Infinite Summer was mentioned in Newsweek, both the online and print edition. Related: hello one zillion new visitors. More info about the event can be found here, and the forums are over yonder. And in case you are wondering: a dedicated reader could pick up Infinite Jest today and still finish by September 21st if they chose to do so, no sweat. (Well, maybe a little sweat. But Lyle can take care of that for you.)
Infinite Summer also graced the pages of The New York Times Book Blog, Phawker, and The EphBlog.
Gayla of Beautiful Screaming Lady views the many exhortations on this site to “trust the author” with skepticism:
I have to admit–and this makes me feel like Ebenezer Scrooge on a deadline at a Christmas parade–I don’t find … these arguments particularly compelling. I agree that the first ten pages are great. There is a lot of great writing in this book. The problem is that there’s also a lot of–not bad writing, but problematic writing, and there are a lot of paragraphs where I feel that Wallace’s point is not so much to communicate with me as to show me what a virtuoso he is…
And that’s why I don’t trust David Foster Wallace. I’m not going to stop reading the book, because its truly fabulous moments are worth slogging through Wardine and yrstruly. But I don’t believe he was in control of his talent.
In an interview with The Aspen Times, the Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller says he’s about to jump in the fray. At this point we’re only a drummer shy of a house band.
William.K.H and Jeffrey Paris argue that Infinite Jest is not “science-fiction”. Jim Brown and Robert Sharp wonder if the novel qualifies as a “new media object”
On Infinite Detox, a blogger struggles to overcome a dependency on tramadol while reading Infinite Jest. He writes: “Six or so months ago I found the book’s treatment of addiction and recovery compelling enough to inspire me to quit cold turkey for several weeks over the Christmas holidays … With Wallace’s book, again, acting as something of a guide and mentor, I hope also to give my drug habit the boot.”
Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:
- Laura of The Book Life.
- Patti of White Pebble.
- Nicola of Nicola’s Blog.
- Mark of The Kaedrin Weblog.
- Geoffrey of Geoffrey Werner Challen.
- Gina of So Silky, So Round.
- Ex Kathedra of The Arbiters of Taste.
- Sarah and Joe of Drunken Bee.
- Ruby of WordWacky.
- Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.
Comments
32 responses to “Roundup”
I blogged this morning about footnote 76, childhood precociousness, and Wes Anderson, as well as last week about addiction, suicide, self-referential thought, and the MIT language riots. (I put these links in the weekly summary thread, too; apologies if you see them twice!) Still really enjoying the book; looking forward to the next spoiler line on Friday.
I respectfully ripped Gayla a new one for that post… she’s just out of her league and complaining it’s not easier.
I’ve been dedicating a paragraph or two of each post on my progress. My love of Mario. My favorite footnotes. Things that alternately thrill and confuse me…
I’m a little more than halfway through IJ. I started a bit earlier than our group’s mass-start, but I also have quite a lot of time to read in the mornings and afternoons. I like it, to put it as broadly as I can. what I don’t like is the feeling of disconnected stories and thoughts and narration- which is the point, I’m told, since DFW is trying to narrate that communication is flawed- but it seems too disjointed. It’s like he wrote about 30 different short stories and someone decided to put all of them together to make a novel.
In one of the initial posts here, a few people said their reaction to the ending was, “Huh.” I’m afraid that’s going to be my reaction, too, just because I don’t see any real cohesiveness to any of the multiple plots, and if it is designed that way, then what’s the point? Maybe that’s the jest of it.
Eric,
I agree with you that the first several hundred pages of the novel are pretty disjointed, with every section seemingly beginning with a new setting and a different cast of characters. At first I found it disorienting and a little bit frustrating, too, but one of the many ironies of the novel is that this very disjointedness emerges as one of the central themes that ultimately serves to tie the whole work together. And oddly enough, after hitting about p.550 I realized, on reflection, that I actually missed the overwhelming narrative chaos of the beginning as the novel as a whole began to make more and more cohesive sense.
“..no sweat. (Well, maybe a little sweat. But Lyle can take care of that for you.)”
Eew.
A review up through page 210 went up yesterday!
I rambled a little about my experience through page 300 (no spoilers though) on Tumblr.
I’ve been helping run the Williams College reading of Infinite Jest, and apart from Ephblog I’ve also been posting at infinite-eph.blogspot.com and then in honor of Wimbledon last week I was writing about tennis and talked a bit about IJ (http://swampedfox.blogspot.com/2009/07/tennis-of-all-kinds.html)
Enjoyed your tennis post. The Hal as “Prince Hal” connection, is, of course, one of the backbones of the book, but hadn’t re-read Henry V, so didn’t know about the tennis connection there, which seems to work on a couple of levels, including the skirmishes with a francophone enemy…or is it J.O.Incandenza who is the “Hal” figure, since it is he who married the equivalent of the french princess (avril). Damn, does this mean I have to go re-read all three Henry VI plays now?
Thanks for the link. This project is a fascinating idea and the perfect way to assault something so complex!
I wrote some random thoughts on IJ over at my blog. Nothing terribly coherent. BUT IT’S THERE
My thoughts on week 3 and an IS mixtape
I’ve been leaving little paragraphs here and there about my thoughts reading, though most of my heavy discussion has been leaving angry replies to people who whine about the Wardine/yrstruly sections, which I find some of the most refreshing portions of the text.
Amen. What’s with all the whining, anyway?
