Infinite Summer

Year: 2009

  • Amanda French: ∞/2

    The midpoint of Infinite Jest is rapidly approaching (next Thursday, according to the schedule). What better time to organize meet-ups, so that readers in various cities can discuss their progress through the novel?

    Militant Grammarians in the audience will notice a conspicuous lack of actor in the preceding sentence. Specifically, we did not say that we would be organizing said meet-ups. Instead, we’re going to do what we do best: come up with a snappy title (“∞/2”) and crowdsource the actual work.

    So, if you’d like to organize a meet-up in Your Fair City, head on over to the forums and start coordinating, champ. And here’s Amanda French–who has been hosting get-togethers from the get-go, with some tips on ensuring that your meet-up doesn’t wind up as an Eschaton-scale debacle.

    Putting together an Infinite Jest meetup just can’t be the same as putting together another kind of reading group, can it? My mother used to belong to a book club that met monthly in one or another of the members’ comfortable houses, with plenty of food and wine and good fellowship. They’d read books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Jane Austen Book Club and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which are all very good books, books that fit well into pleasant surroundings. Reading Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is and should be a little uncomfortable sometimes. After deciding to do Infinite Summer, I put together a weekly meetup in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I’ve done my best to keep it just uncomfortable enough to be interesting. Here are my thoughts on how to do something similar.

    • Hold it in a bar. This a good place in which to discuss addiction to pleasure.

    • Do not hold it in a sports bar, not even if they’re showing tennis on the TVs. Sports bars are too loud for conversation.

    • Name a place and time that seems reasonable and stick to that, even if some people find it inconvenient. You’ll be arranging this with and for strangers via technologies that mediate communication, and so it’s not the best time for group decision-making. Announce it on the Infinite Summer forum for meetups, and if you use other means of publicity, include the link to that announcement.

    • Make up for this Schtittian intransigence by adopting the same policy as AA: No one can be kicked out. Don’t try to get people to show up every time, or a certain number of times, or on time, or having read as far as the Spoiler Line on the schedule, or not having read any farther than the Spoiler Line on the schedule. Let people come when, if, and however they will.

    • Promise to be there at the same time every time for the duration of Infinite Summer, even if no one shows up. If you wind up alone, you can always use the time to read. Veiled, if you prefer.

    • At the first meeting, now that you’re all relatively unmediated, you can and should make a group decision: how to run the discussions. Do they want you, as the organizer, to come up with a central question or topic every week? Should a different person lead the discussion every week? Are certain topics (such as David Foster Wallace’s life) off limits? Should it be entirely free-form and unstructured?

    • Also decide, at the first meeting, on the chief method of group communication. Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, phone, Infinite Summer forums–or fora? Should it be fora?

    • Ask every newcomer to say why they’re reading the book, whether they’ve read it before, whether they’ve read any Wallace before, stuff like that. Just because all that turns out to be very interesting.

    • Send reminders a day or two before every meeting, with the time, place, and the proper page number from the Infinite Summer schedule.

    Here are some of the ways our discussions stay uncomfortable: we never know exactly what we’re going to discuss, people have read to different places in the book, people talk at length about Wallace books and short stories that others haven’t read, people talk at length about works that others haven’t read like Ulysses and The Corrections, people talk at length about Infinite Summer blog posts and forum threads that others haven’t read, people bring up the suicide, people recount tales of how they once met David Foster Wallace, people talk about their own drug use, people show off how smart they are, people admit that they don’t understand, people ask what the hell is up with Orin that he and all the other football players are attracted to Steeply, people get completely grossed out by the formless blob with the Raquel Welch mask and the hooker with the dead baby, people get completely annoyed by the footnotes, people go off on boring technology tangents about how wrong Wallace was to think that we’d still have viewing cartridges and floppy disks and telephones attached to walls, people start talking about the movie The Ring, people feel that they’re on the verge of realizing something important about the book but can’t put it into words, people stop all rational discussion and just sit around saying how fucking great the book is and how about that Eschaton scene, man, my god, so funny.

