Category: Guests

Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University.

When my friend Brian handed me A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and told me I had to read it, I immediately recognized the name of the author whose story “The Depressed Person” was featured in Harper’s magazine: David Foster Wallace. “Oh yeah, I want to read more of this guy.” When I returned the book, Brian then told me I had to read Infinite Jest. Not wanting to deprive him of his unread copy (NB: Brian has still never read Infinite Jest), I went to my local library in downtown Lexington KY and checked out the book. Fortunately, no one was on a waiting list, so I got more than the standard number of renewals.

I remember reading a lot of the book lying in my bed (like Gately in the home stretch of the book), flipping back to try and keep all the plot threads and chronologies straight, and then giving up on that about page 200 or so and just enjoying it. I remember being thankful that I was sick in January 2001 so I could read large chunks of the book instead of going to work. I remember sitting and reading at this very table that my wife hates (transferred to Morehead KY solely as a frugal gesture) and being utterly blown away by the Eschaton section. After Gately got shot, I would only put the book down to go to work or to the bathroom or to sleep. With two days to go, if you are still sticking to a pages-per-day schedule, I just don’t see how you’re doing that.

Reading Infinite Jest was the most extraordinary reading experience of my life. I find the depth of the last sentence to be unparalleled in literature. Only the endings of Ulysses and Beloved come close to affecting me so profoundly. Thankfully in that sentence, Wallace leads Gately and us out of the hell of that last sequence into a transcendent moment of peace, cold and fleeting but also unbearably beautiful, striking a chord of sadness that still rings deep inside me.

After I finished the book, I could not stop thinking about it. I knew that Infinite Jest was immaculately structured and cohesive, and I wanted to figure out how to articulate Wallace’s achievement. Finally for Christmas 2001 I ordered a remaindered copy of the hardcover from Hamilton Books for about $4 and had it delivered to my in-laws’ house. I wrote numbers 1-28 (and an N) in the shadowed circles of that copy and numbered all the sections. I was given a scrap of paper (in the home of my mother-in-law’s late parents, whose inheritance has just helped us purchase our first home, a home that this hated table will never see) and sketched out a diagram with notes that would become, over the next six years, the 512-page book, Elegant Complexity. Without the daily inspiration of Wallace-l and The Howling Fantods, I might not have finished the task.

Four days before my glorious daughter was born, Matt Bucher said he and his brother John wanted to publish Elegant Complexity (and for the record, that perfect title is actually Matt’s). Because they published that book, I got invited to submit an article to the Sonora Review and to attend a tribute event for Wallace in Arizona, where I met people Wallace knew and loved. I got invited to speak on talk radio in Ireland. I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the Consider David Foster Wallace conference in Liverpool and got to take my first trip to Europe. Matthew Baldwin invited me to contribute the very thing you are reading right now. Reading Infinite Jest changed my life.

Since finishing Infinite Jest, I have read just about everything Wallace has ever written and have also been motivated to read Barth and Pynchon and an author I’d never heard of, William Gaddis. It is a crime that Gaddis is not as revered an American author as Faulkner or Hemingway or anybody you want to name. I have been motivated to read a 600-page anthology of Modern and Postmodern philosophy (although it took me 14 months). I ordered a Vollmann anthology after reading a Wallace interview. As my wife reminded me when I read this to her, I don’t get nauseous anymore, only nauseated. I own and frequently consult Garner’s Modern American Usage, a treasured gift from my mother-in-law. I tell my students (and everyone else, too) that not using that final serial comma before the conjunction is just insane and irresponsible. I think This Is Water is one of the most amazing, beautiful things I’ve ever read and am considering just taking entire class periods at the end of the semester to read it to students. When I want to be a jerk in public, the phrase “this is water” runs through my head and I get calm. Reading Infinite Jest changed my life, and now it’s going to change yours. I promise you. Congratulations to everyone who has participated in Infinite Summer.