I actually find that a lot of the “whining” on this site comes from DFW’s True Believers, who seem to take personal offense at any criticism of DFW or his work, and who will leap to his defense on any and all points, and go to great lengths in their efforts to show that DFW was always right, all-seeing, all-wise, and that we should all just totally trust DFW at all times.
In other words, there’s a lot of whining about whining here (as in, “Why are you hosers ruining our fun with your silly complaints about DFW? Let us debate whether the Dove Bar is ice cream or soap in peace.”). I am obviously exaggerating a little.
In any event, I think what Zach and EC call “whining” is necessary and useful: I think it’s hard to dispute that this site shows strong tendencies towards becoming a massive circle jerk. IMHO, it’s good to have at least a couple people to pee on the parade every now and then. Otherwise, this endeavor becomes an embarrassing hagiographic exercise in Groupthink populated by dittoheads.
i appreciate the general intent of parade peeing….but,
I think some of the arguments regarding clenette/yrstruly are especially bothersome to DFW fans because they seem to originate from the same cluster of academic leftist theories as the nihilism that DFW is critical of.
Dont get me wrong I think its entirely possible to agree wholeheartedly with DFW’s criticism of postmodern philosophy but to accuse him of racial insensitivity. I don’t think there’s neccesarily an inherent logical connection.
Perhaps Im totally ignorant on this but I am under the impression that there is a demographical connection, as in a lot of the people who evaluate literature based on cultural bias also tend to put quotes around “reality”, etc.
And so when I see people arguing the race issue the key frustration is “wow we could probably be arguing instead about how DFW’s work constitutes a sort of post-post-modernism,” which I feel is more interesting and takes better advantage of features that are unique to Wallace’s text, as opposed to racial bias arguments which I feel have been levelled against countless books.
In a nutshell. Thanks!
Exactly – In a nutshell. Q.E.D.
I disagree with postivelypoisonous.
But am also tired of arguing with you. I see there’s a whole school of thought out there that clusters together thoughts which I personally don’t see as logically connected, and that have been grouped in a neat little package a lot of you appear to be awfully fond of.
Whatever.
P.S. Sorry, misread, I agree with some of it. Maybe. I need to drink coffee before commenting. Sorry.
I still think the cluster thing though.
LOL:)
Have you seen the post over at Conversational Reading? Good site and he mentions Infinite Summer and his own detailed read of Good Old Neon. Link: http://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/07/contra-infinite-summer.html
I’m still blogging on my Myspace page at http://lnk.ms/0wq31
Gayla, if you are reading the comments here, I am also frequently struck by the parts of the book that seem like they need rewriting or editing or do not work, for various reasons–e.g., the points where it seems something was being attempted that might have been a great idea in the abstract but that does not work in the writing. One reading strategy I have employed is to kind of let go at those points and let myself be curious about what I might learn later. A few times, I have learned that a ham-handed passage or even a passage that annoys/disturbs/nauseates me is cast into a different light by later passages.
It has made my experience much more fruitful to try to the extent I can to forget about the author as a real person…This is what I usually do when I read anyway. I don’t think a great deal about the author, but about the book. If the book is amazing, I do admit I get somewhat curious about what kind of person could write such an amazing book. But for the books I love, it is the book that looms large. The author is a minor consideration. If I really thought about the weird stuff in Tolstoy’s marriage and kept thinking about it the whole way through Anna Karenina, I’m pretty sure it would have wrecked the novel for me.
For various reasons, it is harder to do that with this novel and this author but I find that the book works in a different way when I try.
Stepping back from the intense *thing* whatever it is, about this author helps me treat the book with the respect I want to give it.
[…] « Roundup […]
I did an online book club for Infinite Jest last summer which kind of fell apart after September 12.
I also posted a new entry to my blog about how much I love the idea of Infinite Summer, and/but don’t have the stamina to re-read the book right now.
Still keeping up with my own read-through, now with support from Infinite Summer!, over at my site: http://thatsoundscool.blogspot.com/2009/07/infinite-jestation-blogthrough-pages_15.html
I’m making wild leaps and stretches, and I’m loving the fact that there’s so much meat on the bones of this novel that it’s seemingly inexhaustible–I rarely find myself covering the same ground as other bloggers/readers (though I’ve never really had the problem that leads Struck to need to plagiarize in ft. 304).
Still doing my thing over at Love, Your Copyeditor every Wednesday.
Topics so far have included the unusual use of quotation marks, translation gaffes, and putting hyphens in strange places.
Thanks for previous shout-outs. And not to be picky about the pronouns, but I’m a chick.
Thanks for the shout out! I’m still managing two lengthy posts/week, love the traffic you sent over. My recent post is about Substance use, Too Much Fun, and Dis-ease.
http://infinitetasks.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/too-much-fun/
And thanks, too, for the intro to Infinite Detox, http://infinitedetox.wordpress.com/. That site is absolutely terrific.
You know the guy in college who shows up to class the 3rd or 4th week and asks the Prof if it’s too late to add, and exasperated the Prof says alright. Well that guy is me and I’m just now showing up to infinite summer and I appreciate you telling me that’s alright. I’ve got about 3000 Kindle location units under my belt this morning, so I should be caught up just after the first midterm. Thanks for hosting a terrific site.
I’m with you, Edward – I saw the article in Newsweek, and am sweating it out this weekend trying to catch up. Great stuff.
Here is a link to my review of Infinite Jest in relation to its length as a tome. Enjoy!
http://absentnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/07/infinite-jest-and-importance-of-tome.html