    Hope your discussions go half as well.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 6

    Milestone Reached: 443 (45%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: Mario’s semi-fictional film “The ONANTiad”, which documents (a) the rise of Johnny Gentle from Famous Crooner to head of the Clean U.S. Party and then President of the (then) United States; (b) the establishment of the Organization of North American Nations; (c) the creation and subsequent expatriation of the Great Con(cav|vex)ity; and (d) the origins of subsidized time.

    Page 394: Lyle dispenses advice to students down in the weight room, including “don’t underestimate objects”.

    Page 395: Descriptions of the James Incandeza films The Medusa vs. the Odalisque and THE JOKE.

    Page 407: The story of E.T.A. Eric Clipperton, who won tennis matches by threatening to kill himself if he loses. (And then does so anyway when he wins.)

    Page 410: The origin of InterLace Entertainment.

    Page 418 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marthe and Steeply have the “single-serving sized cup of soup” discussion (how do people weigh deriving their own pleasure against inflicting pain on others).

    Page 434: Gatley and Stavros Lobokulas clean the Shattuck Shelter.

    Characters The characters have been given their own page, which will be updated weekly.

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

  • Matt Earp: Standing Witness

    Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.

    The Basics

    ’97: I’m 18, a freshman at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My best friend gets me to read A Supposedly Fun Thing. I go to see DFW speak at the Harvard Film Archive. I fall in love.

    ’99: Coming back from Australia, I’ve finished Infinite Jest on a six week road trip, and landing in San Francisco, a friend, the same friend in fact, and I go see DFW again at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (now sadly gone). I tell DFW I want to make a play out of IJ, and he laughs and says “Let me know how it turns out.”

    ’00 (summer) – I do it. I sit in 100 degree heat sweating to death in an apartment on 11th and C in New York, and trim, coax, and cajole the script from it’s 900 or 1000 pages down to 70, focusing entirely on Enfield and Hal, because to take on any more would have been ludicrous.

    Sept ’00 – March 6th of ’01: I turn 21 and we produce Infinite Jest, now called Standing Witness. Bonnie Nadell, one of the best literary agents UK has, grants me permission to do it as long as it’s a one time event and we don’t charge for it. My advisor cajoles me into making the script more coherent and understandable. I cast my best friend and closest acting associate as Hal. My genius props designer not only makes tennis balls drop from the ceiling during Eschaton, but makes it snow in the theater later in the play, and a lot of other magic.


    Eschaton
    More photos from “Standing Witness” here.

    Another friend turns Mario into a Bunraku puppet. Two further actresses and friends meld Madam Pyschosis into a character that’s part radio host, part DFW’s narration, part Mario’s voice, and part an excuse for me to try some of the Supercollider patches I was working on at the time to mess with her vocal cadences. The whole cast shows up at 6AM to liberate the bleachers from a block of snow, bleachers that eventually become the audience seats. We crank the sound system in the theater up at 2AM and play jungle into the wee hours when we can’t concentrate on building the set any more. The staff hated us. The audience loved us, both those who’ve read the book and those that haven’t. We finish the play. We have a ridiculous cast party, one of the stage runners singes her eyebrows off on a flaming 151 shot, and we burn the set plans outside in the snow.

    I never direct another piece of straight theater again.

    Eschaton

    Eschaton was the crown jewel of the show – I mean, it’s probably the crown jewel of the book anyway, but as a scene it’s got everything a director could want in it. It’s funny, it’s got drama, it’s got the dual attention between the big kids and little kids, it’s got a huge build up, it turns into a fight … and it ends with one of the most dramatic moments in literature, the infinitely long frozen arc of the computer as it flies out of Lord’s hands through the air and onto the court.

    Because it was a black box configuration, we had the opportunity to use one of the balconies as a space for the big kids to sit and watch, and to me that way it was like Pemulis was conducting the madness from on high. Not only was he above the kids but above the audience as well. He could manically shout down at the little kids during the action from above while Hal fretted, Axford (who in my version was sort of Peemster’s sidekick) smoked and Troeltsch narrated. Meanwhile the little kids started pleasantly enough but slowly devolve into this elegant match that turns into a fight, then into a wrestling match, then a melee, then a disaster. It all happened over the course of about 12 minutes.

