Infinite Summer

Author: admin

  • Matt Earp: Standing Witness

    Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.

    The Basics

    ’97: I’m 18, a freshman at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My best friend gets me to read A Supposedly Fun Thing. I go to see DFW speak at the Harvard Film Archive. I fall in love.

    ’99: Coming back from Australia, I’ve finished Infinite Jest on a six week road trip, and landing in San Francisco, a friend, the same friend in fact, and I go see DFW again at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (now sadly gone). I tell DFW I want to make a play out of IJ, and he laughs and says “Let me know how it turns out.”

    ’00 (summer) – I do it. I sit in 100 degree heat sweating to death in an apartment on 11th and C in New York, and trim, coax, and cajole the script from it’s 900 or 1000 pages down to 70, focusing entirely on Enfield and Hal, because to take on any more would have been ludicrous.

    Sept ’00 – March 6th of ’01: I turn 21 and we produce Infinite Jest, now called Standing Witness. Bonnie Nadell, one of the best literary agents UK has, grants me permission to do it as long as it’s a one time event and we don’t charge for it. My advisor cajoles me into making the script more coherent and understandable. I cast my best friend and closest acting associate as Hal. My genius props designer not only makes tennis balls drop from the ceiling during Eschaton, but makes it snow in the theater later in the play, and a lot of other magic.


    Eschaton
    More photos from “Standing Witness” here.

    Another friend turns Mario into a Bunraku puppet. Two further actresses and friends meld Madam Pyschosis into a character that’s part radio host, part DFW’s narration, part Mario’s voice, and part an excuse for me to try some of the Supercollider patches I was working on at the time to mess with her vocal cadences. The whole cast shows up at 6AM to liberate the bleachers from a block of snow, bleachers that eventually become the audience seats. We crank the sound system in the theater up at 2AM and play jungle into the wee hours when we can’t concentrate on building the set any more. The staff hated us. The audience loved us, both those who’ve read the book and those that haven’t. We finish the play. We have a ridiculous cast party, one of the stage runners singes her eyebrows off on a flaming 151 shot, and we burn the set plans outside in the snow.

    I never direct another piece of straight theater again.

    Eschaton

    Eschaton was the crown jewel of the show – I mean, it’s probably the crown jewel of the book anyway, but as a scene it’s got everything a director could want in it. It’s funny, it’s got drama, it’s got the dual attention between the big kids and little kids, it’s got a huge build up, it turns into a fight … and it ends with one of the most dramatic moments in literature, the infinitely long frozen arc of the computer as it flies out of Lord’s hands through the air and onto the court.

    Because it was a black box configuration, we had the opportunity to use one of the balconies as a space for the big kids to sit and watch, and to me that way it was like Pemulis was conducting the madness from on high. Not only was he above the kids but above the audience as well. He could manically shout down at the little kids during the action from above while Hal fretted, Axford (who in my version was sort of Peemster’s sidekick) smoked and Troeltsch narrated. Meanwhile the little kids started pleasantly enough but slowly devolve into this elegant match that turns into a fight, then into a wrestling match, then a melee, then a disaster. It all happened over the course of about 12 minutes.

    So many details about it were just amazingly fun to engineer. Dressing everyone up in as much winter gear as we could find, and making sure all the clothes were a little too short (to give the illusion that the actors, all 18-21, were actually 12-14). The actor who played Otis P. Lord gave an awesome performance in the perfect beanie, playing the most gigantic nerd on earth and carting around an old monitor which we destroyed every night (no easy thing to engineer, throwing a heavy monitor about 20 feet over the heads of a bunch of fighting actors…). The impending sense of disaster as tennis balls started to fly off in all directions, and the double horror and glee that all the designers and I felt as we both watched the audience get (sort of intentionally) pelted with balls and held our breath hoping nothing would knock a light or a piece of sound equipment out of alignment.