John Moe is a writer and public radio host now living in St Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the book Conservatize Me and his short humor pieces appear in several anthologies as well as on McSweeneys.net.

I’m still upset at the author for being a thief. Ever been robbed? Like had your house burglarized and your stuff rummaged through and stolen? There’s this period right after it happens when you can’t believe that someone got into where you live, the space where you sleep and bathe and eat, and just took stuff you had bought and taken care of. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still walking around wanting to punch someone. Don’t bother calling the goddamn cops, they won’t do anything.

Or, okay, different analogy. We’re an urban metropolis that’s collapsing under the weight of corruption and moral degradation, gangs are everywhere and no one collects the garbage. Dystopia, right? But! We do have this one super hero who occasionally rescues us and occasionally he can’t quite rescue us but even then he provides us with the idea of hope, the idea of salvation and redemption being possible from our little hell. Only now David Foster Wallace has hanged himself and so our superhero has just announced that screw this city, I’m moving to Australia and you’ll never see me again and so we’re just left with rot and sorrow and no one will even collect the garbage and the cops are shooting people for no reason and everything’s on fire. Wallace left us. I hate that guy. And I love that guy, of course, but you know that by now. Fucking guy. Fucking Wallace. I should explain. On April 4, 2007, I got a phone call at work from my wife. She said my brother Rick had shot himself in San Diego where he was living. I was sucked up out of my chair (never to return fully to Earth) and calmly asked if he was dead. She didn’t know. Within a few hours, I was on a flight from Seattle to San Diego and drove straight to the hospital where Rick was. His brain was already gone, his body soon followed. The next several days were spent performing small tasks that all weighed a ton: collecting his personal effects at the hospital, figuring out what was to be done with the apartment he shared, all his books. I had to get a ride to the gun range where he had shot himself, talk to the manager who had been on duty about what happened, he told me about the employees who were on duty that day who still hadn’t come back to work. I had to drive my brother’s car from there back to the hotel where I was staying, leave it in the parking lot, and figure out what the hell was to happen next. Some tasks weren’t so straight forward, like getting to know the ex-girlfriend who would, in three months, give birth to a daughter Rick would never hold.

After a few days, I returned home to Seattle and all I was left with was, essentially, research material. Accounts of friends and co-workers. I also had my memories of him. The early ones were all viewed through a lens of him being The Greatest Guy Ever because he was my older brother and that’s how it works. The later memories are more painful: Rick being high at family gatherings, Rick asking for money, me not allowing Rick to meet my kids because I simply didn’t trust him any more, coming to the beginnings of a reconciliation with him months before he died, confident there would be years and years more time. The thing is, when someone decides not to go to work one day and instead puts a bullet in their head, everything else they do is a prologue to that act. So every camping trip anecdote, every story told by a trucking company co-worker about Rick’s penchant for adopting injured animals, every joke shared by a fellow volunteer at the sobriety hotline where he dedicated his time, it all leads up to what he did and that’s how you understand it. Their lives read like a suicide note. The howl Kurt Cobain produces on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from the Unplugged in New York album is terrifying to me, or would be if I could listen to Nirvana anymore. I picture every Wallace book I see on a shelf as being soaked in tears. David Foster Wallace and Rick Moe, born just six months apart, were completely different people. I know that, but I have pretty hard time drawing distinctions sometimes. They both had brains that didn’t work in the same way as most other brains. I admired them both in ways that transcended any other admiration I had felt. With Rick, it was, again, the golden glow that older brothers have, on their bikes and skateboards, with their strength and jokes and cars. With Wallace, it was reading some of those Harper’s essays and experiencing Shea Stadium Beatlemania and a kind of loving fear all at once. Oh, so that’s a writer, I thought, sweating, screaming on the inside. As someone who wanted to be a writer, it was incredibly inspiring and absolutely soul crushing. Being a writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment. A few years ago, I was working on a narrative non-fiction book and had a chance to go on a cruise as part of my story gathering. I knew not to bother. Maybe someone else could dare write about cruise ships, but what kind of sucker do I look like, you know? I loved my brother and I loved Wallace.

