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

[fiefoe]

Title track, part 1.

It strikes me that DFW tries hard to disarm the reader because his unbashed subjectivity naturally rouses a reader's defenses. In non-fiction, salesmanship has to go before showmanship.

• I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen a toupee on a thirteen-year-old boy. (The glowing fish liked to swarm between our hull and the cement of the pier whenever we docked.
• the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods sound of a cruise ship's horn.
  
• (Mr. Dermatitis ... kept talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I'd skipped the karaoki semifinals in the Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him; I wish him ill.
• We pass a huge field of those hammer- shaped automatic oil derricks all bobbing fellatially, and on the horizon past them is a little fingernail clipping of shiny gray that I'm thinking must be the sea.
• There's washcloths w/o nubble or nap, and of course towels you want to propose to.

The title is a tricky thesis, but the author is patient in laying out his case.

• it's also a bona fide product - it's supposed to be produced in you, this feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that's marketed under configurations of the verb "to pamper."
• There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: ...I felt despair. 
• (The ocean) turns out to be basically one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed - rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships' hulls with barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. 
• It's not an accident they're all so white and clean, for they're clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea. 
• ...various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to "triumph" is via the rigors of self-improvement and the crew's amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue to personal titivation: diet, exercise, megavitamin supplements, cosmetic surgery, 
• It makes your existence seem noncontingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out:
• That they'll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation.
  

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