Category: Matthew Baldwin

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

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

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

The conversation between LaMont Chu and Lyle–and the highlighted passage, specifically–was eerily familiar. About a month ago I read an article entitled Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment, in which a video game developer pointed out how easy it is to design titles that are addictive without being especially fun. “There’s a vital question that is rarely asked,” he said. “Does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep better at night selling one than the other.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few weeks ago I was speaking to a journalist and struggling to explain how a novel so revered by people who have read it could also be so off-putting for those wading through it for the first time. I mentioned the length of course, and the endnotes, and the 84¢-words, and the sentences that go on for so long that they begin make you feel anxious, as if you are watching someone who has been underwater for longer than you reckon they can hold their breath. I mentioned all that, and then there was some dead air on the line (this was a phone interview), and I just blurted out something to fill the silence. “The thing is,” I said, “Wallace doesn’t teach you a little bit about tennis and then start talking about tennis. He just sort of starts talking about tennis.”

Not my most articulate moment, I’ll be the first to admit. But thinking back on this statement later, it struck me as perhaps the most insightful thing I said during the interview (a low bar, to be sure). Most authors will ease you into a subject, provide some background and context before going in-depth. Television serials preface episodes with a “Previously on” primers. Hell, even videos games to play bingo for cash begin with a tutorial these days. But when Wallace “introduces” a topic, it’s like you’ve walked into a lecture having missed the first hour.

He is, to be honest, something of a bully. Not in a beat-you-up-take-your-lunch-money kind of way, but in the same sense that the President of the United States is said to occupy the “bully pulpit”. The term, coined by Theodore Roosevelt, refers to the fact that the President can talk about the issues he cares about, and the rest of the country has no choice but to listen. If a President wants to start a national conversation on health care (say), we converse about health care.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace wants to talk about tennis and football and addiction and depression and mathematics and the many ways in which one may murder a cockroach, and your options, as a reader, are (a) like it or (b) lump it. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone droning on and on about his hobbies and his solitaire apps free interests, someone who follows you around and thwarts you evasive maneuvers, until you only options are to give up and listen or leave the party altogether.

Any many people do. Leave the party, that is. By which I mean they close the book on page 77 and go back to being interested in the things they are interested in. That’s what did a decade or so ago.

But here’s the amazing thing, at least in my experience of the last month. If you let Wallace bully you for a few hundred pages, if you let him just ramble on amicably about the things he’s passionate about, you finally know so much about the subject matter that you start to care about it, even if against your will. Last week, realizing that I had never in my entire life seen an entire tennis match, I actually watched a torrent of the Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick Wimbledon 2009 Mens Final. Last night when an alcoholic character in a TV show said she wouldn’t attend AA because “it ain’t nothing but a cult,” I felt personally offended. Wallace is like the Lloyd Dobler of authors: he doesn’t woo you with flowers and chocolates, he stands outside your window with a boombox over his head until you relent.

Except the boombox is so 20th century; it’s really more like an preloaded iPod. Which may be why, on the #infsum Twitter channel, catchingdays called Infinite Jest “the first shuffle novel“. That’s a great analogy. The book as like a compilation of Wallace’s favorites, semi-randomized to keep you on your toes.

And do you know why shuffle mode is so popular? Because every once in a while, wholly by chance and when you least expect it, you hear something that you’ve loved all your life. For me it was Eschaton, falling, as it does, squarely on the intersection of two lifelong interests: Cold War politics⁴⁷ and games⁴⁸. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew, and the radio did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel that truly resonated with me.

And now, of course, I’ve become so versed in the author’s various obsessions that all the themes in the novel resonate–and will continue to do so in future novels I read. Thanks a lot David Foster Wallace, ya big ol’ bully you.

Warning: This post does not contain spoilers in the traditional sense of the word (i.e., information to which you have not yet been privy), but it does synthesize some data points to reveal a (IMO, non-critical) fact to which you may not have tumbled yourself. There are likely many more in the comments. If you prefer to make all the connections yourself, feel free to skip today’s entry.

Consider the following:

1. On page 64 it says “Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds.”
2. On page 157 the header is “WINTER B.S. 1960“.
3. On page 159, James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s age is given as ten.
4. One page 172, the (abridged) header is “TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY … IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD [etc.] … ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE”.
5. On page 223 we learn that the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar fell three years before YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

So, let’s see. James was 10 in 1960, so he was born in 1950 (or possibly 1949, if the passage set in 1960 transpired before his birthdate). He died 54 years later, in the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar. 1950 + 54 = 2004. Therefore, the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar is 2004, and The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (which falls five years later) is 2004 + 5 = 2009. Plus or minus a year, depending on the exact date of his birth.

I feel compelled to tout this particular instance of deductive excellence on my part because it is the only one I have successfully completed.²⁸

Meanwhile, in the forums, readers blithely mention connections that I totally, completely missed. “X said Y and Z said Y, therefore X is Z.” That kind of stuff. It makes me want to turn back to page 3 and just start over, and this time transcribe the novel into a notebook line-by-line, to ensure that I don’t miss a thing.

It also makes me feel like George Michael. No, the other George Michael.

(Just mentally replace the phrase “math problem” with “contemporary post-modern masterpiece”.)²⁹

I love a good mystery as much as the next guy, but finding clues in Infinite Jest sometimes feels like trying to find a pattern in the digits of pi, or solving various quests in an adventure video game (“You seek the Crown of Midas? Alas, it was broken in seven pieces, each of which was placed in a different world. Run around for the next 35 hours and collect them all, why don’t you?”).³⁰

How say you? Do you like the treasure hunt aspect of the novel, or do you occasionally find yourself wishing Wallace would quit with the coy and give us the straight dope? What connections have you unearthed thus far?

Misc:

Thunder Stolen: My original topic for today’s post was going to be the Wardine and yrstruly sections, but on Friday that particular discussion broke out like a brawl in a soccer bar. It’s even spilled over to yesterday’s Roundup thread and, frankly, I am now kind of relieved that I wasn’t the one to first throw a folding chair.

Self-PUNK’D: I finished the 14-page endnote 110 (yeah, I’m a bit ahead of schedule–shhhh!). It’s so long that I had to take a break in the middle of it. When I returned and saw my bookmark one centimeter from the end of the novel rather than the beginning, I had a momentary, electric thrill. It was like finding a $20 bill on the ground, and then remembering that you are in your own bedroom.

Art Imitates Life: My friend J. was going to participate in Infinite Summer, but then she decided that she had too many other books that she wanted to read . “Funny thing, though,” she told me over the weekend. “The first book I read was The Emperor’s Children, which had a character who was trying to read Infinite Jest to impress people on the Internet.”

Fifteen years ago I told an acquaintance of my aspiration to become a Peace Corps volunteer.

“Good luck,” was her reply. “Did you know that only one out of every nine people who apply gets in?”

As this was five years before the Internet-As-We-Know-It, and even more before the debut of Snopes, there was no obvious way to confirm or falsify such a claim.¹⁸ And so, as someone who has never been a “Top 11 Percentile” kind of guy, I marched through the application process with a grim sense of defeatism.

And then, of course, when I was accepted, my ego ballooned like a nervous Tetraodontidae, as my status as one of the elite few who could weather the merciless vetting process was officially recognized.

Sadly for my overinflated self-regard, I mentioned the “one of nine that apply get in” figure to a member of the Peace Corps staff while serving. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that too,” he said. “Except, I wouldn’t state it like that. It’s more like: for every nine people that apply for the Peace Corps, only one winds up in-country.”

“What’s the difference,” I asked.

“The difference is that of those nine people, five or six voluntarily withdraw after sending in their ap, because they got a job or a house or girlfriend or whatever. And a couple more drop out after the interviews or in the middle of training, for one reason or another. You guys are what’s left.”

Infinite Jest also has a “one in nine” reputation about it, a book that thwarts most attempts to conquer. But as we stand on the summit of page 168 and look back on the pages before, we see now that process by which the potential readership is whittled down is one of self-selection. It’s eminently readable, if you’re resolved to read it.

Indeed, the first 150 pages are something an application process: will you apply yourself to this Brobdingnagian novel, or will you drop out for reason or another? If you’ve made it this far: congratulations. You’re what’s left.

And at this point in the novel, Wallace rewards us for our perseverance. It’s as if he’d been holding a somewhat awkward get-together until the party-hoppers people left, then cranked the stereo and rolled out the keg. Here’s what we’ve been treated to since page 144:

• The hilarious “Why Video-Phones Failed” essay, tangential to the plot but perfect encapsulating many of the themes. As with “Erdedy waits for Pot”, I would have been perfectly happy reading this as a self-contained short story.
• The “sterile urine” section which, in addition to being funny and interesting in its own right, also provides us with some background information on Mario, the Incandenzas, and ETA in a remarkably straightforward manner, unencrypted by acronyms or allusions or endnotes.
• A whole chapter set in the familiar B.S. era. This may not be one of the promised Hamlet parallels, but this is surely one of the most amazing monologues in literature.¹⁹ If I ever audition for a local production of Our Town, pages 157-169 are totally going to be my reading.

It’s the literary equivalent of hearty pat on the back and “welcome to the club”. For good or ill, you’re in it for the long-haul now.

Misc:

Controversy: Over on infsum Twitter channel, the debate continues to rage: is a “trial-size Dove bar” ice cream or soap?

Vexation: Despite seeing the word “map” used at least a score of times, and in a variety of different contexts, I still cannot figure out exactly what Wallace means by it. Head, face, brain, personality?

Paradox: I love that Wallace–a man who wrote the initial, 1,700 page draft of Infinite Jest by hand–cannot be bothered to spell out words “with”, “without”, or “with respect to”.

Fun fact I learned from the last book I read: the Dead Sea, with a salt concentration of 32%, is so saline that it practically precludes swimming. You can dive in (though heaven forbid you do so without hermetically-sealed goggles), but the density of the water will pop you back to the surface like a cork. Remaining underwater for any period of time requires a Herculean effort.

That’s an apt analogy for the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest.¹⁴ I’ve found it easy, in the pre-coffee morning or the laying-in-bed night, to simply float upon the surface of the narrative, consuming paragraphs without much regard as to whether or where or when we’ve seen a character before, or what major and minor motifs are currently being explored, or how this eight page filmography fits into the whole.¹⁵

At other times, when I am fully lucid and engaged (i.e., between the hours of Last Latte of the Day and First Beer of the Evening), I try to submerge myself in the text. But it is not without exertion, and I have to come up for air every 20-30 minutes. Indeed, it feels like exercise. Not “work” mind you, but an endorphin-producing, man-I-feel-better-about-myself-for-having-done-that workout.

Each dip into the novel also feels like a completely separate excursion. When I take a break from a conventional novel it’s like pressing pause on a video, with the narrative flow frozen on the screen, awaiting my return. But in reading Infinite Jest I have tended to stop at the chapter divisions, and nearly every chapter of the first 100 pages starts in a new place, with new characters, and often in a new time. It’s akin to reading a collection of short stories, set in a shared universe but with little else in common. I can see why many people–including myself a decade ago–put this novel down and never pick it up again. There is so little connective tissue thus far that the end of each chapter feels like a natural place to stop reading, forever.

And yet, 100 pages in, I sense engrossment on the horizon. With each additional chapter I find myself sinking into the salty tide. It’s probably only a matter of time before I disappear below the waves for good.

Some other observations:

Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.

Confession: Endnote 40 marks my first genuine irritation at Wallace’s “pretentiousness” (real or perceived). It (the endnote) begins with “In other words”, implying that it is going to help the reader understand Marathe’s true allegiance, and then provides an explanation even more opaque than that found in the body of the novel. Maybe it just caught me in a bad mood, but I was confused, I wanted clarity, and phrases such as “the even-numbered total of his final loyalties” failed to provide.

Question: Has anyone yet deduced the meaning of the glyphs that sometimes precede chapter headings?

I have a sneaking suspicion that these are the true chapter delimiters, and that the year headings are but chyrons.

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.

I don’t know why I own Infinite Jest.

Well, let me clarify. I know the reason I own it: it is, by all accounts, exactly the sort of narrative I most enjoy. I love novels that bend, and then break, and then place into a woodchipper the conventional narrative structure. I adore films where you spend the majority of your time wondering what in the hell is going on. I am helplessly addicted to a TV show that has spent the last five years opening matryoshkas, only to reveal smaller dolls within.

Reputably, Infinite Jest is all these and more.¹ So the reasons for my ownership are obvious.

What I am unclear on is why I own it. Like, the actual mechanics by which the book came to be in my possession. Presumably someone, at someone point, urged me to invest in a copy, but I don’t recall purchasing it. Or borrowing it. Or finding it on a suitcase in a railway station, attached to a note reading “Please look after this bear of a novel.”

Indeed, most of my memories of Infinite Jest revolve around bending over to retrieve something off the floor of our computer room–a pen the cat has batted off the desk, say, or a sheet of paper the printer has ejected with a whit too much enthusiasm–and seeing it, lurking on the bottom shelf,² wedged between Underworld and Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (the former with a spine suspiciously pristine, the latter looking like it’s gone through the dryer). “Remember that night?” it asks. “The night we spent on the redeye from Washington D.C.? You read 120 page of me, promised we would stay together until the end. What happened?” I avert my eyes, quickly straighten, and flee. This may well explain why the floor of the computer room is two inches deep in abandoned pens and Google Maps hard copies.

In addition to Infinite Jest, here is a list of other David Foster Wallace works that I have somehow failed to read: all of them. Or at least that was the case two month ago, when I first envisioned this crazy event. Since then I have been wolfing down DFW essays as a golden retriever would a dropped ice cream sandwich.

Among the first was The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, which contains this train-wreck of a sentence:

The house I end up sitting with clots of dried shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler 74-year-olds and exactly the kind of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over.

Honestly, if I hadn’t already announced Infinite Summer, that might have been its end. It’s not the worst sentence I’ve ever seen,³ but I had to go over it three times just to parse, and thought of reading 1,079 pages thrice over the summer struck me as even more insane than the original proposal.

My trepidation lasted exactly 24 hours, until, halfway through his amazing essay Shipping Out (PDF), I stumbled across this thing of wonder:

Only later do I learn that that little Lebanese Deck-l0 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck-l0 Head Porter, who had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who received confirmed reports that a passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded a rolling Lebanese head for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and the Austrian Chief Steward had reported the incident to a ship’s officer in the Guest Relations Department, a Greek guy with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.

Holy great jeezum crow almighty. It is clear that the peaks in Wallace’s writing are an order of magnitude greater than the occasional valleys.

And based on the first 20 pages of Infinite Jest, at looks as though the peaks in this novel will be so plentiful that altitude sickness will pose the biggest threat. Like a climber headed toward his first summit, I am filled with an excitement tinged with apprehension, and a hope that I have enough oxygen for the journey.