A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
August 30, 2025 — David Foster Wallace
Review
I did not approach this very familiar with Wallace’s work. I read ‘Consider the Lobster’ years ago and found it fantastic, but never searched for anything else. I’ve been in a Lynch kick most of the year, and when I heard recently that DFW wrote a long essay about him, I threw this book into my thriftbooks cart.
There are seven essays here. I read 3.5, and I’m going to talk about them briefly, separately, and then come back to the collection.
Notes
Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
Get it out of the way: I don’t care about tennis or really about any of DFW’s experiences with tennis. The writing gripped me because I know Philo, and I know Champaign. I grew up about 100 miles south, and that is not that far in rural Illinois. Sometimes I would drive from my hometown to/from Champaign, and I would drive from my apartment across from the Kraft factory out to Urbana and on out towards the Wal-Mart and head down Rt 130. That would take me through Olney, Illinois, and then I’d head west. That route goes through Philo. I usually preferred to take I-57 South through Effingham (home of one of the largest freestanding crosses in the USA), but interstate driving can get monotonous, and I eventually got sick of driving through Effingham.
It’s weird to read about your home state in a book. Keep in mind, in a lot of books “Illinois” and “Chicago” are synonymous. I adore Chicago, I love it and miss it. But Illinois is not simply Chicago, and everyone south of I-80 gets just a little bit pissy (actually, progressively pissier the more southerly you go) at this notion. Half of the State below I-80 thinks secession wouldn’t be a completely stupid disaster (it would be).
I enjoyed DFW’s writing about Illinois, about the weather and the wind and the people. Much was familiar to me. I think the weather has changed a little, but talking to my mom, she found it all very familiar. DFW saw more tornadoes than I did while living there. I remember crossing the street with my mom to go into my grandpa’s shop, a concrete building with a tin roof, because we didn’t have a basement. In my mind’s eye, a tornado’s funnel bore down on us, towering into dark and green clouds. This is apparently not quite true, but it feels true. I certainly remember picking our ancient German Shepherd up and putting her into the bathtub when my sister and I had to shelter in our little apartment years later. That felt stressful because the place had been completely destroyed by a tornado during its construction, apparently.
In the essay, the only thing that stood out to me is that DFW could be just a little prickly. I didn’t think much of it, because I’m pretty prickly.
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E Unibus Plurum (.5)
This is an essay vaguely about TV in the 90s, adverts, and fiction. I dropped it about halfway through as it felt painfully boring and out of date.
David Lynch Keeps His Head
The reason I bought the book! In general, I enjoyed the essay. It’s funny, well observed. I particularly appreciated some of the discussion of morality / good/evil etc, such as:
“In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is ‘implied by’ good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff, encoded in it.”
There is also a fine consideration of comfortable vs uncomfortable and what we desire when we’re watching tv/film/etc. That’s all good. I think there are parts of the essay that get in the way of what otherwise would be a really well considered piece. More on that later.
A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
The title essay, and the one that each time I shared with someone I was reading this would be referenced (it was always either this or Infinite Jest, and you could probably guess who was who). Super enjoyable, undoubtedly the best of the essays I read. The observation feels well-tuned, often very funny! There is also quite a bit of self-deprecation here, some of it really crying out. Maybe not to regular folks? But if you have been depressed and/or suicidal, I feel like you can see the shroud of ideation here. I could, anyway.
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
I had to stop reading and think about that and read it again and put the book down the a while at that passage. I know the feeling very well, everything slipping right through your fingers. Meanwhile people will say how good x is or how much one has accomplished, and it does nothing but frustrate you and make the missing parts ache more. He also talks about feeling anxious to even leave his room, which I can relate to in my way (and let me tell you, these two joys really make bad bedfellows).
A few things / passages that I loved:
I was the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64, and also the only person who referred to the evening meal as “supper,” a childhood habit I could not seem to be teased out of.(footnote 32, page 280) – I call dinner ‘supper’ as well, and hear about it sometimes.
On the next page (paragraph 3 of footnote 32) he justifies this “fast” footnote which lasts a total of 3 pages. That cracked me up.
