The cruise essay by David Foster Wallace
*A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again* slash *Shipping Out*
From Wallace’s essay of going on a cruise in the mid-1990s. The longer version is in the book of the same title; here is a link to the essay scan PDF.
The shorter version was in Harper’s Magazine; it is so well-edited that I then read the longer one. Read the longer one and skim when you’re inside passages you don’t care about, it’s fine.
I’ll show you the best highlights that don’t require much context, but probably it’s better to read+skim the essay and come back. Okay:
I’d divide this essay into: 1. Wallace talks with people, and 2. Wallace observes people and things. The two parts are equally funny, but the first is mainly positive and optimistic and easygoing, and the second is mainly not.
When Wallace talks with others, Wallace is charming, thoughtful, fun and quite extroverted. (Yes yes, he’s the author.) But the funniest parts are not those.
And from the observation parts, there is stuff that’s interesting and sweet:
And funny in silly Conan O’Brien-y ways, like the au jus drippings thing above, and the toilet thing:
And this essay has the first footnotes within footnotes I’ve ever seen. I love them.
And there is good fashion advice for a cruise:
And he tries to save a Lebanese porter from Greek doom, after Wallace took his own bag up to his room and didn’t let the porter bring it, and ends the passage with the phrase “here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline”:
Only later did I understand what I'd done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who'd had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who'd received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own luggage up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday's supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer's English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double-bind I'd put the porter in — brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu — ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave; and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline.
In further retrospect, I think the only thing I really persuaded the Greek officer of was that I was very weird, and possibly unstable, which impression I'm sure was shared with Mr. Dermatitis and combined with that same first night's au-jus-as-shark-bait request to destroy my credibility with Dermatitis before I even got in to see him.
(That one would have been three screenshots put together.)
And another cruise ship docks next to the one Wallace is on:
But there is a lot of (very funny) judgment of how the world is and how people are that I think is not healthy to think, write, publish and read. I’m not following my rule of not engaging with people that killed themselves —
Skipping creative work made by people that committed suicide (and murderers)
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(Given the topic, I’m sorry if this post feels harsh. And if you’re on the fence about reading it, skip it.)
— but this kind of judging is a big reason for the rule. If I went on a cruise with a few friends that also like to make jokes I would have a magnificent time, one of the best of my life, and truly wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The majority of the humor would also be observational. But it’s not good to indulge in it.
There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanus, Die Lumpenamerikaner. The Ugly Ones. For me, boviscopophobia (= the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
And in my head I go around and around about whether my fellow Nadirites suffer the same steep self-disgust. From a height, watching them, I usually imagine that the other passengers are oblivious to the impassively contemptuous gaze of the local merchants, service people, photo-op with-lizard vendors, etc. I usually imagine that my fellow tourists are too bovinely self-absorbed to even notice how we're looked at. At other times, though, it occurs to me that the other Americans on board quite possibly feel the same vague discomfort about their bovine-American role in port that I do, but that they refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them: they've paid good money to have fun and be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they'll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent twinge of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise they've worked and saved for and decided they deserve.
Details are life, or the best part of life. But we ultimately have to interpret details in a fun and positive way, and make people feel hopeful when they see your interpretations.
A group of Nadirites is learning to snorkel in the lagoonish waters just offshore; off the port bow I can see a good 150 solid citizens floating on their stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man's Float, looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap - from this height a macabre and riveting sight.
Most of the time Wallace interprets things accurately, and he’s not too dramatic about it.
A further self-esteem-lowerer is how bored all the locals look when they're dealing with U.S. tourists. We bore them. Boring somebody seems way worse than offending or disgusting him.
I just feel: people will do what they like. And they like it with all those aspects you’re hyper-focusing on, or the aspects don’t bother them. They won’t write an essay about following you around as you observe them to write an essay. I’m very much telling myself all this too.
I imagine it would be pretty interesting to trail a Megaship through a 7NC Cruise and just catalogue the trail of stuff that bobs in its wake.
