cruiser yacht 360 express

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Cruisers Yachts 360 Express

By Kevin Falvey
Updated: March 3, 2008

If you think “value priced” and “high end” are mutually exclusive descriptions of boats, think again. Cruisers Yachts 360 Express offers stout construction, a great layout, and splendid accommodations for a middle-of-the-category price of $320,000.

Displacement is a good way to compare how similar in size boats are. It’s an indicator of volume. Anyone who’s ever said that a certain boat was big for its size knows what I’m talking about. A larger displacement on the same LOA makes for a roomier boat.

The 360 Express displaces 20,000 pounds on a 38′ LOA, making it bigger than its model designation would indicate. So it’s with no reservations that I compare it to Sea Ray’s 380 Sundancer ($395,062 powered like my test boat), which, though a foot longer and carrying the same beam, has a nearly identical displacement.

Whoa! Am I telling you that you can buy the same size boat for tens of thousands less? No, because you have to look at other aspects as well. Although the 360 Express carries more fuel, and so should have greater range when powered equivalently (horsepower-to-weight ratios are to range what length-to-displacement ratios are to size), the 380 Sundancer comes standard with some big ticket items that are optional aboard the 360 Express. The hardtop and generator are the most glaring examples, adding $16,620 and $16,665, respectively, to the price of the 360 Express. That narrows the retail price gap to about 10 percent of either boat’s manufacturer’s suggested retail price. At that point, you can nitpick items, but instead, I’d suggest that you examine how you go boating.

The layout of the 360 Express is markedly different from that of the 380 Sundancer. It has a walkthrough windshield that offers quick access to the bow. Its small sidedecks allow for a bigger cabin. Of course, if you transit locks frequently, you might prefer more substantial sidedecks. The 360 Express’s companionway hatch is on centerline rather than to port, allowing its companion lounge to lie along the portside of the helm deck. Three can sit on this lounge facing abeam, or one person can recline, head against the padded helm. The 360 Express’s doublewide, flip-bolster helm bench contrasts with the 380 Sundancer’s single helm chair and double-wide companion lounge directly next to it. The 360 Express has a large wetbar installed in the aft cockpit, compared to the 380 Sundancer’s smaller wetbar installed at the port side of the helm deck. The larger wetbar on the 360 Express is superior for entertaining but reduces seating by about two, depending upon crew girth. (Order the optional rumble seat–$4,080–for the swim platform to regain those two seats.)

Belowdecks, at the base of the 360 Express’s companionway steps, you’ll find a large, swanky head with an impressive separate shower stall. The stall’s bifold door folds flat against the bulkhead. When the shower’s not in use, that feature allows for home-like elbow room for someone using the vanity and mirror. When the shower is being used, the door seals watertight with a gasket against the vanity. The 380 Sundancer employs a split head arrangement forward with dual access from both the salon and the master stateroom. Do you mind not having a private way into a head? Do you prefer that guests have quick access to the loo from the cockpit? Will you need to have the head available while another crewmember is showering? The answers to these questions are personal, intangible, and can’t be priced.

Power Aplenty

Another feature that sets the 360 Express apart from the 380 Sundancer and other cruisers, such as the 41’3″, 18,500-pound Four Winns V378 ($347,938 with twin 375-hp Volvo Penta 8.1 Gi gasoline V-drives, standard hardtop, and generator) is its variety of propulsion choices. Beneath the hatches aboard the 360 Express, you can install stern drives, V-drives, or tractor drives. You can choose gas or diesel. However, MerCruisers are no longer available.

My test boat, perhaps the last MerCruiser-equipped 360 Express, housed twin 370-hp 8.1S gasoline V-drive inboards. The installation and serviceability is as good as it gets. From chafe-protection and electrical bonding to labeling and the ability to lay hands upon filters, dipsticks, batteries, seacocks, and bilge switches, I found no flaws. The high-water alarm is an uncommon safety feature and conforms to the ABYC recommendation for boats with enclosed accommodation spaces. The only goof I uncovered was at the well that houses the windlass under a hatch at the bow. It’s pitched aft and holds water. Cruisers Yachts says this glitch will be rectified. Grab a dock hose and see for yourself.

Hit the throttles. You’ll find the 360 Express’ performance as smart as its accommodations and rigging. Although undue inclination and hanging at hump speed are characteristic of many V-drive-powered cruisers, the 360 Express escapes this fate. It planes readily without loss of forward visibility. The prop pockets deliver a nozzle effect that increases the speed of water flowing through them. This counteracts the loss of buoyancy typical of pockets. Lift is increased because of the faster stream. While cruising, a gentle touch results in a quick turning response. With a top speed of nearly 39 mph, this boat feels as if it’s loafing at a 30-mph cruise with these engines. That’s good for engine wear. It’s also good any time you’re running in following seas. Having plenty of acceleration on tap is another fine feature found on yet another nice Cruisers Yacht.

Extra Point: The transom rumble seat is upholstered with high-density foam, better suited to handle the soaking it gets as the boat comes off plane.

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Cruisers Yachts 360 Express

Cruisers Yachts 360 Express Boats for sale

2011 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express

Newburyport, Massachusetts

Make Cruisers Yachts

Model 360 Express

Category Motor Yachts

Posted Over 1 Month

2011 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express Cruisers Yachts continues to offer innovative boats with cutting-edge styling and luxury-class features. Introduced in 2008 as the 360 Express (and called the 380 Express beginning in 2012), this richly appointed family cruiser is agile, roomy, and extremely well finished. As one expects in a boat this size, the feature list is long. Her impressively stylish, full-width salon includes a spacious galley with faux-granite countertop, forward stateroom with privacy curtain, and a U-shaped rear lounge (with table and storage) that easily converts into a double berth for guests. The head has a separate shower stall and features a countertop with Venetian style tile backsplash. Note the built-in entertainment center and and space-saving rectangular dinette. The Cruiser’s roomy, guest friendly cockpit includes a doublewide helm seat, portside chaise lounge, and circular rear settee that converts into a large sun pad. The fiberglass hardtop is standard. Call today for a private showing of this clean express cruiser !!

2008 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express

Grasonville, Maryland

2008 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express New Listing With Specs And Pics To Follow

2009 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express

Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

2009 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express Freshwater IPS! Beautiful black hull 360 Express with Volvo IPS500G. Professionally maintained, One Owner, Joystick control....Trades Encouraged!

Allen, Texas

Private Seller (214) 783-5837 Photos Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3 Photo 4 Photo 5 Close Request Information * Name First Name * Email Telephone (optional) Best Time to Contact Anytime Morning Mid-day Evening Question/Comments (optional) Shop Safely: Protect Your Money. By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use. Contact Seller 2008 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express,Pristine condition, well kept, less than 100 hrs on engines and generator, twin Volvo 8.1 inboard engines, upgraded vinyl seats and carpet in cockpit, new canvas covers and cockpit enclosure, custom stereo system, flexi-teak swim platform, and other recent upgrades, fresh water use only. Extremely nice boat - almost like new. $260000, 2147835837 Be sure: Get a boat history report|Finance this boat|Get an insurance quote|

