a supposedly fun thing essay cruise

8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

David foster wallace.

353 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 1997

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

“Because after a couple days of this fabulous invisible room-cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra knows when I’m in 1009 and when I’m not. It’s now that it occurs to me how rarely I ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors—zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery’s even more complex and unsettling than I’d first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I’m gone more than half an hour. When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors possibly know how long I’m going to be gone? I try leaving 1009 a couple times and then dashing back after 10 or 15 minutes to see whether I can catch Petra in delicto, but she’s never there. I try making a truly unholy mess in 1009 and then leaving and hiding somewhere on a lower deck and then dashing back after exactly 29 minutes — and again when I come bursting through the door there’s no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for 31 minutes and then haul ass back — and this time again no sighting of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming and there’s a mint on the pillow’s fresh new case. Know that I carefully scrutinize every inch of every surface I pass as I circle the deck during these little experiments — no cameras or motion sensors or anything in evidence anywhere that would explain how They know. So now for a while I theorize that somehow a special crewman is assigned to each passenger and follows that passenger at all times, using extremely sophisticated techniques of personal surveillance and reporting the passenger’s movements and activities and projected time of cabin-return back to Steward HQ or something, and so for about a day I try taking extreme evasive actions — whirling suddenly to check behind me, popping around corners, darting in and out of Gift Shops via different doors, etc. — never one sign of anybody engaged in surveillance. I never develop even a plausible theory about how They do it. By the time I quit trying, I’m feeling half-crazed, and my counter-surveillance measures are drawing frightened looks and even some temple-tapping from 10-Port’s other guests.”

Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn't seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche." (224)

John McEnroe wasn't all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived--the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad." (230)

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

• Fellowships

Exploring the art and craft of story

Why's This So Good?

October 18, 2011, “why’s this so good" no. 16: david foster wallace on the vagaries of cruising.

Megan Garber

Tagged with.

For seven days and seven nights in mid-March of 1995, David Foster Wallace took a cruise.

He did not have a very good time.

The results of the voyage are recorded in “ Shipping Out ,” an extended essay, framed playfully as an ad for a cruise ship, that ran in Harper’s in early 1996. (It was later re-titled “ A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again ” and set as the anchor to Wallace’s 1998 essay collection of the same name.)

Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else – had it been written, actually, by anyone else – the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith , its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.

But Wallace isn’t just a writer. He is a philosopher with a writer’s imagination. And “Shipping Out,” despite its lyricism (“I have felt the full, clothy weight of a subtropical sky”), is an argument whose poetry and provocations orbit around a single point: “There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad.” A thesis Wallace will prove through taxonomic considerations of ship-borne sorrows, through vignettes conveying both humanity and the absence of it, through rhythmic repetitions of the word “despair,” through inventories of assorted atrocities that have, in the topsy-turvy moral terrain of the Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise, adopted the guise of Mandatory Fun.

These indictments will all be incredibly un-subtle. Wallace rechristens the Zenith the Nadir , which name it will maintain for the remainder of the voyage’s 18,000 words.

“Shipping Out” begins with a list. “I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue,” its author tells us, the “now” hinting – three words in! – that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise comes with certain obligations.

I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that look computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.

I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in one week, been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles…. I have absorbed the basics of mah-jongg and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children.

I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and done this during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between “rolling” in heavy seas and “pitching” in heavy seas. I have heard a professional cruise-ship comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.”

He goes on in this way for an entire page-and-a-half, an inventory of experience that is often amusing and occasionally confusing and always, until the end, refusing to stop. And while the nouns-without-verbs approach is often the wrong one – there’s a fine line, after all, between listing and laziness – here, it allows Wallace-the-narrator the freedom of panoramic memory, and Wallace-the-author the ability to mold memory into argument. (“List,” intr. v., arch. ShipSpeak , “to tilt.”)