    Not only did I direct the whole thing, I sound designed it as well (theater was always kind of just an excuse for me to have access to loud toys and a place to use them in), and my favorite moment of the whole play was the sonically enhanced crash of the monitor onto the floor that coincided with the blackout at the end of the 1st act and the loudest noise I could make (I ripped it from the explosion at the beginning of 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare). We spit it out through two giant subwoofers under the audience. Literally earthshaking. It was magnificent. Every night we got some of the loudest and most raucous applause I’ve ever heard at a theater.

    Coda

    I haven’t actually read the book since then … it was so very much of a particular time and place for me. Since my life has taken me away from theater, I didn’t think about it much again till Infinite Summer asked me for the use of the picture of the Eschaton game and Matthew offered me a chance to reflect (by the way, the balls falling from the ceiling were more for visual effect than because the book calls for them … dramatic liberties I suppose). In doing so, I found an old review of the play on Wallace-L … read it if you care too, although definitely be warned of spoiler alerts about a few details:

    Happy reading, I hope IJ gives you as much joy, wonder, happiness and sadness as it did for me all the times I’ve read it.

  • Michael Wendling: Good Old Wireless

    Michael Wendling is a writer and producer. He is currently producing From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC World Service, and is working on a novel.

    Pretty much every form of media gets slammed in IJ, even the forms that don’t actually exist. The students at Enfield T.A. and the addicts at Ennet House mong out in front of mind-numbing cartridge-eating TPs. Video telephones are on the shelves for five sales quarters before, in one of the funniest riffs in the book, human paranoia and insecurity crush the whole industry. Movies – well, one in particular – kill. And yet radio, that good old wireless, is somehow still around, unchanged, strangely and hopefully connective.

    I’m talking mostly here about the scene which begins on page 181. Joelle/Madame Psychosis is hosting Sixty Minutes More or Less on WYYY. There’s fresh air in the studio and Madame Psychosis gets paid for doing a midnight slot with ‘solid’ ratings on a student run station, cushiness which stretches things a bit even by IJ standards.

    Anyway, the point is that Sixty Minutes +/- is soothing, comforting, familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to the radio late at night pretty much anywhere in the world. MP shouts out to tortured M.I.T. geeks and U.H.I.D. freaks. Up the hill Mario is listening “the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to tone of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like” while the rest of the family gathers for dinner. Leaving aside the weird UV plant lights and the connections between the radio host and the people around the table, it could be a scene from decades ago – or “three generations past”, to be specific. The frantic pace of the novel slows for a while as MP rattles off deformities in a grotesque, hypnotic intermission.

    Radio’s not really a main theme in IJ, but it does tie a few plot strands together (if you’re reading for the first time you haven’t got to that bit yet so I won’t give it away). It’s also a subject Wallace returned to later, most notably in his Atlantic profile of right-wing jock John Ziegler.

    But here’s the interesting thing. These days, radio in general is on a bit of a winning streak. It’s not dying like newspapers, or inane and shouty like television. Corporate stations are dull as ever, but now we can listen to underground podcasts, news from foreign countries, hipsters telling stories, community broadcasting. And that wasn’t really the case when Wallace was writing the book. In the mid-90s, US radio was in a perilous state. Anodyne, heavily formatted music stations were, in Thom Yorke’s phrase, “buzzing like a fridge.” Clear Channel had started gobbling up stations and installing geography-less robo-DJs. Cash-strapped NPR was constantly under threat of becoming even more cash-strapped by a hostile Republican Congress. There were few breaks in the clouds and only a very small inkling of how technology would soon transform not only the way we access auditory information but indeed the whole idea of what we think of as radio.

    I think it’s reaching to credit Wallace with any sort of prescience in this area – after all, WYYY is old-school, the ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band’. And when Madame Psychosis is gone from the airways, Mario and the rest of her audience is bereft: “The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better.”

    Still, at least for a few pages, Wallace taps into a pretty fundamental idea: radio is the only medium that can be as simple as one human being speaking to another. And sometimes, that’s just enough.

  • Andrew Womack: Love

    Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.

