Infinite Summer

Year: 2009

  • Roundup

    Infinite Summer was mentioned in Newsweek, both the online and print edition. Related: hello one zillion new visitors. More info about the event can be found here, and the forums are over yonder. And in case you are wondering: a dedicated reader could pick up Infinite Jest today and still finish by September 21st if they chose to do so, no sweat. (Well, maybe a little sweat. But Lyle can take care of that for you.)

    Infinite Summer also graced the pages of The New York Times Book Blog, Phawker, and The EphBlog.

    Gayla of Beautiful Screaming Lady views the many exhortations on this site to “trust the author” with skepticism:

    I have to admit–and this makes me feel like Ebenezer Scrooge on a deadline at a Christmas parade–I don’t find … these arguments particularly compelling. I agree that the first ten pages are great. There is a lot of great writing in this book. The problem is that there’s also a lot of–not bad writing, but problematic writing, and there are a lot of paragraphs where I feel that Wallace’s point is not so much to communicate with me as to show me what a virtuoso he is…

    And that’s why I don’t trust David Foster Wallace. I’m not going to stop reading the book, because its truly fabulous moments are worth slogging through Wardine and yrstruly. But I don’t believe he was in control of his talent.

    In an interview with The Aspen Times, the Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller says he’s about to jump in the fray. At this point we’re only a drummer shy of a house band.

    William.K.H and Jeffrey Paris argue that Infinite Jest is not “science-fiction”. Jim Brown and Robert Sharp wonder if the novel qualifies as a “new media object”

    On Infinite Detox, a blogger struggles to overcome a dependency on tramadol while reading Infinite Jest. He writes: “Six or so months ago I found the book’s treatment of addiction and recovery compelling enough to inspire me to quit cold turkey for several weeks over the Christmas holidays … With Wallace’s book, again, acting as something of a guide and mentor, I hope also to give my drug habit the boot.”

    Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

    If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.

  • Infinite Summery – Week 3

    Milestone Reached: Page 221 (22%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 151: Drug tests at E.T.A; Mike Pemulis sells sterile urine.

    Page 157 – WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ: Himself’s father (Hal’s grandfather) prepares to teach Himself how to play tennis, tells of the incident that ended his own tennis career, and drinks heavily.

    Page 169 – 4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis acquires some “incredibly potent” DMZ.

    Page 172 – TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA (etc.): Hal narrates a film made by Mario. The narration consists of a series of how-to instructions “Here is how to do individual drills …”)

    Page 176 – SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS … WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: A series of statements made by recovering addicts at Ennet House.

    Page 181 – LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Madame Psychosis begins her show at 109-WYYY FM; Hal and Mario listen at the Headmaster’s House.

    Page 193: A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the other six buildings on the Enfield Marine Public Heath Hospital complex (down the hill from ETA).

    Page 198 – 6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: ETA weight room; introduction to Lyle, the sweat-licking guru.

    Page 200: An overview of the residents of Ennet House, including a long discursion on Tiny Ewell and his fascination with tattoos.

    Page 211: Michael Pemulis hypes up the DMZ to the other members of ETA.

    New Characters: Really just one: Madam Psychosis, the host of “Sixty Minutes More or Less with…” on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station 109-WYYY FM, a program to which Mario listens religiously.

  • Nick Maniatis: The Howling Fantods

    Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the fourth time he stopped counting.

    The Howling Fantods was inspired by Infinite Jest. I bought a discounted first edition of Infinite Jest in response to a review I had read in what I think was the Melbourne Age. My first Wallace reading experience was on public transport, on my way home one evening, in Canberra, Australia. The opening pages of that novel changed me.

    It was 1996 and I was in my third year of university. An icon for the program NCSA Mosaic had appeared on the desktop of computers at the Australian National University and opened my eyes to the world wide web. In late ’96 or early ’97 I made a free personal “me” page using the geocities (ugh) hosting environment. I loved reading Wallace. I loved the idea of this web thing. I merged the two and the SCREAMING FANTODS was born. (I was emailed a correction a few days later)

    Around this time I discovered wallace-l the Wallace mailing list back then appeared to be mostly academics and students. There were a number of amazing group reads of Infinite Jest co-ordinated through wallace-l. Another just finished up prior to Infinite Summer (IJIM – Infinite Jest, In Memorial). Right now the focus over at wallace-l is Oblivion.

    I don’t think I’d ever been privy to such articulate, academic, and passionate discussion about a text. Ever. There were people there who were just as internet aware as me, if not more so. They were also much, much smarter. It was scary. It was fantastic. And all their discussions were searchable. They still are.

    Infinite Jest was, I think, published at just the right time. The blossoming world wide web brought readers, academics and fans together using a common, digital, user-created medium that seemed designed to discuss this book.

    I feel terribly lucky to have been part of that early online community. I’m glad they were there for me in September last year.

    And now we have Infinite Summer. There’s not much more exciting than seeing your favourite author mentioned all over the web. And not only that, the focus is on his writing, not what happened in his life. There is no way I’d be ever able to find the time to organise something as mammoth as a large scale Infinite Jest group read, so it is wonderful to see the dedicated team here managing spectacularly.

    The best bit, readers, is that you’ve all made it this far. You’re almost over the hump. Once you get through the first 250 or so pages the bigger payoffs start hitting in droves. I’m keeping an eye on the forums and blogs and quite clearly many of you out there are finding this much easier and more entertaining than you thought it would be. I’ll let you in on another secret:

    It gets better.

    I’ll be surprised if you can keep to as little as 75 pages a week after page 500. That will certainly be the biggest challenge.

    Bits that I think are worth mentioning / revisiting from the first 210 pages:

    p37 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: I’m sorry everyone, it’s the ice-cream. Confirmed by a trusted Wallace-l member who asked David Foster Wallace personally. Sorry. It was even harder for me to accept because when I was reading IJ on release I hadn’t ever seen Dove ice cream or chocolate in Australia. I thought soap was the only option.

    p37-38 Clenette and p128-135 Yrstruly: I know a number of you skipped these two sections. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. Honestly? I’d prefer you skip them if it means you don’t close the book and never open it again. I found them hard the first time too. I also had an inner urge to find them offensive. Was Wallace making fun of these people? How come the other sections don’t read like this? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is narrating? Wait a minute, who was narrating before?

    My advice? When you read IJ again (or if you flick back for a second attempt) just go with the Clenette and Yrstruly sections. Don’t try to parse everything, they don’t work if you slow down and read carefully. Both sections work more effectively when you are already vaguely familiar with their content because then the voices and rhythms start to wash over you. When that happens so do the characters. And then you’re inside their heads and THAT is not comfortable. In fact it is very, very uncomfortable. I’m not going to try for a moment to argue that they are realistic voices or heads to be in. But these two sections do their jobs very well if you just let go and trust Wallace. Does this sound familiar?

    It wasn’t until a few years ago did I get a flicker of how spot-on Wallace is with these sections. Post schoolyard fight, I had some students write reports of the incident they witnessed. In their rush to get everything out of their heads and onto the page they seemed to forget about formal English grammar, or formal anything, for that matter. It was stream of consciousness stuff. Emotion mixed with description mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue mixed with unusual, but workable, phonetic transpositions. These kids were not illiterate by any means. If anything the stress of the situation had messed with their ability to express themselves using the English expected of them. The reports reminded me instantly of Infinite Jest and made me appreciate it even more.

    If you want to see if Wallace can make this work in greater length try ‘John Billy’ in Wallace’s short story collection ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. There’s also another example of this voice in another of his stories. But to tell you which one would actually mess with the impact of it. I know you’ll find it yourself.

    p105-109 Marathe and Steeply on choice: Which character do you side with? Are you actively choosing? Or just going with your gut reaction? Is it impossible to choose? Double-bind maybe? When I first read IJ I didn’t find the Steeply and Marathe sections particularly compelling.

    On the second read they were my focus. It is so easy to sweep the Steeply and Marathe conversations to the side when you want to know more about the entertainment. I think they’re some of the most underrated parts of the book. Read them.

    p144-151 Videophony: I find it impossible to use Skype without thinking about this section. Particularly when I want to check my email or surf the web at the same time as the current video chat and feel I can’t without being rude. I’ve also become aware of how often I relax with my arms folded above my head while sitting upright, how often I scratch my nose, and how often I pick at my right ear.

    p157-169: Every single line of this section is pure gold and leads perfectly to page 169’s time slowed down can’t look at the page (but can’t look away either) moment.

    p196: HELP WANTED. I don’t think I need to explain this.

    The very best thing about Infinite Summer so far, for someone who has read the book way more times than is healthy, is re-living my first read via all of your comments and posts. The Infinite Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog are doing a mighty fine job too.

    Infinite Jest is my favourite book and I have not stopped reading it for any length of time since I opened it to the first page all those years ago. Be careful, or else this Infinite Summer thing might live up to just a little more than its name…

  • Post of the Pop-Tart Brown Sugar Cinnamon Toaster Pastry

    This post subsidized by Kellogg’s.26

    Everyone knows that Sunday evening feeling.27 The pit in your stomach that grows and grows while you watch crappy TV shows that you’re not really watching because school is tomorrow and you have. Not. Done. Your. Homework.

    Those who read my post last week (“Not the best student“) will not be shocked to learn that I suffered heavily from the Sunday evening feeling. I do not believe that I ever, in my school career, did a single piece of homework until the night before it was due.

    How does this relate to Infinite Jest? Please. Like you even have to ask.

    I’ve just finished some blast processing, reading all 75 of this week’s pages in one sitting, which MAN I do not recommend. It’s certainly lucky that, as Matthew mentioned, these pages were a lot more easy going than earlier fare. But still, that’s a lot of pages. I’m looking to Infinite Summer as an exercise in reading and writing, sure, but more than anything I’m hoping to learn some time-management skills, too.

    I can’t help but be jealous of Hal’s routine at Enfield Tennis Academy  — there’s very little space there to mess up or miss a deadline. I suppose it could be that I’m just jealous of his life, of course — what I wouldn’t give to be moneyed, super-intelligent and a tennis ace. Well, maybe scratch the tennis part, I’m not really one for sports. And his smarts seem like a bit of a burden at times, actually.

    Okay, so I just want the money. Big deal.

    The more we delve into Hal’s (mis)adventures at ETA, the more anxious I grow about that first chapter. I’m really liking this guy, guys. And I don’t want him to become that trapped soul, that shell of a person.

    I really feel like this post is lacking a unifying theme, but I’m sure that’s to be expected after cramming that much IJ into my head. And the whole Madame Psychosis section did some damage all by itself. I can’t quite work out if I like it or not. Or even if I like the idea of her show or not.

    I mean, it’s certainly a great concept — this mysterious figure, the only paid host of a college radio station, sending out whatever she feels like to MIT students and anyone else who can pick it up. I’m just not sure I’d be one of the students who tuned in with any kind of regularity.

    The show we ‘overheard’ seemed deliberately opaque, and hard to parse — I’m presuming even more so delivered to your ears. I’m wondering if the show is Foster Wallace’s way of commenting on the difficulty of reading his own work. I’m wondering if that’s too shallow an interpretation on my part. I’m wondering if my pop tarts are finished cooking yet.

    Okay, that last one isn’t really relevant, I’ll grant you. Unless it’s somehow telling that I finished that chunk of Infinite Jest and immediately craved cinnamon pop tarts?

    (Note: I request silence from those of you who know that I always crave cinnamon pop tarts.)

    So: is everyone doing better than me, or are you guys having to indulge in massive catch-up sessions, too? Did you like the Madame Psychosis section, and if you did can you tell me why and what it’s about so I can steal your words and use them at parties to sound clever? And are my pop tarts done? (Yes.)

  • We’re Together Everybody Knows And Here’s How The Story Goes

    So, the bricklayer story.

    On page 139, Wallace gives us a very funny memo sent from one State Farm employee to another. The memo quotes from an insurance claim. Because I know there are folks who aren’t quite caught up yet, and because this discussion is specifically about Wallace’s choices in telling it, here is the passage as it appears in the novel:

    Dear Sir:

    I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the accident reporting form, I put “trying to do the job alone”, as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following details will be sufficient.

    I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.

    Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone.

    Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground.

    Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body.

    The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a… endtranslNTCOM626

    Like a lot of folks I’m sure, I read that piece with an acute sense of deja vu. I not only knew the story, I knew specific phrases were coming even before I read them.