This is, in other words, narrative without a narrative, its arc propelled by the suggestive spray of bullet points. The items pop; they peal; they pierce. In their tell-don’t-show insistence, they speak to the aggression that simmers beneath the pseudonymous servility of the m.v. Nadir , the struggle between entitlement and indignation that reveals itself gradually, mercilessly, in the buildup of such apparently innocuous announcements as “I have met Cruise Staff with the monikers ‘Mojo Mike,’ ‘Cocopuff,’ and ‘Dave the Bingo Boy.’ ”

Wallace is plunging us, forcefully but (this being Wallace) also charmingly, into the world of the Nadir .[1] In ceding his story, at least at its outset, to a kind of narrative nihilism, he is revealing the essay’s upshot – sadness, emptiness and the causes/manifestations thereof – even before he comes out and, un-subtly, says it. Conga lines notwithstanding, this was not a fun trip. It was actually, for no specific reason and for every big reason, kind of a horrible trip. And right away, as ship leaves shore, Wallace has stretched his Caribbean Cruise to taut implication. We are about to learn what it means to spend seven days and seven nights on an island of floating fun, surrounded by nothing save a sea of very bright blue and 1,500 professional smiles.

“Shipping Out” is, again, framed – and, within its Harper’s setting, designed – as a brochure (“THE FOUR-COLOR BROCHURE”) advertising the Nadir and its assorted delights. On the one hand, this is an extended visual joke at the expense of the ship’s own very real, very earnest, very cringe-worthy marketing document. (“When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the talk among your companions turns to, ‘What next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck? After discussing all your options, everyone agrees: ‘Let’s do it all!’ ”)

The advertorial overlay, though, is more than a frame: It’s also a visual explanation of why the Nadir is, finally, so sad. The brochure, like the Luxury Cruise itself, is not an invitation so much as an exhortation. It requires things of you, the carefree vacationer, the primary among them being that YOU WILL HAVE FUN. It’s persuasion that takes the persuading for granted.

This is advertising (i.e., fantasy-enablement), but with a queerly authoritarian twist. Note the imperative use of the second person and a specificity out of detail that extends even to what you will say (you will say “I couldn’t agree more” and “Let’s do it all!”). You are, here, excused from even the work of constructing the fantasy, because the ads do it for you.

You are excused, in other words, from choice – and thus, finally, from yourself. “The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure but that you will ,” Wallace says.

They’ll make certain of it. They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able – finally, for once – to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice.

Again, the lack of subtlety here is powerful. “You will have no choice” ranks among the most chilling sentences in the English language; Wallace plunges us into it. The advertisement, the embodiment of the Nadir ’s ethic of cheery indenture, literally surrounds Wallace’s discussion of the ship’s constraints. The mandatory fun is inescapable.

In the face of all this fun – the Midnight Buffets, the shuffleboard games, the anonymous Towel Boys, the upscale cruise companions – Wallace (inevitably, he suggests) starts to lose it a little bit. Five-star meal after five-star meal, lobster after lobster, make him constantly hungry. Room service taking longer than a few minutes to arrive makes him cranky. Likewise the smudge on the elevator window. Likewise the lack of volume control in hallway speakers. Little indignities are, suddenly, everywhere.

Finally, we get a plot. And it is an anti-arc, a movement toward regression and moral morass. Wallace becomes greedy. He becomes needy. He talks about his tummy. (“The fact that adult Americans tend to associate the word “pamper” with a certain other consumer product,” Wallace points out, “is not an accident.”)

In most stories, plot points are defined by ruptures in normalcy, by frustrations of expectation. In “Shipping Out,” the key moments of dramatic transition play out in fusion, in the blending of expectation and reality. Wallace, once so defiantly detached from the Nadir ’s insistent indulgence, succumbs to it. The divisions he’s so carefully constructed through his own objectivity – the human over here, the hedonistic over there – collapse into each other. Need, moralized, feeds on itself, daring him – requiring him – to take one more trip to the Five Star Caravelle Restaurant, to take one more turn at the craps table. The Luxury Cruise converts WANT (Wallace renders it, appropriately, in caps) into not just an impulse, but something worse: an imperative.