2000 Cruisers Yachts 4450 Express Motor Yacht

Rockwall, Texas

Model 4450 Express Motor Yacht

2000 Cruisers Yachts 4450 Express Motor Yacht The Cruisers 4450 Express Motoryacht is a sleek, powerful yacht that offers all the advantages of express-style cruising. The cockpit provides comfortable seating associated with traditional express boats but eliminates the typical separation of guests between a bridge and aft deck. The cockpit includes a wetbar with fridge and a full windshield provides excellent wind and weather protection. Owners will also be able to select a Bimini top enclosure that attaches to a standard arch, or an aft hardtop with wing doors and a full weather enclosure. This boat offers triple-stateroom accommodations in a true aft-cabin interior which sleeps 11 people comfortably. The master stateroom offers both privacy and luxury, is located aft, and features an island berth, walk-in closet, and a private head with shower and jacuzzi tub. A guest stateroom is located forward with walk in closet, and a third stateroom is located at midship which can be twine berchs or a full king. The spacious, bright main salon offers additional sleeping accommodations with fold out couch and fold down dinette for another 2 Queen beds with a large convertible dinette, full service galley, and and the optional L-shaped sofa sleeper. This is literally the Cleanest, Most Beautiful 2000 you have ever seen....everyone that sees this yacht thinks it's only 5-6 years old. You could literally eat off the engine room floor. Boat is in perfect running condition. The leather couches are softer than any car you've ever been in. In the last 6 months I've put nearly 30k in upgrades, the boat didn't need anything I just wanted to restore it to as new as possible, plus some fun new upgrades. The ONLY reason I'm selling is currently building a home on the lake so no need for a boat to stay on anymore, and wife won't let me have both. Below is a list of most of them: 2 New LED 360 Degree spot lights and wiring harnesses Review Mirror 4 nine inch LED Back and Side Docking Lights 5 Underwater 5inch Blue LED lights with control at Dash New Chrome Dual Fog Horns 4 New Fenders and Front Bow Fender Holders New Rain Ex Windshield Wipers 2 New 32 inch 4k LG Smart Tv's.........4 tv's total on boat New Cabin Smart Stereo with remote Wine Racks New LED Spreader Lights in Blue New LED Boarding Lights in Blue 3 New Fire Extinguishers New Outside Smart Stereo with remote DVD player in Main cabin 2 New aft cabin tables and legs New bottom job 7 months ago and Zincs Generator Tuneup 2 months ago 2 New Igloo Ice chests and Mounts on swim platform All New LED Lights Trought the entire boat, in all light panels, ceiling (Every Where) All New Gauge Clusters backings and lights on main gauge cluster in atf 5 New Toggles to control everything added All New Bedd

2003 Sea Ray 360 Sundancer

Tarpon Springs, Florida

Make Sea Ray

Model 360 Sundancer

2003 Sea Ray 360 Sundancer Shed KeptWindlass, Spot Light, A/C, GeneratorClean Knowlegeable cruisers will be hard pressed to find a more capable mid-sized express than the Sea Ray 360 Sundancer. Gracefully styled and impressively finished, the 360 delivers a careful balance of performance and comfort. Built on a deep-V hull with an average beam, the Sundancer's mid cabin interior gets high marks for it's quality furnishings and fixtures. This is a comfortable salon with plenty of storage, a built-in entertainment center, a plush Ultra-leather lounge and excellent headroom. A two-part pocket door provides privacy for the forward stateroom, and both the salon and mid-cabin lounge convert easily into double berths. At the helm, a bucket seat with a flip up bolster allows stand up driving and there's space in the tiered, burled dash for electronics. Engine access is excellent; the entire cockpit floor raises on hydraulic rams to expose the motors and V-drives. Additional features include and extended swim platform, an underwater exhaust system, a transom storage locker and a cockpit wet bar with fridge. There is also a table and seating area. A bimini top and extended aft top with camper sides enclose the cockpit area. Call today to schedule a showing.

2005 Sea Ray 360 Sundancer Fully Loaded!

Pompano Beach, Florida

Model 360 Sundancer Fully Loaded!

Category Cruiser Boats

2005 Sea Ray 360 Sundancer Fully Loaded! Knowledgeable cruisers will be hard-pressed to find a more capable midsized express than the Sea Ray 360 Sundancer. Gracefully styled and impressively finished, the 360 delivers a careful balance of performance and comfort. Built on a deep-V hull with moderate beam, the Sundancer’s midcabin interior gets high marks for its quality furnishings and fixtures. This is a comfortable layout with plenty of storage, a built-in entertainment center, a plush Ultraleather lounge, and excellent headroom. A two-part pocket door provides privacy for the forward stateroom, and both the salon sofa and midcabin lounge convert easily into double berths. At the helm, a bucket seat with a flip-up bolster allows for standup driving and there’s space in the tiered, burled dash for electronics. Engine access is excellent; the entire cockpit floor rises on hydraulic rams to completely expose the motors and V-drives. Additional features include an extended swim platform, an underwater exhaust system, transom storage locker, and cockpit wet bar. OWNER MOTIVATED! ***BRING ALL OFFERS*** Extended warranties and financing available. *** BROKERS WELCOME *** ... Click on "FULL SPECS" for pictures and details... TRADES ACCEPTED: up or down: including boats, yachts, cars, RVs, real estate... Worldwide Delivery and Financing Available!

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2008 Cruisers 360 Express

2008 cruisers 360 express specs.

Boat Type : Stern Drive Power Boat
Quantity: 2
Horse Power: 330
Type: Diesel
Hull Material : Fiberglass
Beam : 12'6"
Length : 38'
Net Weight : 23300 lbs
Max Bridge Clearance : 11
Max Draft : 3.42 ft
FreshWater Capacity : 64 gals
Holding Tank Capacity : 40 gals
Fuel Capacity : 300 gals
Looking for the Boat Manual? 2008 Cruisers Yachts 360 Express Request Boat Manual Now

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david foster wallace essay on irony

David Foster Wallace and the Joy of Irony

July 25, 2022

Raymond Dokupil

Articles , Arts & Culture Articles

“I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems.” – David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing

“the problem with making yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” – c.s. lewis, the magician’s nephew, my meditations on irony began with two pieces from david foster wallace. the first was his essay “e unibus pluram: television and u.s. fiction,” written in 1990 and published in 1993. the second was an interview of wallace conducted by a german television station in 2003. while these are by no means considered wallace’s most prominent creative products, they are central to wallace’s philosophy and i will refer to them throughout the course of this essay., wallace died by suicide in 2008, supposedly as a result of being removed from his antidepressant medications. but we do a disservice to wallace’s intellectual struggles if we simply conclude that he “died of depression.” in his 2003 interview, wallace explained his inspiration for infinite jest began with a much deeper problem than his own mental health condition:, “for the upper middle-class in the u.s., particularly younger people, things are often materially very comfortable, and there’s also often a great sadness and emptiness…i started [ infinite jest ] after a couple of people, not close friends, but people i knew, who were my age [and] had committed suicide. it just became obvious that something was going on. and i know that that impulse was part of starting the book.” [1], wallace was interested in what had driven people of his generation to suicide, and in some sense infinite jest was an investigation of that question. but the reader who was not familiar with wallace himself may not have been aware that he was conducting such an investigation. to quote wallace,, “i’m not often all aware of stuff that’s really funny in the book…i set out to write a sad book. and when people liked it and told me that the thing they liked about was that it was so funny, it was just very surprising.”, jennifer frey, professor of philosophy at usc, describes wallace as someone who “wanted to be charles dickens and couldn’t.” [2] frey’s assessment of wallace is not to say that wallace had delusions of grandeur—quite the contrary. if the duty of the novelist is to identify and provide answers to the particular cultural malaise of his own time in accessible and contemporary language, no one took this duty more seriously than wallace. the undertaking of such a project was what defined the success of dickens, austen, tolstoy, dostoevsky, and the like. it just so happens that today’s cultural malaise is apparently in some state can only be described as an addiction to postmodern irony, and this poses an especially pressing problem for artists., the use of postmodern irony originally began not as a philosophical movement but with the “metafiction” of elite avant-garde novelists. but by the time of the 80s and 90s, postmodern irony had become so mainstream that it was appearing on the david letterman show and pepsi commercials. how can novelists provide an anecdote to postmodern irony when the novelists themselves were responsible for developing it wallace saw that there was a serious (if not insurmountable) challenge in using fiction to solve a problem which the whole genre of fiction had itself embraced. he wanted to answer what dostoevsky called “the desperate questions of existence.” but to truly seek the answer, to ask the question as if you really wanted the answer, would be received by modern audiences merely as moralistic finger-wagging. it is now considered banal and unsophisticated to say what you really mean or claim that what you are saying is actually true. this is the way the universe ends, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a perfunctory roar of canned laughter from saturday night live., one might say that the solution to this problem is simply to ignore the cultural riffraff and return to a more classical state of mind. maybe wallace’s problems are merely the product of his own vanity. he wanted to say what he meant and still be considered a relevant turn-of-the-century novelist. but it is not so simple to escape an addiction to a certain habit of thinking. wallace knew that if he simply adopted some higher, more classical form of language, he would risk being branded as another alan bloom type and dismissed as yet another conservative doomsday prophet. the effects of postmodern irony are so ubiquitous that it could almost be described as cancerous on a cellular level, and no one is immune to it, not even conservatives., indeed, the modern disease of cancer is a very appropriate analogy. cancer cells are not harmful when they work for us. they only become a disease when they turn against us. when rationality turns against us, the soul is at civil war. you may try criticizing the disease of postmodern irony, but you cannot wield the critical mind against postmodernism any more than you can run to the police for aid if you are being chased by them. criticism itself is the thing that has gone wrong. our present situation cannot be resolved by returning to classical irony. a more serious operation is at hand., wallace felt that his audiences were so addicted to these habits of thought that there was no other way of writing fiction except in the language of postmodern irony. by most measurements, this project was a failure, and wallace knew it. wallace’s suicide was not just manic depression. one cannot read his work without being haunted by the sobering suspicion that the cause of his suicide was directly related to the fact that he could not resolve the problems he identified in his writing. assuming that wallace’s critiques of u.s. literature are legitimate and not simply the obsessive pessimism of a disgruntled manic depressant, it is incumbent upon us to wrestle with these critiques as if our life depended on them, because for wallace, it did., irony, comedy, and the devil, i am both a drama teacher and a debate coach, which comes as a surprise to many people who see rhetoric and theatrical arts to be as different as apples and oranges. debate is rational, analytical, left-brained (they say) while drama is artistic, creative, visual, spatial, right-brained. in many ways, drama and debate are closer cousins than they appear, but the strangest common attribute they share is the constant recurring character of the devil. the phrase “devil’s advocate” ( advocatus diaboli ) has its origins in the catholic church, but the methodology itself is part of an older tradition rooted in the socratic method (διαλεκτική). if we note the latin and greek origins of “devil” and “dialectic”, we see their kinship on more obvious display. the word for devil is diabolos , meaning “to tear through.” “dialectic” or “dialogue” comes from dialektike, or “to speak through.” one must not forget, however, that playing “devil’s advocate” is just that: playing. it is an ironic stance. the devil’s advocate pretends to believe the opposite of what he really believes in the service of the thesis, with the intention of sharpening and narrowing the interlocutor’s conclusion. but playing the devil is playing with fire, and things do have a way of getting out of control., in the arts, particularly in comedy, there is a similar attraction to “playing the devil.” the comedic opportunities are obvious. there is nothing particularly funny about saying, for example, “i love beyonce,” but put on devil’s horns and say the exact same thing, and it becomes a joke (about which beyonce happens to be the unfortunate victim). the word satan means “accuser” and comedians generate laughter by doing precisely that: accusing. the devil calls black “white” and white “black”—anything the devil condones is, at the same time, a damning indictment. for a comedian, playing the devil is a goldmine for comedy. comedy, like rhetoric, thrives on reductio ad absurdum —a tactic which reveals the ridiculous by seeing the world through the devil’s perspective. rationality, dialectic, comedy, and the devil are all devices in the ironist’s toolkit., of course, i am not saying that comedy is a satanic profession (or am i ha ha, just kidding.) but the comedian’s reputation for being (secretly and ironically) the most depressed person in the room is so well-known now that it is almost a cliché to point it out. the “sad clown” has become a stereotype. it is easy to see why. the ironic stance is liberating and, at the same time, dangerously addictive. it was wallace who pointed out that the original meaning of addict, addicere , meant religious devotion. he continually emphasized the importance of human beings needing to be able to worship something. what was worthy of our worship, however, wallace did not know., humor and violence, it is a given that much of comedy depends on making a jab at another’s expense. there is an implicit violence in comedy which is revealed in our language by the very fact that we call the ironic twist the “punchline.” in film, visual humor is often referred to as a “gag.” being the “butt-end” of a joke calls to mind the picture of being bludgeoned by the end of a spear. when a joke is funny enough you can even say that it “kills you” or that you “died laughing.” i used to write comedy sketches as a teenager and stumbled across this comedic maxim independently of any professional tutelage: pain is funny. this raised for me a rather uncomfortable question. is the postmodern claim true that all language is simply masked violence, we are taught as children that happy people laugh, and sad people cry. but if it is true that all humor depends on some form of violence or cruelty, then the true makeup of the human psyche is much more malevolent than we supposed. in fact, it is entirely malevolence, and the postmodern claim that all speech is violence is true. there is no difference between “wholesome” comedy and “black” comedy—there is only mildly violent and more violent, and your taste for either depends entirely on your tolerance for pain., it is true that we tend to idealize the innocence of children and gloss over certain acts of childhood cruelty which, without discipline, will later develop into undisguised malevolence. an honest interrogation of human nature will reveal to us the unpleasant truth of our own darkness. the same spirit which drives a mean child to pull the wings of a moth may be the same spirit which drives him to torture political prisoners in an internment camp. should we assume that this malevolent spirit composes the whole of the human spirit, many would naturally respond to this accusation by insisting upon the inherent innocence of children. but the cynic can easily blockade any attempt to return to such a paradisal state of mind by dismissing it as sentimentalism. once the accusatory stance has been assumed, it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to go back. irony is caustic: once the punchline has been delivered, the previous perspective dissolves in the light of the (superior) ironic perspective. once the accuser has spoken, we see our nakedness, and are ashamed., c.s. lewis and the devil, c.s. lewis was a master satirist, and it is not an accident that one of lewis’ must humorous works consisted in him playing the devil in the screwtape letters . screwtape, a senior devil instructing his nephew on the ways of damnation, devotes an entire letter to the subject of laughter. screwtape divides the four kinds of laughter into joy, fun, the joke proper, and flippancy. for screwtape, joy is the least desirable form of laughter:, you will see [joy] among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. among adults some pretext of jokes [3] is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. what the real cause is we do not know. something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call music, and something like it occurs in heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. besides the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of hell . [4], screwtape’s ignorance of joy is key to lewis’s work and provides insight into the plight of the comedian: “what the real cause is we do not know .” lewis, of course, knows about joy, but he must pretend that he does not know, because he is in the ironic position of the devil. the greek root for irony, eironeia, means “feigned ignorance.” if the ironic stance is to play the devil, such ignorance is necessary for the role, for the devil knows nothing of joy. given the nature of irony as such, it becomes clear where comedians go wrong. if you make a career out of playing the devil and become too used to seeing the world from his point of view, there may come a day when the “feigned ignorance” is not so feigned. comedy is cutthroat industry, and the one who wishes to be the king of comedy must be funny all the time . he cannot afford taking off the horns even for a second. if there is no use for joy in his profession, why keep on pretending why not make a faustian deal and become the devil himself the depressed clown is depressed because he pretended to know nothing of joy until he really didn’t. as lewis put it in the magician’s nephew , “the problem with making yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.” [5], fun, says screwtape, is related to joy and is therefore also of no interest to him. any kind of disinterested fun or enjoyment of something, which cannot be proven to really be at anyone’s expense, obviously cannot be very fertile grounds for cultivating vice. the joke proper is a “much more promising field” for screwtape. screwtape defines the joke proper as the “sudden perception of incongruity” and lewis is probably referring to the more formal kind of joke-telling which depends on an ironic twist and a punchline (i.e. “a man walks into a bar…”). the joke proper is about having a “refined” sense of humor, which i find to be much more characteristic of british than of american comedy. the joke proper is the mother of flippancy, and it is flippancy which screwtape holds in highest regard. as an extension of the west, american tends to take british sensibilities to their farthest extremes, and it is not surprising that flippancy has become our primary mode of humor. screwtape says,, flippancy is the best of all…only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. no one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. if prolonged, the habit of flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor against the enemy that i know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. it is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and excites no affection between those who practice it ., at the heart of the problem of postmodern irony is demonic flippancy. this is the cardinal sin of postmodernism which david foster wallace failed to identify. it is impossible to employ postmodern irony as a means to escape flippancy and return to joy. the title of wallace’s novel, infinite jest, meant more than even he realized: it is no accident that hell is described as a bottomless pit. insofar as the western literary tradition has embraced postmodern irony, fiction as an art form is dead. if the novel is to survive, this tradition must be abandoned. only by a total death of this tradition can our culture resurrect the childlike appreciation of disinterested joy., the rediscovery of joy, i argued in part 1 of this essay series that the toddler playing peek-a-boo was the “atomic building block” of laughter. the rediscovery of joy is the most urgent quest of our present age—the “desperate question of our existence.” our call to action, then, is to look to the child. the toddler plays with a narrative in which the mother does not exist, but only in the interest of celebrating her existence. his “irony,” if we are to call it that, is predicated on joy, because the punchline depends not on accusing the solidity of her existence, but on affirming her solidity., joy is a certain quality of being which, by definition, is opaque to the ironic stance, because it is a thing outside of irony. and it is this quality of being which we must somehow return to. we must become as children to enter the kingdom of heaven. we must be born again. the ironist sees at once that such a thing is impossible. “how can one be born again” asks the bewildered rationalist thinker nicodemus. “he cannot enter again into his mother’s womb, can he” jesus answers,, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. do not be amazed that i said to you, ‘you must be born again.’ the wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the spirit., nicodemus said to him, ‘how can these things be’, jesus answered and said to him, ‘are you a teacher of israel and do not understand these things truly, truly, i say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you do not accept our testimony. if i told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if i tell you heavenly things no one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven: the son of man. as moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in him have eternal life.’ [6], christ says that we must be born of the spirit to inherit the kingdom. those born of the spirit evade the accusatory stance of the ironist. the ironist cannot “zoom out” over those born of the spirit and accuse them, because they are like wind and their origins cannot be identified. christ as the divine logos is origin itself. christ’s statement leaves the final arbiter of truth in a domain outside of argument, posing problems for both the atheist and the christian apologist alike. even if we were proclaim upon the rooftops, “joy is the final layer of sincerity,” we would not yet have saved ourselves, even if such a statement were true—even if we sincerely say it. irony—or rather, the rational principle—cannot discover joy. if the truth cannot be arrived at by argument, our knowledge of joy depends entirely on revelation. no matter how well the comedian perfects his art, no matter how loud his audience howls and whoops with overtures of approval, he has not come one step closer to creating joy. joy must be revealed to us in a divine action of grace, or not at all. what other choice do we have, [1] wallace, “david foster wallace unedited interview”, 2003, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=iglzwdt7vgc, [2] jennifer frey, “the therapeutic fiction of david foster wallace”, sacred and profane love , 2021, https://sacredandprofanelove.com/podcast-item/ep-32-jon-baskin-on-the-therapeutic-fiction-of-david-foster-wallace/, [3] lewis deliberately capitalizes the word “joke” and “laughter.” i do not know whether this is some british peculiarity or whether lewis has in mind some idea of a perfect platonic joke and therefore capitalizes it for emphasis., [4] the screwtape letters, ch. xi, [5] lewis, the magician’s nephew, [6] john 3:6-15, * see parts 1 and 2 of raymond’s essays here and here ..

Raymond Dokupil is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He co-hosts a culture and literature podcast: Unreliable Narrators .

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David Foster Wallace's importance of being earnest: Irony, Generation X and the sheer joy of language

Dfw was exceptional in so many ways -- and the root of his distinction might be his sense of americanness, by adam kirsch.

Excerpted from "Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas"

Today, we think of the 1920s as a golden age of American fiction. But to Edmund Wilson, looking back from the vantage point of 1944, the most striking thing about this modern generation, which he did more than any critic to foster, was its failure to reach full development. The best writers of the twenties, he wrote in “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,” had either “died prematurely . . . leaving a sad sense of work uncompleted,” like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or “disconcertingly abandoned their own standards”—here the unnamed culprit is surely Ernest Hemingway, whom Wilson had helped to discover. To us, these are canonical names, predestined for Library of America cursive. So it is helpfully disconcerting to learn that, to Wilson, they seemed to have been canonized prematurely: “men of still-maturing abilities, on the verge of more important things, have suddenly turned up in the role of old masters with the best of their achievement behind them.”

At the time Wilson wrote, this particular style of American literary martyrdom was on the verge of obsolescence. After the war, as the center of cultural gravity moved from London and Paris to New York, and the American university and publishing establishments began their dramatic expansion, the situation of the American writer became very different, and in most material respects much better. Consider the major American novelists who emerged in the 1950s—Bellow, Updike, Mailer. All enjoyed longevity, consistent productivity, and public honor; the disorder of their personal lives was chronic and in some sense stimulating, rather than acute and lethal. In all these respects, they are markedly different from the great writers of the 1920s. And today’s leading writers, who are more dependent on the academy for sustenance, seem still further from the old, prodigal, unhappy American career.

Except for David Foster Wallace. Wallace was exceptional in many ways—in the scale of his ambition and achievement, the affection he inspired in readers, the generational significance of his life and death. But the root of this distinction may have been his untimely, unfashionable style of Americanness. Like Sherwood Anderson, Wallace presented himself as a sensitive man at odds with a crass commercial society; like Fitzgerald, he was a collegiate prodigy (his first novel, "The Broom of the System," started as a senior thesis at Amherst) who achieved fame as the voice of an era; like Hemingway, he was deeply concerned with traditional manliness, and with the ethics of sports and games.

And like all three, he was a self-conscious son of the Midwest. Wallace grew up in Champaign, the son of a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; but he did not see himself as part of a relatively placeless academic caste. Instead, he fully embraced his origins in America’s physical and metaphorical “heartland,” and he wrote with a certain trepidation about the big cities of the East. In “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his celebrated essay about taking a luxury cruise, he offhandedly mentions “the way we find even very basic human decency moving if we encounter it in NYC or Boston.”

Wallace admitted that it was, in part, the ethnic and racial diversity of the metropolis that made it seem alien to him. “For me, public places on the U.S. East Coast are full of these nasty little moments of racist observation and then internal P.C. backlash,” he confesses. As a writer who went to college and entered the literary world in the mid-1980s, during the first flush of multiculturalism and political correctness, Wallace was highly aware of his ambiguous status as a white male. “If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins are great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders— well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs?” he asks, only half-jokingly, in an early story, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.”

That title is itself half a joke, borrowed from Berkeley’s poem; yet the story, which enacts a complicated homage to and rebellion against John Barth’s metafictional classic “Lost in the Funhouse,” takes its directional symbolism seriously. Barth lives in and often writes about the Maryland tidewater country, on America’s eastern rim. Wallace’s story, which describes a group of writing students visiting rural Illinois, explicitly casts the journey west as a movement away from eastern complexity and metafictional jadedness, toward a new birth of naïveté and sentimental directness. This early in his career, Wallace already saw himself as a spokesman for “the forward simplicity of a generation for whom whatever lies behind lies there fouled, soiled, used up. East.” Hemingway’s Nick Adams, recuperating from war by going fishing on the Big Two-Hearted River, or Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, returning to “my Middle West” after his corrupting sojourn among the Buchanans and Wolfsheims, would have understood Wallace perfectly.

Certainly, the body of work Wallace left behind is open to the criticism Wilson leveled at those writers—it is precocious, very uneven, at times immature. And Wallace’s death by suicide, at the age of forty-six in 2008, has sealed him forever in the catalogue of tragic, “premature” American writers. Yet with Wallace, too, the faults of his work seem inseparable from the virtues. A more disciplined, tactful writer would not have published a thousand pages of "Infinite Jest," with all its shaggy-dog repetitions and manic elaborations and half-baked jokes. But then, a shapely, 400-page version of "Infinite Jest" would not have been a cultural sensation or a generational landmark.

