David Foster Wallace: Cruising

I have only read Wallace's nonfiction, to which I respond like a trained seal, clapping and barking over every line. His fiction, most specifically Infinite Jest, is tempting, but the chunk of time required to read and enjoy it isn't in my portfolio at the moment. Short nonfiction, on the other hand, is just right for my straitened circumstances. At one point I even listened to an audiobook of some of his essays, the collection Consider the Lobster, read by the author, which is every bit as good as reading him yourself. Come to think of it, I had indeed read the Lobster story in Gourmet, where it was originally published, where tracking down the footnotes in their multiple-column layout was a chore indeed. In the audio version, he included all the footnotes, but read them in a different voice so you would know that they were footnotes. It was a bravura performance. (Reading Wallace and skipping the footnotes would be like reading Moby-Dick and skipping the parts about whaling.)

Shipping Out is an article that originally appeared in Harper's Magazine, in which Wallace goes off on a vacation cruise of the Caribbean. He is, to put it mildly, an acerbic critic. He is also a supremely literate and hilarious writer, and coming across this [via] forced me to drop everything and read it immediately. A word of warning: it's a pdf, and my eyes still hurt from reading it on my iPad (especially, of course, the footnotes: shades of the Gourmet lobster!).

If you've never read Wallace, start here. If you have read Wallace, you don't need me to prod you.
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