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Her name was Zenith, and she deserves to sail alongside Pequod, Demeter, and the ship of Theseus in the fleet of literature’s floating icons. You probably won’t recognize her name, but you no doubt know this ship made famous by David Foster Wallace in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” originally titled “Shipping Out”. 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.
Opinion Completely at Sea - The New York Times
Opinion Completely at Sea.
Posted: Thu, 08 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet. View award-winning vacations sailing from your backyard and discover deals you won't have to go great distances for with our collection of cruises near you.
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Arriving just a month before “Infinite Jest,” the chronicle of his experience on a seven-night cruise helped announce him as a leading literary voice of his generation. The essay launched a microgenre of “cruise lit,” sending journalists on voyages dedicated to everything from cryptocurrency to the Backstreet Boys. In the title essay, originally published in Harper's as "Shipping Out", Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean aboard the cruise ship MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir. He is uncomfortable with the professional hospitality industry and the "fun" he should be having, and explains how the indulgences of the cruise cause introspection, leading to overwhelming internal despair. Wallace uses footnotes extensively for various asides. Conga lines notwithstanding, this was not a fun trip.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
It was actually, for no specific reason and for every big reason, kind of a horrible trip. And right away, as ship leaves shore, Wallace has stretched his Caribbean Cruise to taut implication. We are about to learn what it means to spend seven days and seven nights on an island of floating fun, surrounded by nothing save a sea of very bright blue and 1,500 professional smiles. Experience a once-in-a-lifetime moment you will never forget while witnessing the icy-blue glaciers and unique wildlife of Alaska.
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I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh.
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But when he boarded the Zenith, which he called the Nadir, Wallace was known only to a readers on the cutting edge. And once on board, he took readers on a wild and witty ride into the “dark heart” of the cruise industry. A couple of weeks later, not having learned that this wasn’t happy party conversation, I brought up the cruise again. This was to be a literary cruise, and a month before it was to depart, I ran into a future shipmate at a party. She was a fellow author, likewise booked to participate in a series of onboard lectures and panels.
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I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key West, Florida. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977. Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time.
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In the face of all this fun – the Midnight Buffets, the shuffleboard games, the anonymous Towel Boys, the upscale cruise companions – Wallace (inevitably, he suggests) starts to lose it a little bit. Five-star meal after five-star meal, lobster after lobster, make him constantly hungry. Room service taking longer than a few minutes to arrive makes him cranky.
The way that they spoke to me in our email interviews was incredibly patronizing, incredibly slick, using this therapy language, just gross, falsely spiritual — and also so dumb. But lots of people buy it, and that was what was shocking, when people start crying about what is to me such obvious messaging, which is much creepier. There are all these women’s writing areas that, far from being ghettoized, are where a lot of the money is if you’re a freelance journalist — and where a lot of the audience is, frankly.
Jason Segel played Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg Lipsky. The film won an Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sarasota Film Festival,[77] and Segel was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. After over two decades in service for different cruise lines, Zenith was sold in 2019 to Peace Boat, an altruistically oriented cruise line founded in the ‘80s by Yoshioka Tatsuya. The activist was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize, and his seemed like a fitting flag for Zenith to sail under in her sunset days. For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series.
I have felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-of-the-gods-like sound of a cruise ship’s horn. I have absorbed the basics of mahjong and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. When David Foster Wallace first published “Shipping Out” in Harper’s Magazine in 1996, it changed readers’ ideas about what magazine journalism could say and sound like.
To be clear, I don’t feel like I was forced to do it. If you’re going to be really staunch — I’m only writing about Don DeLillo and, like, war — then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. But I had all these joking thoughts beforehand, and then, because of the way the cruise turned out, I was able to just write them directly.
Again, the lack of subtlety here is powerful. “You will have no choice” ranks among the most chilling sentences in the English language; Wallace plunges us into it. The advertisement, the embodiment of the Nadir’s ethic of cheery indenture, literally surrounds Wallace’s discussion of the ship’s constraints.
For a volatile star of film and literature who survived fires, viruses, and ’90s Hollywood flops, I can imagine worse fates. Better to be melted down and recycled than to fade away. Zenith was built in 1992 and sailed in service of Celebrity Cruises, taking passengers around Florida and the Caribbean. Zenith, if Wikipedia is to be believed, has a star turn in the film’s final shot, blaring its horn as it plows towards a collision with Russell’s puny motorboat.
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