David Foster Wallace interview on his Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise (WPR) (1997)

In this interview, David Foster Wallace reads from his essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and discusses his week long experience on that cruise on Wisconsin Public Radio.
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"For seven days and seven nights in mid-March of 1995, David Foster Wallace took a cruise.
He did not have a very good time.
The results of the voyage are recorded in “Shipping Out,” an extended essay, framed playfully as an ad for a cruise ship, that ran in Harper’s in early 1996. (It was later re-titled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and set as the anchor to Wallace’s 1998 essay collection of the same name.)
What makes “Shipping Out” such a fantastic specimen of literary journalism is how insistently un-literary it is. It is not delicate; it is not subtle. Wallace, given his remarkable talents, could easily have Shown Not Told and Onion-Peeled and Sublimated his way through the story, suggesting, through the intricacy of his diction and the elasticity of his prose, all the little ironies and oddities that a Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise (line: Celebrity; class: Luxury) might convey. He could have made the cruise a metaphor - for death, for life, for capitalism, for colonialism, for America - and called it a day. (Or seven.)
Had “Shipping Out” been written by someone else - had it been written, actually, by anyone else - the result would probably have been a perfectly lovely magazine essay embodying the kind of rhetorical doubling that perfectly lovely magazine essays tend to strive for: on the one hand a travelogue with a transformative narrative arc and appropriately Dickensian details…and on the other a cultural critique of the m.v. Zenith, its curiosities, its context, and the various Global Phenomena it represents: economic entitlement, imperative leisure, people who use “cruise” as a verb.
But Wallace isn’t just a writer. He is a philosopher with a writer’s imagination. And “Shipping Out,” despite its lyricism (“I have felt the full, clothy weight of a subtropical sky”), is an argument whose poetry and provocations orbit around a single point: “There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad.” A thesis Wallace will prove through taxonomic considerations of ship-borne sorrows, through vignettes conveying both humanity and the absence of it, through rhythmic repetitions of the word “despair,” through inventories of assorted atrocities that have, in the topsy-turvy moral terrain of the Seven-Night Caribbean Cruise, adopted the guise of Mandatory Fun."
-- niemanstoryboar...
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