Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • 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 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

    Thirty years on, those discussions have aged remarkably well, partly because the novel itself reads more prophetic each year. Wallace was writing about entertainment as a slow-acting poison long before the attention economy had a name, and re-reading him now — when the average adult carries a mobile casino, an infinite scroll, and a half-dozen streaming queues in their pocket and toggles between dopamine drips the way the residents of Ennet House toggle between substances — makes the satire feel almost quaint. Which is partly why tracing the influences below feels less like trainspotting and more like reverse-engineering how he saw it all coming.

    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.

     

      1. 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.

     

      1. 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.

     

    1. 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.