This past summer, my family and I took a cruise to Alaska. It was a learning experience, and one that included a few things that I had a hard time adjusting to. People never stopped eating, for one. The voice of our Cruise Director Jason radiated from unseen speakers and everyone stopped what they were doing to listen. Important facts to know included what the appetizer special was that evening and when Sunset Tai Chi would begin. Everyone was very old.
I thought of David Foster Wallace nearly every single hour.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is Wallace’s piece about the cruise experience, and having recently gone through it first hand, I can only assume that Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All is also incredibly, fantastically, disgustingly true.
Wallace allows himself to appear how he really is in his writing — a little neurotic, “lifesick”, a once Illinois resident who has since moved on to what the reader can only imagine are better things — which leads us to believe that he is painting everything with the same sense of truth. I worried, at first, about the people he discusses in his pieces, and how insulted I thought they might be upon finding his work in a magazine. ”He called me a compelling advertisement for sunscreen!” I imagined one leather-skinned woman yelling to her husband in the other room. ”He only wrote what he saw, dear!” the man would yell back, eyes not straying from the television. The woman would look at herself in the mirror. Eh, she’d think. Probably true. Wallace’s work is so compelling, and so (en)gross(ing), because it details real people and real events, with only a slightly sardonic tilt from his perspective. His asides seem to me to be a mix of awe and appreciation for the things he experiences. ”You couldn’t make this stuff up!” he seems to say, and also, “If you dont want me to write about the drunk Ronald McDonald at the fair, don’t have a drunk Ronald McDonald at the fair. I told you, I have press credentials.”
I love the idea of covering a cultural experience like one would cover the Olympic Games, and with the same detail and ferocity. In my own work, I hope to remain starkly true to reality in the same way that Wallace does, because it seems to me that humor emerges from realism all on its own.
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The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is the largest rodeo in the world (scoreboard Texas). I’ve never been to any state fair (Dallas hosts the State Fair of Texas) but I’m going to speculate that what’s seen at HLSR is strikingly similar to anything one would find at a red-state state fair.
That said, self-awareness isn’t usually a quality I observe in many of the attendees at the rodeo. David Foster Wallace is pretty high-brow for them. Not sure if they would ever read about themselves as a potential sunscreen advertisement or if they would even think to consider themselves as the person being written about if they were to ever read DFW’s essay.