Infinite Summer

Category: Guides

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part I

    This is the first of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Congratulations on reaching the halfway point.

    Eden M. Kennedy: Thanks.

    Matthew Baldwin: Huzzah!

    Avery Edison: Thank you. Although I think that once you factor in the endnotes, we technically haven’t even started.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I turned 40 last year, which is pretty much halfway to dead. This feels like that in a “I’ve been reading this same novel for so long I’m not sure what I’m going to do after I finish it” way.

    IS: What do you think of the novel so far?

    KG: I really love this book, and not in a way I can remember ever loving a book before. Last summer I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which is also in the 1,000-page range and is about as beautiful a traditional novel as I can imagine. On some sort of linear scale I would tell you I liked both of these books about equally, but if you were charting my feelings about these novels in three dimensions the plots marking my feelings would be pretty distant from one another. Man, so different.

    MB: I am also enjoying it immensely. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also find it taxing. I once likened reading Infinite Jest to exercising, and that opinion hasn’t changed: I’m happy while I’m doing it, I’m happy having done it, but getting myself to do it everyday is something of a challenge. I also find myself eager to be done reading the novel the first time so I can start reading it the allegedly more rewarding second.

    AE: I’ve very recently started enjoying the book, although I’m having trouble articulating just what about it that I’m so enjoying. I had a lot of frustrations related to the lack of information we’d received in the first few hundred pages, and now that we’ve learned a little more about the ‘world’ of the book I’m happier to plow through it.

    EMK: I feel as though it really took getting past page 400 for the book to open up for me, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m a crummy reader or because patterns are beginning to take shape or because the characters are familiar enough to me now, or what. But despite some rocky weeks, I know I’ll finish it now, and I’m looking forward to finding out what it is that happens at the end that makes some people turn right back to page one and immediately start over again.

    IS: And the endnotes?

    MB: I have gone back and forth on the issue about two dozen times in the last month, and right now I’m learning away from “essential literary device” and toward “gratuitous pain in the ass”. Plus I just don’t buy any of the rationales I’ve heard for them: that they simulate the game of tennis, that they simulate the fractured way we’d be receiving information in Wallace’s imagined future, that they are there to constantly remind you that you are reading a book, etc. I’d be more inclined to believe these theories Infinite Jest was the only thing Wallace had written that included them. But the more you read his other works, the more it becomes obvious that Wallace couldn’t even sign a credit card slip without bolting on an addendum. The dude loved endnotes–I’m pretty sure that’s the only real reason they are there.

    KG: Everything DFW writes is in some way about this difficulty we have communicating. I mean I don’t think it’s as contrived as that—I think he finds endnotes practical as a way of imparting information without interrupting the primary narrative—but I think they are useful in the context of these themes that he’s always returning to.

    MB: Why do you always take David’s side?

    EMK: I’ve completely gotten used to the endnotes and I actually look forward to them, as they often turn into little punchlines for jokes you had no idea you were being set up for.

    AE: I’m not really that bothered by the them. I can definitely see where they could have been included in the text (either as parenthetical asides, or as footnotes on the page), but it is nice to have a break from the main text now and then. I think I also like that, whilst everything else about DFW’s style is so subtle and cultured, there’s something rather in-your-face about his use of endnotes. I like that it’s a very clear “eff you” to the reader.

  • Humble Pie

    Alright. You got me — I’m kind of enjoying this book now. And when I say “kind of”, I mean “a lot”. I’m writing this post extremely late because I’ve been staying up at night to read Infinite Jest. I’ve skipped out on plans with my family to stay in and read it. Heck — for the first time since starting, I’m ahead of the Spoiler Line. Wow.

    For what it’s worth, I feel like I should tell you that you guys would be terrible at AA. A lot of you told me last week, in the comments, that I should just quit. Stop. Read no further. Some of you even had the temerity to suggest that I suffered from some substantial lack of grey matter. An accusation I shall not waste time repudiating, because I’ve already spent so much time leafing through the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling “repudiate” right.

