Alright. You got me — I’m kind of enjoying this book now. And when I say “kind of”, I mean “a lot”. I’m writing this post extremely late because I’ve been staying up at night to read Infinite Jest. I’ve skipped out on plans with my family to stay in and read it. Heck — for the first time since starting, I’m ahead of the Spoiler Line. Wow.
For what it’s worth, I feel like I should tell you that you guys would be terrible at AA. A lot of you told me last week, in the comments, that I should just quit. Stop. Read no further. Some of you even had the temerity to suggest that I suffered from some substantial lack of grey matter. An accusation I shall not waste time repudiating, because I’ve already spent so much time leafing through the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling “repudiate” right.
Thank you to all the people who told me to stick with the book. You guys galvanized me to come up with a plan of action. I looked up how much I had to read, counted how many days I had until I had to write this post, and then used the calculator on a phone smarter than myself to do math that a child could manage. And then I sat down every day and read 30.667 pages.66
It’s quite something to be learning a little self-discipline by committing to working on a task every day, and during the course of that task read a summation of the same disciplinary tactics applied to alcoholism. Many times I felt like not picking up IJ, either because I was slogging through Marathe and Steeply, or because I wanted to play Mario Bros., but read the book anyway because I recalled the words “for god’s sake Keep Coming Back”. It was a great insight into the power of committing to a goal and actively working for it in spite of oneself.67
So. I’m reading the book every day, and enjoying the crap out of it. Even the Marathe and Steeply sections that I mentioned just a few scant sentences ago. I’m also not counting page numbers anymore, desperate to just meet my quota for the week. And the “portraits” of characters I mentioned last week have stopped seeming superfluous, and instead started making everything that much more real, just like they are intended to.
Long story short — I Kept Coming Back, Trusted in a Higher Power (DFW), and, well… It Just Worked.
Now, if only I could quit the booze.
Avery–
While I feel the need to recapitulate other people’s comments that — in your Herculean struggles and willingness to messily spill all the details of your deep, emotional roller-coaster, ups-and-downs with Learning To Love This Damn Book — you have gradually become probably my favorite of all the guides working in IS to date, I also feel the need to speak up in an odd little defense of those of your critics who encouraged, Way Back When, that you quit if you weren’t enjoying things. While some of them might, no doubt, have been speaking from some sense of overly-inflated moral authority vis-a-vis their belief regarding your intellectual capacity or moral fortitude to Handle It, my guess is that others, misguidedly or not, might have been speaking from a place of solicitude regarding whether or not it’s even Fair, to try to constantly force their personal aesthetic preferences, on another human being in the face of obvious discomfiture. From that perspective, the folks who joined in the chorus of “if you *really* aren’t enjoying it all that much, you should just Quit”, might be roughly analogous to those subjects in the famous psychological behaviorist study years back, who, when told that they needed to keep administering an ever-increasing series of high-voltage shocks to a “test subject” even in the face of said subject’s screams of pain, eventually got to the point where they said “enough is enough, I’m not gonna do this any more.”
In other words, maybe, just maybe, some of these folks were helpfully suggesting that you abandon your pursuit of IJ because they took you at your word when you said you weren’t enjoying it, and they felt some small pang of compassion which caused them to want to rail against the peer pressure which urges people to Press On And Succeed, even in the face of abject misery. I remember when I first read this novel (way back in the Year Of The Tucks Medicated Pad, haha), and went through my own brief insistence on proselytizing its virtues to every single one of my friends who crossed my path. When more than one of them reacted to their foiled attempts to read the book with a lack of enthusiasm which I had previously only associated with people undergoing invasive root-canal procedures, I began to think that maybe, just MAYBE, I was being unduly sadistic in terms of insisting on foisting this massive tome on folks who, for whatever reason at that point in their lives, just didn’t have it in ‘em to choke down reams and reams of labryinthine Wallacian prose.
In any case, glad to see you’re liking the book again. DFW has a tendency to sneak up on people like that. Good luck with the rest!
