Free A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Page B

heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the
     ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once
     touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi
     and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost
     fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at 45°, Antitoi detached a retina and had to wear
     those funky Jabbar retina-goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons
     where the guy’s face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him, two catcher’s masks offence, we both got deep quadrangular
     lines impressed on our faces, torsos, legs’ fronts, from the fence, my sister said we looked like waffles, but neither of
     us got badly hurt, and no homes got whacked—either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after, they do that,
     obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something that might as well be will, or else it wasn’t a real one. Antitoi’s
     tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.
    1990
     
E UNIBUS PLURAM
    television and U.S. fiction
    act natural
    Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers.
     They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is
     because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks:
     they covet a vision of themselves as
witnesses
.
    But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely
     how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come
     across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out of their fly, whether
     there’s maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they’re ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers
     and starers.
    The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention. Dislike
     being watched. The exceptions to this rule—Mailer, McInerney—sometimes create the impression that most belletristic types
     covet people’s attention. Most don’t. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us watch.
    Most of the fiction writers I know are Americans under 40. I don’t know whether fiction writers under 40 watch more television
     than other American species. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American
     household. I don’t know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually
     I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
    Right away you can see a couple of things that look potentially great, for U.S. fiction writers, about U.S. television. First,
     television does a lot of our predatory human research for us. American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real
     life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on. But television comes equipped with just such a handle. It’s an
     incredible gauge of the generic. If we want to know what American normality is—i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal—we
     can trust television. For television’s whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It’s a mirror. Not the Stendhalian
     mirror that reflects the blue sky and mudpuddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors
     his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is simply invaluable