A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) by David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) by David Foster Wallace, containing the following essays:


"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (Harper's, December 1991, under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes"): Wallace reviews his youthful tennis exploits (he was pretty good) within the context of the flat Midwestern landscape of his childhood and his own obsessive relationship with geometry. 

Interesting, but at this point in his writing career, he's still irritatingly obtuse at point, a man who's swallowed a thesaurus and isn't afraid to barf it up on the page. Also, on a personal note, Wallace's essays on tennis are the least interesting part of his catalog for me. It's his favourite sport, so beneath all the sarcasm and pith, one is still stuck with a writer telling one why the sport he or she prefers is also the greatest sport that ever was. 


"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993): Wallace makes a number of fascinating and worthwhile critical observations about how TV influences contemporary fiction. 

As in a lot of Wallace's more theoretical work, the main flaw is his tendency to equate the tastes of himself and his friends with everyone's tastes, everywhere. Here, that means Wallace believes everyone in the late 1980's and early 1990's was watching TV in as cynical and 'meta' a fashion as the people in his living room, all of whom were graduate students in literature and creative writing. Um, no. Gross generalization.


"Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (Harper's, 1994, under the title "Ticket to the Fair"): Wallace travels to the 1993 Illinois State Fair, and the trip gives us the first of Wallace's sublime pieces of reportage. A fine, funny, sympathetic piece.


"Greatly Exaggerated" (Harvard Book Review, 1992): A review of Morte d'Author: An Autopsy by H. L. Hix, including Wallace's personal opinions on the role of the author in literary critical theory. Boring but short.


"David Lynch Keeps His Head" (Premiere, 1996): Wallace makes a number of interesting observations about David Lynch's body of work. He also got to visit the set of Lost Highway, a fact that allow for observations about how Lynch's compulsive coffee drinking leads to a lot of bathroom breaks so the auteur can micturate. Really good work.


"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" (Esquire, 1996, under the title "The String Theory"): Oh, God, more tennis. Though Wallace is at the 1995 Canadian Open, which at least allows for a lot of sarcastic culture shock, the Open being in Montreal. 


"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (Harper's, 1996, under the title "Shipping Out"): Wallace goes on a Caribbean cruise. Hilarity and misanthropy results. Wallace's ability to be agog at both the weirdness of others and the weirdness of himself is in full flower here, producing one the the great travel pieces I've ever read. 


Overall: David Foster Wallace is not for everybody, but those who like him, like him a lot. An uneven but rewarding collection, and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", "David Lynch Keeps His Head", and especially "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" elevate it to Highly Recommended. Even with those goddam tennis pieces.

Through Time and Space with Warren Ellis

Stormwatch: Force of Nature (1996/ Collected 1999): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Randy Elliot, Pete Woods, and Michael Ryan: This volume reprints the first six issues of Warren Ellis' writing stint on Wildstorm's Stormwatch. Prior to Ellis, Stormwatch was an undistinguished superhero comic with an interesting premise -- its superheroes worked for a United Nations strike force. Ellis made the series more political and much weirder pretty much from the get-go, setting up a later transition from Stormwatch to The Authority. The art from main penciller Tom Raney is solid, but it's Ellis' cynical yet hopeful take on superheroes that is the main attraction here. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes (1996-97/ Collected 2000): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Tom Raney, Jim Lee, Randy Elliot, and Richard Bennett: The second volume of Warren Ellis' Stormwatch focuses on the new heroes Ellis has brought to the team, most notably Jenny Sparks and Jack Hawksmoor. Jenny Sparks is the "Spirit of the Century," one of a number of Ellis' Wildstorm characters born at the beginning of the 20th century to act as super-powered anti-viral agents for the Earth. Jack Hawksmoor has been remade by mysterious aliens to be the protector of cities. 

Ellis gives Sparks a clever career retrospective that homages a variety of different comics styles from the appropriate eras -- Jenny's 1930's adventures mimic the art style of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster, her 1980's adventures the look of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Tom Raney does especially fine work here on the Sparks issue. Fan fave artist and Wildstorm publisher Jim Lee shows up to draw an issue linked to Wildstorm's WildC.A.T.S. superhero team. Recommended.

Stormwatch: Final Orbit (1998/ Collected 2001): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Bryan Hitch, Chris Sprouse, Michael Ryan, Paul Neary, Kevin Nowlan, and Luke Rizzo: The end for Stormwatch (and the birth of The Authority) comes partially in the last issues of their book, partially in the pages of the WildC.A.T.S./Aliens crossover. As those are the aliens from Alien and Aliens, you can probably guess at least some of the reasons Stormwatch ceases to exist. More of a tidying up than anything else, though the Aliens issue is compelling from writer Warren Ellis and artists Chris Sprouse and Kevin Nowlan. Recommended.

Supergod (2011): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Garrie Gastonny: Warren Ellis takes superheroes to one logical endpoint in this 2011 miniseries, using them as both metaphorical stand-ins for nuclear weapons and as quasi-realistically imagined horrors in and of themselves. It's bold, bleakly funny, and depressing as Hell. In a world where nations that include Great Britain, the U.S.A., India, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Iraq (hilariously in the latter case with funds diverted from post-Gulf-War-2 U.S. aid) race to develop superhumans, who will win? Well, not humanity. Recommended.