Yeeeeeessssssssss! Avery, this is awesome. And let me just be the first person to tell you I Told You So.
I am so thrilled to read this. Avery seems to be the sort of person I would really like in the real world, and it kind of bummed me out to know that we disagreed about my favorite book.
The world is back as it should be. Hurrah.
Noto on characters: Clipperton was a junior tennis player, but NOT as student at ETA. He was not affiliated with an academy.
I didn’t respond to your last post, but I was of the camp thinking “quit for crying out loud!” I’m glad you like it, but if someone is a few hundred pages in and not liking it . . . there are waaaay to many good books out there.
I’ve been considering how much time I’m putting into this book (and love it), but it’s a pretty huge number of hours. I can’t imagine spending this much time doing something that was making me frustrated or I just didn’t like.
Glad you like it! I’m over 600 and I can’t put it down now. There’s either a weird momentum that kicks in at the half-way mark, the stories keep getting better, or I’m just liking it more and more and more.
This past Tuesday my local indie bookstore, Skylight Books, in Los Feliz, had a very informal mid-read meet for Jesters to just greet and share. Refreshments were Molson Canadian beer.
What so surprised me was that although there were only about 20 of us, it was an amazing cross-section of ages and socio-economic types. And just like you, Avery, almost all of us had run at least once into the wall– but had come off it somehow renewed. i don’t know what DFW may have intended as a “process” for the readers– but i have come to understand that somehow this wall experience is inherent.
In a comment i made to your posting last week I suggested that I found that to get inside this book, I had to slow down all preconceived notions of fiction reading and engage the book line by line, image by image, as if i were watching a film in slow motion where you can see detail that is not apparent at 24 fps. I wonder if somehow the strict discipline schedule you have now set yourself helps create some sense of a new space that invites you more easily into the book’s detailed world.
I was also at the Skylight event (I was the one wearing a pink striped shirt), and it was good to meet other people who were dedicated to reading IJ.
Although I started a bit early, and am ahead of the game, it’s helped tremendously to have a schedule, and to know that other people are reading at the same time. It’s also been great to revisit and rethink different parts of the book through forum discussions.
Yay Avery! Keep on keepin on.
Doesn’t sound like the reason you are enjoying the book now has much to do with the actual content of the book.
It’s not fair, I think – no, I don’t think, I know – to equate advising someone to quit IJ with advising someone to quit AA, which Avery rather casually does. Remember, nobody ever walks into an AA meeting because their lives are going so wonderfully well. However “the spider” (and while I can think of all kinds of things I dislike about AA’s view of the world, the way in which “the disease” gets anthromorphised as “cunning, baffling, and powerful” is a strong and useful metaphor) is always telling newcomers (and not-so-new-comers, for that matter) that this time things will be different out there, that this timea little strictly regulated drinking won’t get out of control…etc.
The difference then is this – if one thinks reading IJ sux, then quit – there won’t really be any consequences (moral philosophers such as Benatar have explained the difference between consequences such as pain and foregone pleasure). If you think life in AA sux – well, going back out there isn’t going to make things better.
As somebody with 1/10 of DFW’s intellectual candlepower, but many similar interests, I am awed by the way in which he treats AA – seeing the contradictions, the inconsistancies, but yet accepting the whole.
OK, so I think this post terrifies me more than your last one — Having done my best to make my peace with the fact that not everyone loves this book like I do, even people who I’m sure, SURE, I tell you (pause to shake fist at the heavens) would like it if they just kept at it, I find myself at loss how to respond to someone who seems to prove my hunch. Now I have to start all over trying to not let people “get me started” on this, to not go off on a rant about the smug bastards — um — I mean differently-opinioned — reviewers on Amazon who…well, dang it, OK….calming down…one day at a time…it works if you work it…keep coming back…OK, a bit calmer now.