    I grew up in a tennis household, amidst gleaming trophies of miniature champions immortalized in mid-serve. In my house, tennis dominated our television viewing, closets were stuffed with retired racquets, and the hampers always reeked.

    To this day, my father is a tremendous player, with a game so solid you can’t pick it apart. Return his serve (good luck), and he’ll reply with dizzying spin. He complains about arthritis in his rotator cuff, then sends a lob to wherever you aren’t.

    To be fair, his ability is hardly innate. Long before I was born, he began practicing at least every other night. (Playing actual matches was reserved for the weekends.) He would hone his serve by setting up empty tennis-ball cans in the service courts, knocking them down until he could place the ball with the kind of precision that squeezes a laugh out of a nervous opponent. At 76 years of age, his game is still tight (even if his speed on the court is reduced—osteopath’s orders); though when talking about diehard players, assessing whether 76 is young or old is missing the point: The important fact is he’s now been playing for 57 years. That’s a level of experience few amateur players will ever have time to catch up to.

    It’s true that I have not and never will beat my father at tennis. I am probably more OK with this than he is; his coaching over the years has been a constant source of positive reinforcement, but despite his best efforts it has only gone far enough to turn me from a bad sport (it was years before he’d let me swing one of his new racquets again) into a serious appreciator, if not a player, of the game. I’ll give credit to my forehand as pretty devastating, but everything else is succotash.

    I first came to Wallace through his David Lynch piece—which hooked me with its descriptions of the director’s constant coffee drinking and resultant urinating behind nearby trees during the filming of Lost Highway—which I read in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. But it was the adjacent story in the book, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (published as “The String Theory” in Esquire in 1996), that sealed Wallace’s place in my mind. Because finally, here was someone who could write, really write, about tennis. Someone who finds the joy in the game’s enduring physical and mental struggle, and the humor in realizing there are only a few people in the world who possess the dedication it takes to truly excel at the sport—and that you will never be one of those people. Because it is very funny to come face to face with your limitations. It’s the same kind of funny as when your father, 40 years your senior, places a serve to your backhand and all you can do is laugh it off.

    I was taken so much with the article that I Xeroxed and mailed it to my father, who I knew would enjoy it as much as I did, and for much the same reasons. It’s widely lamented that there are no decent tennis movies,44 though there aren’t as many complaints about tennis books—this is both to do with the fact that tennis books center on the psychology of the game (as in, how to freak out other players and how to keep yourself from getting freaked out by other players) and because articles and excerpts fit more neatly into the rare holes that open in a player’s practice schedule.

    I phoned a couple of weeks later, and asked how he’d liked it, and he said the footnotes threw him, and that he couldn’t finish it.45

    Throughout the piece and in Infinite Jest, Wallace—who, as is widely noted, was a ranked junior player—distinguishes between “serious players” and the rest of us. (I weigh in more at the seriously unserious end of this scale.) In both works, he needs to draw this distinction because, of course, we can all guess that most readers are not tennis appreciators, much less tennis players, much less amateur players, much less professional players, much less the very best of the best, the Top 10, the Grand Slam winners. And while it’s partly out of reverence for the serious players’ ability, it’s also because, concentrically speaking, the vast majority of his audience will not fully get that reverence unless he spells it out. Certainly, Wallace’s style is powerful, muscular—he’s unafraid to force a point home.46

    Which is why Wallace’s tennis writing is so dead-on, why it has always struck me so specially. Because I too love the game, and love knowing I will never be much of a tennis player (much less a serious player)—because I would rather watch and marvel at the ability of others. That is what I love. And I suppose Wallace has a character in Infinite Jest who does just that, too.

  • infinitedetox: Waving the White Flag: Reading as Rehabilitation

    infinitedetox is blogging about addiction and Infinite Jest at infinitedetox.wordpress.com.

    My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.

