"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

[fiefoe]

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"
This is the only essayI would have paid not to read. 

• unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness,
• a certain type of transcendent semihuman who, in Emerson's phrase, "carries the holiday in his eye." ... that television actors' eyes carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness... It is contemporarily heroic.
• Indifference is actually just the '90s' version of frugality for U.S. young people: wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it.

"Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All"
Thankfully DFW changed gear here. It's so much better when he writes (at least partially) to entertain.

• (While his Native Companion is being hung upside down at the top of the Zipper:) My own makeup leans more toward disassociation when under stress. A mother in shorts is trying to get a stroller up the steps of the Funhouse... 
• We watched (the horse) pee. The stream's an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and little chips of wood from the floor. 
• "The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun -" "Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit." "- whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun."
• The sound of myriad deep fryers forms a grisly sound-carpet all up and down the gauntlet of booths.
• ... farm kids, deep-rural kids from back-of- beyond counties like Piatt, Moultrie, Vermilion, all County Fair winners. They are earnest, nervous, pride-puffed. Dressed rurally up. Straw-colored crewcuts. High number of freckles per capita.
• Some serious kinetic force is coming from somewhere, clearly. A sort of attempted sidearm-twirl sends a baton Xing out and hitting a big woman's kneecap with a ringing clang, and her husband puts his hand on her shoulder as she sits up very rigid and white, popeyed, her mouth a little bloodless hyphen.
• Mosquitoes work the crowd.
• But then (the boxing match) is over in an instant at the second intermission when one of the little boys, sitting on his stool, being whispered to by a coach with tattooed forearms, suddenly throws up. Prodigiously. For no apparent reason. It's kind of surreal. Vomit flies all over. Kids in the crowd go "Eeeyuuu." Several partially digested food- booth items are identifiable - maybe that's the apparent reason. His scary coach and the ref wipe him down and help him from the ring, not ungently. His opponent tentatively puts up his arms.
• I witness a single thick coil of vomit arc from a car; it describes a 100-foot spiral and lands with a meaty splat between two young girls whose T-shirts say something about volleyball and who look from the ground to each with expressions of slapstick horror.

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