    Thank you to all the people who told me to stick with the book. You guys galvanized me to come up with a plan of action. I looked up how much I had to read, counted how many days I had until I had to write this post, and then used the calculator on a phone smarter than myself to do math that a child could manage. And then I sat down every day and read 30.667 pages.66

    It’s quite something to be learning a little self-discipline by committing to working on a task every day, and during the course of that task read a summation of the same disciplinary tactics applied to alcoholism. Many times I felt like not picking up IJ, either because I was slogging through Marathe and Steeply, or because I wanted to play Mario Bros., but read the book anyway because I recalled the words “for god’s sake Keep Coming Back”. It was a great insight into the power of committing to a goal and actively working for it in spite of oneself.67

    So. I’m reading the book every day, and enjoying the crap out of it. Even the Marathe and Steeply sections that I mentioned just a few scant sentences ago. I’m also not counting page numbers anymore, desperate to just meet my quota for the week. And the “portraits” of characters I mentioned last week have stopped seeming superfluous, and instead started making everything that much more real, just like they are intended to.

    Long story short — I Kept Coming Back, Trusted in a Higher Power (DFW), and, well… It Just Worked.

    Now, if only I could quit the booze.

  • I Love You Though You Hurt Me So

    Years ago when I was a creative director at an ad agency/design firm, I wrote a campaign for a wood-fire Chicago steakhouse that included print ads and billboards featuring an illustration of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the headline: “IT’S PAYBACK TIME.” Based on assorted letters to the editor there was virtually no one who liked the ad itself. Vegans were outraged. Local historians raced to the defense of the unfairly maligned cow. Even committed carnivores didn’t particularly like the idea of eating an animal in an act of revenge, joke or no.

    None of that hostility transferred to the restaurant, however. The campaign worked. Diner traffic to the restaurant increased.62

    In Infinite Jest, Wallace describes a series of television commercials so appalling they virtually destroy broadcast television, even as sales of the products advertised in the spots soar.

    (E)ven though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were denouncing the LipoVac spots’ shots of rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures that resembled crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed autopsies and cholesterol conscious cooking shows that involved a great deal of chicken-fat drainage, and even though audiences’ flights from the LipoVac spots themselves were absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows around them…the LipoVac string’s revenues were so obscenely enhanced by the ads that LipoVac Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene, sums the besieged Four now needed in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran and ran, and much currency changed hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump as if punctured with something blunt.

    It’s a very funny and smart observation, and there are plenty of examples of this phenomenon throughout advertising history. Currently there’s a series of spots for the Palm Pre that is pretty much reviled by everybody, even as the early returns show a spike in the product’s profile. And I probably don’t have to say anything more than “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!” to cause a cringing face to appear as a reflection in your laptop screen.63

    Wallace anticipated the success of a number of technologies–time shifting and DVRs and On Demand video, for instance–that have changed our relationship with television and more specifically with advertising. But perhaps most relevant to Infinite Jest is a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggesting that viewers enjoy television programs when commercial breaks are included more than the same programs shown without commercials “by a decisive margin.” This is true even though “at every given moment watching the sitcom will be more enjoyable than watching a television commercial.” I’m not sure the authors of that study have a handle on exactly why that this is.64

    There would seem to be an interesting take on the subject within the pages of Infinite Jest, however.

    The Steeply and Marathe sections explicitly establish the idea that freedom in the form of “choosing” is supposed to make us happy, but is really a cage in itself. The Ennet House and ETA chapters are concerned with the related paradox that, while “fascism” by its nature is clearly an immoral incursion on the dignity of the individual, we must surrender to a kind of “personal fascism” (here in the form of AA or sadistic conditioning drills) if we are serious about pursuing happiness.65 “We are children, bullies but still children inside, and will kill ourselves…if you put the candy within the arms’ reach,” Steeply says. Without some authority looking after our better interests, and left to our own choosing, we will surely follow the path of short-term gratification over long-term satisfaction–we will choose to watch The Entertainment even knowing the dire consequences of that decision.

    So isn’t it interesting that while very few of us would choose to watch commercials if given an opportunity to skip them, almost all of us find the program with commercial interruptions forced upon us more pleasurable than the program without them?

    And isn’t it also interesting that, some 13 years before the surprising results of this study, Wallace published a novel (a novel specifically about the inevitably fatal pursuit of uninterrupted pleasure) with the interruptions mercifully built in?

  • Something Smells Delicious

    I went out to our community swimming pool the other day festooned in sunscreen, reading glasses, and a hat with a large brim, lugging my Giant Book. I put out my towel on a chair near one of my neighbors.

    Neighbor: “Gosh, that’s a big book. What is it?”

    Me: (Assembling a winch to hoist it high enough for her to see the cover) “Infinite Jest ? I’m reading it for an online book . . . club, sort of thing.