…I’m getting ready to go down to lunch I’m mentally drafting a really mordant footnote on my single biggest peeve about the Nadir: soda-pop is not free, not even at dinner: you have to order a Mr. Pibb from the 5☆C.R.’s maddeningly E.S.L.–hampered cocktail waitress just like it was a fucking Slippery Nipple, and then you have to sign for it right there at the table, and they charge you — and they don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr Pepper on you with a maddeningly unapologetic shrug when any fool knows Dr Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or at any rate extremely dissatisfying indeed.
Read that and not cackle, I challenge you (page 318). There’s also a multi-paragraph tale of DFW getting the chess equivalent of chokeslammed by a 9-year-old that is very good.
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Overall
So what’s my problem with the book? Parts of DFW really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t like how he often refers to women as “females.” Sure, he says “males” too, but, why? It feels so strange, so odd. I am sure that in the mid-90s, this didn’t have the same tinge of weird-incel-shit that it does today, but I can’t separate it. Especially when I think a lot of dweeb incels would probably think DFW was Very Smart and worth emulating, without any of the talent or consideration. It’s also now impossible to consider much of his work without reflecting on not only his mental health but his history of being violent with people. I do not think we need writers to be perfect or anything like that, but I think we have to consider who we’re reading as we’re reading them.
Along with that, and with the ‘female’ thing, it seemed like every other page he made very strange comments about women. On page 156, in the Lynch essay, he talks about a sex scene in which a character played by Patricia Arquette is passive during. He adds a footnote, “(sex scenes that are creepy in part because they’re exactly what the viewer himself imagines having sex with Patricia Arquette would be like).” Okay, David, thank you for letting us know. What is the point of this footnote? To be funny? I don’t care that DFW, a guy from Philo, thinks an actress would be a lame fuck. Also, why does he think it’s funny to make a comment like that? I don’t really get it. I completely understand what basically amounts to being horny, and even making comments like that to friends or something, shit I don’t know. But this was published in Premiere magazine. Not exactly just shooting the shit!
One comment might be fine on its own, even funny (perhaps I’d have found this funny if it were about a hot guy, I don’t know). But DFW is often writing about women in this way in the Lynch essay and later in the cruise ship essay. There is a long passage from pg 178-179 describing the various folks on the crew of Lost Highway, and he divides them by department and subdivides them somewhat by gender (gender is clearly the driving division because he genders the departments). This is the 90s, what do you expect. But his writing betrays what I think is an impression of how he sees and values these people. “Grips tend to be large beefy blue-collar guys with walrus mustaches and baseball caps and big wrists and beer-guts but extremely alive alert intelligent eyes”. Okay. Later, “A lot of the script people and wardrobe people and production assistants are also female,” (females, gross) “but they’re of a different genus—younger, less lean and more vulnerable, without the technically savvy self-esteem of the camera/sound women. … [these] females all have the same pained ‘I-went-to-a-really-good-college-and-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life’ look in their eyes, the sort of look where you know that if they’re not in twice-a-week therapy it’s only because they can’t afford it.”
My honest gut reaction was, “wow, DFW needs to go fuck himself.” Mean writing is often fun to read, and I can tell you it is very fun to write. I think there are things and people one can write meanly about. I don’t think this is that. I find DFW to be quite mean-spirited in his writing, often making people the butt of jokes, but not in a taking-the-piss way, but in a way that makes me think he is being mean to someone, punching down.
I read that passage to three different people (all women), and got three different reactions. One didn’t think much of it, one thought it was funny, and one thought it was sounded a bit sexist. I don’t know what my survey reveals. All I’m willing to say is that this specific aspect of the writing started to grate on me in such a way that I didn’t want to read the other essays.
In the days between finishing the essays I was willing to read and writing this, I did wonder to what degree this is hypocrisy on my part. I wrote a few months ago about a trip to Philadelphia in which I got a bit drunk and told a bartender I found him very hot (uncharacteristic), so, is that the same thing that I’m criticizing DFW for? I think probably not. For one, I made this statement to the person’s face, I didn’t make a creepy comment about an actor in a magazine. And when I wrote about that, I don’t think it was from an imbalanced way. Also, my blog has maybe 25 readers. Not exactly the same subscription base, no?
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I found a lot of DFW’s writing here funny, more of it observant and smart. Some of it grating and out of a different and worse era, which got in the way of these essays holding up as well as they could have. I also think he is often quite pretentious, but then so am I. So, I’m calling this one a wash. I probably will not read anything more from DFW.