But if enjoyment is an ethic, and you’re not having any fun…what then? What happens in a world whose only purpose is desire? A few weeks prior to his own sail, Wallace mentions, a sixteen-year-old boy had done “a half gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship,” killing himself. The incident was ruled a suicide. This is, of course, its own moment of tragic foreshadowing. But it’s also remarkable how perfectly logical the boy’s jump seems in the context of the world Wallace has created – a world in which “the very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort”; in which the Caribbean’s “almost retouched-looking prettiness” looks not beautiful, but “expensive”; in which even the purest of sights carries the weight of synthetic appropriation. A world in which the only choice that seems, finally, fully yours – the only choice that seems fully real – is a leap.

******* [1] It’s worth noting here, via shameless-rip-off-of-Wallace’s-trademark-footnote, that Wallace “underwent” (his word) his maritime holiday for the sole purpose of writing about said maritime holiday. He approaches his time aboard the Zenith/Nadir not as a sunscreen-swathed fun-seeker, eager to shed his conscience along with his cares and most of his clothes, but rather as a reluctant, or at least recalcitrant, observer. One whose shipboard baggage includes, instead of the 1995 cruiser’s typical Bermuda-short/flip-flop/fanny-pack trifecta, a journalist’s penchant for skepticism and a novelist’s bias toward Bigness. There is, as such, an element of fatalism animating Wallace’s experience of his Seven-Night Luxury Cruise. An enjoyable cruise would have made for a boring essay. He is, in his way, a colonist.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab , where she writes about the future of news.

For more from this collaboration with  Longreads and  Alexis Madrigal , see  the previous posts in the series . And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

Most popular articles from Nieman Storyboard

The intersection of “breaking bad,” marty robbins and “el paso”, “telling true stories: is it worth it” by tom junod, interview with ed kashi: taking it beyond the media.

Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.

• Latest Show
• Arts & Culture
• Politics & History
• Science & Technology
• Religion & Philosophy
• Going For Broke
• Dangerous Ideas
• Deep Tracks
• Sonic Sidebar
• The News From Poems
• Ideas from Africa
• Find A Station
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Music

You are here

David foster wallace on 'a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again'.

David Foster Wallace's essays have their own unique cult following. There’s one, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is a hilarious diatribe about cruise ships.  It even inspired an episode of the Simpsons, “ A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again ,” Bart goes on a cruise with his family and loves it — which is of course the polar opposite of David’s experience.  In 1997, Steve Paulson spoke with David Foster Wallace about his essay, which convinced many of us we should never, ever go on a cruise.  

David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

53 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a 1997 essay collection by David Foster Wallace . The seven essays explore 1990s US social issues through subjects such as television, tennis, and (in the most famous essay) a Caribbean cruise. The essays have been referenced many times in popular culture, particularly the title essay, which recounts Wallace’s experiences on a cruise.

This guide references the 1998 Abacus edition of the collection.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 7,500+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 4,900+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

In the first essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” Wallace reflects on playing competitive junior tennis as a youth in Urbana, Illinois, when he discovered a talent for geometrically visualizing tennis court conditions and used it to his advantage. This tactic allowed him to execute a defensive style of play involving little more than returning volleys until his opponent made a mistake, became exhausted, or became frustrated. Wallace’s approach served him well until puberty, at which point he developed much slower physically than other boys his age. Before long, his defensive mathematical approach failed as bigger, stronger opponents simply overpowered him.

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 100+ new titles every month

The next essay is titled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The first phrase in this title is a play on the Latin phrase “E Pluribus Unum” (“out of many, one”), a US motto printed on the country’s currency. Foster’s version inverts the meaning, translating to “from one, many” (or “from some, more”). This essay offers one of the earliest expressions of Wallace’s “New Sincerity” ethos , an approach toward art and literature that the author is often credited with introducing. According to Wallace, the New Sincerity mentality dictates that artists abandon the irony and cynicism that became dominant during the Postmodernism era of the 1960s and that the author sees reflected in modern television: “The next literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles” (81).

In “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” Wallace details his experiences at the 1993 Illinois State Fair. He notes that the fair provided a microcosm of Illinois and Midwestern culture in general. People from rural and urban areas alike came to enjoy the activities, most of which centered on food. Wallace recalls sensing clear distinctions between agriculture professionals, event competitors, and the laypeople who simply wanted to go on carnival rides and indulge in unhealthy food.