    So many details about it were just amazingly fun to engineer. Dressing everyone up in as much winter gear as we could find, and making sure all the clothes were a little too short (to give the illusion that the actors, all 18-21, were actually 12-14). The actor who played Otis P. Lord gave an awesome performance in the perfect beanie, playing the most gigantic nerd on earth and carting around an old monitor which we destroyed every night (no easy thing to engineer, throwing a heavy monitor about 20 feet over the heads of a bunch of fighting actors…). The impending sense of disaster as tennis balls started to fly off in all directions, and the double horror and glee that all the designers and I felt as we both watched the audience get (sort of intentionally) pelted with balls and held our breath hoping nothing would knock a light or a piece of sound equipment out of alignment.

    Not only did I direct the whole thing, I sound designed it as well (theater was always kind of just an excuse for me to have access to loud toys and a place to use them in), and my favorite moment of the whole play was the sonically enhanced crash of the monitor onto the floor that coincided with the blackout at the end of the 1st act and the loudest noise I could make (I ripped it from the explosion at the beginning of 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare). We spit it out through two giant subwoofers under the audience. Literally earthshaking. It was magnificent. Every night we got some of the loudest and most raucous applause I’ve ever heard at a theater.

    Coda

    I haven’t actually read the book since then … it was so very much of a particular time and place for me. Since my life has taken me away from theater, I didn’t think about it much again till Infinite Summer asked me for the use of the picture of the Eschaton game and Matthew offered me a chance to reflect (by the way, the balls falling from the ceiling were more for visual effect than because the book calls for them … dramatic liberties I suppose). In doing so, I found an old review of the play on Wallace-L … read it if you care too, although definitely be warned of spoiler alerts about a few details:

    Happy reading, I hope IJ gives you as much joy, wonder, happiness and sadness as it did for me all the times I’ve read it.

  • I Am Not Enjoying this Book

    (Note: This post was not a reaction to Kevin’s post from yesterday, but works in tandem with it, I think. Although it’s safe to say that we each draw very different conclusions.)

    I am not enjoying Infinite Jest.

    Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun experience, right? So here it is. Confession time.

    I resent that I’m having to work this hard, that I feel like I’m indulging the author. I resent having to read enormous blocks of text, with no paragraph breaks, for pages and pages at a time. I resent the endnotes that (more often than not) only serve to either waste my time or confuse me even further. I resent that I’m continually reaching supposed milestones (“just make it to page 100!” “get to 200!” “300 is where you get rewarded for all your effort!”) that don’t actually represent any appreciable change in tone, style or plot.

    I feel like my time is being wasted with an overabundance of technical explanations of subjects — tennis, drugs — that are largely irrelevant. DFW is explaining the wrong stuff. I’m at page 310 (behind, I know) and by now I’d have absolutely loved to see some explanation of the world these characters live in. Instead, we’re only being given vague allusions to “the great concavity” that leave me itching to check the wallacewiki just so I know what’s bloody going on.

    Because that’s the thing — I don’t feel like anything actually is going on. I’ve gotten three hundred pages into this book, and nothing at all has happened. I feel like I have read three hundred pages of introductions to characters. Some of those characters (Hal, the folks at Ennet House) have been introduced multiple times, to no further elucidation. Some of them (James Orin Incandenza Sr., Himself, Guillaume DuPlessis) are freaking dead.

    Instead of action, I’m getting portraits. Highly detailed — to a fault — portraits. And that would be fantastic if I were in an art gallery, or reading a collection of biographies. But I’m not — this is supposed to be a story, a series of interesting events told in a compelling manner. Not a bunch of descriptions of people and locales presented in an outright hostile manner to weed out the ‘unworthy’.

    This post sounds a lot more hate-fuelled than I intended it to, I’m sure. I don’t hate this book, otherwise I would be quitting.59 But I am frustrated by it, and it is becoming more and more important that a payoff arrive, and soon.

    I’m sure it will. Many people I respect are having a great time reading Infinite Jest. I hope I can join them.

