Jacket Copy, the LA Times literary organ, interviewed Matthew Baldwin. The Story Behind Infinite Summer. The Valve, meanwhile, finds the project “a little morbid“.
Unbeknownst to us, Infinite Summer was mentioned on television at some point.
Mark Flannigan, the Contemporary Literature Guide of About.com, is on-board.
Says Whitney of Feet on Polished Floor: “Reading David Foster Wallace is like punching yourself repeatedly in the face. But in a good way.”
Danielle started late but is determined to finish by August 12th. Cynthia of Catching Days was also tardy, but has already caught up.
Gerry Canavan, on the narrative shift that begins on page 140
The multiple perspectives characteristic of Infinite Jest have now, suddenly, infected the text itself; the chapter headings that had previously presented themselves as objective and reliable third-person-omniscient narration are now uncovered as subjective and perspectival, opinionated, excitable, and frankly a little confused.
Michael posted an “Infinite Summer playlist” at Trials & Tribulations. He also pointed out another playlist made by Señor Cisco.
Many bloggers are providing regular updates of their reading. Among them:
- Paul of I Just Read About That … , who provides character profiles, synopsies of plot developments, and more.
- The Feminist Texan.
- Charles & Leah of Ashcan Rantings.
- Ward at Brain Health Hacks.
- Sarah of Sarah’s Books
- Chris of Pandemonium of the Sun.
- Jennifer of Piano & Scene.
- Erica is using her MySpace page to track her progress through the novel.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.
Thanks for the link! Really enjoying the whole Infinite Summer project so far.
I posted about it today at Infinite Zombies:
http://infinitezombies.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/of-attachment-in-infinite-jest/
I was expecting to see songs related to IJ in some way (like which show up in the narrative somewhere, like “I Want to Tell You) the in the mixes.
Some friends and I recently (as in, VERY recently) launched a blog in which we’re planning to share lofty thoughts (haha) about the media we’ve been consuming lately.
I wrote about Infinite Jest for my debut post. Since I haven’t really blogged outside of LJ (does that even count?), it’s been a new experience.
Also, the camaraderie of I-S.org and the I-S group on fb has been so encouraging as I continue brain-tackling IJ. Thank you everyone for your thoughts and fantastic links!
And just in case, here’s the link to the blog:
The Arbiters of Taste
Exchanging thoughts weekly about the novel with a friend on my blog Drunken Bee.
My post isn’t about Infinite Jest; it’s about joining Infinite Summer. But here it is in all its glory: Infinite Summer: Reading as a Social Experience.
Hello! I’m posting about my reading progress and Infinite Summer fun every Monday evening at So Silky So Round:
http://sosilkysoround.blogspot.com/2009/07/smoothly-economical-frolicking.html
Got my third lengthy post up last night, this time on “Why IJ Doesn’t Really Count as Science Fiction.” Thanks to all the other bloggers out there who are working through this book with me!
http://infinitetasks.wordpress.com/
I’d started doing this with some bloggers in January. Congratulations! You’ve remotivated me to get back into the book, just in time for the p. 210 deadline today! My latest musings–which, given the nature of this section, are just escapism–are found here: http://thatsoundscool.blogspot.com/2009/07/infinite-jestation-blogthrough-pages.html
I’m a little behind (one week of pages) but I’ve been enjoying this ride. Thanks for organizing this project! It’s great to have guides and fellow travelers on this journey.
[...] week’s IS blog roundup revealed that someone had created an Infinite Summer playlist. Recall me saying I’m a total [...]
Dave loved LeGuin
This reference to LeGuin raises one of the exact motives for placing this narrative in the near-future:
At Arizona in the early 80s, the Iowa-schooled fiction professors had the usual establishment East-coast publishing view of the purpose of “literature” and were seeking to enforce a purity of form and content aimed at a contemporary upper middle class educated, mostly white audience: call it realism, character fiction or boring crap, its techniques were defined and “teachable,” i.e. easily identified in student text, thus making for “sound” judgments of the quality of such work. These teachers had no place for “genre fiction,” nor for anything the least bit “experimental” (whatever that means to a true creative artist), and would sneer any such attempts from the room as soon as they were displayed in workshop. The post-World War II novelist (Brill Among the Ruins, among other fine volumes) and 15 year veteran director of Iowa’s Writing Program, Vance Bourjaily once described the problem in the program like this:
At Iowa, he tried to get the best writer’s in America to come to Iowa farm country to teach for a year or two, and then they would recruit these youngsters based on their manuscripts, and these ambitious kids would come into workshops and chew up one another’s stuff like little piranha to get the attention of the famous writer at the head of the table. The problem in Tucson was the tenured fiction professors were almost, if not all, former Iowa students, less well published than they might have liked by that point, applying that practice to the students around the table. Little fun was had once a week on Wednesday afternoons. Vance had been lured down to semi-retirement for the sun and tennis of Tucson by several of these former students of his, yet he found the place far too “self-righteous in an odd way,” to tolerate and took a flyer to Baton Rouge, and residence in New Orleans the summer of ‘85; some of his students stayed. Dear Dave then walked into this seething mess, with “Broom” tucked in his travel trunk. Bad news on the rise.