Then on September 12, 2008, fucking Wallace fucking killed himself. Look, I know well that depression is a disease. I know he fought it like a gladiator his whole life. I know, too, that he didn’t get the help he needed from the rest of us. I know that if we as a society approached depression and mental health with the same dedication and persistence with which we approached drunk driving or smoking or, hell, littering in the past, we’d bury a lot fewer of our brothers and daughters and heroes. It is important to address these issues with the help of professionals – find more information about them, here. We might have new Nirvana albums and Elliott Smith albums to enjoy. But I’m still angry at the events that took place and I’m still angry with these two heroes of mine who killed these two heroes of mine. I’m still angry for having my house burglarized. Wallace’s death brought for me a fresh version of the dread I was already experiencing after Rick’s suicide, this knowledge that life will never be like it was, it will be weirder and darker and happy at times and always always always more sad. I know now that everything Wallace wrote will be different for me than it was before. Even memories of his funniest writing include memories of the sorrow and desperation packed in there. My struggle when I do reach back into Wallace’s words will be to see beyond the shovel to the gut I felt when I heard he had died. I’ll need to get past the anger I feel for fucking ripping us off and denying us those future tomes. I’ll need to see David Foster Wallace for more than just the last thing he did. I need to remember wrestling with my brother in the rec room and going off jumps on bikes instead of his body hooked up to machines in a San Diego hospital. A few months after Rick died, I was given a notebook that he had kept as part of his ongoing recovery program. It was a journal of his fight to stay straight, to make a new life for himself that wasn’t built around drugs. I kept this notebook on a high shelf in the back of my closet for weeks, eyeing it once in a while as I passed through the room, thinking about it constantly. I had to know that there was something to Rick that I had not yet discovered, maybe some insight, at least some humanity. Finally, I took the notebook down, went to a Starbucks for some reason, got a big cup of coffee and entered his loving and terrible world. Then closed it, went to my car, and wept. Then ran some errands.

Infinite Jest is on my shelf now. Sure is big. Man, look at that thing. I hope to get to it soon. I hear it’s really great.

Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.

Infinite Jest is an original novel. I mean that in every sense of the word. Wallace has constructed an original novel that is imaginative and fresh; each storyline drips with his distinctive style. It also is the origin point for a new type of novel writing, a path others want to follow. Let me go back and repeat part of that: Wallace has constructed an original novel. The act of constructing a novel of this size and scope invariably involves some degree of borrowing bits and pieces–either from one’s own drafts and notebooks, or from the writing of others–and stitching together many smaller pieces.

In addition to Wallace borrowing from his own work (c.f. Antitoi mentioned in his 1992 Harper’s essay “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and available in PDF here), many of the details in Infinite Jest owe something to one or other of the thousands of novels Wallace had digested up to that point. Some of these references are homages, some are Nabokovian red herrings, most are just delightful. There are obvious references like Hamlet and Marathe/Marat, but the four influences I’ve chosen to focus on below might not be immediately apparent to the first-time reader.

These influences will be familiar to the members of wallace-l and I give that community credit for unearthing most of these connections.

1. The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: The Bruce Green–Mildred Bonk scene early on (p. 39) introduces us to Tommy Doocey, “the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.” Compare that description with page 76 from The Liar’s Club (1995), (a memoir, by the way): “I knew a drug dealer once who collected [snakes] in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: ‘You weally tink dis is uncut?’ It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.” Now, Karr and Wallace were an item (per The New Yorker and The Washington Post), but there’s no telling if he picked that bit up from Karr’s book or if he himself went to one of those buys at the real Doocey’s place. Karr’s version is arguably funnier.
2. End Zone by Don Delillo: It would not be unfair to call End Zone the biggest literary influence on Infinite Jest (at least the E.T.A. half). That is somewhat ironic since End Zone is only 250 pages long. Several key details from EZ show up in IJ, but the biggest is probably the concept of Eschaton. The main character of EZ, Gary Harkness, is obsessed with nuclear strategy. He repeatedly mentions the term eschatology. DT Max tells us that one of the original titles of End Zone was “Modes of Disaster Technology.”

   Some other similarities:

   • The militaristic coach in a tower looming over the field;
   • The players (football college rather than tennis academy) over-intellectualizing their roles and future success;
   • The widow of the founder is the president of the school;
   • The powdered milk.

   Wallace and Delillo both spent time in Texas (the setting for End Zone)–Wallace on a Lannan grant in Marfa (you can read more about Wallace in Marfa in Sean Wilsey’s book Oh the Glory of It All) and Delillo researching Libra in Dallas (Delillo’s wife is from Texas).

   There are dozens of other nods to Delillo’s other books throughout Wallace’s work (“The Broom of the System” is similar to a phrase in Americana, the M.I.T. Language Riots are mentioned in Ratner’s Star, etc.) and the Ransom Center in Austin owns a set of correspondence between Wallace and Delillo.

3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris: Consider these two passages:
   Red Dragon: “[The gun] was a Bulldog .44 Special, short and ugly with its startling big bore. It had been extensively modified by Mag Na Port. The barrel was vented near the muzzle to help keep the muzzle down on recoil, the hammer was bobbed and it had a good set of fat grips. He suspected it was throated for the speedloader.” (RD, p. 137)

   Infinite Jest: “The Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special…blunt and ugly with a bore like the mouth of a cave…The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor…It’s not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader….” (IJ, pp. 609-610)

   Wallace was admittedly a big fan of Harris’s writing. And he confesses that he loved the technical details of Tom Clancy novels. In this list Wallace included two Thomas Harris novels in his top 10. (A lot of people think DFW was joking or something when compiling that list, but I’m telling you it’s sincere.) I think this is a place where Wallace needed a detail about a beefy gun and either remembered or came across this in Red Dragon and ran with it.

4. Super Mario Brothers: OK, this seems like a stretch and it’s not literary, but bear with me. Mario Incandenza, the middle child, is a “small hunched shape with a big head” (p. 32), extremely short, but he has a big head, an oversized skull on a little body. He sort of looks like Super Mario. And then there’s this on page 42:
   

   “Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”

   For those of you who lived without electricity in Siberia during the late 1980s, the game Super Mario Brothers featured a character named Mario jumping up to a flagpole at the end of every level.

   Later, walking with Schtitt:

   Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

   So, Mario’s brothers play a game, but now Mario, not Hal, is the focal point–these are Mario’s brothers. (With respect to the Incandenza brothers, another connection here is with The Brothers Karamazov. Timothy Jacobs wrote his dissertation at McMaster University partly on comparing the Brothers Incandenza with the Brothers Karamazov.) The connection between Mario Incandenza and Super Mario Brothers is by no means rock solid, but the short, dark-haired Mario concentrating on that flagpole sure does conjure an image worthy of it.

John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. He is also the co-creator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular vlogbrothers channel on youtube, which spawned the nerdfighter community, a tight-knit group of a hundred thousand nerds who use the internet to celebrate intellectualism and nerd culture.

Okay, so full disclosure: I am behind. (I’m only on page 350.)

I first read Infinite Jest in the summer of 1996, the summer after my freshman year of college. I had a beautiful first edition⁸⁰ that I’d bought entirely because of a review in Time Magazine. (Off-topic, but remember magazines?) I lived that summer with three friends from high school and a juvenile pet squirrel named Trippy in a two-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, Alabama. We slept on these four full-sized mattresses we had kind of half-stolen from our friend’s dad, who owned a Days Inn.

My memories of that summer:

1. The squirrel died. I came home from work one day, and the squirrel was dead in its cage, and I knew I had to tell my roommate Todd, who was particularly attached to Trippy and who was also reading IJ. I When he came home that day, I said, “I think Lenz got a hold of Trippy,” which in the end was, like, way too casual a way of telling Todd that his squirrel had died.
2. I spent a lot of time lying on the bare Days Inn mattress, an unzipped sleeping bag over me, my forearms aching from the size of the book.

This time around, reading Infinite Jest has been an exercise in delighted confusion. But for me, in 1996, all reading was a matter of delighted confusion, and if I didn’t understand something, I just kept reading. Of course, I had no idea what was happening in the book.⁸¹ All I knew was that I liked Hal, and that I liked mmmyellow, and that even though it was horrible and all I kinda wished I was good at tennis.

When I finished the book, I immediately flipped to the first page and started reading again. For me, that summer, IJ achieved its craziest ambition: It became my Entertainment.

When I got back to school that Fall, one of the first things I did was get on the Internet, which was then capitalized, to find out what other people who’d read IJ had thought of it, whereupon I learned that even though I’d read IJ three times in three months, I’d had absolutely no idea what the book was about and had totally misunderstood everything. So it has been nice to read it with y’all this time around, because it keeps me on track.

I write novels for teenagers now—such books are colloquially called “Young Adult books” or just YA—and whenever I’ve had about two beers and find myself with other YA authors, I always start in on this soliloquy about how the contemporary young adult novel was not invented by J. D. Salinger or Judy Blume or Robert Cormier but by David Foster Wallace, whose ETA scenes more closely resemble what most YA writers are after. Like, for one thing, the best contemporary young adult fiction moves effortlessly between high and low culture in that way that only teenagers and David Foster Wallace can. I mean, my favorite books when I was eighteen were IJ and The Babysitters’ Club #43: Claudia’s Sad Goodbye.⁸² DFW proved that one way to bring readers to complex ideas is to utilize the sentence structures they hear every day; YA fiction has been trying to do this ever since.

Also, there’s the whole thing of treating teenagers as intellectually capable and genuinely funny people, which IJ did not invent but did master. Plus, YA novels on average are more likely to use footnotes than novels for adults.⁸³ It’s actually pretty stunning how massively so many YA writers (I mean, me especially, but also other people) have ripped off ETA and Pemulis and Hal, how deeply DFW has shaped our understanding of what it means to be smart and talented and scared and 17.

So now, 13 years after first reading the book, I find myself treasuring the ETA scenes more than I did when I was of the age when I should have been treasuring them. Any book worth its salt has any many readings as it does readers. My reading has been slow going because it is such an awful pleasure to be in the shadow of my 18-year-old self, that skinny kid who was learning that unprecedented intellectual feats were not resigned to history.

But this makes it sound like reading IJ has been some rosy-fogged visit to the past. What I’m savoring so much, I think, is not remembering the me who first read the words, but … well, here is the truth: It is the lamest thing in the world to feel like you are alone and then to read a story that makes you feel unalone. Great books like IJ can and do accomplish so much more than this small trick of direct identification, but even so: For me to read a book that so expertly articulated the obsession and narcissism and sadness of the glass eye turned in on itself kind of made my life that summer and moving forward more bearable.

That was no small gift to me at the time—and it is no small gift this time, either.

Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.

The Basics

’97: I’m 18, a freshman at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My best friend gets me to read A Supposedly Fun Thing. I go to see DFW speak at the Harvard Film Archive. I fall in love.

’99: Coming back from Australia, I’ve finished Infinite Jest on a six week road trip, and landing in San Francisco, a friend, the same friend in fact, and I go see DFW again at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (now sadly gone). I tell DFW I want to make a play out of IJ, and he laughs and says “Let me know how it turns out.”

’00 (summer) – I do it. I sit in 100 degree heat sweating to death in an apartment on 11th and C in New York, and trim, coax, and cajole the script from it’s 900 or 1000 pages down to 70, focusing entirely on Enfield and Hal, because to take on any more would have been ludicrous.

Sept ’00 – March 6th of ’01: I turn 21 and we produce Infinite Jest, now called Standing Witness. Bonnie Nadell, one of the best literary agents UK has, grants me permission to do it as long as it’s a one time event and we don’t charge for it. My advisor cajoles me into making the script more coherent and understandable. I cast my best friend and closest acting associate as Hal. My genius props designer not only makes tennis balls drop from the ceiling during Eschaton, but makes it snow in the theater later in the play, and a lot of other magic.

Eschaton
More photos from “Standing Witness” here.

Another friend turns Mario into a Bunraku puppet. Two further actresses and friends meld Madam Pyschosis into a character that’s part radio host, part DFW’s narration, part Mario’s voice, and part an excuse for me to try some of the Supercollider patches I was working on at the time to mess with her vocal cadences. The whole cast shows up at 6AM to liberate the bleachers from a block of snow, bleachers that eventually become the audience seats. We crank the sound system in the theater up at 2AM and play jungle into the wee hours when we can’t concentrate on building the set any more. The staff hated us. The audience loved us, both those who’ve read the book and those that haven’t. We finish the play. We have a ridiculous cast party, one of the stage runners singes her eyebrows off on a flaming 151 shot, and we burn the set plans outside in the snow.

I never direct another piece of straight theater again.

Eschaton

Eschaton was the crown jewel of the show – I mean, it’s probably the crown jewel of the book anyway, but as a scene it’s got everything a director could want in it. It’s funny, it’s got drama, it’s got the dual attention between the big kids and little kids, it’s got a huge build up, it turns into a fight … and it ends with one of the most dramatic moments in literature, the infinitely long frozen arc of the computer as it flies out of Lord’s hands through the air and onto the court.

Because it was a black box configuration, we had the opportunity to use one of the balconies as a space for the big kids to sit and watch, and to me that way it was like Pemulis was conducting the madness from on high. Not only was he above the kids but above the audience as well. He could manically shout down at the little kids during the action from above while Hal fretted, Axford (who in my version was sort of Peemster’s sidekick) smoked and Troeltsch narrated. Meanwhile the little kids started pleasantly enough but slowly devolve into this elegant match that turns into a fight, then into a wrestling match, then a melee, then a disaster. It all happened over the course of about 12 minutes.

So many details about it were just amazingly fun to engineer. Dressing everyone up in as much winter gear as we could find, and making sure all the clothes were a little too short (to give the illusion that the actors, all 18-21, were actually 12-14). The actor who played Otis P. Lord gave an awesome performance in the perfect beanie, playing the most gigantic nerd on earth and carting around an old monitor which we destroyed every night (no easy thing to engineer, throwing a heavy monitor about 20 feet over the heads of a bunch of fighting actors…). The impending sense of disaster as tennis balls started to fly off in all directions, and the double horror and glee that all the designers and I felt as we both watched the audience get (sort of intentionally) pelted with balls and held our breath hoping nothing would knock a light or a piece of sound equipment out of alignment.

Not only did I direct the whole thing, I sound designed it as well (theater was always kind of just an excuse for me to have access to loud toys and a place to use them in), and my favorite moment of the whole play was the sonically enhanced crash of the monitor onto the floor that coincided with the blackout at the end of the 1st act and the loudest noise I could make (I ripped it from the explosion at the beginning of 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare). We spit it out through two giant subwoofers under the audience. Literally earthshaking. It was magnificent. Every night we got some of the loudest and most raucous applause I’ve ever heard at a theater.

Coda

I haven’t actually read the book since then … it was so very much of a particular time and place for me. Since my life has taken me away from theater, I didn’t think about it much again till Infinite Summer asked me for the use of the picture of the Eschaton game and Matthew offered me a chance to reflect (by the way, the balls falling from the ceiling were more for visual effect than because the book calls for them … dramatic liberties I suppose). In doing so, I found an old review of the play on Wallace-L … read it if you care too, although definitely be warned of spoiler alerts about a few details:

Happy reading, I hope IJ gives you as much joy, wonder, happiness and sadness as it did for me all the times I’ve read it.