From “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace’s great 1994 Harper’s piece about the mixed pleasures of the Illinois State Fair, which seems to have been his entrée into magazine journalism:

“Sitting on the bench, I watch the carnies way below. They mix with no one, never seem to leave Happy Hollow. Late tonight, I’ll watch them drop flaps to turn their booths into tents. They’ll smoke cheap dope and drink peppermint schnapps and pee out onto the midway’s dirt. I guess they’re the gypsies of the rural United States–itinerant, insular, swarthy, unclean, not to be trusted. You are in no way drawn to them. They all have the same blank hard eyes as people in the bathrooms of East Coast bus terminals. They want your money and maybe to look up your skirt; beyond that you’re just blocking the view. Next week they’ll dismantle and pack and haul up to the Wisconsin State Fair, where they’ll never set foot off the midway they pee on. While I’m watching from the bench, an old withered man in an lllinois Poultry Association cap careers past on one of those weird three-wheeled carts, like a turbocharged wheelchair, and runs nearly over my sneaker. This ends up being my one unassisted interview of the day, and it’s brief. The man keeps revving his cart’s engine like a biker. ‘Traish,‘ he calls the carnies. ‘Lowlifes.’ He gestures down at the twirling rides. ‘Wouldn’t let my own kids go off down there on a goddamn bet.’ He raising pullets down near Olney. He has something in his cheek. ‘Steal you blind. Drug-addicted and such. Swindle you nekked them games. Traish. Me, I ever year we drive up, I carry my wallet like this here.’ He points to his hip. His wallet’s on a big steel clip attached to a wire on his belt; the whole thing looks vaguely electrified. Q: ‘But do they want to? Your kids? Hit the Hollow?’ He spits brownly. ‘Hail no. We all come for the shows.’ He means the livestock competitions. ‘See some folks, talk stock. Drink a beer. Work all year round raising ’em for show birds. It’s for pride. And to see folks. Shows’re over Tuesday, why, we go on home.’ He looks like a bird himself. His face is mostly nose, his skin loose and pebbly like poultry’s. His eyes are the color of denim. ‘Rest of this here’s for city people.’ Spits. He means Springfield, Decatur, Normal. ‘Walk around, stand in line, eat junk, buy soovneers. Give their wallet to the traish. Don’t even know there’s folks come here to work up here.’ He gestures up at the barns, then spits again, leaning way out over the cart to do it. ‘We come up to work, see some folks. Drink a beer. Bring our own goddamn food. Mother packs a hamper. Hail, what we’d want to go on down there for! No folks we know down there.’ He laughs. Asks my name. ‘It is good to see folks,’ he says before leaving me and peeling out in his chair, heading for the chicken din. ‘We all stayin’ up to the motel. Watch your wallet, boy.'”

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Calling hogs at the 2010 Illinois State Fair: