Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • Colin Meloy: Thoughts at pg. 750; or, Staying at Pace

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

    First thing: Apparently summer is not infinite. It’s September 2nd and it’s cold in the mornings here and the leaves are just starting to turn and our tomatoes are dying.

    Second thing: I’m keeping at pace.89 That’s my stand. And it’s not like I’ve had to hold myself back or anything – I’ve had kind of a busy summer and I’m not really a fast reader. However: I think another guest commenter may have mentioned, flying a lot lends itself to marathon reading sessions. The most traction I’ve had on the book has been achieved at 30K feet. So early on I actually had some breathing room and I managed to get a few other books read during my infinite summer.90 Initially I thought it’d be easy; that I’d get my 12 pages in IJ done and I’d be able to take on some light auxiliary reading. Things got a little crazy; I went on rock tour and I’ve had to abandon that plan. And while I’m sure there were folks who were pretty chuffed with themselves to be able to tweet “Finished. Think I’ll start in on 2666” in mid-July, I think that keeping to the schedule91 is the proper way to do this thing. For one thing, 12 pages a day is a reasonable amount, especially considering that I end up reading at least 3 of those pages more than once. And, more importantly, I’ve really loved reading all of the supplementary blogging that everyone has been doing92 Rushing ahead would somehow lessen the experience, don’t you think? So I’ve kept to pace.

    Third thing: Okay: I’d like to just state that David Foster Wallace’s greatest achievement with this novel, in my estimation, is that he has managed to create a book whose key plot components are an elite tennis academy, a batty avant-garde film director, a dystopic future in which time is subsidized by corporations, a vast addiction-recovery complex, a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists/assassins, a film that is so compelling to its viewers that it will literally reduce them to a vegetable state, and a rampaging horde of feral hamsters and yet nothing has really happened. That’s the genius of this novel. It’s like Wallace is pushing the very limit of what plot elements a story can reasonably sustain, letting those elements wildly orbit one another until a kind of big bang occurs. One hopes. When describing this book to others (my baffled tour-mates, for one, sitting in their bus-bunks with their wrists unbent, blithely reading some slim novel or other) I’ve said that I’m well over ¾ of the way through this 1000 page book and I think I’m still getting exposition. I’d become really accustomed to the structure of the book and started to learn not to expect too much from the little plot pointers that DFW would throw at me – I grew closer to the characters in the understanding that these disparate worlds may never meet. And all of a sudden, things are changing: it was like witnessing the meeting of two old friends, you know, like one from college and one from high school. When Steeply was watching Hal play tennis. When one of the assassin roulants scoops up the unsuspecting engineer. When – holy shit – Marathe infiltrates the Ennet house! These perilous orbits are crashing closer and closer together, I think. We’re moving out of exposition, dear readers! The pages are starting to turn a little faster – though I’ll still be keeping at pace, thanks very much.

  • Maria Bustillos: The Wonder of Wallace-L

    Maria Bustillos is the author of 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.” Her next book, Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman, is coming out in September. She lives in Los Angeles, can be contacted at dorkismo@gmail.com, and is on Twitter as @mariabustillos.

    My first post to wallace-l, the mailing list dedicated to David Foster Wallace, is dated 6th July 2001. I had finished Infinite Jest only the week before, and spent the following days obsessively trolling the Internet for clues to the mysteries that remained. wallace-l was quite obviously home to a ton of devoted, knowledgeable Wallace fans, and I hoped that, through these sages, I would be able to unlock the novel’s secrets without having to read and study it more closely. Which didn’t happen at all! Instead I wound up studying the novel for years on end, and having the time of my life.

    Though eager to tap the wisdom of the wallace-l membership, I was shy to post at first, intimidated by their intimacy as well as their erudition. But on that day, Marcus Gray had asked the list about the likely value of a set of signed Rushdie proofs he’d acquired somehow. I’d been an avocational bookseller for some years, so I told Marcus what I could about his Rushdie proofs, and concluded with the following:

    I just signed onto this list yesterday; finished Infinite Jest last week and am still kind of boggled, like I could tie a handkerchief around my head and start moaning "my braim hurts." Anyway, I hope you guys can all supply really concise Cliff's Notes-style answers to my many questions, so I don't have to read the damn thing again right away ....

    And so it began.

    Right after my post on that day in July, Marco Carbone weighed in on Warp Records and their influence on Kid A; Darcy James Argue (yes, that Darcy James Argue) quoted Woody Allen and gave some guy stick for dissing, on principle, music that was rapidly composed; Hillary Brown took up cudgels on behalf of Salman Rushdie (“funny doesn’t equal baby food”); Stephen Schenkenberg described Sigur Ros’s live show as a “caught-in-the-most-wonderful-snowglobe-ever experience” and praised Wallace’s obviously-firsthand grasp of tennis lingo; and Steve McPherson lamented his inability to get hold of a copy of The Lost Scrapbook (excellent novel, btw).

    All this and so very much more came within three days of my first post. Such a high level of discourse, such humor and fun, such omnivorous interest and delight in everything from Martin Amis’s teeth to the sociological function of slang; and with room, too, for the goofiest observations and the worst puns, and all leavened with the ineffable pleasure of baiting David Fleissig, who could invariably be counted on to Blackberry in with exasperated exhortations to stay on topic (as if!)

    wallace-l has served as my confessional, my local pub and my support group (the latter, especially, after 9/11 and the 2004 elections.) There have been scraps and little list-dramas (there always are!) but for me it has always been fun, always interesting.

    The wildest episode of all came when Thomas Harris recommended a novel called The Last Western by Thomas Klise to the list. It sounded great, so when I came across a copy I snapped it right up, and reported back in March of 2002 that it bore all sorts of strange resemblances to Infinite Jest:

    there is Herman Felder, the drug-addicted genius filmmaker, engineer and camera inventor whose apocalyptic work ("Cowboys and Indians") tells the story of the human condition (along more martial lines, maybe, than does the film 'Infinite Jest') in a stupendous, world-altering work of art whose creation proves the auteur's undoing. (Incidentally, as in IJ, the title of the book refers to the film and vice versa.)

    And likewise, the story of the book and the story of the film are the same, intertwined and sometimes indistinguishable one from the other.

    There is also a fruitful comparison to be made between The Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed-up in TLW and the residents of Ennet House in IJ; the place apart (a 12th house enclosure, astrology fans), where the true business of the world takes place. And there is a very Gately-like character in the mute pilot, Truman (né Bleeder).

    I was in such a panic to discuss this book with other Wallace fans that I offered my copy to anyone on the list who would care to read it, and someone took me up on this offer: one Erwin Hoesi of Klosterberg, Germany, then living in a monastery (and now a financial analyst living in London, with whom I had a many-splendored evening just a few weeks ago.)

    Erwin, too, had found all sorts of weirdly evocative correspondences between The Last Western and IJ. His remarks were so completely thrilling to me that when I read about a call for papers on Wallace from the “Ball State University Project”, I thought I might throw down, though I hadn’t written anything similar in years. Perhaps a closer study of Klise would unlock all the mysteries of Infinite Jest!

    So I wrote to David Foster Wallace himself for the first time, asking for his remarks on The Last Western. He wrote back, in his matey way, just a few days later. (He always wrote people back; I really don’t know of anyone whom he didn’t write back.)

    Dear Ms. Bustillos,

    Thank you for your very very complimentary note. I regret that I’m not going to be able to help you with your project, for the following reasons: 1. I am wholly ignorant of The Last Western—never heard of it before today* (if it turns out everyone else in the world has read it, it’ll just be one more instance of my ignoramusness); 2. I tend, to the extent that I remember IJ at all, to get all sorts of different mss. and draft and pre-edited versions of it jumbled up with whatever version of it actually came out, and so I am just about the world’s worst source of info on that book.

    I’m flattered that you asked, though, and I wish you luck with your enterprise and the German ex-monk. Yrs. Truly, David F. Wallace

    *Same with the “Ball State University Project,” which manages to sound at once academic, Blair Witch-ish, and prurient. I don’t think I want to know.

    Imagine my total shock! My brains felt like they’d been plunged in ice water. This is what Ptolemy must have felt like when he realized his orbits weren’t perfect! I had been so certain that Wallace had so cleverly and magically transmuted half the themes in The Last Western into Infinite Jest. I dashed off a note to him that began, “You’ve never heard of The Last Western?! Do I ever feel like the biggest idiot going!” and I apologized, and went on to discuss The Blair Witch Project and a few other things, not really expecting to hear from him again. But a matter of days later, I received this (embarrassing! but so funny) postcard.

