Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • Amanda French: ∞/2

    The midpoint of Infinite Jest is rapidly approaching (next Thursday, according to the schedule). What better time to organize meet-ups, so that readers in various cities can discuss their progress through the novel?

    Militant Grammarians in the audience will notice a conspicuous lack of actor in the preceding sentence. Specifically, we did not say that we would be organizing said meet-ups. Instead, we’re going to do what we do best: come up with a snappy title (“∞/2”) and crowdsource the actual work.

    So, if you’d like to organize a meet-up in Your Fair City, head on over to the forums and start coordinating, champ. And here’s Amanda French–who has been hosting get-togethers from the get-go, with some tips on ensuring that your meet-up doesn’t wind up as an Eschaton-scale debacle.

    Putting together an Infinite Jest meetup just can’t be the same as putting together another kind of reading group, can it? My mother used to belong to a book club that met monthly in one or another of the members’ comfortable houses, with plenty of food and wine and good fellowship. They’d read books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Jane Austen Book Club and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which are all very good books, books that fit well into pleasant surroundings. Reading Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is and should be a little uncomfortable sometimes. After deciding to do Infinite Summer, I put together a weekly meetup in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I’ve done my best to keep it just uncomfortable enough to be interesting. Here are my thoughts on how to do something similar.

    • Hold it in a bar. This a good place in which to discuss addiction to pleasure.

    • Do not hold it in a sports bar, not even if they’re showing tennis on the TVs. Sports bars are too loud for conversation.

    • Name a place and time that seems reasonable and stick to that, even if some people find it inconvenient. You’ll be arranging this with and for strangers via technologies that mediate communication, and so it’s not the best time for group decision-making. Announce it on the Infinite Summer forum for meetups, and if you use other means of publicity, include the link to that announcement.

    • Make up for this Schtittian intransigence by adopting the same policy as AA: No one can be kicked out. Don’t try to get people to show up every time, or a certain number of times, or on time, or having read as far as the Spoiler Line on the schedule, or not having read any farther than the Spoiler Line on the schedule. Let people come when, if, and however they will.

    • Promise to be there at the same time every time for the duration of Infinite Summer, even if no one shows up. If you wind up alone, you can always use the time to read. Veiled, if you prefer.

    • At the first meeting, now that you’re all relatively unmediated, you can and should make a group decision: how to run the discussions. Do they want you, as the organizer, to come up with a central question or topic every week? Should a different person lead the discussion every week? Are certain topics (such as David Foster Wallace’s life) off limits? Should it be entirely free-form and unstructured?

    • Also decide, at the first meeting, on the chief method of group communication. Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, phone, Infinite Summer forums–or fora? Should it be fora?

    • Ask every newcomer to say why they’re reading the book, whether they’ve read it before, whether they’ve read any Wallace before, stuff like that. Just because all that turns out to be very interesting.

    • Send reminders a day or two before every meeting, with the time, place, and the proper page number from the Infinite Summer schedule.

    Here are some of the ways our discussions stay uncomfortable: we never know exactly what we’re going to discuss, people have read to different places in the book, people talk at length about Wallace books and short stories that others haven’t read, people talk at length about works that others haven’t read like Ulysses and The Corrections, people talk at length about Infinite Summer blog posts and forum threads that others haven’t read, people bring up the suicide, people recount tales of how they once met David Foster Wallace, people talk about their own drug use, people show off how smart they are, people admit that they don’t understand, people ask what the hell is up with Orin that he and all the other football players are attracted to Steeply, people get completely grossed out by the formless blob with the Raquel Welch mask and the hooker with the dead baby, people get completely annoyed by the footnotes, people go off on boring technology tangents about how wrong Wallace was to think that we’d still have viewing cartridges and floppy disks and telephones attached to walls, people start talking about the movie The Ring, people feel that they’re on the verge of realizing something important about the book but can’t put it into words, people stop all rational discussion and just sit around saying how fucking great the book is and how about that Eschaton scene, man, my god, so funny.