Some intelligent readers have declared themselves simply allergic to Wallace’s style, unable to cope with all the mannerisms and acronyms and footnotes, the boyish self-conscious earnestness, the sentences that start “And but so now” or “The improbable thing of the whole thing was that.” And it’s true that Wallace’s style is so stylized that it teeters on the edge of self-parody, like Hemingway’s. Yet reading a story like “The Depressed Person,” which even at thirty pages feels too long, it is undeniable that this feeling of excess, of being trapped in a room with a very intelligent obsessive-compulsive, is exactly the sensation that Wallace wanted to convey. With Wallace, waste is of the essence of the scheme.

The most American thing about Wallace, however, is his conviction that his unhappiness is a specifically American condition. Like many classic American writers but few contemporary ones, he genuinely experienced being American as a bitter, significant fate, a problem that the writer had to unravel for the benefit of his fellow sufferers. In a late story, “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace theorizes about “the single great informing conflict of the American psyche,” which is “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance.” All of "Infinite Jest" can be seen as a demonstration of the thesis Wallace advances early in the novel: “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.”

When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-sixties cohort known as “Generation X.” “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of "Infinite Jest," “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he writes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades . . . Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.

What is actually most American and most Generation X about these laments, of course, is their provincialism. For Wallace to find it plausible that “being embodied” or “objective insignificance” were new American problems is as sharp an indictment of American ignorance, in its way, as those polls which are always showing that half of us can’t find the U.S. on a map. Except that if any young novelist knew the ancient history of such problems, it should have been Wallace. He was very widely read, and he studied philosophy in college and graduate school; his first novel plays knowingly with Wittgenstein and Derrida. In the introduction to "Fate, Time, and Language," the posthumous edition of Wallace’s senior thesis, his father James remembers reading the "Phaedo" with the fourteen-year-old David: “This was the first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

That short book is both an homage to Wallace’s reputation as a philosophical novelist and an attempt to solidify it. As a senior at Amherst, while working on the fiction that would become "The Broom of the System," Wallace also produced a philosophy thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality.” In challenging Taylor’s 1962 paper “Fatalism”—which is reproduced in the book, along with a number of other philosophers’ responses to it—Wallace set out to defend our commonsense intuition of free will. This sounds like a big, novelistically fertile subject, and in his introduction, James Ryerson claims that Wallace’s early training in philosophy “would play a lasting role in his work and thought, including his ideas about the purpose and possibilities of fiction.”

In fact, what "Fate, Time, and Language" demonstrates is not the value of analytic philosophy for literature, but its dramatic inferiority to literature as a way of discussing the most existentially urgent problems. Wallace’s paper boils down to the statement that the future can’t be fixed before it happens, because it is the future and not the past. But to get to this point, he wends his way through spiny thickets of modus ponens and modus tollens , demonstrating a mastery of propositional logic so thorough as to make the idiom itself seem facile, even comic.

If there is a continuity between Wallace the undergrad philosopher and Wallace the novelist, it is not in the profundity of his ideas, but in his perfect pitch for all kinds of jargon. One section heading in the paper reads “A Formal Device for Representing and Explaining the Taylor Inequivalence: Features and Implications of the Intensional-Physical-Modality System J.” The same teasing relish for professional idioms finds its way into Wallace’s writing about pharmaceuticals in "Infinite Jest," or about lexicography in the essay “Authority and American Usage,” or about the tax code in "The Pale King," his unfinished, posthumously published book.

If Wallace’s sense that his own time and place is uniquely afflicted by loneliness and doubt and mortality cannot be ascribed to ignorance, however, it becomes even more significant. For then it must mean that the ways human beings have always addressed these subjects—through philosophy, religion, and literature—have simply lost potency and reality for Wallace, and for the American generation he represents.

There is a revealing exchange on this subject in "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," a book-length transcript of an interview with Wallace conducted by David Lipsky in 1996. Wallace has been denigrating “conventional realistic” fiction, the way “it imposes an order and sense and ease of interpretation on experience that’s never there in real life.” Lipsky, who is also a novelist, cogently objects that “Tolstoy’s books come closer to the way life feels than anybody, and those books couldn’t be more conventional.” To which Wallace replies with a familiar litany: “Life now is completely different than the way it was then”; “some of it has to do with . . . MTV videos”; “life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input”; “I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today.”

This kind of phenomenological presentism is itself pretty old by now—at least as old as modernism. But every generation seems fated to discover it again, and for Wallace it served a very useful purpose. It made loneliness and despair not mere existential conditions, but timely “issues”; it allowed him to think of himself as a representative man and a social commentator. In fact, one whole strand of Wallace’s work is concerned with diagnosing the cultural causes of his generation’s unprecedented anomie. In an influential essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he blames television—not simply in "Bowling Alone" terms, because it physically isolates people and breaks down communal ties, but for the way its massive formulaic stupidity encourages intelligent viewers to develop a defensive irony. “Irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and . . . at the same time they are the agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture,” Wallace writes.

This argument is translated into fictional terms in the early story “My Appearance,” from his 1989 collection "Girl with Curious Hair." The story concerns a middle-aged, moderately successful TV actress who is making an appearance on David Letterman’s talk show. Her challenge is to find a way to communicate sincerely in the face of Letterman’s sneering, withering irony, which to Wallace is the epitome of TV-bred cynicism. A friend tells her that the only way to cope is to out-Letterman Letterman: “Laugh in a way that’s somehow deadpan. As if you knew from birth that everything is clichéed and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that’s just where the fun is.”

Wallace dreads this kind of irony, which poisons communication and makes displays of emotion look ridiculous. (“There’s never been a time in serious art more hostile to melodrama,” he complains to Lipsky.) He dreads it on civic grounds, of course; but he also sees cool knowingness as a deadly threat to his own literary genius, which is essentially sentimental and melodramatic. That is why Wallace is exercised by the ironic self-consciousness of postmodern fiction, in much the same way that he is by David Letterman. John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” can hardly be held responsible for “a great stasis and despair in U.S. culture”—for one thing, not enough people have read it. But in “Westward,” Wallace offers a novella-length attack on the metafictional gamesmanship of Barth’s story: “You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying ‘Here I am, laying you?’ Yes? No? No. Sure you don’t. I sure don’t. It’s a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands.”

Wallace is generally described as a cerebral, difficult writer, and sometimes thought of himself that way. Discussing "Infinite Jest" with Lipsky, he said, “I wanted to try to do something that was really hard and avant-garde, but that was fun enough so that it forced the reader to do the work that was required.” Yet as time passes, it becomes harder to see why that novel was ever considered difficult or avant-garde. Yes, Wallace rotates through a few different narrators, and leaves some background information unclear, and uses some five-dollar words. But none of this requires more “work” than, say, a movie by David Lynch (whom Wallace admired very much). Certainly, the notorious length of "Infinite Jest" is not a gauntlet thrown to the reader. It feels, rather, like a return to the spaciousness of Dickens and Balzac, its bulk a product of repetition and detail and the multiplication of characters. These are all techniques of readerly seduction and immersion, ways of “leading you to bed with both hands.”

"Infinite Jest" is written on the pleasure principle: that is its strength and its weakness. Wallace’s sheer joy in writing is responsible for what he calls in the novel itself “the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth.” It is full of catalogues, stories within stories, invented idioms, and elaborate anecdotes about characters who appear only once. His use of footnotes, one of the most recognizable elements of his style, is a way of making more room for irrelevant digressions, the way a hoarder might build a second story on his house.

One footnote in "Infinite Jest" offers the filmography of an invented director, listing dozens of movies Wallace describes even though they never feature in the novel at all; it runs to eight pages of small print. Elsewhere, Wallace describes a school party at which all the students are encouraged to wear funny hats. This is supplemented by a footnote listing the kind of funny hat worn by every attendee: “Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran Unwin a fez,” and so on. In the introduction to "The Pale King," Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor, mentions that he referred to his first drafts as “freewriting,” and this term perfectly captures the self-delighting excess of much of "Infinite Jest."

Yet "Infinite Jest" is also an attack on the pleasure principle. The main plot concerns a movie that is so entertaining it reduces everyone who sees it to a catatonic stupor. Wallace offers several installments of a dialogue between a Québeçois terrorist, Marathe, whose colleagues want to acquire the movie and use it as a weapon against the United States, and an American spy, Steeply, who is trying to outwit the terrorists and find the movie first. It’s typical of the novel that this dialogue is at once totally slapstick—Steeply wears ill-fitting drag, Marathe speaks mangled, Frenchified English, and the whole conversation takes place on a narrow ledge on a mountainside in the Arizona desert—and didactically earnest. Marathe argues that the only reason America fears “the Entertainment,” as it’s called, is that the country has lost its willpower, its character:

“Now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons . . . can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose? Who will die for something larger?”

This line of argument, comical as it is coming from a French Canadian—the very idea of a dangerous Canadian is a gag, to an American—sounds more formidable when it comes from, say, an Islamic jihadist. (Shortly after September 11, an Afghan mujahideen was widely quoted as saying “The Americans love Pepsi Cola, but we love death,” which is more or less Marathe’s point.) Wallace sharpens the indictment of American hedonism by setting half of "Infinite Jest" in the world of twelve-step programs and halfway houses. How much must people be suffering, Wallace asks, if they are willing to destroy their lives and court death in order to temporarily blot out consciousness?

The name of the movie that entertains to the point of killing is "Infinite Jest," and Wallace means us to see the parallel between it and the novel, which is itself a literary overdose. Can reading—or, more to the point, can writing—be a kind of drug, a distraction from an otherwise insufferable existence? Is it possible to be addicted to writing? There’s no avoiding the question in a book that is so knowledgeable and convincing about the dynamics of addiction—the way suffering leads to excess, which compounds suffering, until it is impossible either to go on taking Substances (Wallace’s term) or to stop. In Alcoholics Anonymous, Wallace insists, it is the most intelligent, articulate addicts who have it hardest: “They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.”

Inevitably, we read Wallace now with the knowledge that he committed suicide, after a lifelong struggle with depression. Talking to Lipsky, he took pains to hide the facts of his illness: he insisted “I’m not biochemically depressed,” and specifically denied that he took antidepressants. In fact, according to posthumous articles by D. T. Max, Jonathan Franzen, and others, Wallace took the antidepressant Nardil for almost two decades, and it was his attempt to go off the drug that precipitated his final depression and suicide. No reader of his fiction, however, could have been convinced by Wallace’s denials, as Lipsky clearly wasn’t. There are just too many characters in his books who share the experience of Kate Gompert, from "Infinite Jest," whom we first meet in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt: “I wanted to just stop being conscious . . . I wanted to stop feeling this way.”

What would it be like to inhabit such a suffering consciousness, without muffling it in a thousand pages of voluble prose? "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," the book Wallace published after "Infinite Jest," is his devastating answer. The book consists of a number of stories, interwoven with “transcripts” of the titular interviews, from which the questions have been deleted. Both stories and interviews show that Wallace’s truest subject as a writer, the one that provoked his most moving and convincing work, was the sickness of the will. Again and again, he creates characters intelligent enough to anticipate every one of their own thoughts and reactions, even the most destructive and dysfunctional, but who lack the will to change them. The maddening self-consciousness and hyperarticulacy that sometimes seem like mere tics of Wallace’s prose become, in "Brief Interviews," the absolutely faithful reflection of a consciousness that knows itself too well, and is disgusted by what it knows.

The ultimate case study here is “The Depressed Person,” in which we see how a woman’s unbearable suffering—“depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself, an agony that was the overriding and unendurable reality of her every black minute on earth”—makes her unbearably self-obsessed. This, in turn, renders her deeply unsympathetic, not just to the friends who abandon her, but to herself, so that self-hatred is added to unhappiness. It is a spiral or Moebius strip of misery, and a genuinely Dostoevskyan performance. Behind the Depressed Person we hear another eloquently damned soul, the Underground Man, who also suffers from the gap between reason and will, between knowing what’s wrong with you and being able to repair it.

“Standard therapy [is] such a waste of time for people like us—they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, you would stop. Which is bullshit.” So says Meredith Rand, one of the half-dozen IRS agents who emerge as major characters in the incomplete drafts and notes of Wallace’s last novel, published as "The Pale King." Other prominent voices in the plotless chorus include Lane Dean, Jr., who takes a job at the IRS after getting his high-school girlfriend pregnant; Claude Sylvanshine, a hapless underling whose career has stalled at a low pay-grade; Toni Ware, whose violent childhood is narrated in a florid style that reads like a parody of Cormac McCarthy; and, most significant, Chris Fogle, who describes his work as an auditor as a kind of religious vocation.

And then there is “David Wallace” himself, who addresses us directly in a few passages. "The Pale King" was apparently meant to be cast as Wallace’s own “vocational memoir,” a description of the year he spent working for the IRS in the mid-1980s, after being suspended from college for running a term-paper mill. Of course, the real Wallace never worked for the IRS, and it is a little dispiriting to see him still toying with metafictional tricks—all the more so when he teasingly disavows those tricks even as he plays them: “Please know that I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome too—at least now that I’m over thirty I do—and that the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” The awkwardness of the “David Wallace” passages in "The Pale King" are indicative of the difficulty Wallace had finding the right way to frame the subject. Indeed, it seems clear from the book as we have it that Wallace chose the IRS as a subject without knowing quite how to write about it, or what stories he wanted to tell.

Why pick such an unpromising subject, and stick with it through years of frustration? (Pietsch writes that Wallace “described working on the novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.”) A clue to the answer can be found in a question Wallace asked in "Infinite Jest:" “ Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?” In that excessively interesting book, the interesting is always suspect. Substances are interesting, the Entertainment is interesting, because they distract a mind that would otherwise tear itself apart; but they only distract, they do not really fulfill or heal.

As an alternative, Wallace offers two images of genuine fulfillment: the utter athletic discipline of the young players at Enfield Tennis Academy, and the utter spiritual surrender of the recovering addicts at Ennet House. In both cases, Wallace is explicit that the key to happiness is the relinquishing of consciousness. The AA slogan is “my best thinking got me here,” while at E.T.A., “the program . . . is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting,” in which the player abandons all thought of fame and victory, concentrating solely on the game itself. In both cases, serenity comes not from the frenzied quest for new sources of stimulation, but from a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of everything that occurs.

This is the Nirvana attained by Don Gately, a recovering addict who is in the hospital for a gunshot wound but refuses to accept any kind of narcotic, lest he jeopardize his sobriety. In the novel’s last hundred pages, Gately overcomes his pain by recognizing that “everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”

But if the interesting is the delusive, addictive maya of this world, then the boring and unpleasant is what is really real; and the token of mental wholeness, of adult sobriety, is the ability to cope with unrelieved boredom. That is why The Pale King had to be a novel about the IRS. For what is more boring and repellent than the tax code, or more notoriously inevitable? “The whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull,” says “David Wallace.” But he suggests that it would be a sign of weakness to ignore it simply because it is dull:

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. . . . Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly with our full attention.

"The Pale King" is Wallace’s attempt to find out if fiction can sustain this kind of attention to boring, banal reality, without contracting into the solipsistic fugues of "Brief Interviews," or expanding into the manic inventions of "Infinite Jest." In fact, Wallace only occasionally tries to make his book itself rebarbatively dull—to enact the boredom he writes about. There are several passages of tax jargon, and a long description of a traffic jam (which doubles down on dullness by turning into a discussion of the failure of the municipal bond issue that could have expanded the jammed road). Most notably, there is a three-page section, printed in double columns like a dictionary or Bible, describing a room full of tax-form examiners at work: “Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page.” This is Wallace’s stab at evoking the routine that leads Lane Dean, for one, to think of his job as a foretaste of hell:

He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.

A genuinely avant-garde or experimental writer might have tried to compose a whole novel out of those double columns. But Wallace was not that kind of writer. Too generous and warmhearted to torment the reader, what he really wanted was to delight and instruct—above all, in his last years, to instruct. For "The Pale King" belongs in a series of late works in which Wallace was grappling with the idea of authority, and tentatively trying on the role of an authority figure. (And how terrible to have to use the word “late” for things written in his early forties.)