In “Greatly Exaggerated,” Wallace reviews Morte d’Author: An Autopsy , a work of prose by US poet and literary critic H. L. Hix. In Wallace’s telling, Hix wished to preserve the idea of the author from Post-structuralist critics who sought to destroy it. Post-structuralism is a school of thought that deemphasizes the role of writers, rejecting the structures on which they rely, under the premise that readers can never truly know a writer’s intended meaning. Thus, post-structuralism shifts the emphasis onto readers, who inevitably process and perceive a text’s meaning in different ways.

“David Lynch Keeps His Head” describes how Wallace travels to the set of director David Lynch’s movie Lost Highway , on assignment for Premiere magazine, to interview Lynch. However, despite his press credentials, Wallace is afforded almost no contact with the director. In lieu of an interview, Wallace reflects on the impenetrably baffling plot of Lost Highway before recalling the mysterious and profound power of Lynch’s earlier films, particularly Blue Velvet . Citing a scene in which the protagonist watches from behind a closet door as one character sexually assaults another, Wallace argues that Lynch gets under audiences’ skin by implicating them in the deviant, sadistic behavior on screen.

In “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” Wallace recounts attending the Canadian Open to watch US professional tennis player Michael Joyce compete. Reflecting on his commitment to the sport, Wallace wonders whether Joyce chose tennis or tennis chose him.

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” describes Wallace’s experience on a seven-day luxury Caribbean cruise. As his fellow passengers engage in what they presumably consider fun and relaxing activities, Wallace is driven to introspection and despair. He likens the extreme pampering that passengers receive from the cruise’s hospitality staff to a mother caring for her infant’s every need. Wallace views this as evidence that, by going on a cruise, passengers express a desire to revert to a state of infancy. As the days pass, Wallace comes to take the luxury and pampering for granted, demanding more of it in hopes of fulfilling an adolescent impulse to want it all, despite knowing that the impulse can never be satisfied.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Related Titles

By David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace

Consider The Lobster

Infinite Jest

The Pale King

This is Water

Featured Collections

American Literature

View Collection

Books & Literature

Challenging Authority

Laugh-out-Loud Books

Nation & Nationalism

Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics

Popular Study Guides

Truth & Lies

David Foster Wallace on a Cruise Ship

Life Is But a Dream

David Foster Wallace Asks: Is Consumerism Enough?

Drew Collins

https://faith.yale.edu/media/life-is-but-a-dream

Information

New episodes drop every Wednesday. Subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

Joy Marie Clarkson

Jonathan Tran

Anne Snyder

Episode Summary

"The ads promise that you will be able—finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.” — David Foster Wallace

“In the cruise brochure’s ads, you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don’t flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it… The ads promise that you will be able—finally, for once—truly to relax and have a good time, because you will have no choice but to have a good time.”

From “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” by David Foster Wallace

Row, row, row your boat…

One of David Foster Wallace’s most famous essays is his ninety-six-page phenomenological account of life aboard a seven-night luxury cruise. The very title, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (originally titled "Shipping Out" in Harper's , 1996) broadcasts that Wallace is clearly no fan of cruises, but we would be mistaken if we read this piece as simply, or even primarily, about the experience of cruising. Because what really concerns Wallace is the thought that the ways we think of life on the ship have become the ways that we think of life off the ship.

"... reentry into the stresses and demands of quotidian landlocked real-world life wasn't nearly as bad as a week of absolutely nothing had led me to fear."

Gently Down the Stream…

There are many aspects of life on the ship that Wallace suggests will tell us something about the problems of life in general—the exploitative dependency of consumers upon employees, the way in which ever-increasing choices and options create the conditions of anxiety.

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily…

But Wallace’s biggest concern is how we abdicate our agency by accepting the ship’s utterly shallow constraints and what looks like a myriad of possibilities. So many possibilities, in fact, that we might feel a deep anxiety at the prospect of not being able to try enough of them. These “possibilities” are in fact small variations within a severely curtailed vision of human agency. Life on the ship, and we can infer, life on land, is organized around two ways of orienting and exercising our agency: self-improvement and self-enjoyment.

