User:Kdcraven12/A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a collection of essays written by David Foster Wallace between 1992 and 1996. It was published in 1997 by Little, Brown and Company and is his second published collection of essays, his first being Girl With Curious Hair (1989). David Foster Wallace has also written three novels: The Broom of the System(1987), Infinite Jest(1996), and The Pale King (2010, published posthumously).

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (Harper's, 1992, under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes")
The book's first essay describes Wallace's preeminence as a junior tennis player in Philo, Illinois. The essay conveys how the bleak flatness and the unpredictable wind of the Midwest helped shape Wallace's game. Wallace declared that "I was at my very best in bad conditions", meaning the intense heat and unrelenting wind. Wallace came to love the sport due to its trigonometric variables which matched his obsession for math and physics. Wallace describes the rise and fall of his tennis career and includes a story of a tornado that intterrupts his drills with his rival Antitoi one afternoon. The tornado is a manifestation of Wallace's statement that "Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration," and the tornado metaphorically represents the confusion and unfairness of life.

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)
This lengthy essay offers a critique of Television and U.S. Fiction as art forms in the 1980s and early 1990s. Wallace describes fiction writers as "oglers" and "born watchers" and comparatively notes how television represents a fiction writers dream come true. Television has unequivically altered fiction and created a new style of fiction which Wallace terms post-post modernism or neo-post modernism. The title "E Unibus Pluram" means "fom one, many" and is a play on the American motto "E Pluribus Unum", which means "out of many, one"; the title conveys the alienation of the television oglers who use television to feel apart of a whole while viewing separately and alone. Wallace eventually purposes his thesis half way through the essay, which states that "irony and rediclue are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers the pose especially terrible problems."(49)

"Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (Harper's, 1994, under the title "Ticket to the Fair")
Originally a finalist for the National Magazine Award, this essay was Wallace's first pseudo-journalistic assignment, where he reported on the Illinois State Fair. Written in a diary-style during the week of August 5th 1993, the essay serves as a critique of tourism by highlting both the pleasures and disgusts he encountered at the State Fair. Similar to the title essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All represents the despair of mass consumption and the inability of Americans to communicate in meaningful ways.

"Greatly Exaggerated" (Harvard Book Review, 1992)
By far the shortest essay of the collection, the eight-page Greatly Exaggerated is a review of H.L. Hix's book Morte d'Author: An Autopsy. According to Wallace, Hix's book represents a debate regarding an author's relation to his work with two opposed camps: "the anti-death guys still see the author as the "origin"/"cuase" of a text, and the pro-death guys see the author as the "function"/"effect" of a text" (142).

"David Lynch Keeps His Head"(Premiere, 1996)
Wallace wrote this essay for the New York film magazine Premiere Magazine as a review of David Lynch's movie Lost Highway. The essay includes subdivided chapters and extensive footnotes, a signature of Wallace's writing. Wallace concludes the essay by saying that it is "basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me" (201). Wallace also makes connections between the film industry and the journalism/writing industry, and he even compares Lynch's films to his own work.

"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry..." (Esquire, 1996, unde r the title "The String Theory")
Full Title: "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness". Wallace revisists his favorite sport, tennis, when he travels to Montreal for the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open. Wallace includes a detailed history and explanation of the Assocation of Tennis Professionals World Tour and, more specifically, how tournaments such as the Candian Open work. He follows Michael Joyce, the 79th-ranked tennis player in the world, as he plays in the underappreciated "qualies", or the qualifying rounds of the Canadian Open. The essay serves as a sort of profile of an obscure tennis player, but it also begs the reader to consider what it might be like to be Michael Joyce, a extremely talented yet unappreciated workaholic who only wants for tennis to "define him" (255).

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (Harper's, 1996, under the title "Shipping Out")
In another critique of the tourism industry, Wallace steps aboard the m.v. Zenith on a 7-Night Caribbean Celebrity Cruise only to leave with an unmistable feeling of despair. Wallace chronicles the entire journey in the style of a diary as he points out the over-indulgences and excessses he encounters aboard the cruise ship. Employing his signature humor, Wallace explores and critiques the American practice of consumption with a keen eye for greedy behavior.

Reviews:
The New York Times: “The primary butt of Mr. Wallace's humor is himself, and if he seizes upon his experiences to reveal ugly aspects of the American character, he always does it through the lens of his own worst impulses." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9403E0DC1231F935A25750C0A961958260

Entertainment Weekly: "The author forgoes his usual irony in favor of seven surprisingly earnest appreciations of everything from being a kid in the geometrically precise Midwest to postmodern critical theory." http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,286968,00.html