Comments on: The Bully Pulpit

By: Infinite Jest « small rectangular objects

Infinite Jest « small rectangular objects — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:53:50 +0000

[...] Matthew Baldwin recently posted this on the Infinite Summer blog: [...]

By: Joanna

Joanna — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:07:38 +0000

I first read this in my last years of college. I had never understood the game of tennis and merely thought it to be a game of back and forth, perhaps one of simply wearing the other out. It wasn’t until reading this book and, esp, the description of Eschaton (who else could combine the accuracy training of a tennis academy with Cold War politics?), that I fully understood the game. Now married to a competitive tennis player, I am still amazed that my love of the game all began after reading this novel.

By: stephanie

stephanie — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 07:26:46 +0000

“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.”

I couldn’t agree more. I started off slightly confused/bored but willing to give it a shot. Now I am loving every single word and wouldn’t have it any other way.

By: Alessandro Pardi

Alessandro Pardi — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:11:34 +0000

Nothing puts me off like writers that ostensibly *explain* things to the reader, and DFW sure was as far as can be from this kind (it was probably only around Mario’s movie section that I finally grasped what the Concavity and the Convexity really are, i.e. the same thing).
Science fiction is where this issue is most problematic, as there are generally a lot of things the reader needs to have explained, and William Gibson’s short story Hinterlands is still my favorite example of how to manage this. And it’s interesting that in that story, too, we find human beings irresistibly attracted to something they know it’s fatal…

By: OneBigParty

OneBigParty — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:38:34 +0000

Ed Finn thank you for the link. That essay is killer. It’s opened up so much. I’m looking at all of the annular and feedback loop sorts of references; the pervasive vibe of the circular, mechanistic or non-mechanistic, with a new twist, a Weinereque twist, so everyone should read it; and that’s only a small bit of why the essay’s so great. (It’s interesting that the new way of looking at an enemy was thought to be by one theorist much _less_ racist than in the past. In theory this should be the case but it doesn’t seem to apply in our current war.) If anything, people should go to the link to at least see the uncanny drawing of a cyborg (computery-looking thing with hands and eyes in military dress) on the cover of Time magazine.

By: Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Cause I Got the Real Love, The Kind That You Need

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:57:07 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Ed Finn

Ed Finn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:10:01 +0000

Oops. Here's that link again: here.

By: Ed Finn

Ed Finn — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:47:13 +0000

Thanks for pointing out the forum on my blog, Matthew. I’m coming around a little to the multiplex model of Infinite Summer.

I really loved the Eschaton section too, for similar reasons. What I especially enjoyed was the way DFW brought us the gleeful, let’s-play-with-our-military-toys element of the real Cold War to life…and then had it turn sour, to remind us of just how dangerous those ideas can be.

Also, Eschaton made me think of a great essay by Peter Galison called The Ontology of the Enemy. It’s about how cybernetics and game theory led us to start imagining our enemies almost as artificial intelligences, infinitely rational and ruthless. Just like the players of Eschaton are supposed to be, except that no human really works that way. A copy of the essay’s posted

By: OneBigParty

OneBigParty — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:01:19 +0000

Reading the Eschaton chapter: It taught me that you cannot even part-skim ever. Once I was attentive it became one of my favorite chapters too. My trust of the author for all it faltered initially is now stronger than before. That was my turning point–now I know I can stick with it, though it’s, for me personally, a huge undertaking because of having a medical problem that affects my cognitive abilities. There’s a lot of dicky neurons that I have to bitch-slap before I can become properly immersed.

One thing that continually hovers over the project for me, would we had all done this while DFW was alive. It would most likely have pleased him immensely and maybe given him that much more happiness and perhaps a thicker armor in a life that somehow didn’t have enough of this to offset the “Bad Thing”.

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:04:02 +0000

As a long-time reader of defective-yeti (and I will keep reading it until you stop paying your hosting fees, no matter how sparse the updates), I have been waiting to see the Matthew Baldwin take on Eschaton.

This essay was not what I was expecting, but it makes a great point. Because it’s the passion with which Wallace writes that drags me along. I devoured Infinite Jest the first time through. I read the whole thing in little more than two weeks. At first I kept reading, waiting patiently for a plot to appear, and then I was hooked in by his passion for all his sundry subjects.

Oddly, It was your passion for board games, the same constant sharing of knowledge though I didn’t know that I cared at the time, that got me interested in board gaming. And everything converges on Infinite Jest again!