    Some time around May, 2004, I willfully entered into a relationship with pharmaceutical opiates. It began as a sort of experiment, quickly escalated into a recreation, and from there vectored toward present-day dependency on a straight line whose slope was gradual, but unwavering.

    In December of last year it became apparent that this line would never flatten out or stabilize on its own, that it would just keep trundling on upwards, tending toward infinity given infinite time. This is when I started to get scared.

    David Foster Wallace had just passed away and I decided to re-read41 Infinite Jest over the holidays, and something difficult to explain happened to me when I began digging into the book again. Somehow the book–and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ—made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating. But let me give it a stab anyway.

    You’ve probably noticed that the idea of self-surrender is treated as a sort of grand, motivating force throughout Infinite Jest – cf. “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away” (p. 53); cf. the Ennet House’s unnamed founder’s “sudden experience of total self-surrender”; and especially cf. every addicted character’s surrender to their enslaving Substance, every recovering character’s surrender to a Higher Power, and can it be just a coincidence that Don Gately’s very own AA group goes by the name White Flag?

    Now let’s take a book. Any book will do, but I think Big Books like Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses work particularly well.42 The thing with books – the more you put into them, the more you get out of them (“Give It Away To Keep It”). You may not care about junior tennis or Quebecois separatism or avant-garde film or AA cliché-mongering, but if you’re going to make any sense of Infinite Jest you’re probably going to have to start caring, a lot. You’re going to have to accept that proto-fascist tennis instructors and disabled pistol-toting terrorists are capable of delivering frighteningly insightful critiques of U.S. culture. You’re going to have to lay aside your Irony Shields and believe, with all your heart, that clichés can be just as potent as Don Gately says they are. In other words, you’re going to have to surrender to the book.

    Be careful not to confuse surrender with passivity. I’m talking about an active surrender here. The actively-surrendered reader will sift through reams of mathematical arcana in order to tease out the implications of an oblique reference, or follow an obscure narrative thread deep into the bowels of Greek mythology to flesh out the author’s hinted-at ideas. Surrendered readers develop an eye for the author’s shortcomings. They share in the author’s failings. They are engaged, but not encaged.43 It may be instructive to compare active surrender with the drooling, pants-soiling passivity of Substance abuse and Entertainment addiction as portrayed in IJ.

    You can probably see where I’m going with this. What happened to me, on December 26, 2008, is that I surrendered myself completely to Infinite Jest. I signed some sort of metaphorical blood-oath committing myself to looking at the world through David Foster Wallace’s eyes. And what happened then was that I saw myself as DFW would have seen me, refracted through the wobbly nystagmic lens of Infinite Jest. Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together.

    Of course, the book ended, and vacation along with it. The circumstances of life returned to normal, and life’s normal stresses and anxieties returned along with them. I stayed clean for exactly two weeks, after which the addiction vector resumed its patient acclivation at precisely the same point it left off. My Shit went back into diaspora.

    Fast-forward six months or so and here we are: another reading of Infinite Jest, another Total Surrender, another attempt to Starve the Beast. I don’t know, though – I’ve got a good feeling about this one. The circumstances, before which I admit complete powerlessness, are different, perhaps permanently so. As of this writing I am 10 days, 4 hours and 22 minutes sober, with some 758 pages of Infinite Jest left to go. But as they say — one day at a time.

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick: On Teaching Infinite Jest

    Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College; she’s the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, and co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons. She blogs there and at Planned Obsolescence.

    As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it–the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction–with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it). It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

    And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out–okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret–every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

    My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them–or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing–we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

    I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

    But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule–for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading–was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

    The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

    I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

  • Nick Maniatis: The Howling Fantods

    Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the fourth time he stopped counting.

    The Howling Fantods was inspired by Infinite Jest. I bought a discounted first edition of Infinite Jest in response to a review I had read in what I think was the Melbourne Age. My first Wallace reading experience was on public transport, on my way home one evening, in Canberra, Australia. The opening pages of that novel changed me.

