Year: 2009

Roundup
Jacket Copy, the LA Times literary organ, interviewed Matthew Baldwin. The Story Behind Infinite Summer. The Valve, meanwhile, finds the project “a little morbid“.

Unbeknownst to us, Infinite Summer was mentioned on television at some point.

Mark Flannigan, the Contemporary Literature Guide of About.com, is on-board.

Says Whitney of Feet on Polished Floor: “Reading David Foster Wallace is like punching yourself repeatedly in the face. But in a good way.”

Danielle started late but is determined to finish by August 12th. Cynthia of Catching Days was also tardy, but has already caught up.

Gerry Canavan, on the narrative shift that begins on page 140

The multiple perspectives characteristic of Infinite Jest have now, suddenly, infected the text itself; the chapter headings that had previously presented themselves as objective and reliable third-person-omniscient narration are now uncovered as subjective and perspectival, opinionated, excitable, and frankly a little confused.

Michael posted an “Infinite Summer playlist” at Trials & Tribulations. He also pointed out another playlist made by Señor Cisco.

Many bloggers are providing regular updates of their reading. Among them:
- Paul of I Just Read About That … , who provides character profiles, synopsies of plot developments, and more.
- The Feminist Texan.
- Charles & Leah of Ashcan Rantings.
- Ward at Brain Health Hacks.
- Sarah of Sarah’s Books
- Chris of Pandemonium of the Sun.
- Jennifer of Piano & Scene.
- Erica is using her MySpace page to track her progress through the novel.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.
July 5, 2009

Infinite Summery – Week 2

Milestone Reached: Page 147 (14%)

Chapters Read:

Chapter	Beginning Page	Synopsis
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT	85	Tiny Ewell travels to the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex via cab. A list of people gathered in the living room of the medical attaché house watching the Entertainment.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT	87	Remy Marathe of the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (wheelchair assassins) and M. Hugh Steeply of the Office of Unspecified Services (OUS) converse on a bluff outside Tucson, AZ. A herd of feral hamsters rampages in the Great Concavity (which used to be Vermont, and is now owned by Canada)
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT	95	Banter and exhaustion in the ETA lockeroom. Present: Hal Incandenza, John (N.R.) Wayne, Jim Troelsch, Michael Pemulis, Ted Schacht, Ortho Stice, Jim Struck, Keith Freer. Marathe and Steeply continue their conversation through sunset.
3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U	109	Big Buddy meetings: first Hal (with Kent Blott, Idris Arslanian, Evan Ingersol), then Wayne, Troelsch, Struck, and Stice.
MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR	121	Mario is seduced by USS Millicent Kent.
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT	126	Marathe and Steeply discuss the Entertainment, and possibility of an antidote (the anti-Entertainment).
30 April — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT	127	“Lyle”, the sweat-licking guru who lives in the ETA weight room. yrstruly, Poor Tony, and C go on a crime spree, acquire heroin from Dr. Wo. The heroin is laced with Drano and C dies after shooting up.
3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U.	135	Orin speaks to Hal by phone. Background of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House. Bricklayer story. Hal’s paper on active and passive heroes. Steeply’s article about the woman who had an artificial heart in her purse when it was snatched. List of Anti-O.N.A.N. groups. Why videography never took off.

Characters:

Characters in bold appear to be major.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 85)

Tiny Ewell: Diminutive recovering alcoholic, being driven to the Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex.

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 87)

Remy Marathe: Member of the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (AFR); is working as a quadruple agent–that is, his superior, M. Fortier, thinks that Marthe is working as a triple agent (pretending to work with the Office of Unspecified Services, while in reality reporting back to AFR), but Marthe is actually collaborating with OUS to secure medical services for his wife.
M. Hugh Steeply: Agent the Office of Unspecified Services. Current operating in disguise as a large woman; Marathe’s contact.

MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR (page 121)

U.S.S. Millicent Kent: Girls 16’s Singles player who attempts to seduce Mario Incandenza.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U

“Lyle”: Guru who lives in ETA weight room and apparently subsists off other people’s sweat.
yrstruly: Narrator of the “dopesick” chapter. Addict, criminal.
C: yrstruly’s companion who dies after shooting up with heroin laced with Drano.
Dr. Wo: Provide Poor Tony with the the heroin, laced with Drano to punish him (Tony) for past grievance.
Poor Tony: yrstruly’s companion, possibly suspected that heroin was laced but said nothing as C. shot up.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. (page 135)

Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name: So into the “anonymous” scene that he remained completely so. Founded the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

July 4, 2009

Michael Pietsch: Editing Infinite Jest

Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, and was David Foster Wallace’s editor. He adapted the following from “Editing Wallace,” a Q&A with Rick Moody, published in Sonora Review 55, May 2009.

In April 1992 I received on submission from David Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, around 150 pages of Infinite Jest, the opening section. They were wild, smart, funny, sad, and unlike any pages of manuscript I'd ever held in my hands. The range of voices and settings sent me reeling. The transvestite breakdown on the subway, the kid in the doctor's office. The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The Lung. Young Hal with his little brass one-hitter. Gately, Troelsch, Schacht. The names! Erdedy, Wardine, Madame Psychosis. I’d read chapters from it published as short stories in magazines and here at last was the gigantic construct that linked those wildly disparate pieces. What I remember is that David knew his book was going to be very, very long, and he was looking for someone whose editorial suggestions he thought he might listen to. I was lucky enough to be working at Little, Brown, a company that was willing to support this kind of endeavor. We signed a contract and waited.

When he was around two-thirds through the novel David sent me a giant stack of pages and asked for my thoughts. I protested that without the whole story it would be impossible to know what ultimately mattered. But I tried to give him an accounting of when I found it intolerably confusing or slow or just too hard to make sense of. I banged my head hardest against the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and the Orin Incandenza football stories and David revised those strands considerably.

We’d agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this? Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them.

Every decision was David's. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his. It is a common misconception that the writer turns the manuscript over to the editor, who then revises, shapes, and cuts at will. In fact the editor’s job is to earn the writer’s agreement that changes he or she suggests are worth making. David accepted many cuts—around 250 manuscript pages is what I recall. But he resisted others, for reasons that he usually explained.

Here are a few of those responses and explanations. They give a sense of how engaged David was in this process and of how much fun it was to work with him.

p. 52—This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter.

p. 82—I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back.

p. 133—Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up disc so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding.)

pp. 327-330. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on your part, my canines are bared on this one.

Ppp. 739-748. I’ve rewritten it—for about the 11^th time—for clarity, but I bare teeth all the way back to the 2^nd molar on cutting it.

P. 785ff—I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?

I keep trying to imagine encountering David’s books separate from the tall, athletic, casual, brilliant, concerned, funny man I knew—the way we encounter most writing, bodies of work whose creators we never meet, complete years before we encounter them. It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind. And I have to say that the David we encounter through Infinite Jest is pretty amazingly like the David I knew. When for a moment I manage to imagine myself as a reader opening up a copy of Infinite Jest for the first time, the way I opened V or Soldier’s Pay or Suttree or A Handful of Dust or The Canterbury Tales, I think Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Not the Best Student

The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.

I know we passed endnote 24 last week, but I want to return to it. And I will do so because when I type things here you have to read them poop ha ha ha I made you read poop.

In 2006 I went away to film school¹⁷ fully expecting to pop out of it again three years later as the most visionary writer/director of my generation. Dream big, kids. I left three weeks later, in part because of some assigned reading that very closely resembled endnote 24, only longer, and with that gross shiny-textbook smell.

So I would like to extend my thanks to David Foster Wallace for making me relive that experience, albeit shorter and in the comfort of my own home, as opposed to hunched over a library table desperately trying to read as fast as possible so I can do my essay/s. I was there three weeks — how did I get behind on so many essays? And why were there essays in a supposedly practice-based course? And why am I still bitter about this?