    Hope your discussions go half as well.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 6

    Milestone Reached: 443 (45%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: Mario’s semi-fictional film “The ONANTiad”, which documents (a) the rise of Johnny Gentle from Famous Crooner to head of the Clean U.S. Party and then President of the (then) United States; (b) the establishment of the Organization of North American Nations; (c) the creation and subsequent expatriation of the Great Con(cav|vex)ity; and (d) the origins of subsidized time.

    Page 394: Lyle dispenses advice to students down in the weight room, including “don’t underestimate objects”.

    Page 395: Descriptions of the James Incandeza films The Medusa vs. the Odalisque and THE JOKE.

    Page 407: The story of E.T.A. Eric Clipperton, who won tennis matches by threatening to kill himself if he loses. (And then does so anyway when he wins.)

    Page 410: The origin of InterLace Entertainment.

    Page 418 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marthe and Steeply have the “single-serving sized cup of soup” discussion (how do people weigh deriving their own pleasure against inflicting pain on others).

    Page 434: Gatley and Stavros Lobokulas clean the Shattuck Shelter.

    Characters The characters have been given their own page, which will be updated weekly.

    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 Bully Pulpit

    A few weeks ago I was speaking to a journalist and struggling to explain how a novel so revered by people who have read it could also be so off-putting for those wading through it for the first time. I mentioned the length of course, and the endnotes, and the 84¢-words, and the sentences that go on for so long that they begin make you feel anxious, as if you are watching someone who has been underwater for longer than you reckon they can hold their breath. I mentioned all that, and then there was some dead air on the line (this was a phone interview), and I just blurted out something to fill the silence. “The thing is,” I said, “Wallace doesn’t teach you a little bit about tennis and then start talking about tennis. He just sort of starts talking about tennis.”

    Not my most articulate moment, I’ll be the first to admit. But thinking back on this statement later, it struck me as perhaps the most insightful thing I said during the interview (a low bar, to be sure). Most authors will ease you into a subject, provide some background and context before going in-depth. Television serials preface episodes with a “Previously on” primers. Hell, even videos games to play bingo for cash begin with a tutorial these days. But when Wallace “introduces” a topic, it’s like you’ve walked into a lecture having missed the first hour.

    He is, to be honest, something of a bully. Not in a beat-you-up-take-your-lunch-money kind of way, but in the same sense that the President of the United States is said to occupy the “bully pulpit”. The term, coined by Theodore Roosevelt, refers to the fact that the President can talk about the issues he cares about, and the rest of the country has no choice but to listen. If a President wants to start a national conversation on health care (say), we converse about health care.

    In Infinite Jest, Wallace wants to talk about tennis and football and addiction and depression and mathematics and the many ways in which one may murder a cockroach, and your options, as a reader, are (a) like it or (b) lump it. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone droning on and on about his hobbies and his solitaire apps free interests, someone who follows you around and thwarts you evasive maneuvers, until you only options are to give up and listen or leave the party altogether.

    Any many people do. Leave the party, that is. By which I mean they close the book on page 77 and go back to being interested in the things they are interested in. That’s what did a decade or so ago.

    But here’s the amazing thing, at least in my experience of the last month. If you let Wallace bully you for a few hundred pages, if you let him just ramble on amicably about the things he’s passionate about, you finally know so much about the subject matter that you start to care about it, even if against your will. Last week, realizing that I had never in my entire life seen an entire tennis match, I actually watched a torrent of the Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick Wimbledon 2009 Mens Final. Last night when an alcoholic character in a TV show said she wouldn’t attend AA because “it ain’t nothing but a cult,” I felt personally offended. Wallace is like the Lloyd Dobler of authors: he doesn’t woo you with flowers and chocolates, he stands outside your window with a boombox over his head until you relent.

    Except the boombox is so 20th century; it’s really more like an preloaded iPod. Which may be why, on the #infsum Twitter channel, catchingdays called Infinite Jest “the first shuffle novel“. That’s a great analogy. The book as like a compilation of Wallace’s favorites, semi-randomized to keep you on your toes.

    And do you know why shuffle mode is so popular? Because every once in a while, wholly by chance and when you least expect it, you hear something that you’ve loved all your life. For me it was Eschaton, falling, as it does, squarely on the intersection of two lifelong interests: Cold War politics47 and games48. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew, and the radio did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel that truly resonated with me.

    And now, of course, I’ve become so versed in the author’s various obsessions that all the themes in the novel resonate–and will continue to do so in future novels I read. Thanks a lot David Foster Wallace, ya big ol’ bully you.

  • Roundup

    Gerry Canavan continues to crank out stellar essays on the novel. Ditto for Paul Debraski, The Feminist Texican, and Aaron Riccio.

    In the Crossover Event of 2009, Andrew of Blographia Literaria posts on Scott’s Conversational Reading, about DFW’s habitual use of parenthetical names in many of his (Wallace’s) more convoluted sentences. Ray of “Love, Your Copyeditor”, meanwhile, demands to know “who signed off on all the hyphens“. And Mo Pie need someone to explain the likes.

    Ellen of “Wormbook” provides a two part progress report on her reading thus far: How, Why.

    The Infinite Summer Flickr pool now has over 70 photos and 100 members.

    Chris of “UInterview” wonders if all the attention Infinite Summer has been receiving lately is just a fad–and if that is necessarily a bad thing. R.J. of “A Litany of Nonsense” isn’t giving up on the novel, but has just about had it with Infinite Summer. And now, in week five, we are seeing our first concession speeches, such as this one from “Literata”.

    Jim Donaldson sent us email:

    Here is something you may wish to post in the weekly round up. Or maybe not.

    Neighborhoodies, of Brooklyn NY, makes an Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirt and sweatshirt. The t shirts are all custom made so you can get any combination of colors you want, though it seems to me purists would want it in regulation red and gray.

    They can be found here and here.

    When I asked them to make a couple of proofreading corrections in their copy and mentioned Infinite Summer, they responded by saying that we can get $5 off any purchase if we put the code considerthemobster (yes, “mobster”) in the coupon field.

    I have no connection with the company at all, other than being a prior satisfied customer–and sufficiently SNOOTY to copy edit their web page and tell them about it.

    Jim sent a similar message to the wallace-l listserv, which spawned a thread on Infinite Jest related merchandise. Some other items that were mentioned:

    Like Jim, we have no connection to the folks selling this stuff. But, in the bottom of this topic the the forums, someone proposes Infinite Summer t-shirts. If you have an idea for a design, or the graphical chops to create a print-ready image, let us know in this topic devoted to the subject.

    You can also use the forums to let us know if you have recently written about Infinite Jest, or mention it in the the comments of this post.

  • Infinite Summery – Week 5

    Milestone Reached: 369 (37%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 306: An overview of the prorectors’ weekend courses (including “The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault”!), plus a description of some anti-O.N.A.N. activity by the separatists (mirrors across the road). This section includes the 14 112 17-page “endnote 110”, a conversation between Hal and Orin regarding the true motives of the separatists.

    Page 312: The birth and life of Mario Incandenza.

    page 317 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marathe and Steeply discuss the American concept of freedom (e.g., freedom from, not freedom to).

    Page 321 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: The E.T.A. students play Eschaton, The Atavistic Global-Nuclear-Conflict Game™.

    Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: An exhaustive description of the Boston AA chapter and a meeting in which several speakers relate unthinkable horrors.

    Characters The below is an abridgment of the Wikipedia Infinite Jest “Characters” section (with all spoilers stripped out):

    The Incandenzas

    • James Orin Incandenza: Filmmaker, founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave over. Nicknames include Himself, The Mad Stork, and The Sad Stork.
    • Avril Incandenza (née Mondragon): Jame’s Widow, heavily involved in the running of E.T.A., affiliated with the Militant Grammarians. Nickname: The Moms.

    • Hal Incandenza: The youngest of the three Incandenza children. One of the novel’s protagonists.

    • Mario Incandenza: The middle child. Born with deformities; also a filmmaker (like his father).

    • Orin Incandenza: The elder Incandenza. A punter for the Arizona Cardinals, serial womanizer, and cockroach killer.

    • Charles Tavis: The head of E.T.A. since James Incandenza’s death. Avril’s half- or adoptive brother.

    The Enfield Tennis Academy

    • Michael Pemulis: Hal’s best friend; prankster, drug dealer, undisputed Eschaton champion, and not destine for The Show.

    • John “No Relation” Wayne: The top-ranked player at ETA. John Wayne was discovered by James Incandenza during interviews of men named John Wayne for a film.

    • Other Prominent E.T.A. Students: Ortho “The Darkness” Stice, Jim Troelsch, Trevor (“The Axhandle”) Axford, Ann Kittenplan, Ted Schacht, LaMont Chu, U.S.S. Millicent Kent (tried to seduce Mario!).

    • Lyle: Sweat-licking guru who lives in the E.T.A. weight room and dispenses advice.

    The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House

    • Don Gately: Former thief and Demerol addict, now counselor in residence at the Ennet House.

    • Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a “Madame Psychosis and P.G.O.A.T, The Prettiest Girl of All Time”): Radio talkshow host; former lover to Orin, starred in many of James Incandenza films; wears a veil.

    • Kate Gompert: A cannabinoid addict who suffers from extreme unipolar depression.

    • Pat Montesian: The Ennet House manager.

    • Ken Erdedy: A cannabinoid addict.

    • Bruce Green: Ex-husband of Mildred Bonk-Green.

    • Tiny Ewell A lawyer with dwarfism who is obsessed with tattoos.

    • Other Prominent Ennet House residents: Randy Lenz, Geoffrey Day, Emil Minty.

    Others

    • Hugh Steeply (a.k.a. Helen Steeply): Agent for the Office of Unspecified Services; currently in disguise as a female reporter profiling Orin.

    • Remy Marathe: Member of the Wheelchair Assassins (separatists) and quadruple-agent who secretly talks to Hugh Steeply.

    • Poor Tony Krause (P.T. Krause): Almost killed by Drano-spiked heroin, accidentally steals a woman’s artificial heart, has a seizure while in withdrawal.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Wikipedia page, the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • Nick Douglas: Skim is for Wimps

    Nick Douglas is the editor of “Twitter Wit,” a collection of witty tweets coming out on August 25. In 2006, he was the founding editor of Valleywag.com. He’s probably writing a screenplay.

    I finished about two-thirds of the books assigned me in my three years as an English major. The department head was right to ask me, when I first switched from political science, “Do you read quickly?” I don’t, and I’d like to blame that on my inability to skim. The less I like a passage, the more I claw at it, wasting my time, because I can’t understand that a published work of prose may still contain unnecessary digressions. And so I’ll often grind to a halt. I’m glad for this flaw in my reading habits, because skimming Infinite Jest is stupid.

    Someone saw me struggling over one dull page of IJ this week, the description of Enfield MA and its institutions (tax-paying and -exempt), and recommended I skim it. She hasn’t, of course, read her copy of the book.

    Because if she had, she’d know that skimmers miss out. Had I skimmed the Wardine and yrstruly sections, would I still have understood that Poor Tony stole the artificial heart that Steeply-as-Helen wrote about? Had I skimmed endnote 24 — well, I’m sure I’m not alone in reading 24 with alacrity, then re-reading each synopsis as I caught references, and soon probably going back to read the whole list in case I’ve missed something.

    Because like Eggers said in his foreword, this book is an exercise for the mind, and Wallace gives us the chance to piece things together before he explicitly synthesizes. He leaves some aspects of the world of O.N.A.N. foggy, so that we must pull a Supreme-Court-Justice-building-the-right-to-privacy-piecemeal-from-the-Bill-of-Rights maneuver to understand that our nation has dug a giant pit in the Northeast and flings its garbage there through the upper atmosphere, and maybe later we’ll be sure whether these catapulted garbage vessels are, once launched, self-propelling, or whether they’re shot out with sufficient force to arc across the continent into Hamster Country.

    Why anyone would want to read this book without the satisfying click (not steady, but in waves, like the click-clack-click of Joelle’s internal monologue, the disappointment at page 223 quickly counteracted by the deductive satisfaction of the next sixteen pages) is beyond me.

    Those digressions that don’t serve the plot (or at least provide a satisfying coincidence that may or may not serve the plot, such as Gately’s role in a separatist’s death or Steeply’s putative puff piece on Poor Tony’s heart-snatchery) serve the theme. Since most of these thematic moments are so subtle, I’m sure we’re particularly required to remember the ones Wallace mentions twice, just as the Biblical God repeats his most important commands three times. So we should definitely remember Hal’s rhetorical flourish at the end of his comparison of Chief Steve McGarrett of “Hawaii Five-0” and Captain Frank Furillo of “Hill Street Blues.” I’m not sure if we’re meant to agree with the teacher who downgraded the paper to a B/B+, or if the only point of that part of the chapter heading is to tell the reader, “Hey moron, pay attention to this part, okay?”

    Which he says so lovingly (and it’s been almost a quarter of the book since he said it last), while warming us up for the meet against Port Washington: “It all tends to get complicated, and probably not all that interesting – unless you play.”

    Which he hits us with again at the end of that section, sneering at the Port Washington parents who wear “the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play.” Almost makes me regret not marking up my book with a pen, lest I embarrass myself with a copy of Infinite Jest sitting on the shelf in good condition like a backslider’s Bible.

    The ill-earned ending to Hal’s essay, the part to which we morons must pay attention, posits that the culture’s next great hero will be passive. And how chilling is that? We’ve now spent three hundred pages biting our lips over the impending death of Hal’s communicative abilities, and our curiosity over the titular Infinite Jest has for the last few dozen of those pages only been answered with clues about its origin and content, but clearly we’re waiting to see how many people Wallace is going to mow down with Chekhov’s gun.

    Hal, don’t tell us we need a passive hero, don’t jinx yourself in a grade school essay, don’t go catatonic on us! Don’t end up like the frozen attentive faces in videophone dioramas or Kate Gompert in the doctor’s office or the zombie that John Wayne resembles to Schacht or the Basilisked statues of your father’s victims-by-film! Keep your face moving, and I’ll keep reading every single page, like Bastian keeping Atreyu alive and saving Fantasia from the Nothing.

    Except, like, smarter.

  • Brittney Gilbert: You Have Chosen To Be In Here

    Brittney Gilbert is the blogger for San Francisco’s CBS 5; she also mouths off at her long running personal blog, Sparkwood & 21. This is her first time reading a David Foster Wallace novel.

    Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time did it to me. It made me fall in love with fiction. I’d been an early reader, and a frequent reader, but when I discovered L’Engle’s Wrinkle in 5th grade there were sparks, complete with a speeding heart, sweaty palms and butterflies knocking around in my stomach until I get back to that engrossing book.

    That long torrid affair with fiction came to a horrible halt when I started reading material online all day long for pay.

    I am a blogger by trade. I’m a blogger who blogs about blogs for a living for a local television news station. Part of that job entails monitoring 300, 400, 500 blogs every day (I lost count.), so that I may recommend content written by locals to locals. I’m a human aggregator. I scan and skim and skip big chunks of text so that I can crank out 10, 20, sometimes 25 posts in a single day. I cannot read all the posts made by local bloggers in a single day. It would be impossible. That means I never get to the end of what Google Reader pipes in to me, and I start it all over again the following morning with more scanning, skipping, skimming until some post pegged with bullet points or strategically placed bolded text catches my attention enough to single it out for suggestion. Large, long, thoughtful posts don’t get read in full, so much as passed on to others to read simply due to the length.

    I likely skim over a good 20,000 words a day. Lots of them register, but many do not. I’ve had to become a masterful scanner of reading material, a skill that is essential when monitoring a huge amount of content every day, but one that will utterly annihilate your ability to sit down and read an actual book. Infinite Jest is the first book I’ve taken on to read in a long, long time. Because my job requires a good eight hours a day of reading (scanning, whatever), I just don’t have the drive or stamina to come home and read some more. It’s usually “The Bachelor” or “Real Housewives” or “People Who Think They Can Dance” running around in my brain once I’ve clocked out for the day. But the reading I do for my work isn’t reading at all, not really, and so by diving into Infinite Jest after having avoided novels for so long I have slowly, and almost by accident, gotten my attention span back.

    For someone who hasn’t read anything longer than a New Yorker article in a solid six months, IJ is an unmerciful beast to bring me back into the fiction fold. I began my Infinite Summer journey like an excited elementary student on her first day back to school in fall. I packed my enormous book in my backpack, along with a fresh steno notepad and capped pen, so that I could read on the bus or on the train or on my break at work. I was going to win at Infinite Summer! I was pumped! I was going to do this! But I learned very soon a few things: 1) You carry that book around on your back every day and you will need a spinal alignment. 2) People look at you funny when you read that tome in public. 3) Infinite Jest cannot be read in ten minute spurts on the back of a bumpy, crowded bus barreling down Mission Street. I was going to have to really commit to this book the way one commits to a college course or a part-time job or a new lover.

    That’s when the magic happened. When I took the book to my room and closed the door and even lit some candles, because, dammit this was a date, part of me that was lost to internet reading peaked its head up. I was spending serious one-on-one time with a big, beautiful book, and when I really gave myself over to it, and fought the urge to skim and won, I knew IJ had become more than my latest reading project, it had became the rebirth of my much-missed attention span.

    Infinite Jest takes focus. I cannot listen to music while reading this novel, nor can I take it in with television on in the background. I can’t skim parts and still get the gist. The text requires 100% participation on my part. It has become a meditation. I have to be present and mindful in order to fully ingest the words before me. I cannot click to open a new tab, to check to Twitter to see if anyone famous has died, or refresh D-Listed.40 It’s just me and the lavish landscape Wallace created.

    “I am in here.”

    I have chosen to care about this book, to give it a place in my life. In doing so I am rewarded with messages in IJ about the importance of being present. Of just breathing. Themes abound in IJ about focus, about choosing what it is that you pay attention to, and how crucial it is to do that with the utmost care. If only because our whole lives depend on it.

    By virtue of being what it is, a dense, complicated, scattered work of immense volume, Infinite Jest enforces its own themes. Focus, presence of mind and conscious choice are all things thrust upon the reader when they enter into a contract to finish DFW’s IJ. Having wine before reading makes the trek a little too muddy. Reading with a clear mind, free of adulterants, will allow the book to bring you its own incredible high. There is keen insight embedded in nearly every page, but you have to be fully present to see them.

    “Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticsm with great care.”

    The non-linear (to say the least) structure, the constant change in voice, forced flipping, always flipping, to the back of the book for endnotes are elements that don’t allow you to get lost in a story. “You are reading a book,” you are often reminded. You are in here. You are not Cinderella at the ball or Hermione at Hogwarts, you are reading Infinite Jest. You may get caught up in the frenzy of Erdedy’s panicked wait for pot, but not for long. Soon you are reading Infinite Jest again.

    It’s easy to see that Wallace had a difficult time with focus, what with the sprawling nature of his most famous novel. It’s almost as easy to see that he knew the vast importance of mental discipline and presence of mind, if you can manage to have some of that yourself. With Infinite Jest Wallace was able to let his mind roam in fantastic, spooling, brilliant ways, yet did so within the confines of a single book. Sure, it’s a really long book, but he was able to box his thoughts. And by offering that book to you he is giving you the same opportunity, the chance to see just how difficult but but ultimately freeing that can be.

  • Odds and Ends

    Media: There was a piece about Infinite Summer in Salon last week. Other mentions in the media: a lengthy article in the Globe and Mail, and mention in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Blog (our new motto is “Infinite Summer: Spanning the Globes”), and a feature in the Kentucky Courier-Journal.

    Spoilers: We hates them, we hates them forever! That’s why we have implemented spoiler tags, both here and in the forums. Ideally you’ll never have occasion to use them, because you’ll be scrupulously adhering to the Spoiler Line. But if you ever find yourself wondering if something constitutes a spoiler (hint: if you feel the impulse to preface a statement with “I swear this is not a spoiler, but …”, it almost certainly is), please enclose it in <spoiler> tags, like so:

    DMZ is people!!

    For the lowdown on the forum spoiler tags and restrictions, please see this topic.

    Summer Vacation: Matthew, Eden, Kevin, and Avery are taking the week off, but we have four Guest Guides to pick up the slack. We’ll see you all in a week.

  • Infinite Summery – Week 4

    Milestone Reached: Page 295 (30%). A third of the way there, people.

    Chapters Read:

    Page 219: Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a, Madam Psychosis, who dated Orin and starred in many of James Incandenza’s films (in addition to whatever other relationship they may have had), attends a party and attempts suicide by overdose in the bathroom.

    Page 223: The chronology (cue voices from on high):

    Year of the Whopper
    Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
    Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
    Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
    Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
    Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
    Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
    Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
    Year of Glad

    Page 227: Helen P. Steeply’s (Putative) Curriculum Vitae.

    Page 240: A description of Enfield.

    Page 242: Hal and Orin speak on the phone. Hal describes the bizarre mechanics by which their father committed suicide, and his horror upon discovering the body.

    Page 256: ETA plays Port Washington in a tennis match.

    Page 270: Don Gately, now on staff at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, councils the newest resident Geoffrey Day.

    Page 281: Having defeated Port Washington, the ETA gang returns home on a bus.

    Page 283: All about Orin: how he made the transition from tennis to football, and his relationship with the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne.

    Page 299: Poor Tony undergoes a week of withdraw (most of which is spent in a library restroom), culminating in a seizure while riding the train.

    Characters: We get the sense that almost all of the major characters have been introduced by this point (fingers crossed!). We’ll do a complete rundown next week.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • Missed Connections

    Warning: This post does not contain spoilers in the traditional sense of the word (i.e., information to which you have not yet been privy), but it does synthesize some data points to reveal a (IMO, non-critical) fact to which you may not have tumbled yourself. There are likely many more in the comments. If you prefer to make all the connections yourself, feel free to skip today’s entry.

    Consider the following:

    1. On page 64 it says “Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds.”

    2. On page 157 the header is “WINTER B.S. 1960“.

    3. On page 159, James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s age is given as ten.

    4. One page 172, the (abridged) header is “TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY … IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD [etc.] … ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE”.

    5. On page 223 we learn that the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar fell three years before YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

    So, let’s see. James was 10 in 1960, so he was born in 1950 (or possibly 1949, if the passage set in 1960 transpired before his birthdate). He died 54 years later, in the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar. 1950 + 54 = 2004. Therefore, the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar is 2004, and The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (which falls five years later) is 2004 + 5 = 2009. Plus or minus a year, depending on the exact date of his birth.

    I feel compelled to tout this particular instance of deductive excellence on my part because it is the only one I have successfully completed.28

    Meanwhile, in the forums, readers blithely mention connections that I totally, completely missed. “X said Y and Z said Y, therefore X is Z.” That kind of stuff. It makes me want to turn back to page 3 and just start over, and this time transcribe the novel into a notebook line-by-line, to ensure that I don’t miss a thing.

    It also makes me feel like George Michael. No, the other George Michael.

    (Just mentally replace the phrase “math problem” with “contemporary post-modern masterpiece”.)29

    I love a good mystery as much as the next guy, but finding clues in Infinite Jest sometimes feels like trying to find a pattern in the digits of pi, or solving various quests in an adventure video game (“You seek the Crown of Midas? Alas, it was broken in seven pieces, each of which was placed in a different world. Run around for the next 35 hours and collect them all, why don’t you?”).30

    How say you? Do you like the treasure hunt aspect of the novel, or do you occasionally find yourself wishing Wallace would quit with the coy and give us the straight dope? What connections have you unearthed thus far?

    Misc:

    Thunder Stolen: My original topic for today’s post was going to be the Wardine and yrstruly sections, but on Friday that particular discussion broke out like a brawl in a soccer bar. It’s even spilled over to yesterday’s Roundup thread and, frankly, I am now kind of relieved that I wasn’t the one to first throw a folding chair.

    Self-PUNK’D: I finished the 14-page endnote 110 (yeah, I’m a bit ahead of schedule–shhhh!). It’s so long that I had to take a break in the middle of it. When I returned and saw my bookmark one centimeter from the end of the novel rather than the beginning, I had a momentary, electric thrill. It was like finding a $20 bill on the ground, and then remembering that you are in your own bedroom.

    Art Imitates Life: My friend J. was going to participate in Infinite Summer, but then she decided that she had too many other books that she wanted to read . “Funny thing, though,” she told me over the weekend. “The first book I read was The Emperor’s Children, which had a character who was trying to read Infinite Jest to impress people on the Internet.”