Infinite Summer

Category: Guests

  • Andrew Womack: Love

    Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.

    I grew up in a tennis household, amidst gleaming trophies of miniature champions immortalized in mid-serve. In my house, tennis dominated our television viewing, closets were stuffed with retired racquets, and the hampers always reeked.

    To this day, my father is a tremendous player, with a game so solid you can’t pick it apart. Return his serve (good luck), and he’ll reply with dizzying spin. He complains about arthritis in his rotator cuff, then sends a lob to wherever you aren’t.

    To be fair, his ability is hardly innate. Long before I was born, he began practicing at least every other night. (Playing actual matches was reserved for the weekends.) He would hone his serve by setting up empty tennis-ball cans in the service courts, knocking them down until he could place the ball with the kind of precision that squeezes a laugh out of a nervous opponent. At 76 years of age, his game is still tight (even if his speed on the court is reduced—osteopath’s orders); though when talking about diehard players, assessing whether 76 is young or old is missing the point: The important fact is he’s now been playing for 57 years. That’s a level of experience few amateur players will ever have time to catch up to.

    It’s true that I have not and never will beat my father at tennis. I am probably more OK with this than he is; his coaching over the years has been a constant source of positive reinforcement, but despite his best efforts it has only gone far enough to turn me from a bad sport (it was years before he’d let me swing one of his new racquets again) into a serious appreciator, if not a player, of the game. I’ll give credit to my forehand as pretty devastating, but everything else is succotash.

    I first came to Wallace through his David Lynch piece—which hooked me with its descriptions of the director’s constant coffee drinking and resultant urinating behind nearby trees during the filming of Lost Highway—which I read in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. But it was the adjacent story in the book, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (published as “The String Theory” in Esquire in 1996), that sealed Wallace’s place in my mind. Because finally, here was someone who could write, really write, about tennis. Someone who finds the joy in the game’s enduring physical and mental struggle, and the humor in realizing there are only a few people in the world who possess the dedication it takes to truly excel at the sport—and that you will never be one of those people. Because it is very funny to come face to face with your limitations. It’s the same kind of funny as when your father, 40 years your senior, places a serve to your backhand and all you can do is laugh it off.

    I was taken so much with the article that I Xeroxed and mailed it to my father, who I knew would enjoy it as much as I did, and for much the same reasons. It’s widely lamented that there are no decent tennis movies,44 though there aren’t as many complaints about tennis books—this is both to do with the fact that tennis books center on the psychology of the game (as in, how to freak out other players and how to keep yourself from getting freaked out by other players) and because articles and excerpts fit more neatly into the rare holes that open in a player’s practice schedule.

    I phoned a couple of weeks later, and asked how he’d liked it, and he said the footnotes threw him, and that he couldn’t finish it.45

    Throughout the piece and in Infinite Jest, Wallace—who, as is widely noted, was a ranked junior player—distinguishes between “serious players” and the rest of us. (I weigh in more at the seriously unserious end of this scale.) In both works, he needs to draw this distinction because, of course, we can all guess that most readers are not tennis appreciators, much less tennis players, much less amateur players, much less professional players, much less the very best of the best, the Top 10, the Grand Slam winners. And while it’s partly out of reverence for the serious players’ ability, it’s also because, concentrically speaking, the vast majority of his audience will not fully get that reverence unless he spells it out. Certainly, Wallace’s style is powerful, muscular—he’s unafraid to force a point home.46

    Which is why Wallace’s tennis writing is so dead-on, why it has always struck me so specially. Because I too love the game, and love knowing I will never be much of a tennis player (much less a serious player)—because I would rather watch and marvel at the ability of others. That is what I love. And I suppose Wallace has a character in Infinite Jest who does just that, too.

  • infinitedetox: Waving the White Flag: Reading as Rehabilitation

    infinitedetox is blogging about addiction and Infinite Jest at infinitedetox.wordpress.com.

    My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.

    Some time around May, 2004, I willfully entered into a relationship with pharmaceutical opiates. It began as a sort of experiment, quickly escalated into a recreation, and from there vectored toward present-day dependency on a straight line whose slope was gradual, but unwavering.

    In December of last year it became apparent that this line would never flatten out or stabilize on its own, that it would just keep trundling on upwards, tending toward infinity given infinite time. This is when I started to get scared.

    David Foster Wallace had just passed away and I decided to re-read41 Infinite Jest over the holidays, and something difficult to explain happened to me when I began digging into the book again. Somehow the book–and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ—made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating. But let me give it a stab anyway.

