Infinite Summer

Year: 2009

  • Jason Kottke: Forward

    Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. The archive of his Infinite Jest commentary can be found here.

    Is everyone in here yet? Yes? Ok.

    I’m thrilled to kick off Infinite Summer with this here Forward. Before we get started, I have a disclaimer to offer. Well, actually several related disclaimers which, taken together, should convince you that I am not at all qualified to speak to you about the literary or cultural impact of Infinite Jest and its author on contemporary American society. Apologies if that’s what you’re here for; in that case I can refer you to Dave Eggers’ foreword in the new paperback copy of IJ.

    Now, the first disclaimer: I was not an English major. In fact, I don’t even read that much fiction. In the past five years, I have read The Corrections, Infinite Jest (for the second time), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Pride and Prejudice, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, nearly half of 2666, and that’s about it, give or take some Lord of the Rings. I will be of little assistance in helping you to understand how Infinite Jest fits into the canon of American literature, past or present.

    Writing is something I don’t know a great deal about either. I earn my keep as a blogger, which profession most people assume is synonymous with writing but really isn’t, in the same way that basketball players run but aren’t runners and architects draw but aren’t, uh, drawers. I love Wallace’s writing in IJ and elsewhere but beyond that, I can’t tell you why it’s good, who his writing was influenced by, who he influences, or what the purpose of his complex sentence structure and grammatical tics is. (Or should that be “are”? (See what I’m talking about?))

    Furthermore, I do not play tennis, haven’t suffered from depression, have never been addicted to anything (except perhaps Tetris on the original Game Boy), don’t know the Boston area that well, haven’t attended an _______ Anonymous meeting, and did not go to a small college in New England, all things that Wallace pulled from his life experience and wove together in the IJ narrative. Does Wallace accurately convey to the reader the pressures felt by the exceptional junior tennis player? Does the AA stuff ring true? What about the addiction aspects of the novel? I can help you with none of those questions.

    But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.

    And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

    And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.

  • Battening Down the Hatches

  • Colin Meloy: Why I am Reading Infinite Jest

    Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.

    I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase. Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12 years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation when I was thirteen and I had fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex, warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

    Until now.

    Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread, the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.

  • Roundup

    Michael made some Infinite Summer bookmarks with the schedule printed right on them. We were totally going to do the same thing, but whatever we would have cooked up would have looked pretty lame compared to those.

    In addition to creating a Google Calendar and iCal calendar for the I.S. schedule, James also says he’ll be blogging his reading of the novel at his website.

    Ralph created a Google Apps Progress Tracker. “I’m not graphic designer, obviously, so it’s very very plain right now,” he says. “But any and all suggestions welcome.”

    At Infinite Zombies, five six seven writers intend to chronicle their reading of the book in a format they describe as “part book club, part Fight Club“.

    Carolina created a Flickr pool. Photos are also being posted on the Facebook wall.

    The Infinite Summer Ravelry group has hit 50 members. The Goodreads page has 87. The LiveJournal community continues to grow.

    Bitch Ph.D says she’s on board. Marc says that, on June 21st, he’s going to turn his weblog into “my own journal of the Infinite Summer project/book club.” Kev and Emily are going to “post our gchat convos while we read infinite jest.

    Katie is keeping track of her favorite DFW quotations of a Tumblelog. Someone is tweeting Infinite Jest 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

    Meg is trying to talk her wedding guests into reading the novel so everyone will have something to talk about at the reception.

    And here are some other folks who are talking about the project:

    If you’ll be blogging along, let us know in the comments.

  • How to Read Infinite Jest

    The following was drafted by Matt Bucher (maintainer of the wallace-l listserv and author of this post), and augmented by input from Nick Maniatis (administrator of The Howling Fantods, a site devoted to DFW), and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (professor at Pomona College, who teaches a course entitled David Foster Wallace).

    There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down, cut in half, or skipping around. But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester.

    1. Read the endnotes: Please. They are not boring bibliographic details, but rather an integral part of the text. And the bouncing back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug.

    2. Use bookmarks: Yes “bookmarks”, plural: one for the main text and one for the endnotes. Doing so will save you hours of searching, and the aggravation of losing your place several times an hour.

    3. Persevere to page 200: There are several popular way stations on the road to abandoning Infinite Jest. The most heavily trafficked by far is “The Wardine Section”. Where the opening pages of IJ are among the best written in the book, page 37 (and many pages thereafter) are in a tortured, faux-Ebonics type dialect. “Wardine say her momma ain’t treat her right.” “Wardine be cry.” Potentially offensive (if one wants to be offended), and generally hard to get through. Hang in there, ignore the regional parlance, and focus on what the characters are doing. Like most things in the book, you’ll need to know this later. Likewise for the other rough patches to be found in the first fifth of the novel.

    4. Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.

    5. Flag, copy, or bookmark page 223: Page 223 of the novel contains some information that you will either need to internalize or refer to frequently to make sense of the narrative. Once you reach it, flag the page with a stickie, dogear the corner, photocopy the material, stick a (third) bookmark there–whatever will ensure that you can find this information when you need it.

    6. Don’t do the thing you’re dying to do right now: Namely, flip to page 223 to see what we’re talking about. David Foster Wallace ordered the book the way he did for a reason, and part of step 4 above is respecting that. In fact, we encourage you to take the fingers-in-the-ears “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” approach to spoilers in general.

