In the underrated Mike Judge film Idiocracy, Luke Wilson is unfrozen centuries in the future where people have become so stupid that a two-hour video of a man’s naked, farting ass wins four Oscars, and Wilson has to run around desperately trying to convince everyone on the planet that humans will go extinct unless they stop irrigating their dying crops with Gatorade.70
Which got me thinking: Will anybody still be reading Infinite Jest 100 years from now?
One of the enduring appeals of writing a book has always been that it doesn’t seem so ephemeral. Especially in an age of new media, a book feels like a lasting creation, a thing of permanence. We still have Bibles that rolled off Gutenberg’s press lying around our climate-controlled archives, and so there’s no reason someone couldn’t be curled up with that romance novel of yours late at night in the year 2525.
This is a self-delusion of authors, of course. Very few books outlive the people who wrote them. Looking back at the publishing year 1896 (100 years before IJ) the only novels I can see that anyone’s still reading with any regularity were both written by HG Wells.71
In 2005, the Guardian polled 500 British book clubs book club readers and asked them which novels written in the 20th Century (and the first few years of the 21st Century) would be considered classics a century hence. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the sample, the list is about half-filled with recent book club faves–The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Star of the Sea, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Atonement, The Handmaid’s Tale.72 The Guardian kind of sneers at this result,738 but it might not be so far off. These are works of popular fiction with a lot of copies in print and a large group of individuals evangelizing for them. There are reasons to think some might have a chance at enduring
Infinite Jest, at least in 2009, certainly has plenty of rabid evangelizers. It has some apparent obstacles to its longevity, however. Infinite Summer started with thousands of enthusiastic and determined readers. Based on activity in the comments and the forums and on Twitter, I’d guess that through attrition we are already less than half what we were. That kind of drop-out rate could be punishing to the book over the years. The amount of time and effort it takes to read, digest, and discuss makes it an unlikely candidate to be taught widely in undergraduate classrooms (although obviously it can be done). Wallace’s persistent, casual use of brand names and pop-culture references74 would make this novel considerably more difficult to read down the road–imagine what adding a full complement of footnotes on top of the original endnotes would do the level of difficulty.75 IJ is also distinctly American, which cuts a couple of ways, I suspect.
As deliberately tempting as Wallace makes it to quit reading this book, you have to figure, in the long run, that everyone might take him up on it eventually.
On the other hand.
I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now understand it.
In Idiocracy, Luke Wilson eventually convinces the morons of the future that water isn’t poisonous. Addressing them he says, “There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags.76 And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies–movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!”
I might even work on a version of that speech when it’s time for me to start pushing Infinite Jest on my friends.
Comments
66 responses to “I’ve Seen the Future, Brother, It Is Murder”
Good points. I’m not sure it adds up to anything, but I think it is interesting that there is such public interest in this book in 2009, the year in which (by most estimates) the bulk of the novel is set. I’m not really sure what that could mean. Maybe it has more to do with our only really understanding the time it was written (the mid-’90s) in hindsight.
And for the record, if The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is still being read 100 years from now, then Mike Judge is the new Nostradamus.
But Kevin: Gatorade is what plants need!
Funny you mention Idiocracy because there are some strong thematic resonances between the film and IJ: they both take place in an over-corporatized future dystopia, where waste and garbage have become huge issues and the populace is either too dumb to appreciate anything other than fart jokes (Idiocracy) or so pleasure-obsessed as to be in danger of Entertaining themselves to death (IJ). Both works focus heavily on what happens when you take the pursuit of personal happiness/self-gratification to its logical end-point.
Crave, my friend… it’s what plants *crave* 😀
Oh that’s right — because “crave” is way more Xtreme a verb than “need” 🙂
I don’t think things like the book’s ‘high drop-out rate’ or its reliability on an understanding of American culture would necessarily lead to its disappearance in 100 years. I mean, just look at Ulysses — a long, incredibly Dublin-centric novel that is notorious for kicking most readers out around Proteus. It was published almost 90 years ago, and people are still hacking away at it today.
Now, I gotta go down some more Electrolytes so I can have the energy to hoist up my copy of IJ and continue reading.
I agree. Novels that stand the test of time often do so because of the literary community. The popularity of a novel, at least at the time of its publishing, seems pretty unimportant to its longevity.
Frankly, I think Infinite Jest will always be written about and talked about, not necessarily because of its merit, but because of its size and because Wallace will probably become some sort of cult figure, not undeservedly.
