Quoth DFW:
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?... If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.I never managed to warm to DFW's fiction - but I think that his journalism did manage to pull this off. If you get a chance, I'd suggest picking up a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Among other things, it contains the only two articles about tennis that I've ever read from start to finish.