    My uncle was in the insurance business and he often sent me and my dad and my brothers funny things he encountered (this was in the actual mail, before the days of the casual email forward). I not only remembered getting this story, an alleged insurance claim from somewhere, but I remembered it being identical to Wallace’s text, almost word-for-word.

    My first inclination was that Wallace could not have possibly just cut-and-pasted this whole episode from somewhere else. I considered that maybe my memory was faulty–that Wallace had rewritten an old urban legend with such skill that his version had since become the definitive one. And that my Uncle Tom had sent this to me, not in the late 80s when I was in college, but in the late 90s after Infinite Jest had been released.

    Except.

    You can find this story in all corners of the Internet with just minor variations. The following appeared on a University of Vermont ListServ dated February of 1996, the same month Infinite Jest was published. The words in bold also appear in the IJ version:

    Dear Sir:

    I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

    I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

    Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building.

    In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and the broken collarbone, as listed in Section 3 of the accident reporting form.

    Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in Paragraph 2 of this correspondence. Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mind and was able to hold tightly to the rope, in spite of the excruciating pain I was now beginning to experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground, and the bottom fell out of the barrel.

    Now devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel weighed approximately 50 lbs. I refer you again to my weight. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, broken tooth and severe lacerations of my legs and lower body.

    Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, as I lay there on the pile of bricks, in pain, unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope.

    This is a very old story, one apparently even better known in the British Isles, where it’s said that most comedians of the mid-century had some version of it in their repertoire.20 The insurance claim conceit seems to be a more recent development. It appears in Mike Metcalfe’s 1996 textbook Reading Critically in a form almost identical to the one in Infinite Jest. This version also appeared in a 1982 Louisville Courier-Journal column by Byron Crawford. It’s not available on the internet, but except for a few minor details the text of that article is virtually identical to the text in Infinite Jest. 21

    All of that was to confirm what many of you already know–David Foster Wallace lifted the text of the entire episode from a pass-around joke. And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It surprised me because if a writer had copied someone else’s words so blatantly and without acknowledgment into any other novel I would have been indignant. I wouldn’t have seen any grey area at all. I would have said it was wrong.

    But in this particular context, Wallace’s use of this old story is awfully effective. It’s just one of a series of references to urban legends throughout the book, including one to a famous story about toothbrush mischief that Wallace appropriates with more originality. I suppose he’s trying to point out the unreliable nature of any narrative, that our faith in them is something of an illusion. There is also a recurring theme about control that is explicitly described in an earlier scene,22 which takes place in the ETA weight room. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book so far: “Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down.”

    I dig all of that.

    Still I’m not entirely convinced the ends justify the means. Borrowing and sampling might be done casually by other artists, but words are still sacred to writers. There were a lot ways Wallace might have rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it. 23

    Of course Wallace knew all that, and so we have to conclude that he didn’t do it to deceive and had some other purpose in mind. I suppose he was hoping that readers who knew the story would recognize it, but readers who didn’t know it (which was probably most of them in the nascent days of the Internet when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will probably react to its appearance differently than one who thinks it’s the product of Wallace’s original wit. I suspect Wallace would have anticipated that, too.

    Arrgh.

    So I’m curious what all y’all think. Those who are reading IJ for the third time and those who are reading it for the first. Those who recognized the bricklayer story when they read it and those who didn’t. Where do you come down on this? Is this appropriation of another (unknown) person’s material valid? Or not? Is it okay because it’s a piece of narrative flotsam, the cultural equivalent of abandoned property? If we could attribute authorship to someone, would claiming it be less acceptable? 24 Is it because Infinite Jest seems to be so singular an accomplishment that it frustrates our desire to apply these kinds of standards to it? 25

    Maybe no one cares about this stuff except me, in which case you can just enjoy a recreation of the accident on Mythbusters.

  • The Trick is Keeping the Truth Up-Front

    Thanks for all your comments last week — despite the fact that my question (“how the fuck are you people finding time to read?”) was fundamentally rhetorical, your descriptions of how you’re fitting Infinite Jest into your lives were fascinating. I am still behind, but thanks to a weekend spent back and forth from LAX to DEN combined with a few late nights using IJ to stave off the dread before my mother’s funeral, I got well past page 100, as well as my despair at ever catching up.

