Category: Eden M. Kennedy

I have to admit, I had doubts that I would reach the point where I’d have the privilege of telling you that I have finally, really started loving this book.

Speaking as a somewhat emotionally stunted adult, a lot of the ETA scenes are my favorites, how the gravely serious roots of an Eschaton scenario go ass over teacup when Air Marshal Kittenplan (Kittenplan!) takes a nuclear warhead tennis ball in the neck and the whole event devolves chaotically, balletically, and in super slo-mo, into rubble. That scene is a golden piece of deadly serious yet juvenile tit-for-tat the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last time I watched The Bad News Bears. And how Pemulis may be some sort of elegant, raw math genius but he also gives in to the happy impulse to label his Eschaton diagram of available combatant megatonnage HALSADICK. My inner thirteen-year-old boy is delighted and relieved when this kind of stuff goes down. I’d make a terrible politician.

Gately helped my romance with IJ to blossom, as well as Hal and Pemulis,⁴⁹ and I want to think about the AA stuff some more, and the theme of repetition and recovery that winds such a heartfelt⁵⁰ thread through Infinite Jest.

I was really affected by infinitedetox’s post about his own dependencies and how he was viewing his recovery through the lens of IJ. The section where Gately is lying on the couch at Ennet House listening to a newly admitted addict argue against the daily drill of meetings required by AA struck a chord with me. (I’m not an addict, though I’ve lived with addicts — they tended to disappear my books, and I wonder if they might have rationalized the thefts by arguing that since at the time I worked in a bookstore, I could therefore more readily steal⁵¹ replacement copies of whatever had gone missing⁵² So I’m not an addict, no, but I do understand the need to come to terms with small losses, and to try to learn not to be so defensive in the face of the world’s most ordinary demands.)

I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but reading this book has been like a yoga for me, in the sense that it’s become an almost-daily practice for which it’s necessary to find a quiet space to focus my mind on an object outside itself. I’ve been practicing ashtanga yoga for more than ten years and I’ve found that over time there’s a cumulative and deeply grounding effect gained after regularly, dutifully, and unquestioningly attempting those weirdly liberating knots yoga ask you to tie yourself into. Much like this book.

So when a newly sober fellow demands that an old timer explain to him why AA wants him to keep going to these goddamn MEETINGS all the time, why can’t they just tell you the answer right from the get-go? my first non-AA-going thought was that maybe the point of AA meetings is just to keep going to the meetings. It’s a practice like any other, like going to yoga and listening and stretching until hey, you can touch your toes, or create more space around your heart just by using your breath; or if you don’t like that analogy, like slowly working a piece of wood until over time it becomes shapely and smooth. There are things that are only revealed over time, after doing the work, and those things are sort of the point, yes, but the process of showing up every day is also the point, showing up to your life, to your work, to your family, to your meetings, to the book you’re reading — just doing the work is also sort of the point.

Ninety per cent of life is just showing up, I’ve heard it said, and I’ve always kind of hated that saying because it implies that you can just shamble into class in your sweats without having done the reading. But I also love that saying because if you show up you’re allowing for one of at least two possibilities: that you may be called on and exposed as unprepared, or that you may go uncalled-on and retain your facade of preparedness, but either way you’re still in the position to learn something new about the subject at hand that you wouldn’t have, had you stayed in bed. This weekend my friend Danielle told me that she once had a frustrated professor who stood up in front of her half-empty Friday morning lecture and rewarded everyone who’d come instead of sleeping in or skipping off to Stowe for another in a series of three-day weekends.⁵³ The professor rewarded the students in attendance by saying, “Everyone who showed up today gets an A in this class.”

So I’m glad I keep showing up for Infinite Jest, ready or not. Hey, you showed up, too! So what if you’re behind, or lost, or didn’t look up the word “eschatology” until ten minutes ago. Keep going. We get an A just for being here today.

While browsing through the forums I was delighted to find the beginnings of a discussion about something that had crossed my mind as I read: would it be possible to make a movie out of Infinite Jest that wasn’t a tragic flop?

User “Good Old Neon” jumped right to the question of who would dare to direct such a thing, and his suggestions tickled me pink: either Wes or Paul Thomas Anderson. I can hear laptops banging shut from coast to coast at the mere suggestion that Wes Anderson be allowed within ten feet of the book, but it’s not a bad idea. Who better to create a reality just a few degrees off from our own, as we see in IJ? I have nothing but love for P.T. Anderson and I’d let him at the script in a heartbeat, but I’d also be afraid that I’d die a lonely old woman before he finished it.

Before we starting casting the Incandenza brothers,³¹ or discussing the very real film adaptation of another DFW book that is scheduled to be released four days after we all finish reading this one, let’s look at a few non-fatal attempts in the history of cinema to adapt a beloved and word-tastic classic novel to a ruthlessly visual medium.

Ulysses (1967) starring Milo O’Shea; directed by Joseph Strick (who somewhat ironically was fresh from being fired from the set of Justine, an adaptation of a Lawrence Durrell novel; Strick also produced an adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — the guy wouldn’t give up on literary sources, god bless him); screenplay adapted by Fred Haines (who was also responsible for an adaptation of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). Critical concensus: The screenplay got nominated for an Oscar and the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which honors mean both something and nothing. Imdb users seem to agree that what makes the film work is brilliant casting and use of location; it’s when whole swaths of literature are forced out of actors’ mouths that you begin to remember, uncomfortably, that you’re watching a book.

Catch-22 (1970) starring Alan Arkin, directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay adapted from the Joseph Heller novel by Buck Henry. Critical concensus: Nichols et al. did a brilliant job of capturing the essence of the book, and you’re a ninny if you expect a movie to be exactly like the book it’s based on.

Clockwork Orange (1971) starring Malcolm McDowell, directed and screenplay adapted by Stanley Kubrick. That worked out pretty well, if memory serves, though to be fair this and Catch-22 are somewhat thinner and plot-heavier than IJ.

Conclusion: Michael Cera and a locker room filled with gawky teen heartthrobs discussing their exhaustion. Meryl Streep as Madame Psychosis. Soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright? Get Michel Gondry on the phone, right now.

Thanks for all your comments last week — despite the fact that my question (“how the fuck are you people finding time to read?”) was fundamentally rhetorical, your descriptions of how you’re fitting Infinite Jest into your lives were fascinating. I am still behind, but thanks to a weekend spent back and forth from LAX to DEN combined with a few late nights using IJ to stave off the dread before my mother’s funeral, I got well past page 100, as well as my despair at ever catching up.

Funerals are funny things. I’ve found getting through them, or any difficult emotional event, without losing your shit requires a shift in attention. If I stayed in my head and let memories of my mother and all her kindnesses take over my thoughts, the result was miserable weeping. If instead I stayed in the present — fussy baby being soothed by his grandmother, vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar, my brother saying things about my mother that were absolutely untrue — I found that (a) I wasn’t horrified to be in church, and (b) I could fully participate in the moment.

Here’s a small portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

He goes on the describe a trip to the grocery store after a long day at work — the sort of adult experience most college graduates don’t include in their glossy visions of the future — as an exercise in choices. You can stand in line, tired, starving, and frustrated as shit, and wonder why all these ridiculous, bovine jerks are standing between you and a hot meal at home, or you can remember that everyone has their own heroic battles to fight, and cut them some slack.

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship . . .

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

The more I read of this guy, the more I like him, and the sorrier I am that he’s dead.

I’m so far behind where I’m supposed to be and I’m trying not to panic, though that didn’t work out too well last night at 9:00 p.m.

Me: I can’t do this! I have nothing to say! I’m an underqualified blogging hack with no literary grasp, or scope, and this was all just a horrible mistake so you’d better FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO POST ON INFINITE SUMMER, OH GOD.

Matthew: Buh-wha?

A series of talk-her-down e-mails ensued, wrapping up with a YouTube video of Feist on Sesame Street, singing about the number four. Then I slept for ten hours. Hey! Things are looking up.

I may have several points to make here, but number one is: how the fuck are you people finding time to read? Do none of you have jobs? Certainly you don’t have families, or children belonging to an age group that is defined by its inability to successfully manipulate a fresh band-aid. Too many people need me for too many things, and I suddenly see why it’s all I can do to throw up a blog post and then run screaming to put out another dryer lint fire, or keep a neglected dog from peeing In someone’s shoe, or sadly buttoning up another unironed shirt as I dash out the door to a job where a minor office sport is trying to guess how old I am.

But let’s think about this sentence for a moment:

A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness non-pareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of maxillofaial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.

SHRINKing UPPer CLASSes of PETro-ARab NAtions whose STAGGering FEEs are WHOLly AD vaLORem.

I feel like Rex Harrison ought to burst in and start singing that.¹⁶ And somewhere in Nova Scotia there’s a soundproof bunker where some poor b-list Shakespearean actor has been subsisting on Jell-O and hand-rolled American Spirits, recording an unabridged audio version of Infinite Jest for the last thirteen years.

“I don’t mind,” Hal said softly. “I could wait forever.”

I hope he wraps it up soon and turns it into an 80-gig podcast or this book is going to become a doorstop. Again.

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.

Way back awhile ago, Matthew e-mailed me and said, I’m thinking of doing this thing, would you like to do it, too? And I was all, HELL NO. Why don’t you ask mimi smartypants, she’s the secretary/treasurer of the David Foster Wallace Fan Club. It was my way of saying, thanks, but don’t you want a qualified literary opinion-giver along on this trek? I can barely parse Dr. Seuss.

Then I didn’t hear from Matthew for like three months, so I was all, WHEW! Now I can go back to knitting this sock. But then, of course, Matthew followed up⁴ and said that mimi had declined — having already read the book three times⁵ she wasn’t up for number four.

Then, sensing my reluctance to flaunt my intellectual weaknesses about the Internet, Matthew went on to say a bunch of wildly flattering things about me, like that mine was one of the first blogs he ever read, and that I gave him the idea upon which he built that Nobel Prize-winning physics thing he did about God.

My only qualification for being an Infinite Summer guide seems to be that I, too, once picked up Infinite Jest and failed to finish it. I didn’t even PAY for my copy, I was working in a bookstore at the time and got one free from the Little, Brown rep. Apart from my anxiety about committing to a Big Book at the time,⁶ what bothered me most about the book was the cheap advance-copy binding, the way the cover curled up and over itself when the humidity rose above 15%. I eventually donated it to the Planned Parenthood book sale.

I remember the book being about tennis, which is a sport I enjoy playing once or twice a year. I was varsity in high school, but the coach said that even though I had some talent, I just didn’t appear to want to work very hard.⁷

However, as your sherpa, I vow to come up with something moderately insightful to say each week.⁸