I wasn’t sold on endnote 24 until I read the above passage. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The summary for Cage III – Free Show is an amazing concept. It’s funny and twisted and exciting and everything you think Infinite Jest will be when you first hear about it.

I can’t help but view the whole book in a different light, with Free Show in mind. I would actively discourage myself from such a conscious process, but I’m so obsessed with the quote at the top of this post that I would rather interpret IJ the wrong way than try to put it at the back of my mind.

“Fine, Avery” I hear you say, “you liked a tiny portion of an endnote we all slogged through. Well done. But what about the rest of the book so far?”

I’m enjoying it.

Oh, you want more than that, right? Okay. Well, I’m having great fun with the Marathe/Steeply segment. Although that’s not to say I have any idea what the hell is going on (sentences like “have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray” put paid to that notion). I don’t know if it’s my status as a trans-individual that grants me such delight in Steeply’s extremely poor disguise (re: the lopsided boobs — we’ve all been there), or if we’re all having a good time reading it but I’m not going to question my enjoyment. Especially since I have so little time for such questions after scrawling acronyms from the section onto my arm in a failed effort to remember them.

If you’re interested, having such epidermal annotations publicly visible in a crowded mall will draw the attention of security agents desperate to know if QFP is some kind of terrorist organisation with a vendetta against Sears.

Just, y’know. FYI.

Through All The Dead Ends And Bad Scenes

There is this thing they do on the first day of medical school orientation to help the students understand what to expect. They gather all the first-years into an auditorium and the dean or whoever comes out and he says to them, “Turn and look at the person on your left. Now turn and look at the person on your right. Because in just a few years, both of those dudes are going to be doctors.” Then everyone high-fives and they all make out with each other.

Don’t let your girlfriend go to med school, is all I’m saying. She will totally dump you for one of those guys.

On an unrelated note, I wonder how many of our fellow infsumalians have dropped out already. I was thinking about them as I read my friend Marcus Sakey’s guest essay on Friday.

Like Matt Bucher and Jason Kottke, Marcus stressed the importance of trusting David Foster Wallace as you read Infinite Jest, and this touches on the most important important connections between writer and reader. When I teach writing workshops I tell students that one of the biggest mistakes I think writers make, even some experienced writers, is not doing enough from the start to build the trust of the reader. Many writers seem to expect people will read their novel just because they wrote it, which is insane. Reading a novel of any kind requires a commitment and in a marketplace of infinite choices a novelist needs to convince the reader that he not only has a great story to tell but that he can be relied on to tell it well. And he has to do that immediately. He has to promise.

Having written a book like Infinite Jest Wallace is something like a science fair partner who says to you, “Forget about that corn still you were planning to make with some other writer on your shelf. Let’s build a cold-fusion reactor.” And you’re suspicious because you’ve been burned by ambitious partners before, ones who tell you they want to build a cold-fusion reactor, thus requiring that you do more work than you really wanted to do, but halfway through they’ve blown you off to get high with the Spanish club and left you with a lot of indecipherable notes and not a clue how they’re supposed to go together.

How do you know Wallace can deliver before you’ve already blown the whole summer?

We have a number of reasons to trust Wallace. We have the word of smart people who have read the book, like Marcus, Jason, and Matt. We have almost 15 years of people reading and rereading, mining the book for its pleasures. We have the place to which this book has rapidly ascended in my generation’s unconscious.

But best of all we have the first ten pages.

The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and he deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to make you a promise.

‘I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.

‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.

He could have just said this: Listen up. I have a freaking great story to tell you.

If you feel yourself getting frustrated in parts, or lost. If you feel Wallace has lost your trust, stop, go back and read the first ten pages. You’ll find a promise.

Breathing Into a Paper Bag

I’m so far behind where I’m supposed to be and I’m trying not to panic, though that didn’t work out too well last night at 9:00 p.m.

