Author: Mrs. Kennedy

Over the course of my reading I became aware that DFW liked Cormac McCarthy’s novels a lot, especially Blood Meridian and Suttree. As it happens, those are my two favorite Cormac McCarthy novels as well, and even though it’s been fifteen years since I read either of them, once I became aware of this bibliographical fact I began to pick up threads of McCarthy in Infinite Jest, and threads led to whole hand-loomed rugs bordered with Byzantine pornography.

McCarthy’s and DFW’s writing share several things, including a keen attention to physical and emotional detail, but it’s the way they delve into violence that seems to both unite and separate them. McCarthy, for example, considers the whole scene but then gifts you with just a sketch of the worst details — reading him is like looking at one of Bacon’s howling Popes, it’s the details you have to fill in for yourself that make it ten times worse. But DFW doesn’t let you look away. Think about how the Antitois brothers died. It’s horrible. But their deaths were described with so much detail that by the end I had almost no emotion about them. The image of a man with a spike through his eye or a broomstick shoved all the way through him is, on its own, nearly unbearable. But in IJ these images ride a wave of words that’s already pounded us into submission, and we only come up for air when Lucien Antitois floats cleanly away from his body over the Convexity toward home to the ringing of bells.

The scene where Gately takes the brunt of one Nuck’s aggression toward Lenz and the girls are on the lawn working over the other one echoes this scene from early on in Blood Meridian:

. . . Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.

Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.

The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face. Toadvine held his head back by the hair.

Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.

He kicked.

Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door was completely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.

And so on.

Later on, the way the M.P. beats Gately’s mom in such a slow, considered fashion shows a little more of McCarthy’s restraint. Ultimately I find McCarthy pretty much riveting because he leaves so much out, but the world he creates is one I am heartily glad I don’t live in. Whereas the world of Infinite Jest, despite the horrible things that can happen in it (the family dog being dragged to death and reduced to a nubbin, my God), is one I feel I could navigate maybe just because the nape of the carpet is familiar and I have an accurate sense of how high the nets are strung.

Or, as Gately learns in the midst of his agonizing stint in the hospital bed, focusing on the small things helps you to endure the larger ones.

DFW also alludes to A Clockwork Orange a couple of times, which is well known for its own particular brand of joyous degradation. I think Gately has the self-awareness not to get off on beating the shit out of people the way Alex and his Droogs do — he doesn’t have the heart of a rapist —  and the spoiler line limits what I can say about Sorkin’s crew, but I do know that for me, Gately’s redemption and Hal’s trying to Come In and Mario’s sweet nature and a thousand other moments of true humanity balance out the psychic impact of all the brutality in this novel, described in numbing detail though it may be.

I recall going to see The Sheltering Sky, which was based on the novel by Paul Bowles, at a theater on 34th Street in New York. I found the film a little dull, frankly — like the book itself, I wanted to like it more than I actually did. But there’s a scene at the end where Debra Winger’s in a bar and Paul Bowles himself appears before her and asks her, “Are you lost?” And somehow the fact of the author himself showing up in the film, the presence of the man through whom the story had actually flowed, reduced me to tears. And not just a little wet-eyed sniffle, but true and gut-wrenching bawling. My embarrassed boyfriend supported me for the entire walk to Paddy Reilley’s, a bar on 2nd Avenue which held a variety of liquids he hoped one of which would calm me down. I did eventually, reluctantly, still unable to explain what had hit me. I’d had a similar weeping fit sitting crumpled in a chair outside Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. I don’t know what it was, exactly, that got to me — all those writers! who mean so much! right here! — but I know it hit me hard. I once told someone it felt like God was pressing his thumb right down on my skull.

It’s true that while I’ve enjoyed Infinite Jest very much, this summer has been rough going for me in ways that have tested my focus and resolve on several fronts, and it’s confirmed for me that I’m not really cut out for this Guide business. I’m fascinated by other people’s analysis but I’m not much of an analyzer myself, and I’m sorry if you’ve rolled your eyes more than once reading what I’ve had to offer. I’m a fan of this book, but sometimes fans can’t always summon the kind of commentary that the object of their, uh, fandom (that’s a word, right?) . . . oh, you know what I mean.

The last and maybe only big book I had trouble shutting up about in a way that compares to how many people feel about IJ — the book I bought for friends who I’m sure never read it, and which I have no doubt would have spawned a hideous number of mailing lists had the Internet existed when it was published in 1982 — was James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. A 560-page long poem, is what it is, and it changed my life.

I don’t think there are a lot of parallels between Sandover and IJ, though like many IJ fans, I’ve read Sandover multiple times, and soon as I’ve finished the last page I loop right back to page one and let the momentum carry me through the beginning all over again. Like IJ, Sandover has actual literary critics who appreciate its many levels of intricate discourse (I just made that up! “Levels of intricate discourse”! Jesus, I’m tired), but in Sandover‘s case, the more literary readers view the “fans” as uncritical knuckle-draggers who believe in astrology and collect commemorative shot glasses. IJ‘s community doesn’t seem to fall apart along those lines, and for that I’m grateful. Either that or Matthew’s done a hell of a job of deleting the withering comments before I’ve ever seen them.

See, this is another mark of a terrible critic — I’m making this whole thing about me.

As we lead up to the first anniversary of DFW’s death (this Saturday), just the thought of that event starts to choke me up. I get a tinge of that God-thumb-skull feeling, frankly, which is no good in public. I try to let it ride. Breathe and keep reading. These last 200 pages are turning into exactly the kind of steep-grade toboggan ride I’ve been hoping for, and I’m so grateful I stuck it out. Thanks, you guys. Thanks Matthew, thanks Kevin and Avery, thanks and thanks again to Michael Pietsch, and to all the guest commenters. Almost done. Almost ready to start again.

As your least insightful and hands-down laziest guide, I fully admit that I’m 100 pages behind this week and I’m not even going to try to fake it. But I did spend a fruitful hour this morning browsing DFW reviews and interviews.

This from Newsweek:

NEWSWEEK: What’s your history with tennis?

WALLACE: I played serious Juniors, but I burned out. I play twice a week with friends.

And with 12-step groups?

I went with friends to an open AA meeting and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

Was it therapeutic?

At that point, I was paralyzed about writing, and I was watching too much TV. Here were these guys in leather and tattoos sounding like Norman Vincent Peale, but week after week they were getting better. And I’d go home and work. Going to coffee houses and talking about literary theory certainly hadn’t helped any. Have you read the book?

I haven’t had the chance, but our reviewer just finished.

My hat’s off to him. Tell him Excedrin works best for eyestrain.

From The Chicago Tribune, a surprising claim about DFW’s familiarity with the Internet:

The research reaped personal as well as professional dividends. “If I hadn’t gone to a bunch of AA meetings, I wouldn’t have gotten rid of my TV, because I started to realize the TV didn’t make me happy, but I couldn’t stop watching it,” he said.

Still, he’s been fascinated by some reader reactions so far, including some who liken its jump-cut style and information bombardment to cruising the Internet. “I’ve never been on the Internet,” he said. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way. . . .

“The image in my mind — and I actually had dreams about it all the time — was that this book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the 20th story of a building.”

Here Wallace and the director Gus Van Sant have a delightful phone conversation about Good Will Hunting and it makes me think about the similarities between Will and Hal Incandenza:

DFW: …The thing that interested me about Will — and of course this is like a stroke movie for me — is you’ve got like a total nerd who is incredibly good looking, can beat people up and has Minnie Driver in love with him, so I’m, like I saw it twice voluntarily. Most of the serious math weenies who I’ve met, and I’ve met a few, like who’ve graduated from college at 12 and stuff, they’re not all that smart in other areas. I’ve like never met any who’ve had photographic memories with respect to stuff like agrarian social histories of the American South or legal precedent in the American judicial system and stuff, and so he seemed as if he could almost have done anything that he wanted to do and that math was almost a kind of accident.

GVS: That’s the way we thought of him. But I always felt that his memory was something that was kind of like a bonus. And that mathematics was something that he had done when say he was alone as a child.

DFW: Uh-huh.

GVS: And he had learned and he had become very advanced but that his memory was maybe separate — the memory was like the trick part. So he remembered certain things that he had read in different books his retention was so phenomenal but it was almost like a trick so when he is defeating the guy in the Harvard bar by quoting from text books this sort of capitalist versus socialist…

DFW: Which trust me is every bonehead kid’s fantasy of being able to do that. (Gus laughs) Fuckwad with a pony tail in a Harvard bar, I’ve met that guy. The girl I went and saw the movie with first thought that the guy was like too icky and villainous to be realistic and I hastened to disagree with her.

And this is just funny, from an online chat Wallace participated in with a random sampling of users who had a lot of trouble staying on topic:

dfw: A carbuncle’s fucking HUGE, esse. Like an eggplant or something. Actually life-threatening — it can apparently explode like an appendix and spread toxins throughout your bloodstream. A small but riveting history of cases on death-by-carbuncle is avail

Marisa: I could beat Keats up if I wanted to.

dfw: able in back issues of “Mortality and Morbidity” magazine.

Keats: Oh well, in that case, dfw, I should not have made the comparison.

Keats: Since what I have doesn’t approach the gravity of a carbuncle.

Keats: I think I’m just going to ignore Marisa. She’s one of those live-chat troublemakers.

I’m a little behind in my reading, I’m smack in the middle of the whole Lenz thing and it’s kind of making me sick, so I’m going to backtrack a little.

Last week I accused Infinite Jest of having kind of a Kubrickian sterility about it at times, but as I continue reading and the novel continues to blossom for me, I realize how much life is flowing under that apparently detached, often affectless surface.

The scene where James’ father asks for his help to move the mattress, of course, is a classic example of the sort of achingly slow emotional reveal that takes place in small ways throughout the entire novel — and is starting to encompass my experience of the entire book. In the bed scene you’re directed to focus on the physical detail, at first seemingly for its own sake, until it all adds up to reveal a horror recollected with not only the detachment of time but the precision of someone either so removed from or else so overwhelmed by the emotional impact of the sudden, strange death of his father that the physical details of the morning take on a ravishing Technicolor quality. They say time slows down for some people when they’re in car accidents or disasters, they remember the strangest details later — the song on the radio when the phone rang, the dust on the windshield before your head crashed through it. And once you have the whole picture, no matter how blandly or sharply or affectlessly it’s described, a boy running from his parents’ bedroom to his own and jumping on the bed, the slumped mattress in the hallway and the ring of the glass pushed into the carpet all bear the emotional weight of a man watching himself cope with tremendous loss from a distance. A man with a supremely focused scientific mind that can compartmentalize information and zoom in on a detail — a slowly rolling doorknob — that changes the course of his life.

The mirror cracks in the most delightful way, of course, in the very next scene, when Erdedy tries to refuse a hug. All the hemming and hawing and sweaty palms of someone who doesn’t have Himself’s muscular mind to use as a shield, or “Joe L.’s” veil, who uses drugs to keep the world at arm’s length because the fragile infrastructure of his addiction can only remain intact if no one gets close enough to breathe on it, it all gets crushed so shockingly and wonderfully by Roy Tony.

‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’

‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’. . .

‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

If Erdedy were a different man, a man whose mind was so strong it could shield his heart from both its own needs and the needs of others, he wouldn’t have climbed up on Roy Tony’s neck and not let go, I suppose. But I love that he had enough strength and trust to desperation to give himself over and let Roy Tony destroy his pathetic facade. And we get to see that Roy Tony, as he clears his addiction away, has the heart of a lion.

This is getting long so I’ll just add that I’m also very interested to see if Joelle can continue to justify her own draped existence.

I went out to our community swimming pool the other day festooned in sunscreen, reading glasses, and a hat with a large brim, lugging my Giant Book. I put out my towel on a chair near one of my neighbors.

Neighbor: “Gosh, that’s a big book. What is it?”

Me: (Assembling a winch to hoist it high enough for her to see the cover) “Infinite Jest ? I’m reading it for an online book . . . club, sort of thing.

Neighbor: “Wow, and I’m having trouble finishing my thin little book!” (She holds up Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist.)

Me: “Want to trade?”

Neighbor: “Ha, ha. So, have you met any of the people who are reading along with you?”

Me: “No, actually. I’m not even sure they really exist.”

Neighbor: (Polite confusion)

Me: “I’ve actually been Internet-friends with the guy who organized the group for a long time.”

Neighbor: (Clearly she now suspects I troll “Married But Looking” AOL chat rooms after my family goes to sleep at night)

SOME FAVORITE LINES SO FAR

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.

Here’s how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars’ reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for spirited inquiry.

Or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless home.

The host White flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort. There’s no judgment. It’s clear she’s been punished enough. And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.

There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk.

I have to admit, I had doubts that I would reach the point where I’d have the privilege of telling you that I have finally, really started loving this book.

Speaking as a somewhat emotionally stunted adult, a lot of the ETA scenes are my favorites, how the gravely serious roots of an Eschaton scenario go ass over teacup when Air Marshal Kittenplan (Kittenplan!) takes a nuclear warhead tennis ball in the neck and the whole event devolves chaotically, balletically, and in super slo-mo, into rubble. That scene is a golden piece of deadly serious yet juvenile tit-for-tat the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last time I watched The Bad News Bears. And how Pemulis may be some sort of elegant, raw math genius but he also gives in to the happy impulse to label his Eschaton diagram of available combatant megatonnage HALSADICK. My inner thirteen-year-old boy is delighted and relieved when this kind of stuff goes down. I’d make a terrible politician.

Gately helped my romance with IJ to blossom, as well as Hal and Pemulis,⁴⁹ and I want to think about the AA stuff some more, and the theme of repetition and recovery that winds such a heartfelt⁵⁰ thread through Infinite Jest.

I was really affected by infinitedetox’s post about his own dependencies and how he was viewing his recovery through the lens of IJ. The section where Gately is lying on the couch at Ennet House listening to a newly admitted addict argue against the daily drill of meetings required by AA struck a chord with me. (I’m not an addict, though I’ve lived with addicts — they tended to disappear my books, and I wonder if they might have rationalized the thefts by arguing that since at the time I worked in a bookstore, I could therefore more readily steal⁵¹ replacement copies of whatever had gone missing⁵² So I’m not an addict, no, but I do understand the need to come to terms with small losses, and to try to learn not to be so defensive in the face of the world’s most ordinary demands.)

I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but reading this book has been like a yoga for me, in the sense that it’s become an almost-daily practice for which it’s necessary to find a quiet space to focus my mind on an object outside itself. I’ve been practicing ashtanga yoga for more than ten years and I’ve found that over time there’s a cumulative and deeply grounding effect gained after regularly, dutifully, and unquestioningly attempting those weirdly liberating knots yoga ask you to tie yourself into. Much like this book.

So when a newly sober fellow demands that an old timer explain to him why AA wants him to keep going to these goddamn MEETINGS all the time, why can’t they just tell you the answer right from the get-go? my first non-AA-going thought was that maybe the point of AA meetings is just to keep going to the meetings. It’s a practice like any other, like going to yoga and listening and stretching until hey, you can touch your toes, or create more space around your heart just by using your breath; or if you don’t like that analogy, like slowly working a piece of wood until over time it becomes shapely and smooth. There are things that are only revealed over time, after doing the work, and those things are sort of the point, yes, but the process of showing up every day is also the point, showing up to your life, to your work, to your family, to your meetings, to the book you’re reading — just doing the work is also sort of the point.

Ninety per cent of life is just showing up, I’ve heard it said, and I’ve always kind of hated that saying because it implies that you can just shamble into class in your sweats without having done the reading. But I also love that saying because if you show up you’re allowing for one of at least two possibilities: that you may be called on and exposed as unprepared, or that you may go uncalled-on and retain your facade of preparedness, but either way you’re still in the position to learn something new about the subject at hand that you wouldn’t have, had you stayed in bed. This weekend my friend Danielle told me that she once had a frustrated professor who stood up in front of her half-empty Friday morning lecture and rewarded everyone who’d come instead of sleeping in or skipping off to Stowe for another in a series of three-day weekends.⁵³ The professor rewarded the students in attendance by saying, “Everyone who showed up today gets an A in this class.”

So I’m glad I keep showing up for Infinite Jest, ready or not. Hey, you showed up, too! So what if you’re behind, or lost, or didn’t look up the word “eschatology” until ten minutes ago. Keep going. We get an A just for being here today.

While browsing through the forums I was delighted to find the beginnings of a discussion about something that had crossed my mind as I read: would it be possible to make a movie out of Infinite Jest that wasn’t a tragic flop?

User “Good Old Neon” jumped right to the question of who would dare to direct such a thing, and his suggestions tickled me pink: either Wes or Paul Thomas Anderson. I can hear laptops banging shut from coast to coast at the mere suggestion that Wes Anderson be allowed within ten feet of the book, but it’s not a bad idea. Who better to create a reality just a few degrees off from our own, as we see in IJ? I have nothing but love for P.T. Anderson and I’d let him at the script in a heartbeat, but I’d also be afraid that I’d die a lonely old woman before he finished it.

Before we starting casting the Incandenza brothers,³¹ or discussing the very real film adaptation of another DFW book that is scheduled to be released four days after we all finish reading this one, let’s look at a few non-fatal attempts in the history of cinema to adapt a beloved and word-tastic classic novel to a ruthlessly visual medium.

Ulysses (1967) starring Milo O’Shea; directed by Joseph Strick (who somewhat ironically was fresh from being fired from the set of Justine, an adaptation of a Lawrence Durrell novel; Strick also produced an adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — the guy wouldn’t give up on literary sources, god bless him); screenplay adapted by Fred Haines (who was also responsible for an adaptation of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). Critical concensus: The screenplay got nominated for an Oscar and the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which honors mean both something and nothing. Imdb users seem to agree that what makes the film work is brilliant casting and use of location; it’s when whole swaths of literature are forced out of actors’ mouths that you begin to remember, uncomfortably, that you’re watching a book.

Catch-22 (1970) starring Alan Arkin, directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay adapted from the Joseph Heller novel by Buck Henry. Critical concensus: Nichols et al. did a brilliant job of capturing the essence of the book, and you’re a ninny if you expect a movie to be exactly like the book it’s based on.

Clockwork Orange (1971) starring Malcolm McDowell, directed and screenplay adapted by Stanley Kubrick. That worked out pretty well, if memory serves, though to be fair this and Catch-22 are somewhat thinner and plot-heavier than IJ.

Conclusion: Michael Cera and a locker room filled with gawky teen heartthrobs discussing their exhaustion. Meryl Streep as Madame Psychosis. Soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright? Get Michel Gondry on the phone, right now.

Thanks for all your comments last week — despite the fact that my question (“how the fuck are you people finding time to read?”) was fundamentally rhetorical, your descriptions of how you’re fitting Infinite Jest into your lives were fascinating. I am still behind, but thanks to a weekend spent back and forth from LAX to DEN combined with a few late nights using IJ to stave off the dread before my mother’s funeral, I got well past page 100, as well as my despair at ever catching up.

Funerals are funny things. I’ve found getting through them, or any difficult emotional event, without losing your shit requires a shift in attention. If I stayed in my head and let memories of my mother and all her kindnesses take over my thoughts, the result was miserable weeping. If instead I stayed in the present — fussy baby being soothed by his grandmother, vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar, my brother saying things about my mother that were absolutely untrue — I found that (a) I wasn’t horrified to be in church, and (b) I could fully participate in the moment.

Here’s a small portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

He goes on the describe a trip to the grocery store after a long day at work — the sort of adult experience most college graduates don’t include in their glossy visions of the future — as an exercise in choices. You can stand in line, tired, starving, and frustrated as shit, and wonder why all these ridiculous, bovine jerks are standing between you and a hot meal at home, or you can remember that everyone has their own heroic battles to fight, and cut them some slack.

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship . . .

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

The more I read of this guy, the more I like him, and the sorrier I am that he’s dead.

I’m so far behind where I’m supposed to be and I’m trying not to panic, though that didn’t work out too well last night at 9:00 p.m.

Me: I can’t do this! I have nothing to say! I’m an underqualified blogging hack with no literary grasp, or scope, and this was all just a horrible mistake so you’d better FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO POST ON INFINITE SUMMER, OH GOD.

Matthew: Buh-wha?

A series of talk-her-down e-mails ensued, wrapping up with a YouTube video of Feist on Sesame Street, singing about the number four. Then I slept for ten hours. Hey! Things are looking up.

I may have several points to make here, but number one is: how the fuck are you people finding time to read? Do none of you have jobs? Certainly you don’t have families, or children belonging to an age group that is defined by its inability to successfully manipulate a fresh band-aid. Too many people need me for too many things, and I suddenly see why it’s all I can do to throw up a blog post and then run screaming to put out another dryer lint fire, or keep a neglected dog from peeing In someone’s shoe, or sadly buttoning up another unironed shirt as I dash out the door to a job where a minor office sport is trying to guess how old I am.

But let’s think about this sentence for a moment:

A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness non-pareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofaial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.

SHRINKing UPPer CLASSes of PETro-ARab NAtions whose STAGGering FEEs are WHOLly AD vaLORem.

I feel like Rex Harrison ought to burst in and start singing that.¹⁶ And somewhere in Nova Scotia there’s a soundproof bunker where some poor b-list Shakespearean actor has been subsisting on Jell-O and hand-rolled American Spirits, recording an unabridged audio version of Infinite Jest for the last thirteen years.

“I don’t mind,” Hal said softly. “I could wait forever.”

I hope he wraps it up soon and turns it into an 80-gig podcast or this book is going to become a doorstop. Again.

The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

Way back awhile ago, Matthew e-mailed me and said, I’m thinking of doing this thing, would you like to do it, too? And I was all, HELL NO. Why don’t you ask mimi smartypants, she’s the secretary/treasurer of the David Foster Wallace Fan Club. It was my way of saying, thanks, but don’t you want a qualified literary opinion-giver along on this trek? I can barely parse Dr. Seuss.

Then I didn’t hear from Matthew for like three months, so I was all, WHEW! Now I can go back to knitting this sock. But then, of course, Matthew followed up⁴ and said that mimi had declined — having already read the book three times⁵ she wasn’t up for number four.

Then, sensing my reluctance to flaunt my intellectual weaknesses about the Internet, Matthew went on to say a bunch of wildly flattering things about me, like that mine was one of the first blogs he ever read, and that I gave him the idea upon which he built that Nobel Prize-winning physics thing he did about God.

My only qualification for being an Infinite Summer guide seems to be that I, too, once picked up Infinite Jest and failed to finish it. I didn’t even PAY for my copy, I was working in a bookstore at the time and got one free from the Little, Brown rep. Apart from my anxiety about committing to a Big Book at the time,⁶ what bothered me most about the book was the cheap advance-copy binding, the way the cover curled up and over itself when the humidity rose above 15%. I eventually donated it to the Planned Parenthood book sale.

I remember the book being about tennis, which is a sport I enjoy playing once or twice a year. I was varsity in high school, but the coach said that even though I had some talent, I just didn’t appear to want to work very hard.⁷

However, as your sherpa, I vow to come up with something moderately insightful to say each week.⁸