Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company in 1997, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a collection of essays and arguments by David Foster Wallace. Free from the house styles and editorial limitations of the publications in which they first appeared, the seven essays are printed in full, and with their original titles. In the fifth essay, David Lynch Keeps His Head, Wallace argues of Lynch’s Dune “The overall result is a movie that’s funny while it’s trying to be deadly serious, which is as good a definition of a flop as there is, and Dune was indeed a huge, pretentious, incoherent flop.” [“En-bee, which means noto beanie (sic; nota bene), which the audio comandante wants me to tell you means note well, but actually really means by the way”:] Most of the incoherence was beyond Lynch’s control. Redolent of Wallace’s magazine-essay editors, the producers of Lynch’s Dune had final cut. Wallace was inclined to recognize the detrimental effects of this predicament. But as fans of Wallace know, he was inclined to notice practically everything. His maximalist writing encouraged multifaceted awareness; footnotes within footnotes fell short of covering all Wallace wanted to convey. In effect, his writing says Look at it this way. and this way. and again the way you first looked at it. and now this other way, too.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the template for Flop, which replaces essays with art. In the book we cycle through different perspectives of Critter’s F, L, O, and P paintings, beginning with narrow views and ending with a more complete picture. Two paintings are compatible performative contradictions, and the other two are geometric post-impressionist-ish landscapes. With a multitude of possible readings, one can reasonably both agree and disagree with the arguments raised. Like lots of things, it’s not one or the other that’s true, but one and the other. Get a clue.