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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments The older ladies behind me tell me they've bet I'm here to cover either the auto racing or the pop music. They don't mean it unkindly. I tell them why I'm here, mentioning the magazine's name. They turn toward each other, faces alight. One (not the Historian) actually claps her hands to her cheeks. "Love the recipes," she says. "Adore the recipes," the Unofficial Historian says. And I'm sort of impelled over to a table of all post-45 females, and introduced as on assignment from Harper's magazine, and everyone looks at one another with star-struck awe and concurs that the recipes really are first-rate, top-hole, the living end. One seminal recipe involving Amaretto and something called "Baker's chocolate" is being recalled and discussed when a loudspeaker's feedback brings the Fair's official Press Welcome & Briefing to order. The Briefing is dull. We are less addressed than rhetorically bludgeoned by Fair personnel, product spokespeople, and middle-management State politicos. The words excited, proud, and opportunity are sued a total of 76 times before I get distracted off the count. I've suddenly figured out that all the older ladies I'm at the table with have confused Harper's with Harper's Bazaar. They think I'm some sort of food writer or recipe scout, here to maybe vault some of the Midwestern food competition winners into homemaker's big time. Ms. Illinois State Fair, tiara bolted to the tallest coiffeur I've ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a veritable wedding cake of hair), is proudly excited to have the opportunity to present two corporate guys, dead-eyed and sweating freely in suits, who in turn report the excited pride of McDonald's and WalMart at having the opportunity to be this year's Fair's major corporate sponsors. It occurs to me that if I allow the Harper's-Bazaar-food-scout misunderstanding to persist and circulate I can eventually show up at the Dessert Competition tents with my Press Credentials and they'll feed me free prize-winning desserts until I have to be carried off on a gurney. Older ladies in the Midwest can bake. I first heard of David Foster Wallace from one of the controllers that I supported at work. He was a huge fan of Infinite Jest and told me that I had to had to read it. So I bought it and brought it on my trip to Turkey. I read all of 80 pages of the huge book and put it down. This book required a major commitment and I simply wasn't ready yet. A few months ago, I saw A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and decided to give myself another try. This hilarious essay collection showed me two things: that David Foster Wallace is a genius and that he still requires a lot of commitment from his readers.

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