Comments on: Summer’s End Roundtable, Part III

By: Pemulis' Yachting Cap

Pemulis' Yachting Cap — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:41:45 +0000

I just realized that Mario reminds me a bit of Owen Meany! Anyone ever read that book? Ten times better than the movie, mind you.

By: Pemulis' Yachting Cap

Pemulis' Yachting Cap — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:07:23 +0000

I’m finished! I’d started last summer with all of you and stopped around pg. 300 – had a friend who died of a drug overdose and couldn’t bear to read through anything about addiction or drugs or even tennis players taking drugs. Cut to a year later and I’ve dusted off the book and decided to finish. I have to say it’s a lot more grotesque at parts than I can handle. When Hal describes walking in to find Himself (can we ever use microwaves again?), when Stice’s forehead is stuck to the glass and he gets demapped (I did not find this funny, I found it horrifying) and obviously the last flashback of Gately’s. Does anyone know if Chuch Palahniuk (Fight Club, etc) has read DFW? It sure seems like they influence each other re: grotesque-nightmare-factor. I’m not sure I see how Orin could have been smart enough to know the affect of the Entertainment and dug it up from JOI’s grave but not been smart enough to know who the AFR guys were or to know the Steeply profile was a scam…

I love the little things…like realizing the Yushityu = “You shit you” . I love the phrase “the howling fantods”. I love Pemulis.

I was completely frustrated that two major events – Eschaton and Gately getting shot – happen and then we’re slogging through 200+ pages before we get to know the punishment/outcome of Eschaton and whether or not Gately is even alive.

It makes me extremely sad to read any of the addiction/suicidal/anhedonia parts and think about the author.

I was amazed at all the tech stuff he mentioned that was not to my knowledge around in 1996. For instance Netflix-instant-watch type stuff. Everyone in the tech world owes him royalties. However, it’s also funny that the most tech stuff w/r/t music is the Walkman. Maybe he wasn’t a big fan of music, or it just didn’t relate to the story enough to develop new tech for it?

Next up: well, I’m gonna have to read all his other novels and essays. What a genius.

By: CT

CT — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:36:22 +0000

I, too, wouldn’t have read it without this group, and the site and its offshoots and links enriched my reading experience immeasurably.
As for the “don’t pull more than your weight” I think it’s not just a running reference, but an underlying theme–what is addiction and desire but the grasping for moremoremore?

By: Girl Detective

Girl Detective — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:38:11 +0000

I, too, wouldn’t have read it without this group, and the site and its offshoots and links enriched my reading experience immeasurably.

As for the “don’t pull more than your weight” I think it’s not just a running reference, but an underlying theme–what is addiction and desire but the grasping for moremoremore?

By: Sarah Palmer

Sarah Palmer — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:05:30 +0000

I learned my lesson about trying to talk to someone about “Infinite Jest” on the el in Chicago this morning. I looked up from my seat to see a guy I’ve noticed most of the summer reading the book with two bookmarks. One of the best tips from this site so thank you! I kind of poked him on my way out of the train and said “you’re almost done” and I am hoping he could not hear me with his headphones on and then I continued, with my foot in my mouth, to point at the book and say “it’s really good isn’t it?”. He just stared. Yikes – I feel like a fool. But I really enjoyed the book and I could not have done it without encouragement from this project. So thank you! And if the reader from the Brown Line sees this I’m sorry to have bothered you this morning. I guess I’m now an overzealous IJ fan.

By: alli

alli — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:56:11 +0000

i bought Against the Day in an airport, knowing nothing about Pynchon, on the strength of the blurb on the back cover – but haven’t tackled it. Maybe that one’s next for me!

By: tom collins

tom collins — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:58:54 +0000

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to put together a recap of this summer’s experiene for ‘the French reading public.’ The only thing I can hope for is that this hugely successful, and totally uncontrollable (impossible to synthesize) experience help the people over here to go on with their translations.
A word about TIME. Not only does IJ require quite some time before starting to click, so too did IS require time before beginning to register in terms of value and uniqueness. Everyone who has participated in this ‘event’ cannot help but appreciate the roundtable effect that began well before the end of the experience, not only here but in the satellite area where a whole lotta of serious and funny reading took place.

The most important item for me is something that may appear naive for you all: the fact that this will all remain for future use and abuse. I’m sure (i.e., I would bet on it) that the ‘archives’ of IS are as infinite as IJ itself. So many thanks to those who had the wild conceit of such an undertaking, for the moment totally unheard of in France, where such undertakings would have necessarily taken on the heavy and despairingly exclusive guise of university research. (No criticism intended of university research here) I feel like saying, singing even: “Only in America, land of opportunity” … but I’ll sign off before that!
Thanks ever so much for this golden opportunity. As soon as my ‘paper’ for the French press is ready, I’ll send it along, along with a bad translation.

By: Robert Chatain

Robert Chatain — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:38:48 +0000

Avery’s “paint a picture of an entire world” is perfect. When I got to the end, I just wanted more and couldn’t stop thinking about various scenes, characters, even footnotes — for example, last night I reread the Hal/Orin phone conversations. Once “inside” (maybe past the Clenette section, p. 37), nothing seems superfluous or beside the point.

This is also what made Pynchon’s “Against the Day” work for me a couple of years ago, and although most critics wished it had been pruned way back (one wrote that, had the novel concentrated on its out-West revenge plot, it would have been “the book of the year”), Pynchon had so much great stuff going on at so many levels that less would just have been less. That said, I think IJ is even better — and I’m looking forward to 2666, which looks at first glance like the same kind of book.

By: Dan Summers

Dan Summers — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:19:55 +0000

“Avery Edison: I’m starting to understand that even if one section doesn’t give us any new information or make sense as a part of the story, it’s still important because it builds IJ’s tone. Infinite Jest seems to be less about a series of events that show what happened to a bunch of people, and more about a collection of vignettes that paint a picture of an entire world. Everything is necessary because even the tiniest details inform this portrait of an entire alternate universe.”

Yes. Yesyesyesyesyesyes. That’s it. Exactly.

By: Mrs. Kennedy

Mrs. Kennedy — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:06:20 +0000

Ha! Daryl.

“Let the figurants speak.” Right, thank you. It reminds you that everyone has a story. Mikey, my God — I wish there was a book just about the Pemulis family.