Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.
First thing: Apparently summer is not infinite. It’s September 2nd and it’s cold in the mornings here and the leaves are just starting to turn and our tomatoes are dying.
Second thing: I’m keeping at pace.89 That’s my stand. And it’s not like I’ve had to hold myself back or anything – I’ve had kind of a busy summer and I’m not really a fast reader. However: I think another guest commenter may have mentioned, flying a lot lends itself to marathon reading sessions. The most traction I’ve had on the book has been achieved at 30K feet. So early on I actually had some breathing room and I managed to get a few other books read during my infinite summer.90 Initially I thought it’d be easy; that I’d get my 12 pages in IJ done and I’d be able to take on some light auxiliary reading. Things got a little crazy; I went on rock tour and I’ve had to abandon that plan. And while I’m sure there were folks who were pretty chuffed with themselves to be able to tweet “Finished. Think I’ll start in on 2666” in mid-July, I think that keeping to the schedule91 is the proper way to do this thing. For one thing, 12 pages a day is a reasonable amount, especially considering that I end up reading at least 3 of those pages more than once. And, more importantly, I’ve really loved reading all of the supplementary blogging that everyone has been doing92 Rushing ahead would somehow lessen the experience, don’t you think? So I’ve kept to pace.
Third thing: Okay: I’d like to just state that David Foster Wallace’s greatest achievement with this novel, in my estimation, is that he has managed to create a book whose key plot components are an elite tennis academy, a batty avant-garde film director, a dystopic future in which time is subsidized by corporations, a vast addiction-recovery complex, a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists/assassins, a film that is so compelling to its viewers that it will literally reduce them to a vegetable state, and a rampaging horde of feral hamsters and yet nothing has really happened. That’s the genius of this novel. It’s like Wallace is pushing the very limit of what plot elements a story can reasonably sustain, letting those elements wildly orbit one another until a kind of big bang occurs. One hopes. When describing this book to others (my baffled tour-mates, for one, sitting in their bus-bunks with their wrists unbent, blithely reading some slim novel or other) I’ve said that I’m well over ¾ of the way through this 1000 page book and I think I’m still getting exposition. I’d become really accustomed to the structure of the book and started to learn not to expect too much from the little plot pointers that DFW would throw at me – I grew closer to the characters in the understanding that these disparate worlds may never meet. And all of a sudden, things are changing: it was like witnessing the meeting of two old friends, you know, like one from college and one from high school. When Steeply was watching Hal play tennis. When one of the assassin roulants scoops up the unsuspecting engineer. When – holy shit – Marathe infiltrates the Ennet house! These perilous orbits are crashing closer and closer together, I think. We’re moving out of exposition, dear readers! The pages are starting to turn a little faster – though I’ll still be keeping at pace, thanks very much.
Colin,
I totally agree with you on the schedule thing. I’ve been trying to keep with the schedule, regardless of whether my life allows me to read more or less than the alloted amount. This week I was away and was able to read ahead, but now I feel like stopping, and letting the schedule catch up to me, so to speak. Because I’m dying to hear what some of the guides have to say about events that just transpired for me, but won’t happen schedule-wise untill next week.
By the way, I’ll probably get chastised for going off topic, but kick ass show at Radio City in June.
Madison in August was great, too. I was behind in IJ for that day
I was commenting about the huge amount of exposition to a friend who had already IJ just last nite. To me, the book shifted from this sprawling encyclopedia of characters, places, and background information about this alternate near future at Eschaton. From there, Steeply and Marathe on the mountainside ended, mentioning the WhataBurger became actually having time at ETA move towards the end of November, Gately gets into the fight with the hula dancers and is now in the hospital, etc, etc. But I’d realized – DFW somehow managed to write 500 or so pages plus 200 or so footnotes just to *start* the story =P.
Not that I spend a lot of time thinking about Colin Meloy, but once I learned that you were on board here, I had been wondering if you were still with us. So, hurrah! And I totally agree about sticking to the schedule…I’m finding it much more fun to be a part of everything.
And, although I’ve not read Maile’s book, I’ve loved everything else she’s written, and I’m delighted she has a new book out. She’ll have to wait till the end of Sept for me to look at it though.
That should say Maile’s NEW book, of course.
Thank you for clearly stating in “Third Thing” what I’ve been trying to convey to friends about this book. I may lift this passage (with attribution, of course) for future emails in reply to, “Why is Patrick so hung up on Infinite Jest?”
You may wish to reread the filmography of JOI, and note what film school he was an important member of, before he got into “Found Drama”.
