A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is the title of a 1997 collection of non-fiction writing by David Foster Wallace.

In the namesake essay, originally published as "Shipping Out" in "Harper's", Wallace describes what he sees as the middlebrow excesses exhibited during his one week trip aboard a cruise ship (the m.v. "Zenith", which he rechristens the "Nadir") in the Caribbean. His ironic displeasure with the professional hospitality industry and the "fun" he should be having unveils how the indulgences of the cruise turn him into a spoiled brat, leading to overwhelming internal despair.

Wallace uses footnotes extensively throughout the piece for various asides. Like much of Wallace's work, the essay is written in post-modern style. Another essay in the same volume takes on the vulgarities and excesses of the Illinois State Fair.

This collection also includes Wallace's influential essay "E Unibus Pluram" regarding television's impact on contemporary literature and the use of irony within American culture.

Essays

Essays collected in the book:
*"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" ("Harper's" 1992 under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes")
*"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction ("The Review of Contemporary Fiction" 1993)
*"Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" ("Harper's" 1994 under the title "Ticket to the Fair")
*"Greatly Exaggerated" ("Harvard Book Review" 1992)
*"David Lynch Keeps His Head" ("Premiere" 1996)
*"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")
*"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" ("Harper's" 1996 under the title "Shipping Out")

Excerpt

The following excerpt illustrates Wallace's style and use of footnotes:

:"... advertisement that pretends to be art is, at absolute best, like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. ^{[Note 1]}

::^{Note 1:} This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and no place in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the "Nadir": maitre d's, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers' minions, Cruise Director -- their PS's all come on like switches at my approach. But also back at land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile: the strenuous contraction of fascia with incomplete zygomatic involvement, the smile that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair?

::Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

::And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who has ever bought a pack of gum at a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers scowl, ie. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman's character or absence of good will but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess."

:(Wallace, 1997. p. 289)

References

* Wallace, D. F. (1997). "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-92528-4
* Wallace, D. F. (1996). "Shipping Out", "Harper's Magazine", January 1996 (292:1748)