These “genre” elements, now seen as commonplace in the synthetic freedom of 25 years later, are, in no small part, part of Dave’s natural response to restrictions, to “no”: “Sure I can, watch me,” his claim, always, based in part on the use of “can” in the restriction; the claimant was questioning Dave’s ability, something one found quickly would only make him try harder to achieve what had been termed beyond him.
And but for this need to thumb his nose at such, to rebel, we would have none of it.
LeGuin is the perfect note because she . . . no, her entire work, her soul so seriously on display in the masterpieces, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, or “The Word for World is Forest” or the latest, trans-genre pieces in “Unlocking the Air” and other stories, demonstrates the transcendence of such petty bounds as historic time and place, of contemporary mores and paradigms, permits the most luscious freedom of language and mind, because the reader must imagine what is truly new in what is written; the reader may not merely glean some vaguely similar set of images or responses on which each of them, as a mass market mesmerized mentality, must rely.
An author freed of such constraints of temporal and realistic obligation, may freely wonder “What would a Portuguese-American southie sound like on the train in Boston in June of the Year of Glad?” If it were called 2006 (or is it 1?), the audience’d all be wrapped up in donneybrooks about how wrong a portrayal it all is. (hint)
LeGuin’s wondrous craft, like that of the oft cited Joyce, or the magic realism of Garcia Marquez, or even the finely spun tales of the “realist” John Gardner (“The Art of Fiction” was used as a workshop text in Tucson in the mid 80s, yet his own novels are filled with ghosts and the possibility of magic: Grendel, “The King’s Indian,” or his last work, Michellson’s ghosts), serves to show how uniquely such works of language (composed text, written or aural) work best as language. LeGuin is also the daughter of one of the founders of anthropology, Alfred Kroeber (UC-Berkeley), and the author Theodora (“Ishi in Two Worlds”), an oddly conflicted set of springs for a broad, sure river of thought and art such as she.
And she is the perfect note because of a conversation Dave had about her (probably the spring of ’86 from the context) after the news some one in the lit side of the house was putting Left Hand on a graduate contemporary American literature seminar syllabus. (some English departments are well compartmentalized, and on the 3rd floor of the Modern Languages Building, creative writing and “more serious things” rarely crossed paths, literally, despite the single main hallway.)
The choice frees the writer of the ethos of verisimilitude, and would allow her to duck many of the quibbles that beset some readers about appropriateness of voice, or the validity of some trace detail. Consider “The Great Ohio Desert.” In The Broom of the System, young Dave just wanted to redo the last scenes of Frank Norris’s greedy McTeague and needed a desert nearby his chosen locale of Cleveland, so he created one and thought up a coy, cute excuse about some bizarre political purpose to it, simple as that, he said, “pretty stupid, huh.” Like many, he was not too fond of the book once he saw it in galleys, but by then it was far too late.
For Dave, surrealism revealed an entirely different mind to the reader and like ancient fables cast in the mouths and actions of animals or fools, permitted a completely different magnitude of critique on the culture spawning it. The reality persists within the dreamscape, the dream within the real. The audience asks, “What does it mean?” the author’s reply, “What do you see?” It was Dave who put Mrs. Caliban in one’s hands to fill the time till he felt like coming out of his room during a visit in mid ’88, so a boundary crosser like the master Ursula LeGuin is the most lovely note to strike here.
In the end, Dave’s pen performed the tricks of his mind, no other.
ain’t it wonderful, now,
ain’t it?
gosh, things do runaway with themselves, don’t they?
sorry for the length,
semper fi, guys n gals
enjoy the show
gno?