mundaneness of life, its pathetic, miserable attempts to entertain itself. They're extremely funny but as the essay about TV points out, criticism and irony alone is hallow and so with time one thinks, is that all there is (just as his essays wonder).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely perfect. Cream through and through, with flawless, clarion prose that just peels off your skull and unravels your brain, neuron by neuron. All of the essays are essentially PROPHECY hammered out in DFW's lovely rambling, warm, hyper-articulate REAL TALK voice. And despite the grimness of the subjects, Wallace's palpable intelligence and sensitivity and just plain humane warmth swaddle the despair in a woozy, weirdly-comforting optimism. All of the essays make you palpably ache for DFW, and ache hard for his particular breed of care and respect and dignity that softens his truly-intimidating intelligence and seeming infinite capacity for self-analysis. His occasional jabs sting all that much more for their raw honesty, but they never reach that level of teeth-sucking elitism and rank hatred of the avg HAWHAW FAT MIDWESTERNERS sneer. So, uh, yeah. Also! If that wasn't enough! Features the best fucking analysis of television and pop culture and fiction and irony and just plain everything in Television and US Fiction. Seriously. That single essay reads like the Rosetta Stone for, uh, just about anything from 1970 on. Explains Youtube, Jersey Shore, Lady Gaga, ChatRoulette, Gawker. Everything. So, IN SUMMARY: Everyone else? Give the fuck up. Goddamn.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A superlative collection. The two DFW-as-a-pseudo-journalist-goes-somewhere-you-wouldn't-expect pieces for Harper's were indeed fun, but I think I enjoyed the one about Michael Joyce with the long title the most. I'm not a big fan of sports and making watching tennis seem so appealing to me is tantamount to making watching continents move compelling.Not all of the essays were as nifty: "Greatly Exaggerated" I skip-read and "E Unibus Pluram", while it had some insight, was much too long. Oh, look at me, I'm actually accusing DFW of verbosity! How original.His suicide in September 2008 makes it extremely poignant whenever depression or map elimination is mentioned and no doubt changed how we regard his writing. Because it does have a lot of dark moments amid all the hilarity that previously you might have shrugged off.Yeah, well, vis-à-vis the title story, they've built many of those Caribbean cruise liners here in Finland too and in fact the world's largest is being built in Turku as I type. One of the shipyards, not the biggest one though, is right next to my school. Am I being proud? Nah. It's all owned by South Koreans anyway. Still, some of those ships are fucking huge. The biggest ships get exported, of course, but we do have a "healthy" cruising tradition of our own, although with a bit less luxury and pampering. To wit, two-day cruises to Stockholm or Tallinn and back where the ship metastasizes into a bar/sleazy hotel/public toilet on screws and the idea is to drink, vomit and rape as many passed out people as you can. Cultural differences.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    hilarious and brilliant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hilarious and sad - especially in the light of the author's recent suicide. The title essay about the sanitised life on a luxury cruise is marvellous. Of the cleaner, he says "it's like having a mom - without the guilt!!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. ... Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV."This is a collection of seven essays originally published between 1992 and 1996, combined into a volume that shows off a good range of Wallace's talents. The subjects covered include tennis, a Midwestern state fair, a Caribbean cruise, literary theory, the film director David Lynch, and the relationship between television and American fiction.Wallace is an extraordinarily clever writer; at times in the past I've thought he indulges himself a little too much in showing this off. Here, for the most part, he doesn't do so. (The essay on literary theory may be impenetrable, but that's true of pretty much all literary theory, to the untutored, and at least it has the virtue of brevity.)Half of the essays see him in the role of outsider observer, going back to the kinds of people and activities that he once left behind to join the east-coast intelligentsia. But he is seldom scornful; although he's clearly glad to have moved away, he still has connections with, and sympathy for, his subjects. His relationships with Trudy on the cruise, and tennis player Michael Joyce, seem as warm as circumstances allow.Wallace has a pleasant style, and uses his wit well. He's able to flit from observations of mundane surroundings, to challenging insights into modern society, and back again, without jarring. One highlight for me was the description of the childrens' baton-twirling contest at the state fair, which had me laughing out loud. Another was his terror of being seen, during the cruise, as part of a herd ("boviscopophobia") -- which I think is rather prevalent in some circles, and which I've never had described so clearly.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The part where DFW describes blow drying his hair in the bathroom of his cabin aboard a cruise ship is the single funniest sentence I have ever read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The title essay is a classic that humorously tells of Wallace's time on a cruise (count those Celestial Project sightings!). The remainder of the book is inconsistent.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I laughed very, very hard at the title essay, about the author's voyage on a cruise ship. Having been traumatized by the movie "Jaws" myself, I took great joy squirming along as he leans over the side, looking for fins. Some of the other essays were less enjoyable, but still it's a good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've read some of these essays before, and I find David Foster Wallace hilarious and clever. The narrator's pompous tone makes the audio version unlistenable, however.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A collection of essays on various subjects dating from twenty years or so ago. The title essay describes DFW's experiences of a seven night Caribbean cruise with his acerbic observations on the various follies of the crew and passengers and idea of cruising. Some of the essays didn't age too well, with allusions to people and things that were topical at the time I found hard to remember or care about at this remove.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It's strange to me that when people learn you are a fellow reader, that they seem to then ply you with books (or at least that's what happens to me.) I never really figure out what makes people recommend particular books to me, other than the fact they enjoyed them. To me, that's rather like saying, "Oh, you like food? Then you must try my Uncle Melvin's pork chop recipe," without making any effort to learn that I'm a vegetarian. What about my stack of polar exploration books made you think I want to read an essay by a guy who is bragging about what a great tennis player he was a decade ago in high school?Anyway, so David Foster Wallace's book "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is one of those books that was recommended to me for no reason I can discern. I didn't particularly enjoy it (with the exception of the title, cruise essay) but this book is definitely not the type of thing I typically enjoy reading either. Wallace comes across as pretty pretentious to me in this essays and I admit I started skimming after realizing this really wasn't for me.It has, sadly, made me dread reading Wallace's "Infinite Jest," which I'll have to read one day for my 1,001 book list.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a volume of seven non-fictional essays that David Foster Wallace originally published in various magazines and academic journals between 1990 and 1995. The years of publication are important to consider here because, by now, each of these pieces feels somewhere in the range from slightly dated to very out of date. The essays in this collection cover a broad range of seemingly random topics, from a highly esoteric analysis of the struggle faced by post-modern novelists to effectively mock current televised cultural trends to a profile of filmmaker David Lynch to more accessible pieces chronicling the author’s attendance at a state fair or a luxury sea cruise that he took.It is worth noting that, during his brilliant and all-to-brief career, Wallace’s prose makes it abundantly clear that he was an incredibly bright, well-read guy. This only became a problem when he seemed intent on making sure we knew it, as he does in “E Unibus Pluram”, “Greatly Exaggerated”, and “David Lynch Keeps His Head”. However, when he used his acute—and frequently hilarious—powers of observation as a force for good, the results are both compelling and highly satisfying. Examples of this include “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” and the book’s title piece, as well as his remarkably insightful (and surprisingly still relevant) description of a professional tennis tournament in “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry”. So, while re-reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again about a quarter-century after it first appeared definitely had its drawbacks, it was a pleasure to be reminded of just how great a writer that Wallace could often be.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wallace's writing is ace, spot-on, and so, so, memorable. A rare talent was lost when he died.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't love this whole book--a bit too much odds and sods for me, though the David Lynch bit was fascinating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you are hesitant about Infinite Jest but are interested by DFW, PICK UP THIS BOOK. His essays are so accessible and so hilarious, this is the perfect setting for his writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have to admit that I cheated a bit by skipping the second essay on tennis. I'd say I tried, but that's not exactly true. I read about three pages and then realized that life is too short to spend it reading essays on a sport that I neither play nor watch. Overall, amusing, though not really as funny or as insightful as I'd hoped.

