Author: matthewbaldwin

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 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 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 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.