Life Is But a Dream…

And all of the ship’s options and activities boil down to either self-improvement or self-enjoyment. In the dream of finding happiness on a pleasure cruise, it’s worth asking the question: Is this all that life on or off the boat really amounts to? Becoming better or becoming satisfied?

Over and over again in the essay, Wallace asks, “Is this enough?”

“At the time,” he writes, “it didn’t feel like enough."

Download the PDF Version

Keep exploring.

April 19, 2024

2023 Annual Report

Download the report to see what we were up to in 2023.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

December 18, 2023

The Books We Loved This Year 2023

The Yale Center for Faith & Culture is full of readers—and we love sharing what we’re reading, especially when we find books that connect so deeply with our mission and values. We believe actively reading is an essential part of helping people envision and pursue lives worthy of our shared humanity. What you’ll find below are just a few of our favorite books that helped us envision and pursue our own lives worth living in 2023. We hope you’ll read and enjoy them along with us.

December 6, 2023

Diamonds on the Soles of Our Shoes

A reflection on Jesus's Teaching on Wealth, Affluence, & Generosity, featuring discussions of the rich young ruler, Peter Singer and the Pond Case, and How Much A Dollar Cost? by Kendrick Lamar.

November 27, 2023

A Theological Resource for Giving Tuesday

After the frantic for-profit deals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes the flurry of non-profit appeals on Giving Tuesday. Henri Nouwen offers reflective questions about the relationship between money and power, our feelings about giving, and connecting to why we give charitably.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz

September 1, 2020

The Joy of Humility

The true meaning of humility persistently drives debate, largely because we cannot agree on the word’s definition. The "correctness" of normative terms matters, and humility carries a distinctive normative weight. How we understand humility is not a matter of mere semantics. It is a pursuit of inquiry with the potential to inform—perhaps even to transform—our lives. The Joy of Humility takes up this task with a view toward the perennial question of what entails a truly flourishing life. Here, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and psychologists work to frame the debate in such a way that the conversation can move forward.

March 17, 2020

The End of Youth Ministry?

What is youth ministry actually for? And does it have a future? Andrew Root weaves together an innovative first-person fictional narrative to diagnose the challenges facing the church today and to offer a new vision for youth ministry in the 21st century.

Andrew Root

August 20, 2019

Exclusion and Embrace

If the healing word of the Gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation?

Miroslav Volf

May 21, 2019

Angela Gorrell

April 17, 2024

Poet Micheal O'Siadhail discusses his latest collection of poetry, Desire—reading several poems and commenting on how he dealt with the pandemic and sought to understand it through verse. With Evan Rosa, he discusses his poetry as a living and synthetic record of human history, the nature of human greed and avarice and how it has marred the earth, and the calling to reshape our desires toward what's truly worth desiring: a desire for the sacred, for the transcendent, and ultimately, a desire of God for God's own sake.

Micheal O'Siadhail

April 10, 2024

How to Read Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor is known for her short stories in which “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But it’s often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery O’Connor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered. So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor? Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) joins Evan Rosa to open up about Flannery O’Connor’s life, her unique perspective as a writer, the theological and moral principles operative in her work, all as an immense invitation to read O’Connor and find the beauty of God’s grace that emerges amidst the most horrendous evils. Includes a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Greenleaf.”

Jessica Hooten Wilson

April 4, 2024

A World Out of Joint

What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world? Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here.

March 27, 2024

You Are A Tree

Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson (King's College London) discusses her most recent book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer.

May 1, 2021

Pursuit of a Life Worth Living

“What we’re trying to do is offer students an opportunity to think critically about the most important question of their lives across important and enduring lines of difference. That can only be good for them as individuals and as global citizens.”

Matthew Croasmun

July 31, 2018

Gathering Joy

Willie Jennings

April 18, 2017

The Future of Theology

George Marsden

April 1, 2017

Site Preferences

Use code MOM24 for 20% off site wide + free shipping over $45

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: An Essay (Digital Original)

Contributors

By David Foster Wallace

Formats and Prices

• Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
• Trade Paperback
• ebook (Digital original) $2.99 $3.99 CAD
• ebook $2.99 $2.99 CAD
• Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around April 1, 2012. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Also available from:

• Apple Books
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play

Description

You may also like.