    “Dear Ms. B.”, he began. He replied that he’d been terribly scared by The Blair Witch Project (as I had been) and also by the Blair Witch “fake-documentary infomercial thing,” and finally concluded:

    “You should maybe go ahead and do your paper if you want—I won’t tell anybody that I’d never heard of ‘The Last Western.’ Cordially, David W.”

    If I loved him before, for his work, I loved him again, so much more, even, for being like that. But I never did write the paper. Too embarrassed! Maybe I will, though, someday.

    A long time later, I gave Wallace a copy of The Last Western at a reading. He was wonderfully gracious and kind. A fellow wallace-lister remembered this, and asked him a few months later if he’d read it yet; he said it was almost at the top of his “fun pile.” I often wonder if he ever got to it, and if he liked it.

    The moral of the story being, please join wallace-l. The list is now moderated by the gifted Matt Bucher, a great Wallace scholar himself, who has long kept things welcoming and orderly over there. It’s a gathering of people who value intellectual curiosity, humanity, candor and humility, like a mirror of Wallace’s own qualities, and in that way is keeping something of him alive.

  • Join the Tunnel Club

    This is cross-posted to the forums.

    We’ll be featuring guests for the remainder of the week, but I’m appropriating my Monday slot for a discussion on the future of Infinite Summer.

    the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term); and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club.

    Like The Tunnel Club, Infinite Summer’s raison d’etre is kind of vague. Well, not yet. But it will be in a month, after we’ve finished reading Infinite Jest.

    The question of what would happen to Infinite Summer come autumn was one that I was frequently asked in interviews. And was always very coy in my responses so as not to tip my hand w/r/t the Master Plan … or, rather, the fact that I had no plan, Master or otherwise. The idea of transitioning the site into a perpetual online book club thingamaroo certainly occurred to me, but the amount of work the project entailed (at least until recently) prevented me from mapping out what such a future would look like.

    It’s decision time now, though (it takes at least a month to line up Guides, guests, and so forth). And while I continue to have no solid plan, I am slowly tumbling to the realization that I am going to continue the site, at least for a while.

    Right now I’m trying to figure out what direction to go after IJ. I am well aware that Infinite Jest is a unique artifact, and that Infinite Summer may implode without it at the core. That said, it seems to me there are a few distinct paths the site could take from here:

    • Focus on the novels folks “have always meant to read”: That would be a mix of the classics (Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby) and modern stuff (The Kite Runner, Beloved, etc.).

    • Do the postmoderns, those that stimulate and reward discussion: Labyrinths, House of Leaves,The New York Trilogy–pretty much anything on this list.

    • Keep the site DFW oriented: I recently learned that DFW taught a contemporary fiction course at Illinois State, in which the syllabus was books that he himself had trouble reading. Like me and I.S., he figured that imposing deadlines on himself would be a good way to trick himself into finishing them. Novels included JR by Gaddis, Ratner’s Star by Delillo, Blood Meridian by McCarthy, etc. In addition we could do other novels that Wallace expressed admiration for (e.g., Dune & The Screwtape Letters).

    • Pick books based solely on their conduciveness to catchphrases: Let’s face it: 65% of Infinite Summer’s success is attributable to the phrase “Infinite Summer” itself. Going forward we’ll only select books that lend themselves to catchy title + season project names, e.g., Autumn 2009: “Things Fall Apart!”, Winter 2009: “Snowlita!”; Spring 2010: “From Here to E-vernal Equinoxy!”; and so forth

    A mix of these themes would probably be best; perhaps a huge, postmodern opus every six months, and shorter, more conventional novels in between. Right now I am leaning toward 2666 for winter and Gravity’s Rainbow next summer (or The Pale King, depending on publication date). I would also love to tackle The Recognition and Underworld, devote a season to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and maybe have Dystopiathon (think 1984, Brave New World, and Clockwork Orange). For shorter works, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Housekeeping are at the top of my list (I have a literal list). And as a post Jest palate cleanser, I am tempted to devote October to Dracula, to conclude on Halloween Day.

    But as much as Infinite Summer is about literature, it is also about community. And we’d love to get your input on the website’s future, in either the comments or the forums. We’d love for you to join The Tunnel Club and help us draft our very own version of Robert’s Rules.

    And thank you for your continued participation–I hope the Infinite Summer experience has been as wonderful and engrossing for you as it has been for all of us.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 10

    And welcome to week 10.

    Milestone Reached: 738 (75%)

    Sections Read:

    Page 666 The Tunnel Club searches the catacombs under E.T.A. for rats.

    Page 673: Thierry Poutrincourt joins Steeply and deLint in watching the Hal Incandenza v. Ortho Stice match.

    Page 682 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Matty Pemulis, prostitute and brother to E.T.A.’s Michael, recalls sexual abuse at the hands of his father.

    Page 686 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: After the Stice match, Hal first runs into deLint, then spends the evening watching his father’s films.

    Page 689 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: On the way to Antitoi Brothers’, Poor Tony Kraus considers snatching the purse of the two women in front of him.

    Page 692: Geoffrey Day ruminates on how male Ennet residents have names for their members, and fond reminiscences about Lenz’s “Hog”

    Page 692: A general discussion of depression, alternating between Kate Gompert (thinking about her Ennet House friend who is addicted to train sets) and Hal (watching The American Century as Seen Through a Brick).

    Page 698 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Newer resident Ruth van Cleve leaves E.T.A. in the company of Kate Gompert; P.T. Krause follows, eying their bags.

    Pages 700-701Five brief vignettes:

    • Jim Troeltsch prepares to narrate a wrestling cartridge in his room.
    • Michael Pemulis moves a panel in the ceiling with a handle of a racquet.
    • Lyle sits in his usual spot, atop the towel dispenser in the weight room.
    • Coach Schtitt and Mario “tear-ass” down the road in Schtitt’s BMW.
    • Arvil Incandenza calls a “journalistic business”.

    Page 702: While Hal watches Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, other E.T.A. members invade the common room. Joelle attends a cocaine Narcotics Anonymous meetings, hears about a man who walked out on his wife and child.

    Page 711: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun conclusion.

    Page 714: P. T. Krause gives into temptation and snatches Kate Grompert’s purse.

    Page 716 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz, meanwhile, high on cocaine, plans to rob two Asian women.

    Page 719: The Wheelchair Assassins search Antitoi Brothers’, looking for The Entertainment master copy.

    Page 719 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: P. T. Krause flees Ruth van Cleve.

    Page 721: How the Wheelchair Assassins came to center their search on the Antitoi Brothers’ shop.

    Page 723: Fortier and his prosthetic legs.

    Page 723 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Joelle Van Dyne worries about her teeth, dreams of Don Gately.

    Page 724: Fortier goes to the Antitoi Brothers’ shop, where an Entertainment cartridge as been found. It turns out not to be the master, however.

    Page 728: Lenz robs the Asian woman and hides out in a back alley.

    Page 729: Marathe arrives at Ennet house.

    Characters The characters page has been updated.

    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.

  • Matt Bucher: The Anxiety of Influence

    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.

    Infinite Jest is an original novel. I mean that in every sense of the word. Wallace has constructed an original novel that is imaginative and fresh; each storyline drips with his distinctive style. It also is the origin point for a new type of novel writing, a path others want to follow. Let me go back and repeat part of that: Wallace has constructed an original novel. The act of constructing a novel of this size and scope invariably involves some degree of borrowing bits and pieces–either from one’s own drafts and notebooks, or from the writing of others–and stitching together many smaller pieces.

    In addition to Wallace borrowing from his own work (c.f. Antitoi mentioned in his 1992 Harper’s essay “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and available in PDF here), many of the details in Infinite Jest owe something to one or other of the thousands of novels Wallace had digested up to that point. Some of these references are homages, some are Nabokovian red herrings, most are just delightful. There are obvious references like Hamlet and Marathe/Marat, but the four influences I’ve chosen to focus on below might not be immediately apparent to the first-time reader.

    These influences will be familiar to the members of wallace-l and I give that community credit for unearthing most of these connections.

    1. The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: The Bruce Green–Mildred Bonk scene early on (p. 39) introduces us to Tommy Doocey, “the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.” Compare that description with page 76 from The Liar’s Club (1995), (a memoir, by the way): “I knew a drug dealer once who collected [snakes] in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: ‘You weally tink dis is uncut?’ It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.” Now, Karr and Wallace were an item (per The New Yorker and The Washington Post), but there’s no telling if he picked that bit up from Karr’s book or if he himself went to one of those buys at the real Doocey’s place. Karr’s version is arguably funnier.

    2. End Zone by Don Delillo: It would not be unfair to call End Zone the biggest literary influence on Infinite Jest (at least the E.T.A. half). That is somewhat ironic since End Zone is only 250 pages long. Several key details from EZ show up in IJ, but the biggest is probably the concept of Eschaton. The main character of EZ, Gary Harkness, is obsessed with nuclear strategy. He repeatedly mentions the term eschatology. DT Max tells us that one of the original titles of End Zone was “Modes of Disaster Technology.”

      Some other similarities:

      • The militaristic coach in a tower looming over the field;
      • The players (football college rather than tennis academy) over-intellectualizing their roles and future success;
      • The widow of the founder is the president of the school;
      • The powdered milk.

      Wallace and Delillo both spent time in Texas (the setting for End Zone)–Wallace on a Lannan grant in Marfa (you can read more about Wallace in Marfa in Sean Wilsey’s book Oh the Glory of It All) and Delillo researching Libra in Dallas (Delillo’s wife is from Texas).

      There are dozens of other nods to Delillo’s other books throughout Wallace’s work (“The Broom of the System” is similar to a phrase in Americana, the M.I.T. Language Riots are mentioned in Ratner’s Star, etc.) and the Ransom Center in Austin owns a set of correspondence between Wallace and Delillo.

    3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris: Consider these two passages:
      Red Dragon: “[The gun] was a Bulldog .44 Special, short and ugly with its startling big bore. It had been extensively modified by Mag Na Port. The barrel was vented near the muzzle to help keep the muzzle down on recoil, the hammer was bobbed and it had a good set of fat grips. He suspected it was throated for the speedloader.” (RD, p. 137)

      Infinite Jest: “The Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special…blunt and ugly with a bore like the mouth of a cave…The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor…It’s not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader….” (IJ, pp. 609-610)

      Wallace was admittedly a big fan of Harris’s writing. And he confesses that he loved the technical details of Tom Clancy novels. In this list Wallace included two Thomas Harris novels in his top 10. (A lot of people think DFW was joking or something when compiling that list, but I’m telling you it’s sincere.) I think this is a place where Wallace needed a detail about a beefy gun and either remembered or came across this in Red Dragon and ran with it.

    4. Super Mario Brothers: OK, this seems like a stretch and it’s not literary, but bear with me. Mario Incandenza, the middle child, is a “small hunched shape with a big head” (p. 32), extremely short, but he has a big head, an oversized skull on a little body. He sort of looks like Super Mario. And then there’s this on page 42:

      “Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”

      For those of you who lived without electricity in Siberia during the late 1980s, the game Super Mario Brothers featured a character named Mario jumping up to a flagpole at the end of every level.

      Later, walking with Schtitt:

      Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

      So, Mario’s brothers play a game, but now Mario, not Hal, is the focal point–these are Mario’s brothers. (With respect to the Incandenza brothers, another connection here is with The Brothers Karamazov. Timothy Jacobs wrote his dissertation at McMaster University partly on comparing the Brothers Incandenza with the Brothers Karamazov.) The connection between Mario Incandenza and Super Mario Brothers is by no means rock solid, but the short, dark-haired Mario concentrating on that flagpole sure does conjure an image worthy of it.

  • Oops

    Two months ago Matthew Baldwin told the Guides that August 24-28 would be devoted to guest posts and Kevin Guilfoile, who is a professional, wrote this on a calendar, and Matthew Baldwin, who is not, did not, and, long story short, Kevin doesn’t have a post prepared, so we’re running the weekly guest post today and Kevin will do the Friday slot, and all of this is pretty much 100% Matthew’s fault, although, to be fair, who expects people to write things onto calendars in this day and age, I mean really.

  • Else { Default }

    As details emerge about The Pale King, it’s becoming clear that the 2005 commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College is something of a bridge between Infinite Jest and his final, unfinished novel. Michael Piesch, Wallace’s editor, goes so far as to call “This Is Water” (as the commencement speech is commonly known) “very much a distillation” of The Pale King’s major motifs.

    But if you look closely, you can see a lot of Jest in that commencement speech as well. Take, for instance, Wallace’s repeated references to our “default settings”:

    Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth…

    Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

    Don Gately reminded me of this quotation, around the time he reverted to his default setting and beat the holy living shit out of them wayward partygoers.