THank you for summing up high points thus far-it is definitely “spot on”. Also I agree the keeping on schedule has allowed me further time to TRY and soak more in (thanks to all you brainiacs that so graciously share) – It is wondrous how DFW has kept it all hanging out there but bringing it together all along (it seems).
JOI helped create the anti-confluential school of filmmaking, with “anti-confluential” defined as “resisting the trend to tie all the threads of its narrative together in a nice little package,” to quote one definition taken off the Internet.
The following may be relevant, I don’t know.
Marxists were concerned with how texts act to reproduce the values of capitalism. There was apparently a tradition within Marxist-oriented literary theory of believing that the way we habitually consume texts (and other commodities) is more or less passive and unquestioning. Honestly, I think that’s overstated in Infinite Jest. I came to that conclusion on Sunday after watching an Encore Booknotes interview with an artist/author named Douglas Davis, author of a 1993 book entitled “The Five Myths of Television Power,” in which he shoots down the idea that television has made us passive to any great extent.
The source of the following information is “Postmodernism” by Glenn Ward, the section entitled “Poststructuralists at Work: Pierre Macherey”:
“So as to survive, the status quo has to give the impression of being in good working order. It also has to persuade people that the current state of affairs is simply the way things are. In other words, it has to distract people from the idea that their conditions of existence are the direct result of a historically specific social and economic structure. For Macherey, most texts and their consumers participate in creating and maintaining the taken-for-granted illusion that the status quo is inevitable, coherent, and unchangeable. In short, texts (and the way we’ve learned to consume them) aim to reconcile us to our conditions.
They do this by creating a sense of smoothness or unity. For example, when we watch most films, we tend to become interested only in the events they describe. The questions we ask concern only what is going to happen next and whether a particular character is going to win the day. Thus, whenever we admire or identify with a film star, or simply follow the actions of a character on screen, we rarely think about acting as a form of work, or film as a form of industrial production. We give little thought to the trade union disputes going on behind the scenes, or to the unequal pay structures between technical staff and actors. We are effectively blind to these aspects of film production, and Macherey would argue that we create this blindness for ourselves by letting ourselves be sucked into the film’s unfolding yarn.
We ignore the complex patterns of edits, flashbacks, jump-cuts and all the other devices that go into the fabrication of a movie. Inf fact, most films are really very fragmented, highly complicated pieces of material, but in the process of viewing this fact gets lost. By getting involved (or trying to get involved) in the stories they tell, we unconsciously stitch a multitude of filmic elements (for example, frames, scenes, shots ad sequences) together into an intelligible sequence. In this way attention is drawn away from the social, economic and political context in which the film is made.
For Macherey, all texts only just succeed in achieving such a sense of smoothness. Chaos is always bubbling away just under the surface. The text could easily fall into turmoil, if only we would let it. For texts are really constructed out of ill matching bits and pieces, holes, contradictions, and dislocations. [...]
Texts not only try to cover over their own internal gaps and conflicts, but are created out of the meanings they omit or repress: what a text puts ‘outside’ of itself determines what it says.
This is an example of how, whereas structuralism saw language as a closed system, and tried to fix individual texts to rigid linguistic frameworks, poststructuralism tries to open texts up and cut meanings loose. Poststructuralists do not necessarily believe that everything is meaningless, just that meaning in never final.”
I’m at pace on p. 790. Speaking of pace, if it’s not too far off topic, former American cross-country and marathon champion Alberto Salazar includes two Decemberist songs in one of his recorded Nike coaching runs. I have about a dozen of these continuous-mix workouts on my iPod and I’ve noticed a literary intelligence at play in the production, because of the many running-related double-entendres in the lyrics, like “I don’t want to hurt anymore,” or “I met a girl/she filled my world/she had to run,” etc. In that respect, I think the key phrases in “Sixteen Military Wives,” are “cheer them on to their rivals” and “staring at the natural tan.” Anyway, I hope that’s offensive, I think it’s a great song (which the Guardian Unlimited music blog recently chose as Best Song About Numbers).
“not” offensive, I mean.
I think someone else may have said something similar, but when I finished the book, my first thought was, “It wasn’t long enough!!!” Not because I had so much free time to read that I sped through it (I didn’t) – I’m thinking now that maybe all of that exposition built such a vivid, specific world that I didn’t want to let go.
I’d like to respond more to this post but don’t want to discuss anything past the spoiler-line. I hope we can revisit it after everyone’s finished. This book totally changed the way I read and my expectations for fiction in the future.