In 2000, Wallace covered John McCain’s presidential campaign for Rolling Stone. The resulting essay—“Up, Simba!” in "Consider the Lobster"—celebrates a very traditional ideal of masculine stoicism and honor: “The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero because of not what he did but what he suffered—voluntarily, for a Code. That gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them.” Wallace found a different kind of authority in Bryan Garner, whose "Dictionary of Modern American Usage" he writes about in “Authority and American Usage.” “America is in a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters of usage,” he observes. But Garner, whose work Wallace praises inordinately, strikes him as a model of democratic authority, based not on coercion but on rational consent: “in the absence of unquestioned, capital-A authority in language, the reader must now be moved or persuaded to grant a dictionary its authority, freely and for what appear to be good reasons.”

In the introduction to "Fate, Time, and Language," James Ryerson suggests that Wallace was a philosophical novelist in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre. Perhaps the best reason for denying this is that Wallace did not seem to recognize that the problem he had discovered was Kant’s problem, and that his solution was Kant’s solution. The only valid laws are the ones we legislate for ourselves, in accordance with the dictates of reason: this is the key to moral autonomy, and in "The Pale King," it is the definition of adulthood.

In the words of Chris Fogle, the most significant character in the book, “If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way. Even if it was nothing more than an act of will.” Fogle’s story seems to express Wallace’s deepest intention in writing about the IRS, and his most heartfelt counsel to his readers. It is explicitly cast as a conversion testimony: once a layabout, a stoner, a self-described “wastoid,” Fogle is born again as a mature, disciplined adult, a worthy heir of the father he was always disappointing.

His moment of grace comes when he accidentally stumbles into an Advanced Tax course at his college, and hears what amounts to a sermon, from a professor whom Fogle believes is a Jesuit (though he turns out not to be). Punning bluntly on the notions of “calling” and “accounting,” the teacher tells the students that they are “called to account.” The CPA is commercial society’s indispensable man, its quiet hero: “I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. . . . Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.”

Wallace peppers "The Pale King" with a number of surreal, invented details about the IRS, including its alleged Latin motto, “ Alicui tamen faciendum est ”—roughly, “Anyway, someone has to do it.” And in this book, the ones who step up, who attend to the tedious business of life, are defiantly archaic authority figures. They are midwestern patriarchs, men in gray flannel suits (“like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit,” Fogle says about his father), and earnest Christians—types that seldom appear in pop culture (or literary fiction) except as figures of fun. In one section of "The Pale King," Lane Dean decides not to pressure his girlfriend to get an abortion, but to marry her instead, even though he doesn’t love her. He makes this decision by asking, literally, what Jesus would do, and you can sense Wallace daring you to roll to your eyes.

Such nostalgia for a vanished style of religious and patriarchal authority is a familiar part of conservative political discourse. And while all the voices we hear in "The Pale King" are personae, not the author himself, Wallace takes obvious pleasure in rehearsing a number of conservative tropes, which he knows many readers will find provocative. Hostility to the 1960s has been a constant in his work, dating back to the early story “Lyndon,” which displays a surprising sympathy for LBJ in his contest with antiwar protestors. In "The Pale King," Chris Fogle’s mother is a victim of the 1960s: drunk on women’s lib, she impetuously divorces her dutiful husband, becomes a lesbian, and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books with her lover Joyce. Once Fogle’s father dies, however, she is consumed with remorse for her flightiness, and moves back into the marital home. In a vindictive touch, Joyce ends up getting married to a man and becoming a suburban housewife in Wilmette. See what happens when consciousness-raising gets out of hand?

Other characters in this polyphonic book say things like “the sixties were America’s starting to decline into decadence and selfish individualism—the Me generation,” and talk about the sacredness of the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Even “David Wallace” describes the invention of rolling luggage carts as “the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system—it gives people incentive to make things more efficient.” Meanwhile, the Advanced Tax instructor scoffs at Karl Marx’s vision of a society in which a man can “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I please.” Doing just what you please, for Wallace, is the fatal freedom that leads to anomie and despair.

The problem with Wallace’s cultural nostalgia is not so much the sentiment behind it, which is genuine and partly admirable, as the danger of patness, and the edge of nastiness. But while some passages of "The Pale King" feel complacent, others suggest that Wallace was aware of this danger, and intended to put his central conceit under some ironic pressure. To Chris Fogle, the IRS is “the Service,” and joining it is like joining the priesthood or the Marines. But “David Wallace,” who arrives at the Peoria office and is mistaken for a much higher-ranked IRS employee of the same name, gets to see that the Service is actually full of sinister bureaucratic slapstick, of the kind that Kafka evokes in "The Castle." Again, Fogle yearns to be like his father, but Lane Dean is shown regretting his decision to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood and adulthood so soon.

All of this suggests, once again, that Wallace had not yet imagined his way to a satisfying treatment of the themes he wanted to address in "The Pale King." Above all, he had not resolved the tension at the heart of the project, the problem of how to write an interesting book about boredom. This becomes especially clear in the last major episode in the book, when Meredith Rand describes her experience of mental illness to a fellow auditor, Shane Drinion. Drinion is a perfect IRS employee because he is, evidently, an Asperger’s type, devoid of social instincts but capable of intense, narrow focus. In one of the brief “Notes and Asides” at the end of the volume, Wallace describes Drinion as “ happy ”:

It turns out that bliss—a second-by- second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

The way Wallace tries to dramatize this bliss is by having Drinion, at the moment of total focus, literally levitate: while listening to Meredith Rand’s story, he starts to rise out of his chair. But this is “interesting” in exactly the style of "Infinite Jest," with its unyielding liveliness and cartoon mobility—that is, it is interesting in the way "The Pale King" itself distrusts. When Wallace died, the book shows, he was still in the middle of the ordeal of purging and remaking his style. This is the kind of challenge only the best writers set themselves. One of the many things to mourn about Wallace’s death is that we will never get to know the writer he was striving to become.

Excerpted from "Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas" by Adam Kirsch. Published by W.W. Norton and Co. Inc. Copyright © 2015 by Adam Kirsch. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Adam Kirsch is a writer living in New York.

Remembering David Foster Wallace's Dark Irony

Madeleine Brand

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, committed suicide at his home in Claremont, Calif. on Sept. 12. He was 46. Courtesy of Davidfosterwallace.com hide caption

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, committed suicide at his home in Claremont, Calif. on Sept. 12. He was 46.

David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, committed suicide on Friday, Sept. 12 at the age of 46. Foster Wallace was known as an explosive writer who cast his work with dark irony in subjects ranging from tennis to politics to mathematics to popular culture.

The 1997 MacCarther Genius Grant recipient had recently turned his attention toward teaching as a tenured professor at Pomona College in Southern California.

Read more and share your memories of Foster Wallace on Madeleine Brand's blog post here.

8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. 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. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. 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.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

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David Foster Wallace: 10 quotes on his birthday

Here, from modern literary master david foster wallace, are 10 quotes to celebrate his life., 4. the prison of irony.

February 20, 2013

By Ben Frederick Contributor

"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage…. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

(from " Conversations with David Foster Wallace ," edited by Stephen J. Burn)

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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Hear David Foster Wallace Read His Own Essays & Short Fiction on the 6th Anniversary of His Death,

in Literature | September 12th, 2014 2 Comments

Yesterday, of course, marked the 13th anniversary of the horrible attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Today marks the 6th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s death by suicide. The two events are related not only by proximity, and not because they are comparable tragedies, but because Wallace’s work, in particular his 1993 essay “ E Unibus Pluram : Television and U.S. Fiction ,” has become such a touchstone for the discourse of “post-irony” or “the new sincerity” since 9/11, when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and others proclaimed the “ end of irony .” But the cultural consciousness has shifted measurably since those heady days of fervent affirmation. In a reconsideration of Wallace on irony, Bradley Warshauer writes , “he wasn’t wrong—but he is obsolete.” Our national discourse—as much as it can be defined in broad terms—may have, some argue , swung further toward sincerity and sentimental reverence than Wallace would have liked. And he may have been much more an ironist than he liked to believe.

