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with and marry only each other, seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloid, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so terribly, gloriously natural when we watch.
    Given how much we watch and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who fancy ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass—persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience—are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. This illusion is toxic. It’s toxic for lonely people because it sets up an alienating cycle (viz. “Why can’t I be like that?” etc.), and it’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind of fiction- consumption . Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. Plus the idea that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that there’s any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.

 
a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again

 
also by David Foster Wallace
The Broom of the System
Girl with Curious Hair
Infinite Jest

 
    David Foster Wallace
    a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again
    essays and arguments

    LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
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    To Colin Harrison and Michael Pietsch

 
    Copyright © 1997 by David Foster Wallace
    All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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    The following essays have appeared previously (in somewhat different [and sometimes way shorter] forms):
    “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It All,” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in Harper’s in 1992, 1994, and 1996 under the respective titles “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” “Ticket to the Fair,” and “Shipping Out.”
    “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” in Michael Martone, ed., Townships (University of Iowa Press, 1993).
    “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.
    “Greatly Exaggeerated” in the Harvard Book Review in 1992.
    “David Lynch Keeps His Head” in Premiere in 1996.
    “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” in Esquire in 1996 under the title “The String Theory.”
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Wallace, David Foster.
          A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again: essays and arguments / David Foster Wallace.—1st ed.
                p. cm.
          ISBN 978-0-316-91989-0
          I.