And lastly, while summer may be ending here in the States, spring is about to begin across the world…
Stephanie, I’m already slowing down my reading – hovering, for the first time, right at (and even one day last week a day behind) the spoiler rather than my usual 30-40 pp. ahead – because I don’t want this to end any sooner than it has to. I get afraid when I get engrossed that I’ll read straight through and all of a sudden be done, like a bag of candy at the movies. Not enough M&Ms, I think… Don’t let IJ end…
Even when it ends though, it doesn’t really end. My friend and I were just discussing how we both have IJ-related dreams. I think about the book all the time.. and plan to re-read it after I read all of the readers guides and philosophy texts it refers to. Plus it’s a way of life, kind of. It’s certainly changed my life, particularly in the way that I try to really put myself in the present. I don’t know how best to articulate it, but I just feel like this book will never really leave me.
“…yet nothing has really happened” is probably a common impression of the plot so far compared to traditional stories. From some of the reactions I’ve read from people who finish the book, I’m not certain anything does happen.
In a more immediate sense, quite a lot has happened. But those little collections of moments, often quite extreme, haven’t so far added up to a large story arc. It’s like the difference between what we experience during memorable parts of our days and what we tell others about our life in summarizing things like vacations or weekends.
Because “nothing has really happened,” these little stories and loosely related vignettes come closer to haiku for me than regular fiction. Having written that, I realize it’s a ridiculous thing to say about a 1000+ page book with multi-page paragraphs, but a better description isn’t coming to mind.
I agree. Not only reading exposition, but reading exposition that is just expanding on previous exposition.
But I could read DFW write exposition all day. And there are basically zero other writers I can say that about.
I don’t have an opinion about the rightness, wrongness, or coolness of staying with the schedule and have been adhering more by chance than intention. Having ended up on track, though, I can say that synchrony with fellow readers has turned out to be one of the best features of the IS project. I can’t put my finger on why, but I just enjoy knowing that a bunch of other people are encountering the same delicious turns of phrase and enjoying the same revelations as I am, at (roughly) the same time. It certainly cuts down on my attempts to summarize parts of the book for my (remaining) friends and relations, most of whom probably think I’ve gone a bit off the deep end.
Prolixian, the same goes for my friends, except the one I spent my holiday with, me with IJ, she with Susan Sontag’s Reborn. I was obviously smitten with IJ so I kept on disctracting her with a ‘hey, listen to…’ line. She quickly became so fond of some of DFW’s phrases we now uses them as part of our special code. I believe the big thing that happened this summer – to all of us readers, thanks to IS – was that we all got a friend in every other IJ’s reader, that we started sort of breathing with what DFW created. Or swimming in the water we jumped in with him.
Colin – given your penchant for writing 3-4 (or more) minute, blissful little pop narratives, what sort of chance (in hell?) is there that on your next full length, you tackle IJ by putting it to music? Cause, if you were to do so, you might just be the first band to finally summit In the Aeroplane over the Sea, the album that has ruthlessly presided atop my top ten list since its release.
Somewhere in the foundation writings for this project was a statement about the discussions of this summer being available to future readers.
A corollary of sorts to my unexpected enjoyment of the synchrony with fellow IS participants is that the idea of a solo IJ reader going through these posts later, eager to engage with other IJ readers, but knowing that the dialog is dead and the web site is just an empty shell, strikes me as incredibly depressing.
Well – not all is lost. They can always join the mailing list (which I just did and am very happy about) and engage in discussion.
Mr. Maloy:
In re your Third Thing: you neglected to mention the Giant Feral Infants. They demand propitiation. May you be picked up, drooled upon and dropped.
Otherwise, excellent post. And let me just say, I’m thoroughly enjoying “The Hazards of Love.” Its songs put me in mind of a medieval German forest, for God only knows what reason, but I’m happy to be there.
@ Steven: “Anti-Confluential”:
DFW reviewed David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” back in, I think, 1988. In the review (“Empty Plenum”; pg. 234, it’s googable), Wallace sets forth what I consider to be a kind of foundation for his type of fiction, which is decidedly anti-confluential, and I think he has in mind more than a Marxist-type political agenda when he argues that … well, it’s probably better for me to quote him directly:
“… I’m coming to accept that it’s the petrifiedly standard critical line w/r/t fiction these U.S. days: readers want stories about very particular persons with very particular qualities in very particular circumstances whose genesis must on some level be personally-historic & psychological as well as ‘merely’ intellectual or political or spiritual, pan-human. The ‘successful’ story ‘transcends’ its thoroughgoing individuality/idiosyncracy by subsuming the peculiarities of character & circumstance to certain broad archetypes & mythopeiae inherited from Jung or Shakespeare or Homer or Freud or Skinner or Testament. Particularity births form; familiarity breeds content.
“Rarely is our uncritical inheritance of early Wittgensteinian & Logical Positivist models so obvious as in our academic & aesthetic prejudice that successful fiction encloses rather than opens up, organizes facts rather than undermines them, diagnoses rather than genuflects.