    Funerals are funny things. I’ve found getting through them, or any difficult emotional event, without losing your shit requires a shift in attention. If I stayed in my head and let memories of my mother and all her kindnesses take over my thoughts, the result was miserable weeping. If instead I stayed in the present — fussy baby being soothed by his grandmother, vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar, my brother saying things about my mother that were absolutely untrue — I found that (a) I wasn’t horrified to be in church, and (b) I could fully participate in the moment.

    Here’s a small portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.

    Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

    He goes on the describe a trip to the grocery store after a long day at work — the sort of adult experience most college graduates don’t include in their glossy visions of the future — as an exercise in choices. You can stand in line, tired, starving, and frustrated as shit, and wonder why all these ridiculous, bovine jerks are standing between you and a hot meal at home, or you can remember that everyone has their own heroic battles to fight, and cut them some slack.

    The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship . . .

    Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

    The more I read of this guy, the more I like him, and the sorrier I am that he’s dead.

  • Letters of Acceptance

    Fifteen years ago I told an acquaintance of my aspiration to become a Peace Corps volunteer.

    “Good luck,” was her reply. “Did you know that only one out of every nine people who apply gets in?”

    As this was five years before the Internet-As-We-Know-It, and even more before the debut of Snopes, there was no obvious way to confirm or falsify such a claim.18 And so, as someone who has never been a “Top 11 Percentile” kind of guy, I marched through the application process with a grim sense of defeatism.

    And then, of course, when I was accepted, my ego ballooned like a nervous Tetraodontidae, as my status as one of the elite few who could weather the merciless vetting process was officially recognized.

    Sadly for my overinflated self-regard, I mentioned the “one of nine that apply get in” figure to a member of the Peace Corps staff while serving. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that too,” he said. “Except, I wouldn’t state it like that. It’s more like: for every nine people that apply for the Peace Corps, only one winds up in-country.”

    “What’s the difference,” I asked.

    “The difference is that of those nine people, five or six voluntarily withdraw after sending in their ap, because they got a job or a house or girlfriend or whatever. And a couple more drop out after the interviews or in the middle of training, for one reason or another. You guys are what’s left.”

    Infinite Jest also has a “one in nine” reputation about it, a book that thwarts most attempts to conquer. But as we stand on the summit of page 168 and look back on the pages before, we see now that process by which the potential readership is whittled down is one of self-selection. It’s eminently readable, if you’re resolved to read it.

    Indeed, the first 150 pages are something an application process: will you apply yourself to this Brobdingnagian novel, or will you drop out for reason or another? If you’ve made it this far: congratulations. You’re what’s left.

    And at this point in the novel, Wallace rewards us for our perseverance. It’s as if he’d been holding a somewhat awkward get-together until the party-hoppers people left, then cranked the stereo and rolled out the keg. Here’s what we’ve been treated to since page 144:

    • The hilarious “Why Video-Phones Failed” essay, tangential to the plot but perfect encapsulating many of the themes. As with “Erdedy waits for Pot”, I would have been perfectly happy reading this as a self-contained short story.

    • The “sterile urine” section which, in addition to being funny and interesting in its own right, also provides us with some background information on Mario, the Incandenzas, and ETA in a remarkably straightforward manner, unencrypted by acronyms or allusions or endnotes.

    • A whole chapter set in the familiar B.S. era. This may not be one of the promised Hamlet parallels, but this is surely one of the most amazing monologues in literature.19 If I ever audition for a local production of Our Town, pages 157-169 are totally going to be my reading.

    It’s the literary equivalent of hearty pat on the back and “welcome to the club”. For good or ill, you’re in it for the long-haul now.

    Misc:

    Controversy: Over on infsum Twitter channel, the debate continues to rage: is a “trial-size Dove bar” ice cream or soap?

    Vexation: Despite seeing the word “map” used at least a score of times, and in a variety of different contexts, I still cannot figure out exactly what Wallace means by it. Head, face, brain, personality?

    Paradox: I love that Wallace–a man who wrote the initial, 1,700 page draft of Infinite Jest by hand–cannot be bothered to spell out words “with”, “without”, or “with respect to”.