Fun Thing

As my comment on the previous post indicates, I have just read David Foster Wallace's well-known essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

m.v. Zenith

The essay details1 DFW's experience aboard a Caribbean Cruise ship, and what is most interesting is that I, perhaps a few years after DFW made his voyage, made my own voyage aboard the very same vessel: the Celebrity Cruises' m.v. Zenith2.

I was around 12 at the time, and so did not have the same perceptual abilities of DFW vis-a-vis irony, issues of privilege, and the literary resonances of the Celebrity Cruises brochure. I definitely did not have his wit. I probably had a similar amount of arrogance.

Anyway, my memories of the trip are much spottier. I remember being disappointed in the ship's library (probably because it didn't have any books about Star Wars 3). I remember being prepared, with my sister, to clean up in the kids' mixed doubles ping-pong tournament before our aggressive style of play sent five ping pong balls out to sea 4. I remember wearing a black suit with a mustard-colored clip on tie that I thought was the height of practicality because if I were to drip any mustard onto it, it would disappear. Mustard was and is my favorite condiment.

Most of those memories are neutral (except for the ping-pong story, which I treasure). I don't feel the same level of snide hostility that DFW feels towards cruising in general, though I recognize, as he does, the myriad injustices that pervade and sustain the luxury cruise industry.

But my best memory of a cruise ship comes not from being on board one, but of seeing one from afar. It echoes the end of the essay, where Wallace writes: "...seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial . . . yes, this: like a palace."

SSV Corwith Cramer

I had that point of view once. During my offshore seminar at the Williams-Mystic program, our brigatine, the SSV Corwith Cramer encountered two luxury cruise ships in the Bay of Maine. Probably not the megaships that cruise the Caribbean, but nonetheless answering to DFW's description.

My watch was on deck duty that night, and I forget who was at the helm, but I was standing bow watch. Bow watch was my favorite duty on the Cramer, especially at night. The work entailed tethering one's safety harness to one of the forward stays and peering forward into the darkness, untethering and walking aft every hour, or to report navigational lights or other oddities. So it was that, on the lookout for a small green light, flashing every 3 seconds, I spotted, far out on the horizon, one, quickly resolving into two, yellow lights. I untethered and walked aft, reporting to the helm and to our watch officer, both of whom seemed very unconcerned. I returned forward, and over the course of the next three hours, saw the lights become clusters of lights, then lighted ships, then, just as we were about to be relieved of the deck, two cruise ships docked side by side. Cabin lights, lights atop their false stacks, a glow that, from a few nautical miles out, appeared to be strings of Christmas lights strung up on their decks, all glowing into the darkness, all of this doubled, as the ships seemed close enough to be passing drinks back and forth. See DFW's description, excerpted above, and the full text, at the end of "A Supposedly Fun... etc." for a poetic description.

I remember that clearly, leaning with my leg on the boom, tethered to the forward stay, glancing back over the Cramer, dark, except for her port and starboard, green and red lights, and shivering, thinking of all those people, ostensibly aboard a ship. It is only in regard to this that I join DFW in his snide hostility towards luxury cruises, and wish to say this to cruisers, and even to DFW's ghost himself: disabuse yourself of the notion that you are on a ship. Find a real ship, one that does not seek, via stabilizers and thrusters, to divorce herself from the motion of the sea. Get out of sight of land, out of sight of floating protuberances big enough to be land, then say that you have been on a ship.


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1 And I mean details; in my paperback edition, it runs just under 100 pages and divided into 13 chapters 13-14 chapters, the discrepancy deriving from a 30-page, hour-by-hour catalog of one day's events, which could comprise a significant part of chapter 13, or be considered its own chapter.

2 DFW consistently refers to the ship as the Nadir, which, until I just now looked up the more technical, astronomical definition of Nadir, I did not find particularly funny.


3 The film franchise, not the missile defense program.


4 We made it to the semifinals, and had a decent chance at glory before the kids' program staff decided to cut their losses and not give out any more balls.

Things That Happened Today

I have (yet again) decided that it is perhaps my path in life to be A Writer. Of course, the first problem is that I also want to be other things  (a barista; a musician; a traveler) and the second is that writing (along with all these other pursuits) often involves more doing than being. And doing takes time.

Today, for instance, I spent a good hour playing my banjo, because I have an upcoming gig, and I want to be A Musician, and to be A Musician one needs gigs. But I outpace myself; before writing about my experiences today (an important writerly discipline) I must explain myself 1. I am returning to a discipline of writing 500 words every day. I practiced this discipline once for a sustained period during college. I believe it was six months. I believe that during these six months I was a better writer, though I cannot recall if it ever got me any writing gigs, and it certainly did not advance my writerly career to the point where I am writing anything at all these days really.

So I return to the exercise, first begun because 1) E.B. White was a great essayist and I wanted to write like him, and 2) Ray Bradbury said that he wrote 1,000 words every day of his life, and while I didn't (and don't) want to write like him, I admired (and admire) his resolve and his output 2.

But why do exercises at all? After all, if we extend the word "exercise" to another context, most people successfully walk from place to place without ever engaging in anything that they might call exercise 3. Baby Havah, for instance, can practically walk, yet she cannot conceive of a semantic difference between exercise activity and transportational activity. She has never exercised, yet she has (almost) achieved the practical end towards which the exercise is directed. This sort of extension is, of course, linguistically and metaphorically ungrounded, so I will move on to the original point of the exercise: Writing About my Experiences Today.  Baby Havah was part of my experience a few days ago, so do not expect to see her as the page rolls on. Now, the ostensible focus of this piece:

THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY:

• My doorknob fell off, stranding me outside during my dinner break, forcing me to, using my pocketknife, unscrew my front window and break into my own apartment. I was then unable to properly reattach the front window, so my apartment is currently very vulnerable to intruders.
• I discussed the paradox of choice with a man with an English accent who was delighted to be discussing the paradox of choice as he was being overwhelmed by the paralyzing selection of teas.
• I cooked my friend a vegetarian lunch.
• I tasted homemade Amish rootbeer.
• I decided, while sitting on the toilet, to starting writing 500 words a day. I made this resolution twice, both times while on the toilet.
• I played the banjo.

These are the things, among others, that I did today.

The exercise is grounded in that important writerly assumption that writing is borne out of experience. This may or may not be true; I was recently reading a book by Northrop Frye, which suggested that writing is borne out of societal convention, not experience. My reading of that was, of course, something I experienced 4; I finished that book days ago, which is why its reading is not included on the list above.

The exercise is also grounded in the idea that an essay has a reason to be; that is, that it is not merely an unconnected string of 500 words (probably more, at this point), but that is has some sort of Central Idea; that it has, in the words of the high school English class, A Thesis (Statement) 5. Not that every day's 500 words have some sort of Deep Meaning (and not that every day's will be posted here), but that perhaps, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, the aspiring Writer can turn his daily experiences into something that somebody might, for some reason, be willing to read.

The real reason that I hope to continue in this exercise is not technical. It is not about developing my Voice As A Writer or because I hope to publish one whole year's worth of recollections these in a little book (182,500 Words, I call it in my imagination) 6. I re-begin this discipline because it entails a valorization of the mundane things of daily life. It says to the fallen doorknob, to the homemade root beer and the vegetarian soup, "I care about you, enough to write about you." 7

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1 Sorry for all the run-ons and my skeptically disengaged tone. I've been reading a particular, well-known author and essayist recently a, and undertaken this exercise as a sort of stylistic pastiche.
    a Guess which one

2 Part of why I stopped trying to write was that I felt that I could not write without worrying what people would think of my writing once I was a Great Writer, and while I have since concluded that such thinking is unhelpful and vain, if anyone in any bio ever written of me lists my influences as E.B. White and Ray Bradbury, I will personally club her or him to death with hardcover printings of those authors' works, purchased online, from a bargain bookseller, for that express purpose.

3 Except for that very place-to-place walking, which, especially if they are hip, fitness conscious people too lazy to get to the gym or to walk for purposes other than transportation are very willing to point out as exercise.

4 Though Frye would perhaps argue that regardless of the individual reader's experience of reading the text, the text acts, as evidenced by the fact that it can act on multiple readers who may be having multifarious experiences while reading it.

5 That same thesis statement to be accompanied by, according to Mrs. Zehner, my 10th grade English teacher, five and only five paragraphs of supporting and concluding material. This arbitrariness always bothered me, yet here I am engaging in a exercise with a similarly arbitrary (and numerically consonant) constraint.

6 "Greg Albright's work was influenced by popular writers such as Ray Bradbury and E.B. --- AAAGGGH!!!" the author bio will read.

7 Of course, tonight's writing was not really about those things at all. It was about style, about reassuring myself that this return to the writing game is possible, that I've still got it, a fact of which I cannot assure myself. It's a pastiche of David Foster Wallace, by the way.