Category: Avery Edison

(Note: This post was not a reaction to Kevin’s post from yesterday, but works in tandem with it, I think. Although it’s safe to say that we each draw very different conclusions.)

I am not enjoying Infinite Jest.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun experience, right? So here it is. Confession time.

I resent that I’m having to work this hard, that I feel like I’m indulging the author. I resent having to read enormous blocks of text, with no paragraph breaks, for pages and pages at a time. I resent the endnotes that (more often than not) only serve to either waste my time or confuse me even further. I resent that I’m continually reaching supposed milestones (“just make it to page 100!” “get to 200!” “300 is where you get rewarded for all your effort!”) that don’t actually represent any appreciable change in tone, style or plot.

I feel like my time is being wasted with an overabundance of technical explanations of subjects — tennis, drugs — that are largely irrelevant. DFW is explaining the wrong stuff. I’m at page 310 (behind, I know) and by now I’d have absolutely loved to see some explanation of the world these characters live in. Instead, we’re only being given vague allusions to “the great concavity” that leave me itching to check the wallacewiki just so I know what’s bloody going on.

Because that’s the thing — I don’t feel like anything actually is going on. I’ve gotten three hundred pages into this book, and nothing at all has happened. I feel like I have read three hundred pages of introductions to characters. Some of those characters (Hal, the folks at Ennet House) have been introduced multiple times, to no further elucidation. Some of them (James Orin Incandenza Sr., Himself, Guillaume DuPlessis) are freaking dead.

Instead of action, I’m getting portraits. Highly detailed — to a fault — portraits. And that would be fantastic if I were in an art gallery, or reading a collection of biographies. But I’m not — this is supposed to be a story, a series of interesting events told in a compelling manner. Not a bunch of descriptions of people and locales presented in an outright hostile manner to weed out the ‘unworthy’.

This post sounds a lot more hate-fuelled than I intended it to, I’m sure. I don’t hate this book, otherwise I would be quitting.⁵⁹ But I am frustrated by it, and it is becoming more and more important that a payoff arrive, and soon.

I’m sure it will. Many people I respect are having a great time reading Infinite Jest. I hope I can join them.

Before I dive into the main body of this post, there are a few notes I should get out of the way.

Firstly, I realize that the topic I’m to write about — suicide in IJ — is a little unseemly in light of David Foster Wallace’s own departure from this plane of existence just last year. I apologize for that, but it really can’t be helped.

Second, I will make — every now and then — statements about suicide that I will appear to present as fact. I should clarify (without going into detail) that I have some experience with the whole horrible concept, and am speaking with personal insight, albeit not professional.

Lastly, I totally spent like, ten minutes trying to make a pun out of a combination of the word “unseemly” and the “seam” of a tennis ball, for the purposes of titling this post. This is similar to last week’s endeavor, which saw me spend an equal — perhaps greater — amount of time ruminating on how I could fit the phrase “I decided to call an audible and call Audible” into my post.³⁸

This week’s massive-chunk-of-IJ-that-I-had-to-read-all-at-once³⁹ featured not one but two suicides: a third person look at Madame Pychosis’ — possibly successful — purposeful overdose; and a discussion between Hal and Orin on the cause of their late father’s… well, lateness.

I was struck that Wallace seemed to take great pains to make sure that we saw these two examples of suicide as wildly different from the normal perception of the act. Madame P’s method of choice might seem terribly familiar to anyone who knows much about drug addicts (or watches a whole bunch of CSI), but Wallace — from the beginning of the section — assures you that you don’t know jack:

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction is, of course, more obviously unique — a perversion of the already perverse act of sticking one’s head in an oven. It is the last great technical achievement of a lifelong genius. There is sometimes a desire accompanying suicide to do it as efficiently as possible, which can be at odds with an occasional wish to inflict greater psychic damage than normal on those who have ‘driven you to it’. Incandenza’s method meets both requirements.

These are probably just a couple of literary flourishes in a book already full of them — Infinite Jest is not one for standard deaths of characters, as we learned when reading of Guillaume DuPlessis’ accidental suffocation. But still, there is irony to be found in the fact that Wallace spends such time developing these off-the-wall methods of suicide for his characters, and then ended his own life with a simple belt.

Hal and Orin’s discussion of Himself’s death strays into a discussion of grief itself, and how to handle it. Hal, prodigy that he is, refuses to submit to the prescribed process of loss. He sees his grief counselor as an enemy combatant, to be studied and conquered. This battle appears to be the very method with which he chooses to deal with his grief — Hal cannot see things other than as academic or athletic challenges to be overcome — and we are given no opinion from our narrator (whomever he or she is) on whether or not this is healthy.

I didn’t know David Foster Wallace, and have only read 274 pages of his masterwork, but already I grieve for him and for the books he will never write. I’m sure that part of the process of dealing with this minute amount of grief is to look for clues or hints in the author’s work. Such a cliche way of dealing with this loss would be frowned upon by Hal. But I think that’s okay, because maybe Hal is kind of a jerk.

This post subsidized by Kellogg’s.²⁶

Everyone knows that Sunday evening feeling.²⁷ The pit in your stomach that grows and grows while you watch crappy TV shows that you’re not really watching because school is tomorrow and you have. Not. Done. Your. Homework.

Those who read my post last week (“Not the best student“) will not be shocked to learn that I suffered heavily from the Sunday evening feeling. I do not believe that I ever, in my school career, did a single piece of homework until the night before it was due.

How does this relate to Infinite Jest? Please. Like you even have to ask.

I’ve just finished some blast processing, reading all 75 of this week’s pages in one sitting, which MAN I do not recommend. It’s certainly lucky that, as Matthew mentioned, these pages were a lot more easy going than earlier fare. But still, that’s a lot of pages. I’m looking to Infinite Summer as an exercise in reading and writing, sure, but more than anything I’m hoping to learn some time-management skills, too.

I can’t help but be jealous of Hal’s routine at Enfield Tennis Academy  — there’s very little space there to mess up or miss a deadline. I suppose it could be that I’m just jealous of his life, of course — what I wouldn’t give to be moneyed, super-intelligent and a tennis ace. Well, maybe scratch the tennis part, I’m not really one for sports. And his smarts seem like a bit of a burden at times, actually.

Okay, so I just want the money. Big deal.

The more we delve into Hal’s (mis)adventures at ETA, the more anxious I grow about that first chapter. I’m really liking this guy, guys. And I don’t want him to become that trapped soul, that shell of a person.

I really feel like this post is lacking a unifying theme, but I’m sure that’s to be expected after cramming that much IJ into my head. And the whole Madame Psychosis section did some damage all by itself. I can’t quite work out if I like it or not. Or even if I like the idea of her show or not.

I mean, it’s certainly a great concept — this mysterious figure, the only paid host of a college radio station, sending out whatever she feels like to MIT students and anyone else who can pick it up. I’m just not sure I’d be one of the students who tuned in with any kind of regularity.

The show we ‘overheard’ seemed deliberately opaque, and hard to parse — I’m presuming even more so delivered to your ears. I’m wondering if the show is Foster Wallace’s way of commenting on the difficulty of reading his own work. I’m wondering if that’s too shallow an interpretation on my part. I’m wondering if my pop tarts are finished cooking yet.

Okay, that last one isn’t really relevant, I’ll grant you. Unless it’s somehow telling that I finished that chunk of Infinite Jest and immediately craved cinnamon pop tarts?

(Note: I request silence from those of you who know that I always crave cinnamon pop tarts.)

So: is everyone doing better than me, or are you guys having to indulge in massive catch-up sessions, too? Did you like the Madame Psychosis section, and if you did can you tell me why and what it’s about so I can steal your words and use them at parties to sound clever? And are my pop tarts done? (Yes.)

The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.

I know we passed endnote 24 last week, but I want to return to it. And I will do so because when I type things here you have to read them poop ha ha ha I made you read poop.

In 2006 I went away to film school¹⁷ fully expecting to pop out of it again three years later as the most visionary writer/director of my generation. Dream big, kids. I left three weeks later, in part because of some assigned reading that very closely resembled endnote 24, only longer, and with that gross shiny-textbook smell.

So I would like to extend my thanks to David Foster Wallace for making me relive that experience, albeit shorter and in the comfort of my own home, as opposed to hunched over a library table desperately trying to read as fast as possible so I can do my essay/s. I was there three weeks — how did I get behind on so many essays? And why were there essays in a supposedly practice-based course? And why am I still bitter about this?

I wasn’t sold on endnote 24 until I read the above passage. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The summary for Cage III – Free Show is an amazing concept. It’s funny and twisted and exciting and everything you think Infinite Jest will be when you first hear about it.

I can’t help but view the whole book in a different light, with Free Show in mind. I would actively discourage myself from such a conscious process, but I’m so obsessed with the quote at the top of this post that I would rather interpret IJ the wrong way than try to put it at the back of my mind.

“Fine, Avery” I hear you say, “you liked a tiny portion of an endnote we all slogged through. Well done. But what about the rest of the book so far?”

I’m enjoying it.

Oh, you want more than that, right? Okay. Well, I’m having great fun with the Marathe/Steeply segment. Although that’s not to say I have any idea what the hell is going on (sentences like “have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray” put paid to that notion). I don’t know if it’s my status as a trans-individual that grants me such delight in Steeply’s extremely poor disguise (re: the lopsided boobs — we’ve all been there), or if we’re all having a good time reading it but I’m not going to question my enjoyment. Especially since I have so little time for such questions after scrawling acronyms from the section onto my arm in a failed effort to remember them.

If you’re interested, having such epidermal annotations publicly visible in a crowded mall will draw the attention of security agents desperate to know if QFP is some kind of terrorist organisation with a vendetta against Sears.

Just, y’know. FYI.

The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

“He was forty, and she was twenty. Big age difference. Especially at that age. But they had a baby, and she turned into a completely different person. She punched him. Kicked him in the privates.”

Oh, sorry. That’s part of a conversation I overhead this morning in a diner¹¹ as I waited for my order to arrive and tried pretty darn hard to read Infinite Jest.

I figured since I had to sit through some middle-aged woman’s not-so-elegant discussion of postpartum depression, you should too. Hope you enjoyed it.

Of course, this is something I’ll have to get used to. I’m not the fastest reader, and I’ve never dealt with such a lengthy book before¹² so my method of getting to the end of this thing will be to read it whenever possible, no matter what (possibly loud and obnoxious) company I’m in.

Diner table. Bus stop. Therapy. Wait, scratch that last one. Or maybe not — considering the themes already touched upon in the first hundred pages of IJ, maybe the pretence that I read the tome in the company of my mental health practitioner will be taken as some deep, insightful tying-in of commentary and commented-upon.

Which would certainly not be any kind of misrepresentation on my part. I am insightful as balls.¹³

This space was meant to be taken to introduce myself to you all. There’s a chance I’m failing. In fairness, I’m a little nervous, realizing that if this were Sesame Street, I’d be the kid singled out as the one “doing her own thing”. My fellow guides are all distinctly proven entities, whereas I’m the plucky newcomer with the lucky bat and the sports metaphor that doesn’t make sense in the context of literature discussion.

If you’re wondering, I’m told I’m here to provide a youthful perspective, which I can only read as meaning that the other guides are decrepit and irrelevant, and I’m the cool, young chick that’ll bring in the 18-35 demographic we so desperately crave so that we can make muchos advertising dollars off of David Foster Wallace’s back.

To recap: we’re shills; I’m the only guide worth reading, because I’m young; and having babies makes you hit your husband. I hope you’re taking notes.