  • Cause I Got the Real Love, The Kind That You Need

    When I started writing my second novel,54 I imagined it would be structured like a teraktys, an ancient Pythagorean symbol that plays a role in the story. Specifically, the second section would be twice as long as the first, the third three times as long as the first, and the final section four times as long as the first. Fiction has a way of defying mathematical precepts, however, and the final version doesn’t really resemble a tetraktys at all, except that the fourth part is still at least somewhat longer than the first one.

    I think most writers start out with a Platonic ideal in their head of what their novel might look like when it’s done. For some it might be a mathematical model. For others it might be a quote from some future, hypothetical critic, wrapping the relevant themes in praise. For others it might be the physical thing itself. I think writers do a lot of visualizing in general.55 The craft of writing is forming and massaging words into a whole that hopefully approaches, but never actually becomes, something like the thing you had imagined.

    Anyway, I was struck by this Bookworm discussion with Wallace (different, BTW, from the last Bookworm interview I quoted). Michael Silverblatt started the interview by saying that reading Infinite Jest he was reminded of fractals. Wallace responded by saying:

    I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ’94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to kind of come together.

    It’s illustrative of the gap between our intellects that my ideal novel looked like this and Wallace’s looked like this. Still I understood what he meant. The concept of the Sierpinski Gasket was this organizing metaphor, the avatar of the novel in his head he was trying to make real. And despite DFW’s suggestion that he never expected any reader to notice this, or that the final version of the book doesn’t much resemble a Sierpinski Gasket, there are plenty of surface similarities (and this is what Silverblatt was referring to) in that the main themes and storylines reoccur and replicate in non-linear ways large and small throughout the novel.

    Novelists often talk about seducing the reader into following the story all the way to the end. Structure is one of the tools of that seduction. At its most basic level, structure is the way the author reveals and withholds information–much like the way you reveal and withhold information about yourself on a date in order to create some level of personal intrigue.

    One of the things that makes other writers go nuts up with envy when they read Infinite Jest is that the structure of it is aggressively anti-seductive. I know there are people who are going to say that Wallace had them at I am in here but obviously this novel is very intriguing at the outset and then kind of veers off into insanity for awhile, with constant interruptions and tangents. For a good portion of the first 200 pages, you’re really not sure what the hell he’s talking about, and frankly you’re getting kind of exhausted and frustrated, maybe even offended. Certainly there are many many sections in that period that are brilliant and funny and sexy, but if you think of Infinite Jest as a first date, there are ample opportunities during the appetizers for the reader to excuse herself, head for the Ladies but then veer toward the exit, never to return.

    And certainly a lot of readers over the years have done just that.

    Wallace uses the structure of this novel to a very different purpose. It isn’t designed to lead you, with one hand in your ass pocket, from the beginning to the end. He structured the novel specifically to control the experience of reading it. To disrupt you. To disorient you. To rudely interrupt you. Wallace didn’t want this book to just be about these themes of miscommunication and the impermanence of pleasure, he wanted the book itself to a simulacrum of the characters’ experience. Read this section from the most recent week’s pages and think of it simultaneously as a description of AA speakers and their audience, as a metaphor for writers and readers, and also a humble apologia for the kind of hoops Wallace has so far put the reader through:

    Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants….Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so sincere it’s almost painful.

    But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics speaker–this tall baggy sack of a man, also painfully new, but this poor bastard here completely and openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face shiny with sweat and his talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps….(and) the White Flaggers all fell about, they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone roaring with Identification and pleasure.56

    Most people come to this novel sincerely wanting to have read it. And the journey itself is extremely rewarding. But Wallace makes it very easy to quit this book. In fact, by abdicating the traditional authorial role as seducer, he allows the idea of quitting to become seductive instead.

    Wallace clearly wanted the reader not just to understand, but to feel some simulacrum of the emotions felt by the characters sitting in those AA meetings.57 In just the first half of the novel, the characters enjoin each other (and the reader) to “Keep Coming,” or to “Keep Coming Back” 17 times.

