Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • 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.

  • Roundup

    Every Happy Days needs a Laverne and Shirley, and maybe even a Joanie Loves Chachi for good measure. So too is Infinite Summer spawning spin-offs.

    Next week Infinite Jest will finally be published in German. At that time, the publisher is planning an Infinite Summer like read-along, and has a bunch of writers all lined up to participate. The official site 9all in German, natch) is http://www.unendlicherspass.de/.

    For those who found I.J. a little too daunting (or too readable, and already finished), B. Mernit has launched Infinite Water, which encourages folks to read and discuss David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address.

    Speaking of “This is Water”, the Telegraph has a long article on Infinite Jest, Infinite Summer, and David Foster Wallace. In it, Michael Pietsch speaks a bit about Wallace’s final and incomplete novel, The Pale King, to be published posthumously. The commencement is “very much a distillation” of the novel’s theme, says Pietsch, as well as “attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

    And at long last we have a blogroll. Chronic Infinite Jest bloggers are now listed here on the mothership, for your pursuing pleasure.

    Oh, and a big congratulations to Chaz Formichella, who became the 1000th member of the Infinite Summer. We sent him a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide to commemorate his achievement. Nice work!

  • Infinite Summary – Week 8

    Milestone Reached: 590 (60%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 528 – PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL: The Marathe and Steeply show continues. Steeply argues that America is not the only culture in which people are drawn to things that could “entertain them to death”.

    Page 531 – 0450H., 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT / FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA: Don Gately tells Joelle Van Dyne of a bar fight in which some of his friends “messed with a guy’s girl”; he also asks about the purpose of the veil and her membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.).

    Page 538: How Randy Lenz became a Steel-Sak-wielding animal killer. (Aside: “Randy Lenz and his Steel Sax” is the name of my new light-jazz quartet.)

    Page 548 – EARLY NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND UNDERGARMENT: Rodney Tine, Chief of U.O.U.S. and compulsive pecker checker.

    Page 550 – LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis walks in on John Wayne (N.R.) and Arvil Incandenza in the middle of … something. “‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting” rockets to the top of the “Best Lines in the Book” list.

    Page 553 – WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz and Bruce Green stroll around town. Lenz regales Green with stories, all while wondering how he can ditch his companion in time to do his nefarious deeds. Eventually he manages to get away, and Green observes the dog-killer in action.

    Page 560: Troeltsch, Pemulis and Wayne visit Hal in turn, each for just a few moments.

    Page 563 – SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U: As advertised.

    Page 565: Orin gets it on with a Swiss hand-model. Endnote 234 is a long interview between Steeply and Orin, in which much light is shed on Orin’s relationship with his parents and the mold-eating incident.

    Page 567: Michael Pemulis explains annulation to a blindfolded Idris Arslanian.

    Page 574: Orin sees his first wheelchair-bound “punting-groupie” since Ms. Steeply left.

    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.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part V

    This is the fifth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Any predictions as to what will happen in the second half of the novel?

    Matthew Baldwin: I’ll tell you what I’m not expecting: anything resembling a standard climax or dénouement. In nearly all of Wallace’s non- and short-fiction I’ve read, the pieces just sort of end, often abruptly, with no surprise twist or delivered moral, frequently without even a deft turn of phrase. I always feel like there was an editor somewhere in the process who said, “Hey , David? This is a little too long, so we’re going to just lop off the last third. Does that work?”

    Eden M, Kennedy: I am waiting for some class conflict to bubble up. So far the book seems to gloss over the fact that some Ennet House people work, almost invisibly, at ETA (kitchen; the towel girl), but that leaves me thinking that something’s slowly brewing there, theme-wise. Because what about Pat M., a rich woman who seems to be sort of class-blind — yet finding common ground with all kinds of fucked up people who simply share the will to conquer an addiction? She’s going to end up the Mother Theresa of this novel, you watch.

    Avery Edison: It seems like we’re drawing to the end of Marathe and Steeply’s conversation on the mountainside, and I’d like to see some sort of confrontation between the two before they leave. We’ve been constantly reminded of the gun lurking just under Marathe’s blanket, always in his hand, and so I think it’d be nifty to see some action by Steeply to justify Marathe’s caution. At the moment it seems too much like Marathe has the upper hand.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I just realized that I’m not spending much time trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. This book really is unfolding sort of like a dream for me, where I don’t have much vision of it beyond the present. I think Wallace set up some early seeds of anticipation—we know Hal and Gately are going to get together, for instance—but beyond that I’m not really trying to figure it out much.

    Avery Edison: I’m similar to Kevin in that I’ve not given much thought to the future. So many odd events have happened already, I feel like I have next to no shot at making any kind of accurate prediction.

    KG: I’m sort of letting it happen, and I’m enjoying it. I wish I could live my life that way more.

    EMK: This was fun; can we do it again next week?

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part IV

    This is the fourth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Kevin, do you find Wallace’s style influencing your own? Will the title of your next novel (The Thousand) refer to the number of endnotes you went back and inserted?

    Kevin Guilfoile: I’m pretty easily influenced by anything that I like, but usually within the parameters of my own style. For instance, it’s not unusual for me to write long, run-on sentences when I’m trying to change the pace of a passage (or when I’m deep inside someone’s train of thought) and I probably am doing more of that right now, just because Wallace is so effective with it. The novel I’m currently working on (the one after The Thousand) even has a character that’s rather Gately-like (big guy, ex-con, not an alcoholic but a teetotaler) although I created him before I read IJ. Looking specifically at the stuff I’ve written over the last month or so I can right away identify a lengthy passage in which a pickpocket is rhapsodizing at some length about cargo shorts that seems pretty obviously influenced by IJ.

    Matthew Baldwin: I actually used the word “demap” as a synonym for “kill” in a casual conversation the other day. The person to whom I was speaking had no idea what I was saying.

    Eden M. Kennedy: And I quoted Schtitt to my son on the tennis court. He was complaining how he wanted to switch sides because the sun was in his eyes, and I totally paraphrased that whole section about it always being too hot or too cold or too something on the court, you have to look inside, blah blah. And then I switched and took the sunny side.

    Avery Edison: The only thing I’ve taken away from the book is a pretty heavy ‘drine dependency. That, and a fear of Canadians in wheelchairs.

    And of course, as I typed that joke in I suddenly realize that I’m sitting at my computer in a bandanna. Curse you David Foster Wallace!

    IS: Are you enjoying some sections better than others (E.T.A. vs. Ennet v. Steeply & Marathe)?

    MB: They say that a world class director could film someone reading the phonebook and make it interesting. That’s how I feel about Wallace. In an interview, he talked about the challenge of “tak[ing] something almost narcotizingly banal … and try[ing] to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is.” Given that Infinite Jest is a novel about a tennis academy, a bunch of AA meetings, and two guys chatting on a cliff, it’s clearly a challenge that Wallace both relished and consistently met.

    So I don’t find any of the storylines to be more engrossing than others. In fact, I don’t find the narrative to be particularly engrossing at all. It’s Wallace’s style that I enjoy, and I am largely indifferent as to what subject matter he is writing about at any given moment.

    AE: I’m a big fan of banter, so I look forward to any section (usually an endnote) featuring Hal and Orin on the phone to each other. A lot of information tends to get divulged during those pages, and there’s some nice verbal sparring in the mean time.

    The Marathe and Steeply sections have also grown on me, probably for much the same reason. It’s also nice to see — in a novel that has almost avoided any discussion of its namesake – characters having honest-to-God conversations about The Entertainment.

    EMK: Something shifts in Marathe and Steeply’s conversations as we get deeper into the book; I can’t put my finger on it but it’s definitely becoming easier to read and enjoy their passages.

    AE: I think it’s that as we’re learning more about the world around them, the vague allusions to things such as the Concavity or subsidised time are clearer. I’m sure that the conversation Marathe and Steeply have regarding free will would’ve been impenetrable had we not learned more about the Entertainment’s effects on its viewers. I may go back to the earlier Marathe and Steeply sections and see if they make for easier reading now.

    KG: It changes for me. I found the description of Mario’s puppet show movie to be a lot like being trapped on an airplane listening to someone taking two-and-a-half hours to describe the plot of a two hour movie, and so I wanted to got to Ennet House every minute of that section.

    AE: I really enjoyed Mario’s movie, especially since it gave us a look into the wider community at ETA. Up until then I feel like we’d just been focused on a small group of students (Hal, Pemulis, Troeltsch, etc.) and it was nice to get everyone in that big hall and get little character moments with odd people. The tradition of gathering around for the viewing and the rule that students can eat whatever they want on Interdepence Day was a nice humanizing touch that made the ETA feel more like a school where actual humans would go. Before I saw it as more of a tennis-robot factory, now I’m seeing it as more of a family. Which would make C.T. proud, I’m sure.

    KG: I love tennis and find the ETA stuff really enjoyable overall. On top of that there are set pieces, of course, that are just stunning but I don’t think they are tied to any particular place or character, at least not for me.

    EMK: I love the ETA kids best when they’re giving each other shit, no doubt about it, but the AA stuff is still fascinating to me. Sometimes this book feels sort of sterile, in a Stanley Kubrick way, just very cerebral and cool, so I do tend to feel grateful for the warmer, more human stuff, I guess.

    AE: An exception to that appreciation of the human stuff — at least for me — is anything dealing with Himself’s childhood. Right now if feels like we’re getting background on a character we know is dead, and whose legacy (the Entertainment) we already knew the motivations for. I understand that the scene featuring Himself and The Man From Glad culminated in the origin of Himself’s fascination annulation, but there were a lot of pages to get through for such a small detail. We couldn’t have learned that via. one of Hal and Orin’s earlier conversations, or done without the knowledge entirely?

    MB:: Probably. But those two passages are among my favorite, no doubt because they showcase Wallace’s skill in teasing the interesting from the banal.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part III

    This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Does anyone have a favorite character?

    Avery Edison: I’ve written before about liking Hal the most, whilst suspecting that he may be a dick. That’s still holding true. I tend to like the smarter characters, and in a book full of drug addicts and athletes, Hal is standing out a fair bit.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I like Hal, too.

    Matthew Baldwin: Hal?! I thought you and I shared a crush on Pemulis in common. You’ve changed so much since this project started Eden, it’s like I don’t even know you any more.

    Two of my favorite sections–“Erdedy Waits for Pot” and “Erdedy Gets a Hug”–star the same person, so I guess Ken is at the top of my list as well. I hope the second half of the book is peppered with more of his comic misadventures. Oh Ken Erdedy, will you ever win?

    EMK: I’m also gaining some affection for Steeply, surprisingly. I want to hear more from Avril. In a novel that’s mainly focused on male characters, it’s hard to find a woman to relate to. Apart from Air Marshal Kittenplan, of course.

    Avery, you raised some gender issues in your first post. What are your thoughts on them now?

    AE: After learning more about the Office of Unspecified Services, and its strange M.O. of outfitting operatives with highly inappropriate disguises, I feel a little better about Steeply. I have to believe that DFW is going for something a little higher than “ha, ha, look at the man in the dress!” because he’s obviously a smart guy and that would be an easy joke to make.

    I hope Wallace ends up treating the infatuation Orin has for Steeply with respect and kindness, although the fact that he’s drawn it out for so long worries me. I’m beginning to wonder if the point of Orin’s crush is for us to laugh at him, as many other works of entertainment wish us to when they feature an un-suspecting protagonist becoming romantically involved with a trans-person and having intimacy with, even using things like awesome male masturbators and others. It seems like an innocuous trope, but it reinforces the concept that trans-women “trick” everyone they don’t explicitly divulge their status to. The idea that people are entitled to such information leads to the “trans panic” defense, which is used to justify violence against transgender people on a sadly routine basis.

    Aaaaaand I’ve talked for far too long about this.

    Speaking or Orin and Steeply, how do you feel about the mix of drama and comedy in the novel?

    MB: I have no objection to the absurdity when it is “Out There” (subsidized years, the rise of Johnny Gentle, the history of O.N.A.N., and so on), but find it jarring when it’s in close proximity to the more realistic portions of the novel. I kind of consider Orin to be “Out There” so he’s exempt, but I was truly annoyed at the Clipperton passages. How are we supposed to take the real characters seriously when they are intermingling with cartoons?

    EMK: The Clipperton stuff really felt like a parable or a philosophical exercise to me. “Let’s take this premise and draw it out until it collapses.” It seems like it could have been the outgrowth of some philosophical dilemma that Hal might have invented, just to toy with Orin late at night on the phone.

    MB: And had it had been presented as such I would have no objection.

    EMK: I keep asking myself, “How much disbelief are you willing to suspend in reading this novel? ” Because so much of it is so emotionally real. But then what do we do with the fact that the woman journalist Orin’s so intrigued by is actually a badly disguised man? I find it just so delightful and ridiculous that I honestly don’t care how just plain impossible that would be, I just can’t wait to see how it all shakes out. But still.

    AE: To touch lightly (lest I type out another “trans-issues” screed) on the Steeply thing, I tend to assume that Steeply is actually pretty well disguised, and it’s only the fact that Marathe is such an intelligent man that he notices all the costume’s flaws. We also have to bear in mind that every description of Steeply so far has been after he fell down a muddy slope on his way to meet with Marathe. For all we know, his usual appearance is quite passable.

    EMK: That’s good, I hadn’t thought about it that way at all, I was assuming that eventually someone like Hal would see through Steeply’s terrible disguise and set Orin straight, so to speak (ahem). I certainly hadn’t foreseen something tragic happening with Orin and Steeply. Now I’m a little worried.

    AE: With regard to the mix of drama and comedy, I must say that I’m not finding the book at all laugh-out-loud funny. Every now and then I’ll chuckle at a concept (I think the head-through-monitor part of Eschaton got a giggle) but every attempt at humor by Wallace seems a little self-conscious. When I got to the section with Lateral Alice Moore the other day, I threw up my hands and asked aloud “is there anyone in this book that doesn’t have some ‘comical’ deformity?”

    Kevin Guilfoile: It’s an old assumption that no one would recognize a perfect novel even if it were possible for somebody to write one. If I had one major complaint about IJ it would be this inconsistency of tone Eden and Matthew talk about, but that’s also inevitable given the scope of what Wallace is trying to accomplish. When you write a novel of huge ambition you are, by definition, stretching beyond your known abilities and so there are going to be occasional swings and misses along with the tape measure home runs (and obviously readers will disagree about what works and what doesn’t). During the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found 2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more terrible.