    Gately had been portrayed so sympathetically that his abrupt reversion to type feels almost like a betrayal. And in any other novel the transformation would have been shocking. But so much of Infinite Jest (as with nearly everything Wallace wrote) is about our perpetual war with our default settings, that it’s unsurprising that his characters lose a battle once in a while.

    And this was not the first time I noticed the “default settings” undercurrent in Infinite Jest. The Eschaton set piece, in particular, struck me as something of an elaborate analogy for civilization’s struggle against primacy. Here stand dozens of teens in close proximity, armed with buckets of denuded tennis balls, playing at negotiation and diplomacy. But you know those tennis balls are eventually going to fly. There’s never any doubt. The reams of rules and elegant complexity and Extreme Value Theorem can stave off the descent into mayhem for a while, but cannot hold it back forever.

    Of course the kids really have no incentive not to start lobbing warheads, and one gets the sense that Armageddon is the unspoken point of Eschaton. But in real life the consequences of surrender are considerably more dire (as Gately is presumably going to learn). Wallace makes it clear that the struggle against our genetic heritage–against territorialism and aggression and intoxication and passivity– isn’t easy. But he at least seems to believe that it is possible, if only barely.

    And he clearly thinks that it’s something worth fighting for. Perhaps the only thing worth fighting for.

    That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

    Misc:

    Hooked: During the roundtable I confessed that, while I enjoy the novel and love reading Wallace’s writing, “I don’t find the narrative to be particularly engrossing”. That is no longer true: I am now dying to know what is going to happen to Gately after his startling metamorphosis. Will he be forced to drift from town to town, letting the world think that he is dead until he can find a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within him?

    The Stars Are Right: Also during that roundtable, I predicted that the Bostons of H. P. Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace would eventually intersect. And:

    ‘But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head … As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner of my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I not had the slightest inkling was there.”

    Yeah, well, called that one.

    Lost and Profound: I’m slightly behind because I somehow managed to misplace my copy of Infinite Jest. I’m going to wear a button that says, “I Lost 12 Pounds–Ask Me How!”

  • Roundup

    Man, everyone is doing this Infinite Summer thing. Here is a still from this week’s episode of Weeds.


    “I’ll do that delivery for mom after I finish my chapter.
    I’m sure this Erdedy guy won’t mind waiting ten minutes.”

    (Thanks to Ed for sending us the screenshot.)

    Matt of Wood-Tang is on page 700 of the novel. Jazz is also ahead. Mo Pie finished, as have a whole host of people on Twitter.

    Recent posts from the folks on our blogroll:

    Earlier this week, the NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted an entire episode to David Foster Wallace. In it they speak with (among many others) Michael Pietsch, Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky, and David’s sister Amy Wallace-Haven.

    And Dennis Cooper discovered something magical about the “statistically improbable phrases” that Amazon.com provides for its books. “What Amazon doesn’t tell you is that, in the case of fiction, their SIP feature does not merely hint at important plot elements but MAGICALLY DISTILLS THE ESSENCE OF THE WORK.” He then lists 69 books in SIP form. At #1:

    medical attaché, annular fusion, entertainment cartridge, improbably deformed, howling fantods, feral hamsters, dawn drills, tough nun, professional conversationalist, new bong, ceiling bulged, metro boston, tennis academy, red leather coat, soupe aux pois, red beanie, addicted man, magnetic video, littler kids, little rotter, technical interview, police lock, oral narcotics, sober time, veiled girl

  • Infinite Summary – Week 9

    Milestone Reached: 664 (67%)

    Sections Read:

    Page 575:: Randy Lenz and Bruce Green continue strolling around Boston. We learn that Green’s mother died of fright after opening a novelty snake-in-a-fake-can-of-nuts gift that young Bruce had given her at his father’s urging, and that Green’s father went insane (and was executed for sending out deadly exploding cigars) sometime thereafter. Green and Lenz are separated; when Green next sees Lenz, the latter is killing a dog belonging to some partygoers. The partygoers see the killing and give chase, but Lenz manages to evade them.

    Page 589: Mario’s nineteenth birthday approaches. He strolls near Ennet House, and we learn: (1) he “can’t feel physical pain very well”, (2) he can no longer read Hal like he once was able, and (3) Mario doesn’t understand why the E.T.A. students are embarrassed by genuine emotion.

    Page 593: Don Gately’s Ennet House duties, divided into the “picayune and the unpleasant”.

    Page 596: Orin answers survey questions from a man in a wheelchair, while the “putatively Swiss hand-model” hides under sheets of the bed.

    Page 601: As Gately supervises the reparking of the cars in front of Ennet House, the partygoers arrive in search of Lenz. A confrontation ensues, and Gately is shot while apparently beating several of the assailants to death.

    Page 620: An engineer for WYYY is kidnapped by a man in a wheelchair.

    Page 627 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: E.T.A. students in the cafeteria, discussing a Hal / The Darkness match that Stice nearly won, and debating whether the milk is powdered.

    Page 638 – 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.: Steeply reveals that his father had a literal and life-destroying obsession with the television show M*A*S*H.

    Page 648 – 13 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: At Ennet House, Geoffrey Day describes a dark, billowing shape that he accidentally summoned as a child, the shadow of which left him bereft of hope.

    Page 651 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Steeply and deLint watch the Hal / Stice match. Steeply pushes for an exclusive interview with Hal, but is rebuffed.

    Pages 663, 664, and 665: A correspondence between Steeply and Marlon Bain of Saprogenic Greetings. Endnote 269 contains extended excerpts from Bain’s replies.

    Characters The characters page has been updated.

    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.

  • The Peril of A.P.

    It’s always strange to hear a term you thought you “owned” in a complete different context. Case in point: as a board gamer, I have been using the phrase “analysis paralysis” for years, completely unaware that the term was affiliated (and perhaps originated) with A.A.

    Most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis … That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good … In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

    The problem of analysis-paralysis crops up so often in board game discussion that it is usually just abbreviated as “AP”. And we tend to use the term in two distinct ways: in reference to people, and in reference to design.

    A person who is, in our lingo, “AP-prone” is someone who freezes up on their turn as they mentally traverse the entire decision tree, terrified of making a less than optimal move. Imagine a chess-playing computer, that calculates every possible move and its outcome before taking its turn; now imagine some guy who’s already had two beers and half a bag of Cheetos trying to do the same thing, looming over the table with furrowed brow, stuck in a endless loop because, by the time he considers the last of all possible choices, he has already forgotten the first, and must therefore start again. And meanwhile the fun whooshes out of the room like atmosphere through an open airlock.

    A game that is “AP-prone”, on the other hand, is a design that encourages exactly this kind of minimaxing behavior.68 Whereas many players have learned to turn a deaf ear to AP’s siren song, certain games can ossify even the most casual of gamers.

    AP is such a problem in modern board games, that designers are taught ways to prevent it. The quickest method is to throw a sand timer into the game and declare that each player only has x seconds to complete their turn. Another is to introduce an element to chance into the game, thus making it difficult or impossible to successfully predict future events. A third is to reduce the number of options available to a player at any given time.

    In other words, the solution to analysis-paralysis–at least in terms of board game design–is to reduce freedom: reduce the amount of time, or the amount of information, or the amount of choices. Constraint facilitates action.69

    Even if you don’t play board games, you are surely familiar with the phenomenon. Your 8th Grade English teacher says you can write an essay on anything, and your mind’s a blank; she instead says you have to write it on leaf cutters ants, and at least you know which Wikipedia page to plagiarize. Or consider Twitter: I would argue that the 140 character “limit” (no longer a technical necessity, by the way) is precisely what makes the service so popular.

    Although the term “analysis-paralysis” only crops up on Infinite Jest a few times, in many ways it seems to be the crux of the novel, the delicate balance between freedom and constraint, action and thought, territory and map. Indeed, the recent passages about Randy Lenz and Bruce Green practically depict the two men as incarnations of the extremes: Lenz with his gerbil-in-a-wheel logorrhea, Green clocking in at “about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds, and then just one at a time, a thought, each materializing already fully developed and sitting there and then melting back away like a languid liquid-crystal display.”

    It’s a theme present in all major storylines: Schtitt imposing his Draconian training regiment on the unruly student, honing them into world class tennis players; A.A. teaching “Substance-addicted people” how to stop overthinking and instead “fake it until you make it”; and Marathe lecturing Steeply about the perils of too much choice.

    The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out “Freedom!” and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries “Freedom!” the good father?

    One has to wonder if Wallace wasn’t so keyed into the chaos v. order equipoise because of his own relationship with editors, the tempering force to his own voluminous output, the catalyst between madness and genius.