    I am truly enjoying this novel. I am finding it completely immersive, entertaining, and eye-opening. It’s a marvel to read. But if it weren’t for this project, I’m not sure I would have gotten this far. The stack of other, unread books in my pile is so high and appealing that I might have just decided, Murtaugh-style, that I’m too old for this shit. And I was thinking this morning how grateful I am that this is happening because I want to read this book, and I want to have read it but I don’t think I would have finished it on my own.

    Obviously Matthew wasn’t thinking about any of this when he organized Infinite Summer. How could he when he didn’t know much what the book was about? And no author could imagine that his book would be read exactly this way58 Strictly by accident Matthew kind of stumbled on a method of approaching this novel–a structure for reading it–that actually magnifies and complements the very experience Wallace tried to manipulate within his structure for the novel. For me at least, as it does for Gately, the pressure of the group on the individual (not to mention that one-day-at-a-time schedule of responsibilities) serves as a counter to the seductiveness of Out There, where all those shorter unread books are waiting for me.

    Keep Coming Back because It Works.

    Crazy.

  • P.S. Allston Rules

    I have to admit, I had doubts that I would reach the point where I’d have the privilege of telling you that I have finally, really started loving this book.

    Speaking as a somewhat emotionally stunted adult, a lot of the ETA scenes are my favorites, how the gravely serious roots of an Eschaton scenario go ass over teacup when Air Marshal Kittenplan (Kittenplan!) takes a nuclear warhead tennis ball in the neck and the whole event devolves chaotically, balletically, and in super slo-mo, into rubble. That scene is a golden piece of deadly serious yet juvenile tit-for-tat the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last time I watched The Bad News Bears. And how Pemulis may be some sort of elegant, raw math genius but he also gives in to the happy impulse to label his Eschaton diagram of available combatant megatonnage HALSADICK. My inner thirteen-year-old boy is delighted and relieved when this kind of stuff goes down. I’d make a terrible politician.

    Gately helped my romance with IJ to blossom, as well as Hal and Pemulis,49 and I want to think about the AA stuff some more, and the theme of repetition and recovery that winds such a heartfelt50 thread through Infinite Jest.

    I was really affected by infinitedetox’s post about his own dependencies and how he was viewing his recovery through the lens of IJ. The section where Gately is lying on the couch at Ennet House listening to a newly admitted addict argue against the daily drill of meetings required by AA struck a chord with me. (I’m not an addict, though I’ve lived with addicts — they tended to disappear my books, and I wonder if they might have rationalized the thefts by arguing that since at the time I worked in a bookstore, I could therefore more readily steal51 replacement copies of whatever had gone missing52 So I’m not an addict, no, but I do understand the need to come to terms with small losses, and to try to learn not to be so defensive in the face of the world’s most ordinary demands.)

    I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but reading this book has been like a yoga for me, in the sense that it’s become an almost-daily practice for which it’s necessary to find a quiet space to focus my mind on an object outside itself. I’ve been practicing ashtanga yoga for more than ten years and I’ve found that over time there’s a cumulative and deeply grounding effect gained after regularly, dutifully, and unquestioningly attempting those weirdly liberating knots yoga ask you to tie yourself into. Much like this book.

    So when a newly sober fellow demands that an old timer explain to him why AA wants him to keep going to these goddamn MEETINGS all the time, why can’t they just tell you the answer right from the get-go? my first non-AA-going thought was that maybe the point of AA meetings is just to keep going to the meetings. It’s a practice like any other, like going to yoga and listening and stretching until hey, you can touch your toes, or create more space around your heart just by using your breath; or if you don’t like that analogy, like slowly working a piece of wood until over time it becomes shapely and smooth. There are things that are only revealed over time, after doing the work, and those things are sort of the point, yes, but the process of showing up every day is also the point, showing up to your life, to your work, to your family, to your meetings, to the book you’re reading — just doing the work is also sort of the point.