    7. Abuse your copy: When you are finished, 223 should be just one of many mutilated pages in your novel. Liberal use of tape flags, post-it notes, highlighting, or your anal-retentive page marking device of choice, as a means of keeping track of key passages you think you might like to come back to (or share with others), is encouraged. (Note: the preceding advice is not recommended for those reading on the Kindle.) If you can’t bring yourself to work over your only copy of Infinite Jest, consider investing in a second.

    8. Keep notes: As if lugging around a book the size of a 2 br. 1ΒΌ bath apartment isn’t enough, you may want to carry a notebook as well. You won’t always have the requisite Oxford English Dictionary within arm’s reach, you know.

    9. Brush up on your Hamlet: It’s no coincidence that the first two words of Hamlet are “Who’s there?” and the first two words of Infinite Jest are “I am”. Even the novel’s title was lifted from the play.

      As you read, it behooves you keep in mind the relationships between the characters in Shakespeare’s drama (the ghost, poor Yorick, etc.) and the central themes of the play. You can find a brief primer here.

    10. Employ a reader’s guide: There are two companion guides that you may find helpful. One is Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Burn’s guide is rather short (96 pages), but it includes a helpful chronology , as well as sections on the novel’s critical reception and key plot points.

      Another guide is Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. [Full disclosure: Bucher is the editor & publisher of the Carlisle book.] Elegant Complexity is different than the Burn guide in that it offers a summary and exegesis on every section of the novel–and that it’s 512 pages long. Also included are chronologies, family trees, thematic discussions, and a map of the tennis academy.

    11. Use online references: There are copious webpages out there that the first-time Jesters will find useful. Here are a a few:

      You can find links to more resources at The Howling Fantods.

      Obviously many of these sites contain spoilers, so poke a hole in an index card and only view your monitor through that while visiting one.

  • The Schedule

    Clip ‘n’ Save: it’s your summer syllabus. Note that “location” refers to the Kindle.

    Date Page

    		Location Percent Complete
    Fri, Jun 26 63 1522 6%
    Mon, Jun 29 94 2233 9%
    Fri, Jul 03 137 3236 13%
    Mon, Jul 06 168 3900 17%
    Fri, Jul 10 210 4844 21%
    Mon, Jul 13 242 5561 24%
    Fri, Jul 17 284 6545 28%
    Mon, Jul 20 316 7250 32%
    Fri, Jul 24 358 8174 36%
    Mon, Jul 27 390 8869 39%
    Fri, Jul 31 432 9832 44%
    Mon, Aug 03 464 10556 47%
    Fri, Aug 07 506 11510 51%
    Mon, Aug 10 537 12243 54%
    Fri, Aug 14 580 13233 59%
    Mon, Aug 17 611 13925 62%
    Fri, Aug 21 653 14900 66%
    Mon, Aug 24 685 15628 69%
    Fri, Aug 28 727 16554 74%
    Mon, Aug 31 759 17293 77%
    Fri, Sep 04 801 18315 81%
    Mon, Sep 07 833 19021 84%
    Fri, Sep 11 875 19972 89%
    Mon, Sep 14 907 20767 92%
    Fri, Sep 18 949 21708 96%
    Mon, Sep 21 981 22403 100%

    At the end of each specified day, you should be at or past the given page number or location.

    Question! If, as we’ve said, we don’t care when people start, when they finish, or how fast they go in the meantime, why even have a schedule? Two reason. First, some folks just operate better with milestones. Second, the schedule denotes the Spoiler Line for any given day. For instance, on July 6th we ask that you confine your discussion to only those events that transpire on page 168 of the novel and earlier; on August 17th anything past page 653 is verboten; and so forth. The Spoiler Line will hold both on the posts here and in the Daily Discussion forum. If you find yourself ahead of the pack and eager to chat with like-minded overachievers, or if you’re already read Infinite Jest and wish to talk about the novel in its entirety, what we ask that you do so in the Infinite Jest General Discussion Forum, where there are no spoiler restrictions whatsoever.

    A note about the endnotes: The above schedule does not take the endnotes into account. And as some endnotes are long (like, 14 pages worth of long), that means the actual amount of weekly reading will vary. But, you know, it’s like agreeing to always divide the check up evenly when dining with friends: you may have to chip in a bit more occasionally, but it’s better than haggling over the math.
    A note about editions: As it turns out, all (physical) edition of Infinite Jest have 981 pages: the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc. A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent. A note about the Kindle: At first we thought that we could simply take the 22260 locations in Infinite Jest and divide them by 93 days, as we did with the number of pages, to compute the number of locations one would need to read daily. In practice, however, our location milestones wound up pretty discrepant from our page milestones, and we wanted to ensure that all Infinite Summer participants were on the same page, figuratively and literally, during our discussions. So what we finally wound up doing was compiling a list of 26 unique phrases–one from the bottom of page 21, one from the bottom of page 63, one from the bottom of page 94, etc.–and sending them to Friend of Infinite Summer and Swell Guy Tarun who looked up each on his Kindle and reported back with all of the corresponding locations. Thanks Tarun! You can find the list of unique phrases here.