    You’ve probably noticed that the idea of self-surrender is treated as a sort of grand, motivating force throughout Infinite Jest – cf. “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away” (p. 53); cf. the Ennet House’s unnamed founder’s “sudden experience of total self-surrender”; and especially cf. every addicted character’s surrender to their enslaving Substance, every recovering character’s surrender to a Higher Power, and can it be just a coincidence that Don Gately’s very own AA group goes by the name White Flag?

    Now let’s take a book. Any book will do, but I think Big Books like Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses work particularly well.42 The thing with books – the more you put into them, the more you get out of them (“Give It Away To Keep It”). You may not care about junior tennis or Quebecois separatism or avant-garde film or AA cliché-mongering, but if you’re going to make any sense of Infinite Jest you’re probably going to have to start caring, a lot. You’re going to have to accept that proto-fascist tennis instructors and disabled pistol-toting terrorists are capable of delivering frighteningly insightful critiques of U.S. culture. You’re going to have to lay aside your Irony Shields and believe, with all your heart, that clichés can be just as potent as Don Gately says they are. In other words, you’re going to have to surrender to the book.

    Be careful not to confuse surrender with passivity. I’m talking about an active surrender here. The actively-surrendered reader will sift through reams of mathematical arcana in order to tease out the implications of an oblique reference, or follow an obscure narrative thread deep into the bowels of Greek mythology to flesh out the author’s hinted-at ideas. Surrendered readers develop an eye for the author’s shortcomings. They share in the author’s failings. They are engaged, but not encaged.43 It may be instructive to compare active surrender with the drooling, pants-soiling passivity of Substance abuse and Entertainment addiction as portrayed in IJ.

    You can probably see where I’m going with this. What happened to me, on December 26, 2008, is that I surrendered myself completely to Infinite Jest. I signed some sort of metaphorical blood-oath committing myself to looking at the world through David Foster Wallace’s eyes. And what happened then was that I saw myself as DFW would have seen me, refracted through the wobbly nystagmic lens of Infinite Jest. Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together.

    Of course, the book ended, and vacation along with it. The circumstances of life returned to normal, and life’s normal stresses and anxieties returned along with them. I stayed clean for exactly two weeks, after which the addiction vector resumed its patient acclivation at precisely the same point it left off. My Shit went back into diaspora.

    Fast-forward six months or so and here we are: another reading of Infinite Jest, another Total Surrender, another attempt to Starve the Beast. I don’t know, though – I’ve got a good feeling about this one. The circumstances, before which I admit complete powerlessness, are different, perhaps permanently so. As of this writing I am 10 days, 4 hours and 22 minutes sober, with some 758 pages of Infinite Jest left to go. But as they say — one day at a time.

  • 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.

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick: On Teaching Infinite Jest

    Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College; she’s the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, and co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons. She blogs there and at Planned Obsolescence.

    As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it–the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction–with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it). It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

    And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out–okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret–every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

    My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them–or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing–we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

    I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

    But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule–for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading–was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

    The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

    I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

  • Nick Maniatis: The Howling Fantods

    Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the fourth time he stopped counting.

    The Howling Fantods was inspired by Infinite Jest. I bought a discounted first edition of Infinite Jest in response to a review I had read in what I think was the Melbourne Age. My first Wallace reading experience was on public transport, on my way home one evening, in Canberra, Australia. The opening pages of that novel changed me.

    It was 1996 and I was in my third year of university. An icon for the program NCSA Mosaic had appeared on the desktop of computers at the Australian National University and opened my eyes to the world wide web. In late ’96 or early ’97 I made a free personal “me” page using the geocities (ugh) hosting environment. I loved reading Wallace. I loved the idea of this web thing. I merged the two and the SCREAMING FANTODS was born. (I was emailed a correction a few days later)

    Around this time I discovered wallace-l the Wallace mailing list back then appeared to be mostly academics and students. There were a number of amazing group reads of Infinite Jest co-ordinated through wallace-l. Another just finished up prior to Infinite Summer (IJIM – Infinite Jest, In Memorial). Right now the focus over at wallace-l is Oblivion.

    I don’t think I’d ever been privy to such articulate, academic, and passionate discussion about a text. Ever. There were people there who were just as internet aware as me, if not more so. They were also much, much smarter. It was scary. It was fantastic. And all their discussions were searchable. They still are.