    Ninety per cent of life is just showing up, I’ve heard it said, and I’ve always kind of hated that saying because it implies that you can just shamble into class in your sweats without having done the reading. But I also love that saying because if you show up you’re allowing for one of at least two possibilities: that you may be called on and exposed as unprepared, or that you may go uncalled-on and retain your facade of preparedness, but either way you’re still in the position to learn something new about the subject at hand that you wouldn’t have, had you stayed in bed. This weekend my friend Danielle told me that she once had a frustrated professor who stood up in front of her half-empty Friday morning lecture and rewarded everyone who’d come instead of sleeping in or skipping off to Stowe for another in a series of three-day weekends.53 The professor rewarded the students in attendance by saying, “Everyone who showed up today gets an A in this class.”

    So I’m glad I keep showing up for Infinite Jest, ready or not. Hey, you showed up, too! So what if you’re behind, or lost, or didn’t look up the word “eschatology” until ten minutes ago. Keep going. We get an A just for being here today.

  • The Bully Pulpit

    A few weeks ago I was speaking to a journalist and struggling to explain how a novel so revered by people who have read it could also be so off-putting for those wading through it for the first time. I mentioned the length of course, and the endnotes, and the 84¢-words, and the sentences that go on for so long that they begin make you feel anxious, as if you are watching someone who has been underwater for longer than you reckon they can hold their breath. I mentioned all that, and then there was some dead air on the line (this was a phone interview), and I just blurted out something to fill the silence. “The thing is,” I said, “Wallace doesn’t teach you a little bit about tennis and then start talking about tennis. He just sort of starts talking about tennis.”

    Not my most articulate moment, I’ll be the first to admit. But thinking back on this statement later, it struck me as perhaps the most insightful thing I said during the interview (a low bar, to be sure). Most authors will ease you into a subject, provide some background and context before going in-depth. Television serials preface episodes with a “Previously on” primers. Hell, even videos games to play bingo for cash begin with a tutorial these days. But when Wallace “introduces” a topic, it’s like you’ve walked into a lecture having missed the first hour.

    He is, to be honest, something of a bully. Not in a beat-you-up-take-your-lunch-money kind of way, but in the same sense that the President of the United States is said to occupy the “bully pulpit”. The term, coined by Theodore Roosevelt, refers to the fact that the President can talk about the issues he cares about, and the rest of the country has no choice but to listen. If a President wants to start a national conversation on health care (say), we converse about health care.

    In Infinite Jest, Wallace wants to talk about tennis and football and addiction and depression and mathematics and the many ways in which one may murder a cockroach, and your options, as a reader, are (a) like it or (b) lump it. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone droning on and on about his hobbies and his solitaire apps free interests, someone who follows you around and thwarts you evasive maneuvers, until you only options are to give up and listen or leave the party altogether.

    Any many people do. Leave the party, that is. By which I mean they close the book on page 77 and go back to being interested in the things they are interested in. That’s what did a decade or so ago.

    But here’s the amazing thing, at least in my experience of the last month. If you let Wallace bully you for a few hundred pages, if you let him just ramble on amicably about the things he’s passionate about, you finally know so much about the subject matter that you start to care about it, even if against your will. Last week, realizing that I had never in my entire life seen an entire tennis match, I actually watched a torrent of the Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick Wimbledon 2009 Mens Final. Last night when an alcoholic character in a TV show said she wouldn’t attend AA because “it ain’t nothing but a cult,” I felt personally offended. Wallace is like the Lloyd Dobler of authors: he doesn’t woo you with flowers and chocolates, he stands outside your window with a boombox over his head until you relent.

    Except the boombox is so 20th century; it’s really more like an preloaded iPod. Which may be why, on the #infsum Twitter channel, catchingdays called Infinite Jest “the first shuffle novel“. That’s a great analogy. The book as like a compilation of Wallace’s favorites, semi-randomized to keep you on your toes.

    And do you know why shuffle mode is so popular? Because every once in a while, wholly by chance and when you least expect it, you hear something that you’ve loved all your life. For me it was Eschaton, falling, as it does, squarely on the intersection of two lifelong interests: Cold War politics47 and games48. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew, and the radio did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel that truly resonated with me.

    And now, of course, I’ve become so versed in the author’s various obsessions that all the themes in the novel resonate–and will continue to do so in future novels I read. Thanks a lot David Foster Wallace, ya big ol’ bully you.