Wallace, writes Warshauer, was “a wannabe sentimentalist who was too absurdly talented and probably too obsessed with the artificiality of fiction to be the sort of ‘anti-rebel’ that he himself talked about.” While he may have romanticized the high-minded figure who “stands for” things in uncomplicated ways, Wallace himself was complicated, prickly, and just too hyper-aware—of himself and others—to be seduced by easy sentiment, what Somerset Maugham called “unearned emotion.” While his work pulls us still toward deeper levels of analysis, toward contemplation and critique, toward serious considerations of value, it does not do so by eschewing irony. In the descriptive force of his prose are the evasions, parries, asides, circumlocutions, and jarringly odd juxtapositions of the ironist, the satirist, and—what might be the same thing—the moralist. “The inherent contradiction”—the irony, if you will—of Wallace’s stance, Washauer argues, citing 1999’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men , is that he himself “was addicted to ironic detachment.” But, of course, it’s not so simple as that.

Today we bring you several readings by David Foster Wallace of his own work. We begin at the top with “Death is Not the End” from Brief Interviews , that collection of “weird metafiction” that couches raw and painful confessions in layers of irony. Below it, from that same collection, we have “Suicide as a Sort of Present,” a piece that, in hindsight, offers its own potential morbidly ironic readings. Just above, hear Wallace read the short story “ Incarnations of Burned Children ” from the 2005 collection Oblivion , full of stories Wyatt Mason described as “tightly withhold[ing]… hiding on high shelves the keys that unlock their treasures.” Replete with tiny mechanisms that can take many careful readings to parse, these stories are fine-art studies in ironic language and situations.

One may class David Foster Wallace as a master ironist, despite his critical stance against its overuse, but this reduces the full range of his mastery to one mode among so many. His work embraced the voice of irony and the voice of sincerity as equally valid rhetorical means, alternating between the two in what A.O. Scott once called a “feedback loop.” “ The View From Mrs. Thompson’s ,” the essay Wallace reads above from 2005’s essay collection Consider the Lobster , is a piece he wrote just days after 9/11. Written quickly as a commission from Rolling Stone , the essay records his trenchant observations of the reactions in Bloomington, Illinois between September 11–13. It’s a piece that showcases the tension between Wallace’s sincere desire for immediacy and his almost uncontrollable impulse to amused detachment. And hearing Wallace commemorate the tragic events we remembered yesterday highlights the sad irony of memorializing his own death today.

You can hear many more of David Foster Wallace’s readings and interviews at the David Foster Wallace Audio Project , and be sure to stop by our sizable collection, 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web .

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

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The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

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I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Published April 13, 2014 7:30PM (EDT) David Foster Wallace (Hachette Book Group) Percy Shelley famously wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.". For Shelley, great ...

My meditations on irony began with two pieces from David Foster Wallace. The first was his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," written in 1990 and published in 1993. The second was an interview of Wallace conducted by a German television station in 2003.

irony identified by Wallace and replace it with sincerity and authenticity in post-postmodern literature. This study looks at the connection between David Foster Wallace's influential 20th century essay "E Unibus Pluram", its co-published "Interview with Larry McCaffery" and its greater connection to Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the

Like Hutcheon, the late American writer David Foster Wallace was concerned with the relationship between critical distance and the humorous aspects of postmodern irony. For Wallace, however, by the early 1990s postmodernism had lost its critical edge, along with the subversive potential of its ironic form. If Wallace worried that the critical ...

On David Foster Wallace's long critical engagement with irony, it is generally accepted that ironic discourse disconnects the user from some aspect of being human. ... Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction," 131-46). I am not suggesting that every article claiming that Wallace overturns irony argues that he does so in a ...

978-1-316-51332-3 — David Foster Wallace in Context Edited by Clare Hayes-Brady Frontmatter ... Mastered Irony in Motion (), Understanding David Foster Wallace (, revised and updated in) and ... Time and Language: David Foster Wallace s Essay on Free Will (), Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's importance of being earnest: Irony, Generation X and the sheer joy of language DFW was exceptional in so many ways -- and the root of his distinction might be his sense of ...

The US-American writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is associ-ated with postmodernism and a loose group of authors - the New Sincerity Movement - who departed from the stance of irony and parody common in 1990s literature. 1. Wallace's oeuvre comprises three novels as well as several collections of short stories and essays.

David Foster Wallace witnessed how postmodern irony erodes cultural values by exposing the artifice of language and its human construction. The most egregious example Wallace found was the bestseller American Psycho (1991), by Bret Easton Ellis, which used postmodern irony to satirize American consumer culture in a way Wallace found overly ...

David Foster Wallace and Lovelessness. David P. Rando. I, t has become a critical axiom that in his fiction David Foster Wallace. turns irony inside out in order to express genuine emotion. "Wallace con. ceives a treatment for contemporary American solipsism that is drenched. in hip irony and negates the 'Other'" (143), Petrus van Ewijk writes ...

David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, committed suicide on Friday, Sept. 12 at the age of 46. Foster Wallace was known as an explosive writer who cast his work with dark irony in ...

Introduction. To focus exclusively on David Foster Wallace's creative nonfiction when he wrote one of the most esteemed novels of the 20th century, Infinite Jest, may at first seem ill-judged.Though the writer's work was critically and commercially well-received at its time of publication, scholarly material on Wallace, who published three novels (one posthumous), three short story ...

WALLACE ON IRONISM In his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Wallace argues that "irony tyrannizes us."2 As Wallace traces irony's recent history in America, it gained popularity as a cul-tural tool for exposing hypocrisy. Irony can purport to show, for example, that institutions commonly promote absurdly ideal-

Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun." 5. "E Unibus Pluram ...

Abstract Responding directly to David Foster Wallace's call for a "new sincerity," Jennifer Egan in A Visit from the Goon Squad, finds a way to avoid the detrimental postmodern irony identified by Wallace and replace it with sincerity and authenticity in post-postmodern literature.

Here, from modern literary master David Foster Wallace, are 10 quotes to celebrate his life. ... There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's ...

Decades later, Wallace saw that "a lot of the schticks of post-modernism — irony, cynicism, irreverence — are now part of whatever it is that's enervating in the culture itself.". "The Problem with Irony," Will Schoder's video essay above, draws on Wallace's interview with Rose and much other ...

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments is a 1997 collection of nonfiction writing by David Foster Wallace.. 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 ...

November 29, 2021. Feature photo by Steve Rhodes. David Foster Wallace's work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is ...

Wallace, David Foster, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction , Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993:Summer) p.151

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay ...

Today marks the 6th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's death by suicide. The two events are related not only by proximity, and not because they are comparable tragedies, but because Wallace's work, in particular his 1993 essay " E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction ," has become such a touch ...

"Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage" has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I ...

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The Moscow metro now has a full 4G coverage

On 19 Oct 2018

The Tele2 mobile network company became the first to build an infrastructure for 100% stations of the Moscow's metro. The high-quality 4G internet is now available on all 259 stations of the Moscow's metro, Moscow Central Circle (MCC) and monorail.

The operator has secured a 100% 4G indoor-coverage internet an all stations of the metropolitan metro, including the passageways, pavilions, and stairways. The investments into the project have exceeded 800 million rubles.

The Moscow underground is a specific infrastructure object, which has its own particularities. All works on designing, installation, and adjustment of the hardware should have been conducted exceptionally during night hours when the metro is closed for entry. A sufficient number of stations have a status of cultural heritage, thus, the network development has required additional approvement from the Department of Cultural Heritage of Moscow.

The network coverage within the metro system opens new horizons for the analysis of the "big data". Tele2 Network has analyzed the users' activity during the summer months and has indicated the busiest metro lines, which were: Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya, Zamoskvoretskaya and Kaluga-Riga lines. During the summer months, on the stations of Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya lines the subscribers have downloaded 125 TByte of internet-traffic, have made over 2 million calls with the total duration of 27 thousand hours, which equals to 3 years.

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Turn Your Curiosity Into Discovery

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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