Me: I can’t do this! I have nothing to say! I’m an underqualified blogging hack with no literary grasp, or scope, and this was all just a horrible mistake so you’d better FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO POST ON INFINITE SUMMER, OH GOD.

Matthew: Buh-wha?

A series of talk-her-down e-mails ensued, wrapping up with a YouTube video of Feist on Sesame Street, singing about the number four. Then I slept for ten hours. Hey! Things are looking up.

I may have several points to make here, but number one is: how the fuck are you people finding time to read? Do none of you have jobs? Certainly you don’t have families, or children belonging to an age group that is defined by its inability to successfully manipulate a fresh band-aid. Too many people need me for too many things, and I suddenly see why it’s all I can do to throw up a blog post and then run screaming to put out another dryer lint fire, or keep a neglected dog from peeing In someone’s shoe, or sadly buttoning up another unironed shirt as I dash out the door to a job where a minor office sport is trying to guess how old I am.

But let’s think about this sentence for a moment:

A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness non-pareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofaial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.

SHRINKing UPPer CLASSes of PETro-ARab NAtions whose STAGGering FEEs are WHOLly AD vaLORem.

I feel like Rex Harrison ought to burst in and start singing that.¹⁶ And somewhere in Nova Scotia there’s a soundproof bunker where some poor b-list Shakespearean actor has been subsisting on Jell-O and hand-rolled American Spirits, recording an unabridged audio version of Infinite Jest for the last thirteen years.

“I don’t mind,” Hal said softly. “I could wait forever.”

I hope he wraps it up soon and turns it into an 80-gig podcast or this book is going to become a doorstop. Again.

Dead Sea Diving

Fun fact I learned from the last book I read: the Dead Sea, with a salt concentration of 32%, is so saline that it practically precludes swimming. You can dive in (though heaven forbid you do so without hermetically-sealed goggles), but the density of the water will pop you back to the surface like a cork. Remaining underwater for any period of time requires a Herculean effort.

That’s an apt analogy for the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest.¹⁴ I’ve found it easy, in the pre-coffee morning or the laying-in-bed night, to simply float upon the surface of the narrative, consuming paragraphs without much regard as to whether or where or when we’ve seen a character before, or what major and minor motifs are currently being explored, or how this eight page filmography fits into the whole.¹⁵

At other times, when I am fully lucid and engaged (i.e., between the hours of Last Latte of the Day and First Beer of the Evening), I try to submerge myself in the text. But it is not without exertion, and I have to come up for air every 20-30 minutes. Indeed, it feels like exercise. Not “work” mind you, but an endorphin-producing, man-I-feel-better-about-myself-for-having-done-that workout.

Each dip into the novel also feels like a completely separate excursion. When I take a break from a conventional novel it’s like pressing pause on a video, with the narrative flow frozen on the screen, awaiting my return. But in reading Infinite Jest I have tended to stop at the chapter divisions, and nearly every chapter of the first 100 pages starts in a new place, with new characters, and often in a new time. It’s akin to reading a collection of short stories, set in a shared universe but with little else in common. I can see why many people–including myself a decade ago–put this novel down and never pick it up again. There is so little connective tissue thus far that the end of each chapter feels like a natural place to stop reading, forever.

And yet, 100 pages in, I sense engrossment on the horizon. With each additional chapter I find myself sinking into the salty tide. It’s probably only a matter of time before I disappear below the waves for good.

Some other observations:

Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.

Confession: Endnote 40 marks my first genuine irritation at Wallace’s “pretentiousness” (real or perceived). It (the endnote) begins with “In other words”, implying that it is going to help the reader understand Marathe’s true allegiance, and then provides an explanation even more opaque than that found in the body of the novel. Maybe it just caught me in a bad mood, but I was confused, I wanted clarity, and phrases such as “the even-numbered total of his final loyalties” failed to provide.

Question: Has anyone yet deduced the meaning of the glyphs that sometimes precede chapter headings?

I have a sneaking suspicion that these are the true chapter delimiters, and that the year headings are but chyrons.