A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slo

The very best way to describe Scott Peterson’s demeanor is that it looks like he’s constantly posing for a photograph nobody is taking.

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.”

Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles certain other things one might call Special Treats (e.g. candy, liquor), i.e. treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amo

Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit.

Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.

The modes of presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more int