    Two of the better pieces involve DFW commenting on an event where he clearly does not belong (one is the IL State Fair, the other a seven-day stint on a cruise ship), which were amusing in a this-is-a-quintessential-Harper's article sort of way. Perhaps there's something infectious about DFW's sort of academic navel-gazing which made me sort of self-conscious about my own narrow life/world views, and then a sort of mental claustrophobia sets in, which kind of limits some of the potential enjoyment.

    There was a David Lynch piece, which I thought was quite good. (Although it did reveal that DFW was, at the time of its writing, a little clueless about Robert Rodriguez, which is a little odd since it's not like Rodriguez was that complex a director to start with.) A couple of other pieces, one about authorial intent and whether authors are really dead (in a lit crit sense) and one about literary responses to television, were just kind of blah. The first was a review of a book I was not familiar with and so didn't really stand well on its own. The second just felt dated, as if it documented an inconsequential cultural conflict that had long been superseded.

    I guess, overall, I felt like there was a lot of talent and intelligence on display in these essays, but aside for a few moments, they just left me feeling cold--sort of, why should I care?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good, but not as good as his "Consider the Lobster".

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    David Foster Wallace packs so much into a sentence that I always fear that the next one will get me. Doesn’t matter the topic, Wallace will make it interesting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of seven essays about the popular culture written and previously published in the early-to-mid-‘90s in Harper’s, Esquire, and scholarly journals. Some are entertainingly observational, some are densely erudite, all are brilliant. Most include DFW’s signature styles of verbosity, footnotes and textual shorthand. There’s analysis of rural life via people gathering at a state fair; of pampered life via guests on a luxury cruise ship; of athletic excellence, specifically tennis. And of film, television and literature, for example “Greatly Exaggerated,” which turned out to be literary criticism on authorial context, a topic on my to-pursue list. (I read the essay twice, at first nearly laughing at its over-the-top-ness in density and assuming it must be satire. But it’s not, and I’m drawn to explore it elsewhere to figure it out.) Though the essays are about pop culture, the setting is clearly DFW’s mind. Maybe he manipulates the reader’s attention toward it, but honestly, it feels gravitational. I have everything else of his still to read, yet I despair because eventually there will be no more.