Table Of Content
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.
"Consider the Lobster"
To be clear, I don’t feel like I was forced to do it. If you’re going to be really staunch — I’m only writing about Don DeLillo and, like, war — then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. But I had all these joking thoughts beforehand, and then, because of the way the cruise turned out, I was able to just write them directly.
"Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage"
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. This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. 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.
Fires, collisions, and Kurt Russell: The untold history of David Foster Wallace’s cruise ship.
Reserve your 7+ day vacation today with reduced deposit per person. Only applicable when you book a club balcony suite or below. “The dark heart” of any cruise is its promise of ultimate satisfaction. “I want to believe maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering.
Vacation Your Way
But the Infantile part of me is insatiable.” From his lifelong battle with depression, he knew that human want persist, demanding another indulgence, another meal, another high. I’d been too busy worrying about the calm seas — the endless expanse of nothing but water — to consider that there might be waves in December in the North Atlantic. Lurching away from the conversation, I tapped “storms,” “transatlantic crossings” and “winter” into my phone and then quickly X’ed out the window out of self-preservation. The thing that was interesting to me is the way they all — all the practitioners and the Goop people — would speak to us.
Experience the Majesty.
Lauren Oyler ships out on Goop cruise, in David Foster Wallace's wake - The Washington Post
Lauren Oyler ships out on Goop cruise, in David Foster Wallace's wake.
Posted: Wed, 19 Apr 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Infinite Jest, hailed as a post-modern classic, remains DFW’s masterpiece. But readers not up for such a slog can sample the style, the razor sharp wit, the manic wordiness in Wallace’s essays. This “tropical plumb assignment” came from a “certain swanky East-Coast magazine.” Having published DFW’s acerbic essay on the Illinois State Fair, Harper’s proposed a cruise article. Wallace, then teaching literature at Illinois State, was not eager to go, at least not alone.
The Unhip, Unexpected Joys of Cruising - The New York Times
The Unhip, Unexpected Joys of Cruising.
Posted: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
Live on island time.
Jason Segel played Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival,[77] and Segel was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. After over two decades in service for different cruise lines, Zenith was sold in 2019 to Peace Boat, an altruistically oriented cruise line founded in the ‘80s by Yoshioka Tatsuya. The activist was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize, and his seemed like a fitting flag for Zenith to sail under in her sunset days. For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series.
The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996. 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. My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays.
His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness. I really love, I’m most comfortable writing in, this ironic tone. Irony allows you to express multiple things at once, and that are in tension at the same time, in a way that I think is really entertaining. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t have serious ideas or be emotional — or that your irony is a defense mechanism. But I tried to see it as useful for me as opposed to something I was going to never live up to.
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. Experience a once-in-a-lifetime moment you will never forget while witnessing the icy-blue glaciers and unique wildlife of Alaska.
The way that they spoke to me in our email interviews was incredibly patronizing, incredibly slick, using this therapy language, just gross, falsely spiritual — and also so dumb. But lots of people buy it, and that was what was shocking, when people start crying about what is to me such obvious messaging, which is much creepier. There are all these women’s writing areas that, far from being ghettoized, are where a lot of the money is if you’re a freelance journalist — and where a lot of the audience is, frankly.
And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week. 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. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that look computer-enhanced.
No comments:
Post a Comment