Author: matthewbaldwin

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.

• Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.
• Brittney Gilbert blogs for San Francisco’s CBS 5, and on her own site, Sparkwood & 21.
• Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.
• Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University.
• infinitedetox has been drug-free for close to 90 days and counting, thanks in part to David Foster Wallace.
• Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. His archive of his Infinite Jest commentary can be found here.
• John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Paper Towns (which was just released in paperback) , Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. He is also the co-creator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular vlogbrothers channel on youtube, which spawned the nerdfighter community, a tight-knit group of a hundred thousand nerds who use the internet to celebrate intellectualism and nerd culture.
• John Moe is a writer and public radio host now living in St Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the book Conservatize Me and his short humor pieces appear in several anthologies as well as on McSweeneys.net
• 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.
• 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.
• Marcus Sakey is the bestselling author of four novels. His latest, The Amateurs, was called “genius” by the Chicago Tribune, and his three previous books are currently in development as feature films. He has ridden with gang cops, gone shooting with Special Forces, toured the morgue, and learned to pick a deadbolt. He claims it was all for research.
• Maria Bustillos is the author of the newly released Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman, as well as Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork (in which Wallace fans may read the author’s favorite chapter, “David Foster Wallace: the Dork Lord of American Letters.” You can find her on Twitter at @mariabustillos.
• 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 can be found at mattbucher.com.
• Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.
• Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company and was David Foster Wallace’s editor.
• 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.
• Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less. In 2006, he was the founding editor of Valleywag.com.
• Mimi Smartypants is a Chicago writer and editor, as well as the eponymous author of a long-running weblog. A portion of her early online writing is collected in The World According to Mimi Smartypants.
• 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.

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:

• Infinite Zombies
• Infinite Detox
• A Supposed Fun Blog
• Infinite Tasks
• Gerry Canavan
• I Just Read About That
• Love, Your Copyeditor
• Sarah's Books
• The Feminist Texican
• Conversational Reading
• Journeyman
• Repat Blues
• Chris Forster
• Brain Hammer
• Naptime Writing
• Infinite Jestation

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.

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.

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 exist until Wallace-via-J. O. Incandenza made it up. But once I saw “anticonfluence” in the pages of Infinite Jest, I thought I knew what I was in for. I had turned the novel into a classification problem, with the same impatient faith we bring to search terms and ranked lists, whether we’re looking up boutique camera lenses, obscure Altman interviews, or the fastest withdrawal online casinos canada has and expecting the mess of the world to arrange itself cleanly by relevance. 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, the down-and-out would keep coming back, and Marathe and Steeply would talk and talk and talk, and never the twain would meet. 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.