    It was 1996 and I was in my third year of university. An icon for the program NCSA Mosaic had appeared on the desktop of computers at the Australian National University and opened my eyes to the world wide web. In late ’96 or early ’97 I made a free personal “me” page using the geocities (ugh) hosting environment. I loved reading Wallace. I loved the idea of this web thing. I merged the two and the SCREAMING FANTODS was born. (I was emailed a correction a few days later)

    Around this time I discovered wallace-l the Wallace mailing list back then appeared to be mostly academics and students. There were a number of amazing group reads of Infinite Jest co-ordinated through wallace-l. Another just finished up prior to Infinite Summer (IJIM – Infinite Jest, In Memorial). Right now the focus over at wallace-l is Oblivion.

    I don’t think I’d ever been privy to such articulate, academic, and passionate discussion about a text. Ever. There were people there who were just as internet aware as me, if not more so. They were also much, much smarter. It was scary. It was fantastic. And all their discussions were searchable. They still are.

    Infinite Jest was, I think, published at just the right time. The blossoming world wide web brought readers, academics and fans together using a common, digital, user-created medium that seemed designed to discuss this book.

    I feel terribly lucky to have been part of that early online community. I’m glad they were there for me in September last year.

    And now we have Infinite Summer. There’s not much more exciting than seeing your favourite author mentioned all over the web. And not only that, the focus is on his writing, not what happened in his life. There is no way I’d be ever able to find the time to organise something as mammoth as a large scale Infinite Jest group read, so it is wonderful to see the dedicated team here managing spectacularly.

    The best bit, readers, is that you’ve all made it this far. You’re almost over the hump. Once you get through the first 250 or so pages the bigger payoffs start hitting in droves. I’m keeping an eye on the forums and blogs and quite clearly many of you out there are finding this much easier and more entertaining than you thought it would be. I’ll let you in on another secret:

    It gets better.

    I’ll be surprised if you can keep to as little as 75 pages a week after page 500. That will certainly be the biggest challenge.

    Bits that I think are worth mentioning / revisiting from the first 210 pages:

    p37 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: I’m sorry everyone, it’s the ice-cream. Confirmed by a trusted Wallace-l member who asked David Foster Wallace personally. Sorry. It was even harder for me to accept because when I was reading IJ on release I hadn’t ever seen Dove ice cream or chocolate in Australia. I thought soap was the only option.

    p37-38 Clenette and p128-135 Yrstruly: I know a number of you skipped these two sections. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. Honestly? I’d prefer you skip them if it means you don’t close the book and never open it again. I found them hard the first time too. I also had an inner urge to find them offensive. Was Wallace making fun of these people? How come the other sections don’t read like this? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is narrating? Wait a minute, who was narrating before?

    My advice? When you read IJ again (or if you flick back for a second attempt) just go with the Clenette and Yrstruly sections. Don’t try to parse everything, they don’t work if you slow down and read carefully. Both sections work more effectively when you are already vaguely familiar with their content because then the voices and rhythms start to wash over you. When that happens so do the characters. And then you’re inside their heads and THAT is not comfortable. In fact it is very, very uncomfortable. I’m not going to try for a moment to argue that they are realistic voices or heads to be in. But these two sections do their jobs very well if you just let go and trust Wallace. Does this sound familiar?

    It wasn’t until a few years ago did I get a flicker of how spot-on Wallace is with these sections. Post schoolyard fight, I had some students write reports of the incident they witnessed. In their rush to get everything out of their heads and onto the page they seemed to forget about formal English grammar, or formal anything, for that matter. It was stream of consciousness stuff. Emotion mixed with description mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue mixed with unusual, but workable, phonetic transpositions. These kids were not illiterate by any means. If anything the stress of the situation had messed with their ability to express themselves using the English expected of them. The reports reminded me instantly of Infinite Jest and made me appreciate it even more.

    If you want to see if Wallace can make this work in greater length try ‘John Billy’ in Wallace’s short story collection ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. There’s also another example of this voice in another of his stories. But to tell you which one would actually mess with the impact of it. I know you’ll find it yourself.

    p105-109 Marathe and Steeply on choice: Which character do you side with? Are you actively choosing? Or just going with your gut reaction? Is it impossible to choose? Double-bind maybe? When I first read IJ I didn’t find the Steeply and Marathe sections particularly compelling.

    On the second read they were my focus. It is so easy to sweep the Steeply and Marathe conversations to the side when you want to know more about the entertainment. I think they’re some of the most underrated parts of the book. Read them.

    p144-151 Videophony: I find it impossible to use Skype without thinking about this section. Particularly when I want to check my email or surf the web at the same time as the current video chat and feel I can’t without being rude. I’ve also become aware of how often I relax with my arms folded above my head while sitting upright, how often I scratch my nose, and how often I pick at my right ear.

    p157-169: Every single line of this section is pure gold and leads perfectly to page 169’s time slowed down can’t look at the page (but can’t look away either) moment.

    p196: HELP WANTED. I don’t think I need to explain this.

    The very best thing about Infinite Summer so far, for someone who has read the book way more times than is healthy, is re-living my first read via all of your comments and posts. The Infinite Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog are doing a mighty fine job too.

    Infinite Jest is my favourite book and I have not stopped reading it for any length of time since I opened it to the first page all those years ago. Be careful, or else this Infinite Summer thing might live up to just a little more than its name…

  • Colin Meloy: Why I am Reading Infinite Jest

    Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.

    I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase. Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12 years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation when I was thirteen and I had fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex, warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

    Until now.

    Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread, the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.

  • How to Read Infinite Jest

    The following was drafted by Matt Bucher (maintainer of the wallace-l listserv and author of this post), and augmented by input from Nick Maniatis (administrator of The Howling Fantods, a site devoted to DFW), and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (professor at Pomona College, who teaches a course entitled David Foster Wallace).

    There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down, cut in half, or skipping around. But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester.

    1. Read the endnotes: Please. They are not boring bibliographic details, but rather an integral part of the text. And the bouncing back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug.

    2. Use bookmarks: Yes “bookmarks”, plural: one for the main text and one for the endnotes. Doing so will save you hours of searching, and the aggravation of losing your place several times an hour.

    3. Persevere to page 200: There are several popular way stations on the road to abandoning Infinite Jest. The most heavily trafficked by far is “The Wardine Section”. Where the opening pages of IJ are among the best written in the book, page 37 (and many pages thereafter) are in a tortured, faux-Ebonics type dialect. “Wardine say her momma ain’t treat her right.” “Wardine be cry.” Potentially offensive (if one wants to be offended), and generally hard to get through. Hang in there, ignore the regional parlance, and focus on what the characters are doing. Like most things in the book, you’ll need to know this later. Likewise for the other rough patches to be found in the first fifth of the novel.

    4. Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.

    5. Flag, copy, or bookmark page 223: Page 223 of the novel contains some information that you will either need to internalize or refer to frequently to make sense of the narrative. Once you reach it, flag the page with a stickie, dogear the corner, photocopy the material, stick a (third) bookmark there–whatever will ensure that you can find this information when you need it.

    6. Don’t do the thing you’re dying to do right now: Namely, flip to page 223 to see what we’re talking about. David Foster Wallace ordered the book the way he did for a reason, and part of step 4 above is respecting that. In fact, we encourage you to take the fingers-in-the-ears “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” approach to spoilers in general.

    7. Abuse your copy: When you are finished, 223 should be just one of many mutilated pages in your novel. Liberal use of tape flags, post-it notes, highlighting, or your anal-retentive page marking device of choice, as a means of keeping track of key passages you think you might like to come back to (or share with others), is encouraged. (Note: the preceding advice is not recommended for those reading on the Kindle.) If you can’t bring yourself to work over your only copy of Infinite Jest, consider investing in a second.

    8. Keep notes: As if lugging around a book the size of a 2 br. 1¼ bath apartment isn’t enough, you may want to carry a notebook as well. You won’t always have the requisite Oxford English Dictionary within arm’s reach, you know.

    9. Brush up on your Hamlet: It’s no coincidence that the first two words of Hamlet are “Who’s there?” and the first two words of Infinite Jest are “I am”. Even the novel’s title was lifted from the play.

      As you read, it behooves you keep in mind the relationships between the characters in Shakespeare’s drama (the ghost, poor Yorick, etc.) and the central themes of the play. You can find a brief primer here.

    10. Employ a reader’s guide: There are two companion guides that you may find helpful. One is Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Burn’s guide is rather short (96 pages), but it includes a helpful chronology , as well as sections on the novel’s critical reception and key plot points.

      Another guide is Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. [Full disclosure: Bucher is the editor & publisher of the Carlisle book.] Elegant Complexity is different than the Burn guide in that it offers a summary and exegesis on every section of the novel–and that it’s 512 pages long. Also included are chronologies, family trees, thematic discussions, and a map of the tennis academy.

    11. Use online references: There are copious webpages out there that the first-time Jesters will find useful. Here are a a few:

      You can find links to more resources at The Howling Fantods.

      Obviously many of these sites contain spoilers, so poke a hole in an index card and only view your monitor through that while visiting one.

  • The Schedule

    Clip ‘n’ Save: it’s your summer syllabus. Note that “location” refers to the Kindle.

    Date Page

    		Location Percent Complete
    Fri, Jun 26 63 1522 6%
    Mon, Jun 29 94 2233 9%
    Fri, Jul 03 137 3236 13%
    Mon, Jul 06 168 3900 17%
    Fri, Jul 10 210 4844 21%
    Mon, Jul 13 242 5561 24%
    Fri, Jul 17 284 6545 28%
    Mon, Jul 20 316 7250 32%
    Fri, Jul 24 358 8174 36%
    Mon, Jul 27 390 8869 39%
    Fri, Jul 31 432 9832 44%
    Mon, Aug 03 464 10556 47%
    Fri, Aug 07 506 11510 51%
    Mon, Aug 10 537 12243 54%
    Fri, Aug 14 580 13233 59%
    Mon, Aug 17 611 13925 62%
    Fri, Aug 21 653 14900 66%
    Mon, Aug 24 685 15628 69%
    Fri, Aug 28 727 16554 74%
    Mon, Aug 31 759 17293 77%
    Fri, Sep 04 801 18315 81%
    Mon, Sep 07 833 19021 84%
    Fri, Sep 11 875 19972 89%
    Mon, Sep 14 907 20767 92%
    Fri, Sep 18 949 21708 96%
    Mon, Sep 21 981 22403 100%

    At the end of each specified day, you should be at or past the given page number or location.

    Question! If, as we’ve said, we don’t care when people start, when they finish, or how fast they go in the meantime, why even have a schedule? Two reason. First, some folks just operate better with milestones. Second, the schedule denotes the Spoiler Line for any given day. For instance, on July 6th we ask that you confine your discussion to only those events that transpire on page 168 of the novel and earlier; on August 17th anything past page 653 is verboten; and so forth. The Spoiler Line will hold both on the posts here and in the Daily Discussion forum. If you find yourself ahead of the pack and eager to chat with like-minded overachievers, or if you’re already read Infinite Jest and wish to talk about the novel in its entirety, what we ask that you do so in the Infinite Jest General Discussion Forum, where there are no spoiler restrictions whatsoever.

    A note about the endnotes: The above schedule does not take the endnotes into account. And as some endnotes are long (like, 14 pages worth of long), that means the actual amount of weekly reading will vary. But, you know, it’s like agreeing to always divide the check up evenly when dining with friends: you may have to chip in a bit more occasionally, but it’s better than haggling over the math.
    A note about editions: As it turns out, all (physical) edition of Infinite Jest have 981 pages: the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc. A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent. A note about the Kindle: At first we thought that we could simply take the 22260 locations in Infinite Jest and divide them by 93 days, as we did with the number of pages, to compute the number of locations one would need to read daily. In practice, however, our location milestones wound up pretty discrepant from our page milestones, and we wanted to ensure that all Infinite Summer participants were on the same page, figuratively and literally, during our discussions. So what we finally wound up doing was compiling a list of 26 unique phrases–one from the bottom of page 21, one from the bottom of page 63, one from the bottom of page 94, etc.–and sending them to Friend of Infinite Summer and Swell Guy Tarun who looked up each on his Kindle and reported back with all of the corresponding locations. Thanks Tarun! You can find the list of unique phrases here.

  • Matt Bucher: Why Read Infinite Jest?

    Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.

    I first saw the novel in the window at the old Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek, Denver. I was a college sophomore and my teacher had earlier assigned us a few selections from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. One of those was “Lyndon” by David Foster Wallace. I wasn’t that impressed by the story, but the name stuck with me. And when I saw it again on Infinite Jest, written in tall, skinny, black-on-clouds letters, it all but leaped out at me.

    I liked the title, the fat stack of pages, but it was $30 or so and I was a bargain shopper. It came out in paperback in the fall of 1997 and almost immediately the Tattered Cover had a mountain of them in the bargain department for $8.99 each. They were stacked in a large square, three or four feet high, each book a brick in tower, near the cash registers. How could I resist?

    My first attempt at reading the book sputtered out about 300 pages in. Classes got in the way. And yet, I knew then that Infinite Jest would become my favorite book. I had never felt so connected to 300 pages. I spent much of Winter Break 1997 in bed with the novel, alternately savoring it and plowing through it. I remember skipping some sections and obsessively rereading others.

    The first paperback printing was a strip-and-bind of the hardcover and so the same paper stock bound in paper covers is a good inch taller than the later reprintings. In the years since I first bought that paperback edition, I’ve purchased about ten other copies of the book (either to collect or loan out), but to this day, that first paperback remains my “reading copy.” Before the days of Amazon’s Search Inside! and samizdat hyperlinked-PDFs, you actually had to flip through the book to find all the instances of the word “moon” or all the mentions of a specific prorector. This was tedious and time-consuming, but pulling apart the strands of a work of art had never felt so rewarding. Even 11 or 12 years ago you could go looking for deep discussion about Infinite Jest and find it online. The wallace-l list and the first Howling Fantods message boards were an oasis for me, where I could proudly fly my nerd flag and dig into the minutiae of the book.

    One of the first realizations I had about the novel was that there was no magic key to unlocking all of its secrets. Many of the discrepancies and mysteries in the book were not there to be “solved” in any traditional sense. It is still fun to debate some of the fundamental questions about the novel, but there are no definitive answers. Even if DFW himself said “Here’s what really happened…” you could refute his argument with sound logic from the book.

    In subsequent re-reads, in my 20s, I identified mostly with the younger character of Hal. But now, in my 30s, I find myself most interested in the older Gately, who struggles to be a responsible, sober adult. Trying to understand these characters has occupied a slice of my mental energy for over a decade now. Somehow, it still seems vital to figure out what happens to them, what motivates them, why they make the choices they do. The same could be said of Hamlet or Othello or Lady Macbeth: outside of the beauty of the language, why do these characters persist? I encourage you to find out for yourself.

    But, the thing that keeps people coming back to this book, that keeps them engaged for 1000+ pages, is not the mysteries of the subplots but the raw emotion on the page, the honest feelings laid bare. A persistent theme of the novel is the struggle to sincerely connect with the world. In the process of describing this struggle, Wallace ends up building a connection, a trust, with the reader. Of course this connection made Wallace’s death feel all the more raw and jagged to his readers, present company included.

    Infinite Jest is my desert-island book, a book that I could not wring all the pleasure from if I squeezed for a century. I’ll forever ignore the haters and say I’m happy to have found this thing that instructs, that entertains, that loves.