A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online

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
1
Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
3
2
E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
21
3
Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
83
4
Greatly Exaggerated
138
5
David Lynch Keeps His Head
146
6
Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy,
     Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
213
7
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
256
     
    a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
     
drivative sport in tornado alley
    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