Comments on: Aren’t I Meant to be the Funny One?

By: Kaitlyn

Kaitlyn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:03:54 +0000

Nice use of the word “map.”

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:15:55 +0000

Amen on acid

By: naptimewriting

naptimewriting — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:01:55 +0000

I see the hostility to Derrida, as well. A bit in the anti-academic passages, wherein academese is mocked, but mostly in little references, like the above mentioned bit that “deconstructed” or “deconstruction” (can’t remember which) was Himself’s least favorite word. Deconstructionism itself is quite alienating (in that sense of removing something that seems human and emotionally rich from a text and deconstructing it into signifiers and signifieds, manipulating language at a nano-level), so it would seem a diminishing prospect to have a text fraught with deep existential pain be parsed as an amalgam of signs and signifiers rather than an organic artistic creation. That’s where I hear the Derridean hostility, initially. Willing to hear otherwise, though.

By: Amy Maguire

Amy Maguire — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:11:39 +0000

I’m kind of freaking out because I’m on my second read of IJ, this time reading it in the bathroom, so I’d be forced to read it really slowly. I was up to page 193 when I read about Infinite Summer in Time Magazine, which I only happened to have because my neighbor gave me a bunch of magazines to cut up for some collage. ANYWAY…for the last two days I’ve been alternating between glutting myself on these posts, trying to catch up to the read, and getting thoroughly overwhelmed by the whole damn thing. This is massaging my super private literary masturbation in a way I frankly, never dreamed was possible. Off point, but I wanted to say Hello. Thankfully I have the next six weeks off. Scarily, they may now be completely absorbed in this extravaganza. I am promising now to continue getting some exercise and eating regularly. Here’s to David and an Auspicious Enterprise.

By: naptimewriting

naptimewriting — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:53:16 +0000

amen squared.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:48:14 +0000

Digging into DFW’s suicide through his work feels like grave robbing. For the sake of enjoying IJ as it is I am going to avoid the cemetary. Any person that confronts the absudity of the world reflects upon suicide. If there is any mystery in suicide it not when one choses to end one’s life but when one choses not to.

Let look elsewhere, Camus perhaps.

“There is on but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” Myth of Sisyphus

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:15:30 +0000

Miguel; great, passionate, synopsis of Jacques D.

RE: Derrida

One important notion you did not mention of his is that a writer’s words develop a life of their own; this is a thing I like about Derrida, that he aims “over the head of Kant” back to the Scholasitcs in this. See John Duns Scotus.

Derrida, in Dissemination, reading Plato quoting Socrates:

“And once a thing is put into writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its aid, being unable to defend itself or attend its own needs.”

Derrida continues interpreting Plato: “Wandering in the streets, he [writing] doesn’t even know who he is, what his identity–if he has one–might be, what his name is, what his father’s name is. He repeats the same thing every time he is questioned on the street corner, but he can no longer repeat his origin….Uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any house or country, this almost insignificant signifier is at everyone’s disposal, can be picked up by both the competent and incompetent, by those who understand and know what to do with it…and by those who are completely unconcerned with it, and who, knowing nothing about it, can inflict all manner of impertinence upon it.”

This is an interesting way to consider texts, especially as a writer. One’s words become independent of him, the work its own life, as Derrida puts it, simulacra.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to point out that (even in translation) Derrida knows how to friggin’ write a sentence, eh?

RE: DWF

I am pretty sure Wallace was well steeped in Derrida and was in fact approaching him ironically in this novel. Derrida would not have been obscure for someone of Wallace’s schooling, or for that matter many, many of his readers here.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:07:04 +0000

I was chuckling Matt.

By: Ozma

Ozma — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:17:37 +0000

I agree with Sorrento, above.

That makes a lot of sense Sorrento.

It is a strange way to grieve but then the idea of a grief counselor is absurd and Hal wants to rid himself of the grief counselor.

Being detached and ironic about something horrible is not the same as discounting the horror. It’s something a lot of people do.

I got to the end of the book and went back and for some reason I was re-reading this part to day. I don’t know why I like it.

I notice that all the suicides in IJ are inimitable. They would not get stuck in one’s head as things one might consider doing, in the way that suicidal ideators tend to have described suicides get stuck in their head.

I get this idea that there is hostility to Derrida in IJ but I can’t really back that up.

By: JFD

JFD — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:42:04 +0000

I think that is one of the reasons Hal comes off sarcastic and maybe a bit jerky in the phone conversation with Orin. His anger at Orin’s failure to engage him at the time has ripened into resentment and bitterness. And now that it is necessary for Orin to find out the details, Orin wants to talk. When Hal needed to talk,Orin is nowhere to be found and all Hal has was the grief counselor, a poor substitute for real human connection, which is one of the things that happens all the time in this book.