I agree with regard to the Ulysses comparison. I’m currently trying to hack my way through that one, and I’m finding it immensely frustrating. But, hey, at least I’m trying.
For all its specificity with regard to time and place, with the references and the slang and whatnot, IJ is still a much more accessible book that Ulysses, with a much less obscure plot, and with characters who are much easier to relate to (IMHO). All the references and Americanisms and such may require future readers to look more stuff up, but the story will remain compelling 100 years from now.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to feverishly press another friend to read Infinite Jest.
I had wondered about the attrition issue myself and have certainly noticed a drop-off in the intensity of new posts/comments. When Matthew mentioned in an earlier post that there was a mass exodus all I could think was “say it ain’t so”! Perhaps some of those who left will come back around to it in time.
It’s hard to judge the IJ-related attrition versus normal no-accountability-to-complete- a-sustained-project-related attrition. Had this been an easy book read in installments with over 1K early adherents, how many would we reasonably expect to stay on schedule and interested two months in?
At this point, I am more amazed at the hanging-in than I am of the dropping-off. Look how many of us there are! Remember too, that some of the droppers-off may be done reading the book, or have read it before.
Signing off, an unusually looking-on-the-bright-side, Infinite Tasks
All good points. Also, making it harder to judge Infinite Summer attrition, I know a few people (including myself) who tried out the forums and then stopped. We’re all still on or ahead of the schedule and following the IS posts.
I’m with Cole. I am still reading, and in fact am ahead of the spoiler line, and I do skim the forums, but don’t really post anything to them.
BTW – I happened upon Idiocracy by accident earlier this year, before IS began, and was really disturbed by the vision of the future it portrayed, mainly because I suspected it wasn’t too far from being accurate. I didn’t know at the time that Mike Judge had created the movie.
Regarding the viability of IJ, I think the future is in its favor in that technology is providing more and more the means for both wide-range broadcast or discovery of the thing (for the interested) as well as focused fusion around it (for the passionate).
I heartily agree with the rate-of-project-completion-in-general observation as it relates to the perceived attrition. Also regarding posting activity – normally there are probably more “lurkers” or “listeners” than posters in any venue. I find the deeper into the book I get, the harder it is to find a starting point to write about it, its sprawl and complexity has me in my own cage when it comes to articulating…
On the other hand, I have a “problem” in the day to day, where I can’t stop myself from making references to IJ all the time despite the fact that NO ONE I know has read or is reading it.
Hoo-ah, l-o-t-b-s IT! I’m done reading, but still tune-in to IS every day. I have a forum post that I’m slowly working on, too. I.e., I am (mostly) silent but still present. Don’t count me attritionally absent!
For me, the urgency of evangelism isn’t because I fear the book is endangered. It’s because it’s a great book with great things to say that I want to share. I sometimes almost wish fewer people would read it, that only those who’ll really get it (vs. those who slog through it begrudgingly and still have shitty things to say about it, as if Wallace were forcing them to read it at gunpoint) would pick it up. It’s like being careful about who you share your favorite jelly beans with.
I know the book. I’ve experienced it (three or four times all the way through total, by the end of this summer). Whether people are enjoying it in 100 years or not doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I suppose it’d be nice to know that Wallace was canonized, but that’s not what drives my evangelism. And I don’t evangelize to just anybody. So sheer numbers don’t mean much to me, I guess.
I also agree with this. It’s a drag when you feel like you’ve hit upon some important connection, or figured out some little piece of what DFW was trying to communicate, and there’s no one you know who would care. I’ve given away maybe seven copies of the book, and recommended it to many others. Almost none of them finished it.
Three cheers for Infinite Summer!
Oh, and as far as the original topic goes, I can’t imagine anyone 100 years from now really getting the M*A*S*H bit even if it were explained to them.
Which is too bad, ’cause it resonated big time with me.
You win. I’ve only given away four copies, most recently two weeks ago.
Who are you recommending this book to? I am enjoying the book myself but I don’t think I would recommend this book to very many people I know, minus the one or two who already love huge post-modern-y novels. I don’t think that this book holds much appeal for the average intelligent and well-read person. I think the right reader for IJ is just as eccentric as the text itself.
Can I just say how much I hate Idiocracy?
I like Mike Judge a lot, but it’s one of the worst films I’ve ever had the mispleasure of watching. It’s very sloppily constructed, amateurish, and the attempts at satire and humor are just /grating./
Just saying.
Hear, hear. I thought Idiocracy sucked. Pretty much a one-joke movie, in my opinion. I’d much rather watch Beavis and Butthead…
And the main premise completely gets it backwards; ever heard of the Flynn effect??
Maybe the “drop-outs” are actually folks who read their 10–15 pages per day, but just don’t have enough time to participate in the forums, or, like me, they’ve fallen behind schedule and don’t want to stumble upon spoilers. If it is a choice between participating in the forums and reading IJ, well, I read IJ.
I’m not a dropout, either. After five years of talking about it, I went out and bought my first pair of reading glasses especially for Infinite Summer. That’s how serious I am. I’m about 300 pages behind, but I’m blown away by what I’ve read so far and I want to continue the experience without necessarily knowing where I’m going. Folks say: “Trust the author.” Lucky for me nobody says: “Jump off a bridge”.
I do check in around here every couple of weeks just to see what’s going on and I’m enthusiastically telling all my friends about IJ (and finding that I blather like an idiot because how do you explain that feeling of being caressed by someone else’s imaginary world?). I like to think that I am revving their engines for the, ahem, one thousand six-hundred (1600) page German release next month, but I don’t know for sure.
Now, where are my glasses?
Good points, Bernie, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting it couldn’t happen. I was just musing about it. I’m sure DFW wasn’t indifferent about the subject. Ulysses is still around in part because it’s iconic in Ireland and also because it’s taught in every English speaking University. That could still happen to IJ, of course.
Jim, I’m not going to put Idiocracy in my top ten or anything. It’s not nearly as good as Office Space (or King of the Hill, for that matter). It’s actually pretty terrible to look at. But personally I think the satire is relevant (as ID says), and although it’s really broad it made me laugh a bunch. Every time I’m in a Costco, I still think, “Hey I went to law school here.”
It’s probably about expectations, so if anyone here is Netflixing that film right now I will be happy to agree they should adjust them accordingly.
(I mean, “that could still happen to IJ, except for the becoming iconic in Ireland part probably.”)
The drop-outs are also people who have finished early. There seem to be a lot of those on Twitter. I should join them in the next day or two – and I wonder if I’ll be keeping my interest up in following all this.
True that much of the humor is getting shopworn by its distance from 1994. An amoral football player character named Orin J. would have seemed ‘topical & terribly important’ back then; now, not so much.
I hadn’t even thought of that connection. Good point!
Yep, I finished early and with the way the book is written, I don’t have a clue what I might say that is beyond the spoiler line.
A lot of it runs together for me, after it’s all said and done. I am, however, really enthusiastic about the book, and so happy to have stumbled across this. So finish up already! I want to talk about the ending 😛
A related and also important question is “Will people still listen to Leonard Cohen in 100 years?”
If not, then the terrorists won — no, wait,he’s Canadian, so maybe the AFR — but, no, he’s English-speaking Canadian, so, yep, the AFR probably ain’t fans, so it would mean the terrorists won, I think. The future may be murder, but the mood of much of I.J. lies somewhere between that of “Everybody Knows” and that of “If It Be Your Will.” **
**Of course, “Pump Up The Volume” lies somewhere between those two songs as well, but that’s not a bad thing!
I think an even more apt analogy might be to “Finnegan’s Wake”, a book which perhaps a thousand people alive now have actually, honestly read from cover to cover. (Just for the record, I haven’t). “Finnegan’s Wake” contains thousands of allusions to subjects so obscure and dated and local that no one will ever get them all. It begs you to stop reading it from the very first paragraph and never lets up. Yet it is unimpeachably a part of the western canon. A great novel will survive over time even if its readership is miniscule.
I always liked Joyce’s (possibly apocryphal) reply to those who said FW was too hard: “it took me ten years to write it; it should take you at least that long to read it!”
Best analogy yet. DFW is like Joyce but with John Gardner, Dickens (for the secondary characters overtaking the main characters), and Melville (for the dark undertones), and finally Swift, for the obvious reasons. I finished weeks ago and find mself reading and rereading passages. It’s the ultimate “entertainment” that he warns of.
Ahem, that’s “Finnegans Wake”, without the apostrophe. This is actually a pretty important distinction to make in regards to this book.
This is a small point, but I’m sure more than a thousand people have read FW.
13 posts, and nobody’s mentioned the relevant XKCD?
About your main point, people in the future may not read DFW, but they will very likely read something written by someone who was inspired by DFW, however indirectly. I get the feeling he cared a lot more about getting the message across than whether his name was attached to it.
I decided to comment on this to show that there are also a good deal of readers who are following the blog, reading the book, but not posting in the forums! I should be joining the finishers club in a few days, and unfortunately have a few things I want to discuss, but that can’ be posted due to spoilers.
On the subject of the Guardian article, perhaps a survey of book clubs is not the best way to go about predicting books that will remain influential. Book clubs (generally speaking) read books that are relatively new, and often to do with current topics/ideas. I don’t think that many book clubs would pick up IJ, or a Pynchon, Joyce, or Eco. IMHO, readers of these books tend to do it solo, though the existence of this project would tend to suggest otherwise.
Yeah, I’m one of those readers. I enjoy reading these posts and I’m enjoying IJ immensely, but I don’t feel like joining the discussion.
(Re esp Bernie and Kevin)
The first time I read and finished Ulysses it was because it was assigned in an undergraduate class, a Joyce seminar. And then, the first time I read IJ–also for a (graduate) class.
It is absolutely true that a book survives/becomes canonized because it is embraced by the literary/publishing community. The Great Gatsby is a good example of a (very American) book that was not popular when it was published, but later was embraced by publishers (reissued) and, eventually, academics. Now most of us have read this book in at least one class before we’ve even finished high school. Right?
I’m guessing IJ will have a similar fate (if not at the high school level)–in that it is already taught in colleges, and it is the kind of book that academics can embrace. Which is great, as far as I’m concerned.
P.S. I don’t agree with the Finnegan’s Wake analogy at all. IJ is far more accessible, and seems intended to be far more accessible.
Forgive me. I didn’t mean to italicize half that note! I meant to italicize The Great Gatsby. I should just give up on the html tags.
I absolutely agree that IJ is, and was intended to be, far more accessible than FW. I was trying to undercut the notion that IJ’s length, difficulty and time-and-place specific allusions will perhaps keep it from being read widely in the future by pointing out an extreme example of a work with those qualities which is still revered 70 years after its publication.
When I first started thinking about the longevity of IJ, not too many pages in, I wondered if the allusions would make it seem dated twenty or thirty years from now. But literature from the Western canon, in all flavors, is replete with references to then-contemporary items. We’re just lucky, perhaps, to have access to a novel fresh enough that WE get to catch (at least a few of) the double and triple meanings without consulting the encyclopedia or Fodor’s Travel Guide to Dublin.
Excellent. Re: FW I’ll play some Devils Advocate again, just to bounce things along.
It’s possible that Finnegan’s Wake would not be remembered at all today if Joyce hadn’t also written Ulysses. And while it’s true that a great novel can be remembered over time even with a very small readership, it’s only true of the great novels we remember. There are an untold number of completely forgotten novels that I’m sure would be beloved today if only people hadn’t, well, forgotten them.
That’s an argument I’ll have to advance without an example, however…
Nicely said, Kevin. Aren’t there thousands of active Lit Ph.D.s trolling around for publishable thesis topics. Writing on DFW or Delillo, &c., can be dangerous, since to do so you better know what you’re talking about (since someone else will), right? So why not dig into the archives for that forgotten, but once popular writer?
Historians of Philosophy do this a lot – find who was in conversation with canonical figures, then read them, troll for ideas. Sometimes very good ones, too, since as we all know, “remembered not= good”, necessarily.
1896 was kind of crummy, but 1899 had The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening and Heart of Darkness, all of which are still pretty big because scholars found them and appreciated them.
This year’s emergence of two academic conferences devoted to Wallace scholarship should help cram IJ into the hallowed halls, where even seven years ago nobody in academia was reading Wallace. Ask my thesis committee, who laughed when I asked them to read IJ and a 150 page thesis on it.
I’m going to have to vote on the Ulysses rather than Finnegan’s Wake parallel. Ulysses was hugely important as a Modernist text, as IJ is for whatever we name the post-postmodern lit movement. Ulysses is approachable but layered with meaning so deeply that a guide is necessary. Finnegan’s Wake is inscrutable by design. And I mean, like, PhDs can’t make heads or tails of that monster. Not true of IJ. Read Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace and you will see IJ in twenty new shades of brilliance.
I suspect that many of the commenters, like me, finished a while ago and got bored with all the slowpokes.
Sorry to keep ya waiting, atyf! I coulda run on forward with you, but it didn’t seem nearly as much fun as reading at the pace of all my new friends – and dropping a few thousand words of analysis each week, too! I think folks who hung back with us slowpokes are happy. And think what we have left to look forward to! Another 300+ pages!
Slowpokes?? I’m with Infinite Tasks here, we could be finished now but it seems much more fun to me to stay on schedule. The book itself draws me in so much I find it hard to put down, so I read some DFW essays when I get too far ahead. And yes, indeedy, it’s wonderful to look forward to reading IJ for another month!
I forgot to add – when I think of attrition I was considering those who have completely stopped reading IJ – not those who have already finished. It does make sense that the posters will diminish as they finish and I hadn’t thought of that until all of these comments.
Also one of those early-finishers and more-lurker-than-contributor…
I finished IJ this Sunday. The original plan was to finish the novel before going back to college (next week) and its inevitable piles of non-IJ books to read. Somewhere in the 600’s I found myself reading faster and faster (it felt like an avalanche in cartoons where you’re stuck in a gargantuan snowball and you+snowball keep picking up speed)…until finally it was over.
And now I miss it. I genuinely miss reading IJ. InfSum’s been great for alleviating that loss and I plan to stick around watching the commentary until the end of summer in September. (I totally vote for the second t-shirt idea on the Infinite Summer t-shirts thread, by the way. I’d proudly wear textile proof of being part of this endeavor.)
I started reading IJ on a whim (I’ve never read DFW before–a friend was a DFW fan so we started reading together, plus with TMN on board how could I say no) and I have to say it’s been one of the best whim-inspired adventures ever.
Hang In There, everyone!
Regarding T-shirts – we could steal an idea from the marathon/triathlon world and have shirts with “FINISHER” on them. I read IJ while training for a half Ironman triathlon* so this would be especially cool for me.
* I read some of the sections dealing with the academy kids’ exhaustion from training after I myself had done a seriously hard day of training and I could, like, completely Identify.
This is truly weird synchronicity here. I decide to read IJ mid July. I order from A. Next day find IS, and IJ arrives. Page 821 now. Woof!
A minor detail, but important to note: in 2005 the Guardian polled 48 British book clubs totalling, I think, 500 readers. Not 500 book clubs, as you said.
Thanks Paul. Fixed.
[…] jest, infinite summer, literature by Jeff Ventura Kevin Guilfoile blogging for Infinite Summer, wonders if anyone will be reading IJ 100 years from now, or if the book’s sheer attention and effort requirements – coupled with timestamped […]
A word from a latecomer and slow horse: three weeks ago a friend alerted me to this “Infinite Summer” thing, I thought why not, picked up the book and was pie-in-the-face astonished. I’d had a chance to review this for the Chicago Tribune and passed on it, figuring I wasn’t the right reader for a book that looked meta, self-conscious and (say it) crazy at first glance. Now I find that it’s not meta, not really post-modern either, nor obscure, just requires a longer attention span than most of us are used to, and there’s something brilliant on every page. A classic, definitely, and “Ulysses” is a good point of comparison; that book tells us unique things about a time, a place, its people and the human condition, and IJ does the same. And but so anyway I’m only on page 450, still a bit behind. Onward. Thanks to everyone, especially the four moderators, for their honest reactions, insights, patience and good cheer.
I think Infinite Jest will still be read in 100 years, simply because it already seems to be discussed in canonical terms. When the Great (frequently Massive) novels of the 20th Century are disussed, IJ gets mentioned in the same breath as Joyce and Delillo and Pynchon. As someone else has mentioned, it appears that Wallace is getting discussed by the academy already, and so I think IJ ‘s place in the readership of the future is pretty assured.
Nobody has mentioned Shakespeare and Hamlet. That story is old as dirt and people still perform, read, and most importantly, are inspired by it. Perhaps universal themes–– messages to humanity–– which we find in all the pieces mentioned here today are what allow a tale to survive through the ages. This is regardless of trendy plot structures, culturally based details, or the whims of the publishing market.
I haven’t read all of the other comments yet but I have to say, I wholeheartedly disagree with this post. I feel much more optimistic, I suppose, about the strengths of humanity. It’s contradictory – Americans can be willfully ignorant, narcissistic, and wasteful, as evidenced both in the book and in the recent health care town hall meetings. But in history, there has always been a large group of people committed to resisting this, people who have for the right to take care of each other and this planet. So far, this book has left me both distressed about the state of society but also hopeful and enriched by the myriad examples of humanity and selflessness and compassion.