“Attic myths were, yes, forms of ‘explanation.’ But it’s no accident that great mythos was mothered by the same culture that birthed great history. [...] To the extent that myth enriches facts & history, it serves a Positivist & factual function. but the U.S.’s own experience with myth-making & myth-worship — from Washington & cherries to Jackson & hickory to Lincoln & logs to dime novels & West as womb & soul’s theatre to etc., etc. to Presley & Dean & Monroe & Wayne & Reagan — an experience that informs & infects the very physics of reading, today — confirms that myth is finally compelling only in its opposition to history & data & the cingulum of Just The Facts, Ma’am.
“Only in that opposition can story enrich & transfigure & transcend explanation. [The protagonist's] idiosyncratic/formulaic ‘real’ past in ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’ isn’t weak as an explanation; it is for me weak & disappointing [*BECAUSE*] it’s an explanation.”
And I agree with DFW (to the extent that I understand him) that a standard, intra-textual explanation of a novel’s or movie’s main characters’ personalities and pyschopathologies more often serves to etiolate rather than enrich my experience of those characters. And so an anti-confluential drama’s denouements happen more between the lines rather than on the page. (Greg Carlisle’s book on “Infinite Jest” describes this [= DFW's] approach to anti-confluential literature much better than I can. I highly recommend it.) Even though it’s more work, I’m coming to prefer this type of novel more than standard, linear ones.
An a-c drama is more satisfying to me probably because the moment (many moments, actually) when an a-c’s story’s disparate elements coalesce into one large, epic landscape is intensely pleasurable to experience. More pleasurable even than the pleasant mental “click” experienced at the end of a well-made movie like “Fight Club” or “Sixth Sense.” The pleasure’s more like what I experienced during the fifth or sixth viewing of “Pulp Fiction,” when that movie’s beautiful story’s many threads finally came *fully* together for me.
At any rate, that’s what this second reading of “IJ” has been like for me (and I bolted for the barn nearly a month ago, but I’m still hanging around): intensely pleasurable and full of never-seen-before vistas (thanks mostly to the brilliant insights and signposting of IS’s many smartypants’ readers).
I’ve really enjoyed being on schedule – for me it’s made it a larger experience. If I had already finished I don’t think the posts and forums and blogs would have the same impact/hold on me and they’re such a big part of the whole. I also thought that the schedule would leave time for other books as well and that held true at the beginning, but as it became more engrossing the other books have been put on hold.
Regarding the Third Thing – for me it feels as though I’ve become a part of the world that he creates in IJ and regardless of the outcome, plot development, etc. it’s a world I want to stay in. The approach of the end and my memories of approaching fall (in central Florida it doesn’t really happen)lend a bitersweet edge that is at least tempered by the fact that I know I’ll reread it and can re-enter this world whenever I want. In thinking about the “nothing really happens” aspect the comparison that keeps popping into my head is with Seinfield! I remember when the series first started it was described as being about a group of friends but nothing really happens. I think that’s one of the beauties of IJ – it’s so much like real life, made up of moments and vignettes that sometimes relate to each other but often don’t and we swim through it all. To me it’s what he was getting at in This is Water and is the only true way to live – really experiencing all the different moments and getting the most out of them and not being focused on what it will all add up to for me. Hopefully this makes sense!
I had completely forgotten about anti-confluential – that endnote was such a long time ago – but that sounds like this book. I know no one else who is reading IJ now and I can’t articulate to anyone who dares to ask why I am reading this very heavy book. Not to mention why I am doing it at such a slow pace, following the schedule in my bookmarks and still can’t answer the very simple question – what is the book about??
So it was a private satisfaction to realize, as I attended the awe inspiring Buffalo (etc…) concert – that Colin Meloy was probably right around the same place in this book as I was!
[...] Colin Meloy’s article snapped me back to reality. Before I did that sewing boot camp at the beginning of August and got so horribly off track, I too was firmly reading at pace. Then I got further and further behind in my reading, which in turn made me come down with a case of I have lots of time. I can catch up. I just want to read something ellllllllse. [...]
[...] The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy weighs in on David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” as a part of the reading project [...]
[...] Colin Meloy’s fun post on Infinite Summer he jokes ” that I’m well over ¾ of the way through this 1000 page book [...]
I brought IJ to your Pittsburgh show in case I couldn’t get a ticket & had to wait for my friends while they were inside. Luckily I got a ticket and kept IJ for later that night.
[...] his Infinite Summer post Colin Meloy plugged the new book that his sister had just written. I wasn’t aware of the [...]