Newsletter Signup

David Foster Wallace

About the author.

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System , as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest , was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair , Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster . He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King , was published in 2011.

Learn more about this author

Stop trying to make language ‘funner.’ Grammar rules exist for a reason.

Anne curzan’s book ‘says who’ goes too far in renouncing the fundamental rules of language usage.

Because my no-nonsense mother habitually said “He don’t” and “She don’t,” and my moody steelworker father never opened a book after he quit school at 16, it may seem surprising that I became a stickler for correct English as well as a serious reader. Or perhaps not. To this day, though, I dislike faddish words, vulgarisms, most slang, weaselly euphemisms, clichés, and prose styles that are overly chummy, preachy or hip. When I write, I do my best to sound grown-up but try not to come across as a bewildered holdover from the 19th century.

So I should have been wary when I picked up Anne Curzan’s “ Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words .” “Funner” provocatively signals that this isn’t a book for someone, like me, who once devoted his days and nights to Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s “The Reader Over Your Shoulder,” William Strunk and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style,” Theodore M. Bernstein’s “The Careful Writer,” and William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.” Instead, “Says Who?” pointedly aims to defuse common anxieties over what is “proper” and “improper” usage.

To do this, Curzan, dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, contends that virtually every grammar or vocabulary no-no you learned from Miss Thistlebottom is wrong or out of date. In olden days, a grammatical slip was looked on as something shocking, but now, it would seem, almost anything goes. You can use “like” instead of “as” and “as if,” “who” instead of “whom,” even “irregardless,” regardless of the mute scorn of linguistic “grammandos.” For these last, the barbarisms are always at the gates.

Curzan does underscore that context and social situation should always be considered when we write and speak. As my father used to warn me when I was launching into some heated, clearly ill-advised back talk, “Watch your language, boy.” I quickly did, if I knew what was good for me. The same advice, minus the “boy,” is good for anyone. So is adjusting your words to your audience. You don’t write to your boss in the same way you talk to your children or the way you try to chat up an attractive stranger in a bar.

Curzan repeatedly emphasizes that language evolves, that we should welcome change, that new words express new ideas and thoughts. No one would argue otherwise. Yet rules define any game. Without them, games wouldn’t even exist. Similarly, the traditional principles of sentence structure, verb agreement and even spelling ensure effective and clear communication. Grammar helps us to say what we mean and others to know rather than guess what we’re talking about.

In her own prose, Curzan tries hard to downplay any soupçon of the didactic by adopting an up-to-date, friendly cheeriness. For my taste, she goes too far. She loads on the maple syrup, tacitly assuming that no one will pay attention to her linguistic points without a lot of sweetening. Perhaps she’s right, but I find this approach implicitly demeaning. But then, I would probably register somewhere in the middle of what Curzan calls her “crankiness meter.”

I say “middle” because I do agree with Curzan about the importance of what she calls “kinder,” more inclusive language and usage that avoids giving offense. To advocate for such sensitivity is a key purpose of her book. As she notes, it’s one thing to say “How tall is he?” and quite another to ask “How short is he?” Though essentially the same question, one is neutral and the other judgmental.

Yet even if we all need to be more understanding and less captious about some aspects of our changing language, Curzan doesn’t stress strongly enough the consequences of using vulgar, ugly and slovenly English. As with clothes and manners, the issue is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called the presentation of self in everyday life. Miss Eliza Doolittle can testify that if you talk like a Cockney flower girl, the world will regard you as a Cockney flower girl, but if you talk like a duchess, it will treat you as one. Fundamentally, you may be as gentle and sensitive as Saint Francis of Assisi, but if your English is loose, ungrammatical and crude, or alternatively if it’s pretentious, circumlocutory and condescending, people will think you are either stupid or a pompous blowhard. It’s hard to undo the effects of first impressions.

Verbal tics are particularly insidious. If you continually use “like” in, like, every other sentence you, like, say, it will not only drive others crazy but also brand you as essentially ditsy. If you regularly resort to prefabricated idioms — such as “at the end of the day,” “drain the swamp” or “on the same page” — you aren’t really thinking; your mind has simply turned on the cruise control.

To my old-fashioned mind, the adult use of street lingo, locker room demotic or teen slang, coupled with a lax attitude toward traditional grammar, often indicates a somewhat pathetic nostalgie de la boue. The poor and marginalized are thought to be more genuine, more vital, more imaginative than the dull middle class and the etiolated rich. It’s pretty to think so. However, my parents knew that sounding uneducated, ungrammatical or illiterate isn’t funner; it makes you a figure of fun. The world belongs to those who are taken seriously.

When I was young, I didn’t want to be regarded as a yokel, and that meant avoiding the yokelisms spoken all around me. Through language — that is, through reading, writing and speech — I hoped to better myself. I listened to recordings of Richard Burton and John Gielgud reciting poetry, Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone reading Poe’s short stories. At about the age of 14, I even unearthed a Victorian translation of Demosthenes’ orations and — this is absolutely true — was soon declaiming them to a bathroom’s tiled walls, sometimes following the ancient Greek’s training method by placing a few pebbles in my mouth. When Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography and Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up” extolled the prose of the 18th century, I paid attention. Addison, Voltaire and Swift — these were the masters of concision, clarity, elegance and wit. I adopted these classical ideals as my own, though part of me has always secretly hankered to write with the baroque grandeur and all-stops-out organ roll of Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton and Jeremy Taylor.

Effective prose, in truth, doesn’t resemble conversation. It’s more like sculpting with clay. You start with an inchoate mass, shape it a bit, hate the result, start over, try this, try that, give up, slink away in disgust, come back, work some more and eventually end up with something that looks vaguely like a pot or an essay. Above all, though, as my favorite ghost story author, Vernon Lee, observed in “The Handling of Words,” the craft of the writer consists “in manipulating the contents of the Reader’s mind.” She added that “construction” — and that includes word choice — “means thinking out the results of every movement you set up in the Reader’s mind, how that movement will work into, help, or mar the other movements which you have set up there already, or which you will require to set up there in the future.”

To communicate ideas effectively, clarity must always remain paramount, but that doesn’t preclude an occasional rhetorical flourish or madcap turn of phrase. Nonetheless, tread carefully: Flashy prose, slang and pop references will sound hokey and dated in 20 years. That groovy Beat poetry, man, you can still dig it, though you really need to have bongos. Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flaked, over-the-top style now screams “It’s the Age of Aquarius!” While it’s essential to write for one’s own time, a more restrained diction can often result in a longer shelf life for even supposedly deathless prose.

Still, avoiding mass-speak doesn’t mean you should go panting after show-offy, recherché diction. Anyone can use a thesaurus. Except under highly specialized circumstances, most of which are hard to imagine, never, ever use “sockdolager,” “rupestrian,” “solatium” or “gallinaceous” in a sentence. All these, by the way, were recently emailed to me from a website called Word Genius. I’ve already forgotten what they mean.

Polonius once asked Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” To which the melancholy Dane answered, “Words, words, words.” Anne Curzan and I both love the English language, she being more accepting of the new, while I instinctively value established grammar and usage as bulwarks against confusion, not a set of fetters that bind us. We both agree that people’s use of English brings consequences, often unforeseen and unintended. All of us, then, need to choose our words wisely. But which ones? “That,” as Hamlet once also said, “is the question.”

A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words

By Anne Curzan

Crown. 336 pp. $29

More from Book World

Love everything about books? Make sure to subscribe to our Book Club newsletter , where Ron Charles guides you through the literary news of the week.

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

Still need more reading inspiration? Super readers share their tips on how to finish more books . Or let poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib explain why he stays in Ohio . You can also check out reviews of the latest in fiction and nonfiction .

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

In order to utilize all of the features of this web site, JavaScript must be enabled in your browser.

This is not a product we currently sell.

Try searching for A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again Essays and Arguments , or check out these recommended products: