Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • Acknowledgements

    Back in April, when I set out to recruit three more Guides, I decided to start with the folks I thought would be best suited for the role and then move down the list as I accumulated rejections (of which I expected plenty). Instead, to my great fortune, the first three people I asked accepted. I’m a little unclear on how that happened, but I could not be more appreciative.

    The Guides agreed to do all they did this summer on a volunteer basis. If you believe that awesome and generous people deserve reward, please support them in their current and future endeavors.

    Eden M. Kennedy’s most recent project is Let’s Panic About Babies (co-authored by Alice Bradley), and was called “a hilarious Onion-style website about parenting” by Redbook magazine. Eden also writes yogabeans! (where her son’s action figures demonstrate the intricacies of ashtanga yoga) and Fussy (where she writes angry open letters to Justin Timberlake and chronicles her daily life).

    Kevin Guilfoile’s bestselling debut novel Cast of Shadows–called “gripping” by the New York Times and one of the Best Books of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and Kansas City Star–has been translated into more than 15 languages. He was the co-author (with John Warner) and illustrator of the #1 bestseller My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook by George W. Bush. Kevin is a co-founder and commissioner of The Morning News Tournament of Books, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Salon, and McSweeney’s. His second novel, The Thousand, will be published next year by Alfred A. Knopf.

    Avery Edison is a student of Comedy Writing at a university in England. She writes a few web–comics, maintains a a tumblog, and has one of the most hilarious Twitter streams on the series of tubes.

    While not official Guides, Matt Bucher (of the wallace-l listserv) and Nick Maniatis (of The Howling Fantods) were tireless in their promotion and encouragement. And John Hodgman’s perfect summation of the event–“a noble and crazy enterprise”–is responsible for no small share of the attention and participants we received.

    Many people volunteered their time and talent to write essays and commentary for us. Infinite Summer wouldn’t have been half as successful without the contributions of our guests.

    And rounding out the trifecta was the amazing community that flourished around us. Among those who chronicled their reading of the novel was our blogroll:

    You can find many more posts and commentary in the weekly roundup archives.

    There was also the Infinite Summer Facebook Page, the Infinite Summer goodreads page, the Infinite Summer LiveJournal Community, the Infinite Summer Shelfari group, and Ravelry.

    And I am enormously grateful to everyone who visited the site, participated in the forums, merrily tweeted along on Twitter #infsum channel, and otherwise worked to make this the incredible event it became

    Finally, a shout-out to David Foster Wallace. We owe you way more than thanks.

     
     

  • The End

    Early in Infinite Summer, we received an email from a participant (who requested anonymity):

    I went to a David Foster Wallace talk/autograph signing in Boston years ago. I asked him to write a message of congratulations to the reader on the final page. I thought this would motivate me to re-read IJ, since his congratulatory note would be waiting at the end.

    I will scan his message and autograph, and you can post the images on the site when Infinite Summer officially hits Page 981.

  • Roundup

    As Infinite Summer draws to a close, many have penned their “final thoughts” post:

    • Sarah’s Books: “But and so and but so I finished IJ.”

    • I Just Read About That: “So, obviously, the first reaction is WHAT?!“

    • Infinite Zombies: “I’ve probably tended to race down the hill of those last 200 pages and just lost the end amid the swirling thoughts of how ambitious and crazy and good the whole book is, and I’ve never given the actual end — the stuff about Gately specifically — very much thought.” (Daryl Houston).

    • Of Books and Bikes: “Wow, people. Infinite Jest is a great book, and it’s going on my list of favorite novels ever.”

    • Magnificent Octopus: “At some point, about a week ago, I was ready to say this is an awesome book, this Infinite Jest, and while I spent much of the first couple hundred pages admiring it, I was also somewhat confused and not really relating to it … So but, right, I’m done now, and yup, awesome book.”

    • Shelf Life: “This brings me to my primary problem with Infinite Jest. The excess. Wallace’s writing is amazing. It’s funny and insightful and rich with amusing references and even intentional, revealing mistakes. I loved his narrative voice, but it’s just too much. Too much story, too many characters, too many walls of text.”

    • A Supposedly Fun Blog: “AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH. I was expecting that. But not that.” (Erza Klein) and “I enjoyed it to the end, although I started to resent it about three weeks ago, not because the quality flagged (it didn’t) but because my stack of unread books began to reach truly frightening heights.” (Kevin Carey)

    • Catching Days: “I am shocked at how much I loved Infinite Jest.”

    • Aaron Swartz: “The whole book is laced through with mocking cracks at this disconnected style, like a preemptive apology. And the ending really doesn’t help matters. But in the middle it is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever.”

    • Thinking Without a Box: “A brilliant, earnest, and an enriching piece of fiction. Every time I read pages in the book, I was always amazed by the sheer genius of David Foster Wallace. He was truly a great one.”

    • Verbatim: “I did not want it to end, because now I will never again get to read about Don Gately, Joelle Van Dyne, Hal Incandenza, and all the rest—until I reread, that is.”

    • Jazz … In Strange Places: “when i realized i had only 50 pages left i knew i was screwed in the resolution department.”

    • A Hyperanaphylaxis Universal Mean: “I read Jest in about 10-25 page increments over the past three months; sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but always just like a mule. Plodding along through the hills and the dark down there caverns of this tumultuous, twisting book.”

    • Ongoing: “I’m glad I read it. I would never dream of recommending it to anyone.”

    • Prozac: “Each character, though all seemingly reflective of the author, was so painfully individual and human that I felt I knew them better than I know my own friends and family.”

    • Tape Noise Diary: “Wallace’s inside joke and wink is that what’s entertaining about the story it’s is non-entertainment and unsatisfying story arc. It’s like a very long thesis about addiction and entertainment that uses plot and characters as props.”

    And in case you missed it, much of our blogroll finished the book early (infinitedetox, Gerry Canavan, members of Infinite Zombies, and so forth). We listed their final reactions in the previous Roundup post.

    Also in the last fortnight, a lot of rumination about Infinite Summer and the future of reading. Matthew Battles, of the Hermenautic Circle Blog, writes:

    When I think of Infinite Summer, I remember that the liberal arts are at their heart not a profession or a civic medicine but a disposition.

    The institutions of the life of the mind are in a bad way—and they always have been! I wouldn’t have given you two cents for the institutions at any point in the history of civilization. But the life of the mind isn’t really about institutions, is it?

    I know I’m simplifying things; it could be argued that without institutional exposure to the liberal arts, Infinite Summer’s far-flung participants would never have undertaken conversation.

    Kathleen Fitzpatrick, associate professor of media studies at Pomona College (and I.S. guest) discussed the “death of literature with Humanities Magazine. The Missouri Review ponders Book Clubs in the World of Tomorrow!.

    If you have recently written something about Infinite Jest, pelase let us know in the comments.

  • Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace

    Until recently I had no idea what this book was about. I don’t mean to say that I couldn’t follow the plot (although that happened on more than one occasion), but rather that it was unclear to me whether this was a book about tennis or addiction or entertainment or families or friendships or pet-murdering psychos or what. It seemed to be about all of the above, each in turn, but none for very long.

    But from where I now stand–9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far–it now seems obvious to me what the book is “about”. Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107

    The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book–having read only the first 50 pages before giving up, say, or basing their opinion solely on synopses of the plot and setting–describe the book as the very opposite of sincere, as ironic and cynical and dark.

    My theory is that Wallace has pulled a reverse Mary Poppins, here. Rather than using a spoonful of sugar to disguise the medicine, he set his novel in a borderline dystopia, full of depression and suicide and malcontents, effectively disguising the simple and (dare I say it?) sweet message at it’s core. And he spreads it out over a solid k of pages so that, at no given moment, are you aware of what you’re imbibing.

    No moment except perhaps this one:

    The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

    That passage is found just shy of 600 pages in. And I can’t help but wonder what my reaction would have been if it had appeared on page 13. Would I have rolled my eyes, or laughed in a way that isn’t happy, or chalked this novel up as just a bunch of glurge best suited for the Oprah bookclub?108 Would my Sincerity Deflector Shields been reflexively raised, and remained in battle position for the remaining 950 pages?

    As Kevin noted earlier, my generation has been steeped in irony since the get-go, and plunging into a novel that argued against such modes of thinking would have been the literary equivalent of Cold Turkey, the Bird, white-knuckling. Instead, what Infinite Jest provides is a 13 week irony detox program,109 designed to reduce the cynicism in your system at a slow enough rate that you don’t go all P.T.-Kraus-on-a-subway.

    And then at some point you realize that Wallace has been performing something like a spiritual transfusion, that he hasn’t simply been leeching you of cynicism but also craftily impressing upon you the usefulness, the importance, the utter necessity of sincerity. The dude is like a giant ATHSCME fan, keeping the miasma of toxicity at bay.

    As we reach the end of Infinite Jest the question becomes: can we retain the message that DFW struggled so mightily to impart, or is a relapse inevitable? It’s too bad there isn’t something like an Ennet House for IJ veterans, designed to keep us from drifting to our old ways of thinking, our “default settings” as it were. I can see now why people feel the need to reread the novel on a regular basis: “Keep coming back”.

    Living a life of sincerity is a challenge, but Wallace is going to be very patient about helping us change.

  • “It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know”


    You Are Loved

  • Hollow Man

    I love Nashville. Not the city (I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting), but the 1975 film by Robert Altman. Altman was something of a cinematic David Foster Wallace, creating long and sprawling narratives that were superficially “rambling” and profoundly intricate, and which focused almost exclusively on the characters and the relationships between them. Nashville tackles half a dozen stories at least, some big and some small, and all in parallel. That is to say, it’s more like a collection of loosely knitted short stories than a single chronicle–minor characters occasionally stray from one plotline to another, but by and large the narratives are like strands in a rope, twined but distinct. The only thing resembling convergence in Nashville is the end, when most of the characters find themselves attending the same political rally (long story).

    Twenty years later, Altman made a similarly structured film entitled Short Cuts and, in this one, there’s no unifying event whatsoever.99 And Short Cuts is often cited as a progenitor for another of my all-time favorite movies, Magnolia (this one by the wonderful Paul Thomas Anderson), which also features a number of stories that fail to fully intersect.100

    This type of film doesn’t really have a strict genre classification, but henceforth I shall call them: anticonfluential.

    Of course, I did not know such a word existed until recently. And maybe the term didn’t exists, until Wallace-via-J. O. Incandenza, made it up. But once I saw it, the word, “anticonfluence”, in the pages of Infinite Jest, I thought I knew what I was in for. I figured that the three storylines–E.T.A., Ennet, and Marathe/Steeply–would never merge, that the rich kids would do their drills on the hill, and the down-and-out would keep coming back, that Marathe and Steeply would talk and talk and talk, and never the thrain would meet.101 And where this would catch others by surprise, I would close the book with the smug satisfaction of having foreseen all this as early as endnote 24.

    And then Steeply appeared in the stands of an E.T.A. game, and Marthe rolled into Ennet House. And no sooner had I hastily adjusted my hypothesis to fit the new data (Steeply and Marathe will serve as the bridge between E.T.A. and Ennet, but the school and the shelter will not directly interact) when Hal arrives at Ennet, asking for NA brochure. Even Lenz and P. T. Kraus shared an alley, albeit briefly.

    The moral here, methinks, is: stop trying to outguess Wallace, because that dude will punk you hard.

    With all this anti-anti-confluence afoot, it would be easy to overlook what is, to my mind, the biggest revelation in the book thus far. Waaaaay back on page 693, Hal muses on anhedonia:

    Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.

    Since the first page of Infinite Jest (or, rather, since page 223, when we learned that the first page falls chronologically after the rest), the big question in my mind has been: what terrible thing happens to Hal, that leaves him sounding like “Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet”? But this passage turns that first chapter on its head. Because although Hal feels empty inside in Y.D.A.U., by Year of Glad he’ll be saying “I am in here.” The question now becomes what wonderful thing happens to Hal, that makes his life complete?

    Misc.

    Thumbs Up?: Of the aforementioned Nashville, Roger Ebert said: “after I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser.” And after his recent column about A.A. garnered multiple recommendations for Infinite Jest, Ebert said of the novel “I have it right here. Started it once, am starting again.” One can only imagine what kind of review he will provide at its end.

    Zeno’s Paradoxes: As Kevin and others have noted, Wallace said he structure the novel “like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal”. By fractal, I took Wallace to mean this: that there exist in the book large “things” (themes, motifs, situations, events) that appear nearly identical to smaller “things”, save only scale (in much the same way that the large triangular Sierpinski Gasket is composed of smaller triangles, which are composed of smaller triangles still). But endnotes 324 and 332 are showing the novel to be fractal in yet another sense.

    One property of fractals is that they can expand endlessly.102 The example commonly given is the coastline of a fjord. From a high altitude there is a ragged but definite coastline, of what appears to be 100 kilometers. But when you zoom in a bit you see that the ragged bits meander in and out to such a degree that the true length of the coast is a few more kilometers than you had originally thought. You zoom in more and discover that there is still more coastline, this adding additional meters to the total. Zooming in further adds centimeters. And then millimeters. And then microns.

    So too does the total page count of this novel seem to be growing right in front of our eyes, now that we are finding entire chapters squirreled away in the endnotes. I get into bed, flip ahead to see how many pages I have to read to read before reaching the next break, and discover it to be eight; 14 pages later I close the book, having reached it. It’s like a house in a Harry Potter novel, that appears to be a hovel from the outside and yet somehow contains 12,000 square feet inside.

    Pre-quadrivial : Oh god, that “17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times” flier made me laugh and laugh.

  • Roundup

    This week many readers saw the light at the end of the summer and sprinted toward it, finishing the novel and writing about the end. If you are still behind the spoiler line, you should avoid:

    Earlier, Infinite Detox was outraged at E.T.A. (and the novel’s) treatment of Michael Pemulis. Infinite Tasks concurred.

    Paul Debraski is sticking the schedule; his latest posts looks at Wallace’s prescience regarding technology. Sarah observes that the book has become abruptly infantile.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 11

    Milestone Reached: 812 (82%)

    Sections Read:

    Page 736: Joelle cleans her room, ponders her relationship with Himself and the movies she starred in, and recollects the Thanksgiving she shared with the Incandenzas.

    Page 747: Marathe speaks to Pat. M. regarding admittance to Ennet House. A discussion about discovered cartridges piques his interest. Marathe ponders his various options (rush off to alert the AFR, kill Pat M. outright, etc.)

    Page 755 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Mario wanders around E.T.A. with a camera strapped to his head, collecting footage for a documentary. He ends up interviewing his mother, and asking her how one can tell if someone is sad. The Moms launches into an extended monologue about disassociation, engulfment, and suppression.

    Page 769: Hal and Mario are again sharing a room. They discuss their childhood dog S. Johnson, liars (Orin and Pemulis in particular), and whether it even occurs to Mario that people might lie to him. Hal admits that he would have failed the urine test, if Pemulis hadn’t extorted a 30 day reprieve.

    Page 774: Kate and Marathe chat in a bar. Marathe tells Kate about how his met and married his wife, and Kate is disappointed in the “love” story.

    Page 785 – 17 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal arrives at Ennet house, and asks for a schedule of NA meetings.

    Endnote 324: In the lockeroom, Pemulis consoles his little buddy Possathwaite, who is weeping and declaiming “nothing is true”.

    Page 784: Under interrogation from Rodney Tine, Molly Notkin tells everything all knows about Madame Psychosis and J. O. Incandenza, including the disfigurement of Joelle during Thanksgiving when her mother had flung acid at her father, the father (and Orin) had ducked, and Joelle had gotten it in the face.

    Endnote 332: Wayne does some “candid sharing” on Troeltsch student broadcast; deLint tells Pemulis that he can either finish the term or hit the trail now, but that his tenure at E.T.A. is effectively over.

    Page 795: Hal tries to go to an addicts meeting, but somehow winds up at it “Inner Infant”.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • Nick Maniatis: In Search of Firm Ground

    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 final 200 pages always make me feel like I’m sliding down an ultra fast slippery-dip. I can see the end, but I feel like I’m traveling way too quickly to stop in time. Is there firm ground to land on over the edge?

    This is so much fun. Things are whizzing by so quickly. I wish I could slow time and savour every moment.

    It does. I do.

    One thing of which I am certain is that I don’t want this to end.

    Ever.

    So I run back and climb up the that steep, steep, ladder once more. Already forgetting what it was like to launch off the end and hoping that it continues to be as exhilerating as before.

    It is.

    More recently I’ve learned to look up and away from the slide. Sweep my eyes from side to side and take in the view. Enjoy the journey more than the destination. What I see is amazing.

    There are slides all around me. More people. All engrossed. Worried. Entertained. Thoughtful. Crying. Laughing. Some of them are staring right back at me.

    I would never have guessed Infinite Jest would become such a large part of my life. In fact, I rarely consider just how much time I have spent with this novel, because honestly, sometimes it scares me.

    One thing I know for certain is that this book makes me feel connected to other people. I have conversed with fellow readers electronically for years, many of them through Wallace-L. Listers, journalists, bloggers, academics, fans, publishers, agents and friends. The experience of meeting other David Wallace readers at the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year has me super excited about the November conference in New York. I can’t wait to meet some of you.

    This book builds networks and facilitates relationships.

    Mark and Matt, two friends, 10 or so years (has it been that long?) apart. I shared with both of them, in person, their first read of Infinite Jest.

    Terrified. What if they don’t like it as much as me? Am I obsessed? A creepy fan? Addicted…? So, you like it? Don’t let them see how elated I am. Why play it down?

    I’m sorry we’ve fallen out of touch, Mark. I miss you. Email me. I know you have my address.

    Thank you Infinite Summer. I love reading all of your comments in the infinite summer forums, a couple of the threads in there have blown me away. I’m also loving the blogs: Infinite Detox, Infinite Zombies, Infinite Tasks, and Kul. Thank you.

    I can’t help but hope David Wallace realised what he achieved with this novel.

    This novel speaks to me.

    It make me feel more connected to my family and friends.

    More connected to other fans and readers.

    More connected to my world.

    I better understand my faults and misgivings.

    I am more generous and open to differing points of view.

    I watch tennis with eyes I never knew I had.

    I no longer laugh at AA.

    I understand that letting go, saying no, and not being a slave to my desires is real freedom.

    Double binds only make you stronger.

    Connecting with others is connecting with yourself.

    I understand that one can, simultaneously, fall in love and choose to love.

    Enjoy what is left. You only get one first read.

  • John Warner: My Own Infinite Summer

    John Warner is the author of the leading volume of fake writing advice, Fondling Your Muse: Infallible Advice From a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant. He teaches at Clemson University.

    Twice in my life, when I had no one, David Foster Wallace was there for me. The first time was Labor Day weekend, 1988, my freshman year of college at the University of Illinois.93 No one had told me that even though it was only the second week of school that everyone was supposed to go home. My dorm complex, “the six pack,”94 looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, space for many with very few present. Occasionally I’d hear Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” coming from some other lonely soul’s boom box echoing through the central courtyard, but for the most part it was me and my six inch (not a misprint) black and white television and an advance copy of Wallace’s story collection, Girl with Curious Hair.

    My mom owned an independent bookstore at the time and one of her sales reps must’ve said something like, “this is what the kids are reading these days,” and so she’d sent it to me. A week and a half into school, I was off to an uninspired start, enrolled in 15 hours worth of gut courses, 1200 person lectures with little accountability and even less intellectual stimulation. I enjoyed the free time they left me to nap, but I was well on my way to sleepwalking through my education. Out of sheer boredom I picked up the book and began reading and those stories became my companions through the long weekend.

    Since the English AP exam at the time stopped well short of postmodernism, I didn’t know that such things existed, but the first story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” with Alex Trebek as a character literally tickled me. I had an instant sensation that unlike most of what I’d been fed in high school, this Wallace guy had things to say about the world I lived in. Even now there’s very few writers who manage to write about the world we inhabit today instead of ones in the past.

    His fascinations – television, politics, the way people can be casually cruel or unusually kind to each other – were mine. While up to that time I might’ve said that I had an “interest” in writing, I didn’t really know that these subjects were in bounds for a writer. I’d assumed they were too, I don’t know, small. Wallace proved to me that the opposite was true.

    Fast forward nine years when I had my own individual Infinite Summer. That interest in writing had metastasized into an MFA degree from McNeese St. University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.95 I’d turned in a thesis that I’d begun to loath even as it came off the printer. The stories were primarily ersatz Carver, the kind of competent, shapely tale that got through workshop with minimal fuss, but for sure didn’t excite anyone, least of all me. I was a justifiably unpublished sub-mediocrity and it looked like it was about time to pick up an LSAT prep book.

    I had three months left on a lease and nowhere to live after that, so for the summer following graduation I stayed in Lake Charles with the only possessions I hadn’t sold at a yard sale or shipped back home: a bed roll, a lamp, and a copy of Infinite Jest, and my dog.96 Some friends had stuck around as well, so days were spent shooting pool or watching movies, maybe drinking too early and too much and nights it was me and the lamp and the dog and the book. I’d become a certified Wallace fan by that point, having devoured A Supposedly Fun Thing… and Broom of the System. His essay on the Illinois State Fair cemented our bond as Midwesterners. I thought he was, to put it plainly, a fucking genius. Nights, I listened to the condensation drip from the window air-conditioner and read, sometimes just a few pages, other times for hours. Where writing and creativity had begun to look hopelessly narrow, Infinite Jest, cracked the world back open.

    Once again, reading David Foster Wallace showed me what was possible. But as intimidating as his brilliance was and is, above all, the book demonstrates that if you want to write something at all compelling you’ve got to bore in on what interests you and just work that shit until the goods come out the other side. During my graduate studies I’d lost that feeling, or more accurately, I’d never found it because I was too wrapped up in what the circumscribed group of workshoppers were going to say. I’d been keeping my neck firmly tucked toward my shell lest it get lopped off.

    Summer over, having not written a word for better than three months I moved back to Chicago, into my parents’ basement. I was twenty-seven, broke, jobless and imagined a future life as a kind of mole-man, my eyes saucering from the lack of natural illumination as I spent more and more time underground. One day I started typing a dialog between a man looking for a job and a career counselor and all of the sudden the career counselor is talking about gung fu and the Ultimate Fighting Championships and a poem by W.D. Snodgrass97 and there’s a little fillip in my stomach that I haven’t felt for quite some time. That dialog and what followed it became the first story98 I ever published and it wouldn’t have happened without Infinite Jest reminding me what’s possible (namely anything).

    A couple of years later I had the chance to tell David Foster Wallace about all this, to thank him personally for his example and inspiration, but I choked. I’d been invited to tag along to a dinner with Wallace and about six others after a reading by a friend of mine at Illinois State where Wallace was teaching at the time. He was low key and cool, obviously smart, but not showy about it and as the dinner progressed, the words I might use to convey my admiration roiled around my head without finding any purchase. The best I could do was telling him that I “really enjoyed” his writing at the time of our farewells.

    After his passing, as I read the tributes to the man that had been pouring into the McSweeney’s website, more grief fell out of me than I thought possible for someone I’d met once, briefly. I told a friend about this and very seriously he said, “It’s like he’s your Princess Diana.”