Considering the hefty investment of time and effort you’re making in reading this book, I’m truly happy for you if you’ve finally (albeit suddenly) found enjoyment in reading it. However, your back-to-back “hate it/love it” posts reminded me of the responses to George Lucas’s polarizing “Phantom Menace” film of 1999. I remember the same thing happening then: people who saw that movie would go online and write reviews in which they admitted to not enjoying it, only to be immediately pounced on by the die-hard fanboys (“How dare you diss anything ‘Star Wars!’ It’s pure genius!”) Which would soon be followed by apologetic follow-up posts, in which the reviewer would admit that the fault was surely in himself, and that he’s now seen the error of his ways. So, my point is this: if you really like the book, that’s wonderful, but don’t feel bullied into having to finish it.
comparing IJ to Phantom Menace? Low blow, indeed. Though my memory differs from yours: huge number of people identified PM as crap at first viewing, and I never met anyone who backed off on that assessment, which, now that a decade has passed, has grown and grown — can’t remember the last time I heard a reference to that movie that was anything other than (accurately) scathing.
Golly, I don’t remember “Phantom Menace” being polarizing at all. I remember it being pretty universally, deservedly and unapologetically panned.
I apologize for saying that IJ was “over your head”. That was a bit low. BTW, you’re absolutely right that I would be terrible at AA; I would react like Day does to the simplistic, yet apparently effective, slogans etc.
QUESTION: Does anyone out there know what DFW is referring to by the term “police lock” (used by Mario for stability/balance)? The only thing that makes sense to me is a battering ram, i.e. the short pole that police use to break down doors during raids etc. Any answers/suggestions would be much appreciated.
The question of the police lock has been bothering me, too, so I took a minute to consult The Oracle.
From http://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=216
“The police lock makes Mario into a tripod. Imagine if you had a bat/golf club/hockey stick/broom in front of you and you leaned into it so the point was poking you in the gut. That’s how I see it anyway. Police locks (that I’ve seen anyway) have brackets that get bolted into the door frame and a bar is extended across the door into these brackets, sort of like the ye olde times scenes in movies where a big timber is put across the door OR a bracket is bolted to the floor and the bar is wedged between the bracket and the center (like door knob level center) of the door. So Mario has something like that with a bracket installed in his vest get up.”
And from http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/MA%20Thesis%20Kevin%20McMorrow.pdf
“Mario requires a police lock—a kind of vest from which a steel pole extends to the ground at a 40° angle—just to stand up.”
In New York in the 1980″s police locks were common in lofts and apartments in high-crime areas, which was just about anywhere artists and musicians and other poor folk lived. A police lock is a metal bar that forms the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle (somewhere between an isosceles triangle and a 30-60-90 triangle), the other two sides being the door and the floor. Once it’s in place, someone can pick your lock but they’ll be pretty hard pressed to open your door.
re police locks, I was able to find this:
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/853111_2064_1675934
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/thecity/27lock.html
So glad you’re enjoying it, Avery, and I wonder if this new discipline you’re working on will help make other mammoth tomes more enjoyable as well.
I do hafta say that I don’t think all books are for everybody. My old standard favorite book I used to push on everyone was “The Confederacy of Dunces,” which I still think contains some of the funniest writing I’ve ever read. But I gradually learned that, while some seemed to love it as much as I did, for a lot of people it was just okay, or they couldn’t stick with it. And I’ve started to realize that that’s not so bad.
All of us have very different brains. And a book is sort of a recipe for rewiring a brain in an entertaining way. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. If your favorite book works for someone else, it probably only means that your brains were already surprisingly similar.
I live in New Orleans and even I couldn’t get through Confederacy of Dunces. Ignatius made me want to claw out my eyeballs. After IJ, though, I’m going to give it another shot.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for coming back.
Glad to have you along for the ride, Avery.
Your frustration was something we all can empathize and relate to. I’m duly impressed at how you stuck with it and caught up. No easy task.
Pleasant readings, Mr. Stice
Oh no! Smells like peer pressure.
Don’t quit the booze just yet, Avery. You might need it.