    Infinite Jest was, I think, published at just the right time. The blossoming world wide web brought readers, academics and fans together using a common, digital, user-created medium that seemed designed to discuss this book.

    I feel terribly lucky to have been part of that early online community. I’m glad they were there for me in September last year.

    And now we have Infinite Summer. There’s not much more exciting than seeing your favourite author mentioned all over the web. And not only that, the focus is on his writing, not what happened in his life. There is no way I’d be ever able to find the time to organise something as mammoth as a large scale Infinite Jest group read, so it is wonderful to see the dedicated team here managing spectacularly.

    The best bit, readers, is that you’ve all made it this far. You’re almost over the hump. Once you get through the first 250 or so pages the bigger payoffs start hitting in droves. I’m keeping an eye on the forums and blogs and quite clearly many of you out there are finding this much easier and more entertaining than you thought it would be. I’ll let you in on another secret:

    It gets better.

    I’ll be surprised if you can keep to as little as 75 pages a week after page 500. That will certainly be the biggest challenge.

    Bits that I think are worth mentioning / revisiting from the first 210 pages:

    p37 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: I’m sorry everyone, it’s the ice-cream. Confirmed by a trusted Wallace-l member who asked David Foster Wallace personally. Sorry. It was even harder for me to accept because when I was reading IJ on release I hadn’t ever seen Dove ice cream or chocolate in Australia. I thought soap was the only option.

    p37-38 Clenette and p128-135 Yrstruly: I know a number of you skipped these two sections. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. Honestly? I’d prefer you skip them if it means you don’t close the book and never open it again. I found them hard the first time too. I also had an inner urge to find them offensive. Was Wallace making fun of these people? How come the other sections don’t read like this? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is narrating? Wait a minute, who was narrating before?

    My advice? When you read IJ again (or if you flick back for a second attempt) just go with the Clenette and Yrstruly sections. Don’t try to parse everything, they don’t work if you slow down and read carefully. Both sections work more effectively when you are already vaguely familiar with their content because then the voices and rhythms start to wash over you. When that happens so do the characters. And then you’re inside their heads and THAT is not comfortable. In fact it is very, very uncomfortable. I’m not going to try for a moment to argue that they are realistic voices or heads to be in. But these two sections do their jobs very well if you just let go and trust Wallace. Does this sound familiar?

    It wasn’t until a few years ago did I get a flicker of how spot-on Wallace is with these sections. Post schoolyard fight, I had some students write reports of the incident they witnessed. In their rush to get everything out of their heads and onto the page they seemed to forget about formal English grammar, or formal anything, for that matter. It was stream of consciousness stuff. Emotion mixed with description mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue mixed with unusual, but workable, phonetic transpositions. These kids were not illiterate by any means. If anything the stress of the situation had messed with their ability to express themselves using the English expected of them. The reports reminded me instantly of Infinite Jest and made me appreciate it even more.

    If you want to see if Wallace can make this work in greater length try ‘John Billy’ in Wallace’s short story collection ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. There’s also another example of this voice in another of his stories. But to tell you which one would actually mess with the impact of it. I know you’ll find it yourself.

    p105-109 Marathe and Steeply on choice: Which character do you side with? Are you actively choosing? Or just going with your gut reaction? Is it impossible to choose? Double-bind maybe? When I first read IJ I didn’t find the Steeply and Marathe sections particularly compelling.

    On the second read they were my focus. It is so easy to sweep the Steeply and Marathe conversations to the side when you want to know more about the entertainment. I think they’re some of the most underrated parts of the book. Read them.

    p144-151 Videophony: I find it impossible to use Skype without thinking about this section. Particularly when I want to check my email or surf the web at the same time as the current video chat and feel I can’t without being rude. I’ve also become aware of how often I relax with my arms folded above my head while sitting upright, how often I scratch my nose, and how often I pick at my right ear.

    p157-169: Every single line of this section is pure gold and leads perfectly to page 169’s time slowed down can’t look at the page (but can’t look away either) moment.

    p196: HELP WANTED. I don’t think I need to explain this.

    The very best thing about Infinite Summer so far, for someone who has read the book way more times than is healthy, is re-living my first read via all of your comments and posts. The Infinite Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog are doing a mighty fine job too.

    Infinite Jest is my favourite book and I have not stopped reading it for any length of time since I opened it to the first page all those years ago. Be careful, or else this Infinite Summer thing might live up to just a little more than its name…

  • Michael Pietsch: Editing Infinite Jest

    Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, and was David Foster Wallace’s editor. He adapted the following from “Editing Wallace,” a Q&A with Rick Moody, published in Sonora Review 55, May 2009.

    In April 1992 I received on submission from David Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, around 150 pages of Infinite Jest, the opening section. They were wild, smart, funny, sad, and unlike any pages of manuscript I'd ever held in my hands. The range of voices and settings sent me reeling. The transvestite breakdown on the subway, the kid in the doctor's office. The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The Lung. Young Hal with his little brass one-hitter. Gately, Troelsch, Schacht. The names! Erdedy, Wardine, Madame Psychosis. I’d read chapters from it published as short stories in magazines and here at last was the gigantic construct that linked those wildly disparate pieces. What I remember is that David knew his book was going to be very, very long, and he was looking for someone whose editorial suggestions he thought he might listen to. I was lucky enough to be working at Little, Brown, a company that was willing to support this kind of endeavor. We signed a contract and waited.

    When he was around two-thirds through the novel David sent me a giant stack of pages and asked for my thoughts. I protested that without the whole story it would be impossible to know what ultimately mattered. But I tried to give him an accounting of when I found it intolerably confusing or slow or just too hard to make sense of. I banged my head hardest against the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and the Orin Incandenza football stories and David revised those strands considerably.

    We’d agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this? Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them.

    Every decision was David's. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons for them as clear as possible. But every change was his. It is a common misconception that the writer turns the manuscript over to the editor, who then revises, shapes, and cuts at will. In fact the editor’s job is to earn the writer’s agreement that changes he or she suggests are worth making. David accepted many cuts—around 250 manuscript pages is what I recall. But he resisted others, for reasons that he usually explained.

    Here are a few of those responses and explanations. They give a sense of how engaged David was in this process and of how much fun it was to work with him.

    p. 52—This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter.

    p. 82—I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back.

    p. 133—Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up disc so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding.)

    pp. 327-330. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on your part, my canines are bared on this one.

    Ppp. 739-748. I’ve rewritten it—for about the 11th time—for clarity, but I bare teeth all the way back to the 2nd molar on cutting it.

    P. 785ff—I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?

    I keep trying to imagine encountering David’s books separate from the tall, athletic, casual, brilliant, concerned, funny man I knew—the way we encounter most writing, bodies of work whose creators we never meet, complete years before we encounter them. It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind. And I have to say that the David we encounter through Infinite Jest is pretty amazingly like the David I knew. When for a moment I manage to imagine myself as a reader opening up a copy of Infinite Jest for the first time, the way I opened V or Soldier’s Pay or Suttree or A Handful of Dust or The Canterbury Tales, I think Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

  • Marcus Sakey: Decoding Infinite Jest; or, Don’t

    Marcus Sakey is the award-winning author of Good People, The Blade Itself: A Novel, and At the City’s Edge, all of which are in development as feature films. His new novel, The Amateurs, comes out August 6th. His website features excerpts, contests, and tips for writers.

    I picked up IJ the same way I imagine a lot of you did—while browsing, I was caught by the cover, the hyperbolic quote, and the heft of the thing. This was 1997, an era when I was more likely to be willing to invest in a doorstop novel. But even then, 1079 pages was going to take some persuading, so I opened to the reviews: “Uproarious,” “Exhilarating,” “Truly remarkable,” “Spectacularly good.”

    Okay. You win.

    My first read of the novel was by and large a pleasure. I’ll admit that there were moments when I wondered if I could trust Wallace to deliver the goods. And at that time, I thought that the book could have benefited from a sterner editor (although the submitted manuscript was apparently significantly longer.)

    Still, I labored through the rough spots, and found more than enough to tickle me and keep me going. But while I don’t want to reveal too much, I will say that when I got to the end, my initial reaction was, “Huh.”

    Not in a bad way. There had been moments of such startling brilliance along the way, episodes so hilariously sad and tragically funny, that I knew even at the time that it was something special. But still, at the very end, there was a “Huh” factor.

    Fast-forward two months and ten books, and here’s the thing—I was still thinking about Infinite Jest. In fact, I found myself seeing it more clearly, getting more seduced by it, than when I was actually reading the thing.

    With distance what at first seemed sprawling begins to come into a more cohesive, if still massive, picture. Wallace is a writer who does not spare you the full force of his brain; in fact, he demands your effort like a brilliant professor who expects that you show up every week, well-rested, on time, and with the reading done.

    However, novels aren’t read that way. They’re read in sips and gulps, sometimes a sleepy page before bed, sometimes a hundred with a pot of coffee. Not only that, but because Wallace believes in complexity, he doesn’t always reveal the structure of things all at once; doesn’t make obvious the nature of the world he’s building.

    But finish the book, let it stew, and it will all come together, I promise. And it’s more than worth the effort. So much so in fact, that about a year later I decided to read it again.

    And brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you, on a second read, there wasn’t a word I would cut. Once you’ve got a sense of the greater whole, and once you trust Wallace, the thing is fucking genius. I write a very different style of book, but even so, it makes me want to pack it in and go home. He’s that good.

    But I made a mistake the second time. I thought that because I had puzzled out certain aspects, the rest of the book was a riddle, a code I needed to crack. So I went at it that way. I took notes on characters and relationships. I annotated. I formulated guesses about what “The Entertainment” was, and where it showed up, and how what happened at the end played into what happened at the beginning. I visited message boards and forums and the Wallace discussion list. I spent as much time taking notes on the novel as I did reading the damn thing.

    And here’s what I learned: There is no secret.

    Fundamentally, IJ is a novel about two things: the pursuit of happiness, and the impossibilities of communication. Wallace explores those themes and their intersections in a hundred different ways. And because he was a genius who didn’t believe there were answers to these questions, he also contradicts himself over and over and over. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that there are no assertions of importance in the text that aren’t contradicted somewhere else.

    I realize that sounds annoying. But that’s why I’m writing this piece. It’s only annoying if you look at the novel as a code to crack, if you see everything as a clue.

    After a second read, there were many things I understood more clearly. And damn, how I loved it. But could I tell you, unequivocally, “what happened”?

    Nope.

    It’s not about that. There aren’t easy answers in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. There aren’t single perspectives in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. The world can’t be summed up in a sentence, and so Wallace not only didn’t try—he demonstrated some of the reasons why the world is the way it is.

    Last year, David Foster Wallace hung himself. I’d never met the man, but it threw me into a funk. After a week of moping about, I picked up Infinite Jest again as a sort of personal tribute, and read it for the third time. Read it trusting him, read it feeling the sorrow and the joy and the sheer intellectual pleasure.

    And finally, I read it right.

  • Jason Kottke: Forward

    Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. The archive of his Infinite Jest commentary can be found here.

    Is everyone in here yet? Yes? Ok.

    I’m thrilled to kick off Infinite Summer with this here Forward. Before we get started, I have a disclaimer to offer. Well, actually several related disclaimers which, taken together, should convince you that I am not at all qualified to speak to you about the literary or cultural impact of Infinite Jest and its author on contemporary American society. Apologies if that’s what you’re here for; in that case I can refer you to Dave Eggers’ foreword in the new paperback copy of IJ.

    Now, the first disclaimer: I was not an English major. In fact, I don’t even read that much fiction. In the past five years, I have read The Corrections, Infinite Jest (for the second time), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Pride and Prejudice, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, nearly half of 2666, and that’s about it, give or take some Lord of the Rings. I will be of little assistance in helping you to understand how Infinite Jest fits into the canon of American literature, past or present.

    Writing is something I don’t know a great deal about either. I earn my keep as a blogger, which profession most people assume is synonymous with writing but really isn’t, in the same way that basketball players run but aren’t runners and architects draw but aren’t, uh, drawers. I love Wallace’s writing in IJ and elsewhere but beyond that, I can’t tell you why it’s good, who his writing was influenced by, who he influences, or what the purpose of his complex sentence structure and grammatical tics is. (Or should that be “are”? (See what I’m talking about?))

    Furthermore, I do not play tennis, haven’t suffered from depression, have never been addicted to anything (except perhaps Tetris on the original Game Boy), don’t know the Boston area that well, haven’t attended an _______ Anonymous meeting, and did not go to a small college in New England, all things that Wallace pulled from his life experience and wove together in the IJ narrative. Does Wallace accurately convey to the reader the pressures felt by the exceptional junior tennis player? Does the AA stuff ring true? What about the addiction aspects of the novel? I can help you with none of those questions.

    But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.

    And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

    And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.

  • Colin Meloy: Why I am Reading Infinite Jest

    Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.

    I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase. Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12 years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation when I was thirteen and I had fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex, warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

    Until now.

    Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread, the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.