About the book.. I think the general population may never read IJ, but I don’t see it in any danger of being forgotten. It’s like Don Quixote or Ulysses or some other work that’s critical to literature. You have to care already to read it, but I can’t imagine a world without people who do care about reading, about books, about art, etc. I think this post overgeneralizes and views things very cynically, whereas I think the book is critical but challenges us to do better, to be better.
I meant people who have fought for the right, not “have for the right.” Sorry!
This is kinda implicit in a few of the above comments, but it is worth making the distinction between surviving in “the academy” and surviving with general readers. Its survival in the first category is probably assured, but it would be a shame if it failed to survive outside the academy. I first read it around the time I was myself in a graduate program, but found myself really trying to keep it separate from that pseudo-professional experience, using it almost as a personal antidote to that culture, even as I could easily imagine an overlush concavity thicket of increasingly obtuse theses and dissertations growing from it. Of course, the list is long of books I love and deeply enjoyed when I read them as coursework in high school, college, and beyond, and I am not aiming to say that IJ living on in the academy is not “real” survival. But if it survives primarily or essentially as dissertation fodder, I think DFW would see that as a failure.
Here, here! Stephanie. or There, There….
I’m with Karin D, more lurker than poster, could not hold back my reading momentum, finished early (but so what?)… and could not bring myself to read anything else immediately thereafter. Except this site and others (infinitetasks & infinitedetox are marvelous). O, and except Hamlet, the play. The Riverside Shakespeare collected works has wonderful commentary by Frank Kermode; delightful as accompaniment to reading & re-reading IJ. While we’re batting the ball back & forth on the lasting worth of IJ, consider how absolutely WEIRD and dramatically difficult Hamlet itself is. We’re still coming back to it.
On counting IJ reader participation as any meaningful measure, we would have to know the reader count affiliated with all the other sites, those who don’t ever check in online (not sure I was counted, since I don’t post to forums- yet), all of us oldsters who read books in hand and don’t use e- interface or attend contemporary lit classes. Rather difficult to determine even the present readership. Many of us started before, dropped it, then kept coming back.
Yes, brother, the future is murder. Everyone in Hamlet DIES. The Entertainment will destroy us all. If anyone here has alternate plans for the future, I would love to hear them. All is ephemeral, there is no ultimate meaning… and we’re loving every moment of it! Yee-haw. This is a phenomenal experience, y’all. Keep Coming Back!
First, minor quibble, I think it is “Hear, hear!”. I was always confused by the spelling there and imagined some MP yelling for attention as “I’m over here, I’m over here!” to the chair. But I think the phrase is in a more let me speak vein.
As for the longevity of this (great, great) work, or others. I think we should all take Joele’s advise and simply Abide more in the moment and let the future work itself out. I doubt I will know if IJ is still read in 2509, nor should I care all that much. I think Hal at one point imagined all the food he was going to eat into the forseeable future. And look what good that attitude did him.
mm
Fine quibble, good catch.
Weak pun on: In Here, Out There; also, Be Here Now. Does anyone else go back that far w/r/t popular culture reference? Many references in IJ are news to me, since I have skipped about the past 30 or so years of popular culture. Yet I, as a “downstream” reader, can catch on. If folk in the future can, so much the better for them. The work is phenomenal, the reader must work for it, and I agree that only time will tell. Let us abide.
“Hear, hear” is an ejaculation in praise of the speaker — as in, “listen to this, it’s making sense.” You say it or shout it when somebody on your side makes a serious (or rabble-rousing) point. And no, not that kind of ejaculation.
Kind of like, “Good to hear you.” Sorta.
Three things:
1. Can I say Brawndo?
2. I too, like checking in once in a while, but am finding that I would rather mull over the book this first time through than discuss it (sorry).
3. I recall reading/listening to a discussion about “classics” that pointed out a lot of the books that are considered classics are read, these days, in junior high and high school classrooms. Most people would come up with Tom Sawyer as a classic (which a child can read and understand, at least on some level); Ulysses would probably never occur to the average American reader. I’m on board with the whole “acceptance by the Academy” thing as far as what ends up being timeless. Also, I think I’d sooner compare IJ to Gulliver’s Travels than to Shakespeare.
With all the discussion of Idiocracy, I just wanted to bring up Cyril Kornbluth’s story, “The Marching Morons.” Kornbluth’s rather dim sci-fi view of the future has inspired movies like this one and RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons