Infinite Summer

Author: matthewbaldwin

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part II

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

    Infinite Summer: Have you been sticking to the schedule?

    Avery Edison: For the first time since the project started I’m sticking to the schedule. I had been catching up in 75-page burst the day before my posts were due to be written. It’s not a great way to read the book – the feeling that IJ was a homework assignment was only intensified and the fact that I didn’t have time to take breaks from the harder-to-read sections was stressful.

    Last week I was getting through about thirty pages a day, and now I’ve decreased to around 15. I’m a little ahead of the schedule, which has added a nice, relaxed tone to my reading.

    I mean, as relaxed as you can feel reading about something like the Eschaton game.

    Matthew Baldwin: My trajectory has been the inverse. I was consistently ahead of schedule, by as much as 150 pages a few weeks ago. Then I stalled out for a spell.

    The main thing that stymied me was the passage about Lucien and Bertraud, before the arrival of the Wheelchair Assassins. Every night I picked up the novel, read one or two paragraphs of that section, and gave up. It took me a literal week to get through four pages, 480-484.

    Instead, I occupied my evenings reading everything else by David Foster Wallace I could furtively send to my workplace printer: the David Lynch profile and E Unibus Plurum and Host and The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing and two (count ’em: one, two) long essays about tennis.

    Also, at some point during that period I came down with a cold, and discovered that it is nearly impossible to read Infinite Jest (at least for me) when fatigued, even in the slightest.

    AE: I’ve found totally the opposite – I make the most progress reading the book when I’m sleepy. Usually I read for half an hour to forty-five minutes just after I wake up and just before I go to bed. I think maybe my brain is still relaxed enough to let the words just wash over me, rather than allow me to interrupt myself by over-analyzing the book.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I have actually never been behind, although a couple times the days have caught up to my bookmark. I’m enjoying the book so much, and especially now, that I’ve never not wanted to read it. Right now I’m about a week ahead, I think, which is probably average.

    AE: Kevin, reading ahead doesn’t get you any extra credit. I checked.

    IS: None of you addressed the Wardine / yrstruly sections. Care to do so now?

    AE: I was upset by the Wardine section, but more by its content than style. It’s tough to get through, but both of those sections cropped up during my “read it all in one go” sessions, and so I just kept reading and tried to ignore the language.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I guess the Wardine writing style didn’t worry me too much. Certainly DFW’s not the first white author to write in blackface, so to speak, and I think that whatever you as a reader bring to those sections will determine whether or how much you cringe when you read them. I got into the rhythm of the yrstruly section pretty quickly and just began to follow the action, rather than getting too hung up on the style. I’m just going to trust that there’s a reason for the radical style change that sets those sections apart, and that something will happen to bring everything together in a meaningful way later on.

    MB: The Wardine section didn’t bother me a whit. For one thing, I never made the assumption that Wallace was trying to emulate an entire race’s locution, only that of a specific person. I mean, if he had every black character speaking in that style then there might be cause for alarm, but this section fell 30 pages into a 1000 pages novel–a little early to go all torch-and-pitchfork on the guy.

    And I loved the yrstruly chapter. Very A Clockwork Orangeian.

    AE: Yeah, the yrstruly stuff really pulled me in — the text felt more frenetic than cumbersome. I felt like I really was in the mind of an addict, although — as a middle-class white girl who tried pot just once and felt sick for two days after — that could say more about my perception of drugs users than it does about Wallace’s writing.

    Have any of you been to Boston? Can you visualize the city as you read?

    MB: I think this is the first fiction I’ve read about Boston and its environs that wasn’t written by H. P. Lovecraft, of whom I am a huge fan. So, while reading Infinite Jest, I keep waiting for E.T.A. to play Akham University, or a cult to be discovered holding rituals in the Ennet House basement, or Johnny Gentle to be unmasked as Nyarlathotep. I am pretty sure that Mario’s conception is going to involve the town of Innsmouth.

    EMK: I lived on the east coast from the early eighties to the early nineties and had a few Boston boyfriends, so I feel like I can peg several of the locations he uses in the book, as well as the look of some of the people he describes, especially the Crocodiles and the ETA kids. And now that I think of it, I wonder if some of my ETA associations are tinged by other east coast prep novels, like Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History,” and the dozen others I’ve read over the years. I’m sure that’s a topic for a term paper, somewhere.

    AE: My only exposure to Boston has been via. the film “Good Will Hunting”. I don’t think this affects my reading of the book too much, other than the obvious downside that – in my head – every character looks like Ben Affleck.

    I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

    KG: I grew up in the Northeast and my brother has lived in Boston for 20 years, so I’ve been there dozens of times and so I have a pretty solid picture of the city as I read. If the characters would just ride that little tourist trolley around a bunch, I’d be right there in my head with them.

  • Roundup

    Despite the Avery induced exodus, many folks tenaciously cling to the Infinite Jest bandwagon. The most indefatigable chronicles are:

    The fine folks over at Infinite Zombies

    Gerry Canavan

    Infinite Detox

    Infinite Tasks

    I Just Read About That

    Love, Your Copyeditor

    The Feminist Texican

    Conversational Reading

    		 Journeyman

    Repat Blues

    Chris Forster

    Brain Hammer

    Naptime Writing

    Infinite Jestation

    A Supposed Fun Blog (although they haven’t posted in a fortnight, so perhaps they have been defatigabled …)

    Crystal Bae wrote a nice little entry about Infinite Summer on her blog, Aesthetics of Everywhere. Mike Miley discussed Infinite Summer on The Huffington Post. There was also an article in The Daily Texan.

    Reid Carlberg “Finished That Damn Book“. R.J. Adler of A Litany of Nonsense hit page 500 in the novel and asked “Halfway to What?”

    And Jeremy Stober can’t figure out why he likes Infinite Jest:

    In the meat and heft, the narrative always seems just easy enough to read that you don’t even realize how much of the novel’s world you are absorbing, as if it sort of slips in through osmosis and entrenches itself in your metabolic pathways as you lug the physical weight of the book around.

    Lastly, the students of ENG 590 at Albany’s College are reading Infinite Jest in three weeks (!!), and keeping blogs all the while. You can read about the class here, and find the course website (including links to the student blogs) at ijstrose.wordpress.com.

    if you have written about Infinite Jest recently, please let us know in the forums or the comments.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 7

    Milestone Reached: 516 (52%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 442 – YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Gately ponders his relationship with a possibly fictitious Higher Power, and remembers his mother’s alcoholism / cirrhosis.

    Page 448 – VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U: Hal has the “losing your teeth” dream; Mario continues to listen to “Sixty Minutes More or Less”, even without Madame Psychosis.

    Page 450 – 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Early morning drills at E.T.A.; Schtitt delivers the “second world within this world” lecture (i.e., “suck it up, whiners”).

    Page 461: Pat Montesian, and Gately reckless driving in her husband’s car.

    Page 450 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the “pleasure centers of the brain” (p-terminals) experiments.

    Page 475: Gately continues cruising in Pat M.’s car; the Wheelchair assassins kill Lucien and Bertraud of Anitoi’s Entertainment.

    Page 489 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the possibility of an Entertainment “master”; Steeply asks if Marathe has ever been temped to watch it.

    Page 491 – WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA: James Incandenza helps his father isolate and fix a squeak in a box spring.

    Page 503: At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Ken Erdedy gets hugged by Roy Tony.

    Page 507: Marathe admits to Steeply that some interns were “lost” while there were experimenting with the Entertainment.

    Page 508 – 10 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal and others await punishment for the Eschaton disaster; an introduction to “Lateral” Alice Moore’s.

    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.

  • Infinite Jests

    The ranks of Infinite Summerians are thinning quickly, as participants drop out or finish early. For those of us on the schedule, though, it’s time for a halftime celebration.

    John Campbell drew the above two panels in his Hourly Comic Journal. They appeared in the January 9th, 2008 entry. Mr. Campbell went on to write pictures of sad children, which David Foster Wallace Stranded on a Desert Island:

    The folks at The Onion clearly carried a torch for Wallace as well, as he was often featured in articles such as Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20:

    BLOOMINGTON, IL—Claire Thompson, author David Foster Wallace’s girlfriend of two years, stopped reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday.

    “It was pretty good, I guess, but I just couldn’t get all the way through,” said Thompson, 32, who was given the seven-chapter, heavily footnoted “Dear John” missive on Feb. 3. “I always meant to pick it up again, but then I got busy and, oh, I don’t know. He’s talented, but his letters can sometimes get a little self-indulgent…

    Wallace also made cameos in U.S. Unenjoyment Rate At All-Time High and New Cambodian Barnes & Noble: Will It Threaten Cambodia’s Small Book Shops?. He even made it onto the cover of The Weekender:

    Last year, The Onion ran NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death:

    “I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective.”

    Jason Kottke reprinted an essay entitled Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace, originally written by James Tanner.

    9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’?

    The Howing Fantods held three David Foster Wallace parody competitions. The first two, held in 2004 and 2007, were literary:

    The1 car2 pulled3 up4 into5 the6 driveway.7 Daniel8 locked9 up,10 and11 went12 inside.13

    For the third, entrants were asked to create DFW-inspired Motivational Posters:


    Warning: some of the motivational posters
    contain spoilers.

    If you know of more Infinite Jest or David Foster Wallace humor on the web, please let us know by email or in the comments.

    Update: In a recent post, infinitedetox proposed some Techno-Curmudgeonly Solutions for Life in a Wallacian Dystopia.

  • That’s Entertainment

    At some point in Infinite Jest, around page 73, I abandoned my highlighter. There was simply too much to absorb on the first read, I decided, and I would save the markup for the second pass.

    But last week, on page 389, Old Yeller rode again:

    ‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’

    The conversation between LaMont Chu and Lyle–and the highlighted passage, specifically–was eerily familiar. About a month ago I read an article entitled Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment, in which a video game developer pointed out how easy it is to design titles that are addictive without being especially fun. The same uneasy distinction hangs over much of digital leisure now, from phone games to online poker sites, where the interface can feel less like a doorway to pleasure than a machine for making departure feel like loss. “There’s a vital question that is rarely asked,” he said. “Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep better at night selling one than the other.”

    It’s more than just the similar choice of words that caused my spider-sense to tingle, of course. At the heart of Infinite Jest is an entertainment so alluring that people are literally unable to pull themselves away. In the novel it is (presumably) a film, which would have been a natural choice at the time the book was written. After all, the most compelling video game in 199460 was Donkey Kong County which, while fun, is not strap-on-a-dinner-tray-and-crap-your-pants addictive by any stretch.

    But by the time Infinite Jest was released, 1996, the video game landscape was already changing. A little company called Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo, a near-perfect distillation of addictive video game elements. Eight years later Blizzard combined Diablo with another hit series and gave us the closest real-life analog to The Entertainment: World of Warcraft.

    I am not making the comparison in (um) jest. Tales of people neglecting themselves and their dependence while playing World of Warcraft (WoW) are only a Google search away. And the game is notorious for wreaking havoc on marriages, friendships, employment, bank accounts, and hygiene.61

    How did video games come to usurp television as entertainment’s most irresistible siren? Marathe could tell you the answer to that one: choice, or the illusion thereof. Television ladles out its rewards for free: excitement, romance, shock, horror. But you have to work to reap the same benefits from a video game, and that investment of effort (no matter how minor) amplifies the pleasure, because you feel like you’ve “earned it”. It’s a principle harnessed by everything from roulette tables to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, but video game designers in particular have figured out how to hijack our innate risk-reward mechanism for their own enrichment. Or as David puts it in the Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment article cited above, “Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task.”

    And this is one of the central themes of the Marathe / Steeply chapters. Steeply insists that choice is what makes a people free; Marathe counters that choice can be used as a tool to enslave.

    There is, of course, an even quicker way of stimulating our pleasure centers: rather than simulate an experience that causes the production of mood-elevating substances, you injest chemical compounds that will stimulate the production directly. But as the members of Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink learned at cost, and LeMont Chu learned for free, what at first makes you happy when you have it may eventually just make you sad when you don’t. In fact, to hear Infinite Jest tell it, Lyle’s warning applies to nearly everything: drug use, success, entertainment, videophones. Even a family and the company of the Pretty Girl of All Time isn’t enough to prevent a head / microwave rendezvous.

    I am no scholar of Eastern religions (or Western, for that matter), but I get a distinctively Buddhist vibe from Infinite Jest. That “attachment to a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering and the main obstacle to liberation” (Thanks Wikipedia!).That the body and it’s cravings are just the map, and should not be confused with the territory. How else to interpret that only truly happy character in the novel is the one at E.T.A. who will never be in The Show, who doesn’t use drugs (as far as we know), and can’t even be said to at least have his health?

    As for the rest, it seems that for every character that is grappling with their desire–be in Chu for success or Erededy for pot–there is another feverishly working to undermine the efforts.

    Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

    The truth will set our heroes free. But not until C.T., and NoCoat (purveyors of fine LinguaScraper applications), and the Spider are finished with them.

  • 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.