    Neighbor: “Wow, and I’m having trouble finishing my thin little book!” (She holds up Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist.)

    Me: “Want to trade?”

    Neighbor: “Ha, ha. So, have you met any of the people who are reading along with you?”

    Me: “No, actually. I’m not even sure they really exist.”

    Neighbor: (Polite confusion)

    Me: “I’ve actually been Internet-friends with the guy who organized the group for a long time.”

    Neighbor: (Clearly she now suspects I troll “Married But Looking” AOL chat rooms after my family goes to sleep at night)

    SOME FAVORITE LINES SO FAR

    That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

    Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.

    Here’s how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars’ reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

    This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

    Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for spirited inquiry.

    Or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless home.

    The host White flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort. There’s no judgment. It’s clear she’s been punished enough. And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.

    There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk.

  • That’s Entertainment

    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.

  • Amanda French: ∞/2

    The midpoint of Infinite Jest is rapidly approaching (next Thursday, according to the schedule). What better time to organize meet-ups, so that readers in various cities can discuss their progress through the novel?

    Militant Grammarians in the audience will notice a conspicuous lack of actor in the preceding sentence. Specifically, we did not say that we would be organizing said meet-ups. Instead, we’re going to do what we do best: come up with a snappy title (“∞/2”) and crowdsource the actual work.

    So, if you’d like to organize a meet-up in Your Fair City, head on over to the forums and start coordinating, champ. And here’s Amanda French–who has been hosting get-togethers from the get-go, with some tips on ensuring that your meet-up doesn’t wind up as an Eschaton-scale debacle.

    Putting together an Infinite Jest meetup just can’t be the same as putting together another kind of reading group, can it? My mother used to belong to a book club that met monthly in one or another of the members’ comfortable houses, with plenty of food and wine and good fellowship. They’d read books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Jane Austen Book Club and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which are all very good books, books that fit well into pleasant surroundings. Reading Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is and should be a little uncomfortable sometimes. After deciding to do Infinite Summer, I put together a weekly meetup in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I’ve done my best to keep it just uncomfortable enough to be interesting. Here are my thoughts on how to do something similar.

    • Hold it in a bar. This a good place in which to discuss addiction to pleasure.

    • Do not hold it in a sports bar, not even if they’re showing tennis on the TVs. Sports bars are too loud for conversation.

    • Name a place and time that seems reasonable and stick to that, even if some people find it inconvenient. You’ll be arranging this with and for strangers via technologies that mediate communication, and so it’s not the best time for group decision-making. Announce it on the Infinite Summer forum for meetups, and if you use other means of publicity, include the link to that announcement.

    • Make up for this Schtittian intransigence by adopting the same policy as AA: No one can be kicked out. Don’t try to get people to show up every time, or a certain number of times, or on time, or having read as far as the Spoiler Line on the schedule, or not having read any farther than the Spoiler Line on the schedule. Let people come when, if, and however they will.

    • Promise to be there at the same time every time for the duration of Infinite Summer, even if no one shows up. If you wind up alone, you can always use the time to read. Veiled, if you prefer.

    • At the first meeting, now that you’re all relatively unmediated, you can and should make a group decision: how to run the discussions. Do they want you, as the organizer, to come up with a central question or topic every week? Should a different person lead the discussion every week? Are certain topics (such as David Foster Wallace’s life) off limits? Should it be entirely free-form and unstructured?

    • Also decide, at the first meeting, on the chief method of group communication. Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, phone, Infinite Summer forums–or fora? Should it be fora?

    • Ask every newcomer to say why they’re reading the book, whether they’ve read it before, whether they’ve read any Wallace before, stuff like that. Just because all that turns out to be very interesting.

    • Send reminders a day or two before every meeting, with the time, place, and the proper page number from the Infinite Summer schedule.

    Here are some of the ways our discussions stay uncomfortable: we never know exactly what we’re going to discuss, people have read to different places in the book, people talk at length about Wallace books and short stories that others haven’t read, people talk at length about works that others haven’t read like Ulysses and The Corrections, people talk at length about Infinite Summer blog posts and forum threads that others haven’t read, people bring up the suicide, people recount tales of how they once met David Foster Wallace, people talk about their own drug use, people show off how smart they are, people admit that they don’t understand, people ask what the hell is up with Orin that he and all the other football players are attracted to Steeply, people get completely grossed out by the formless blob with the Raquel Welch mask and the hooker with the dead baby, people get completely annoyed by the footnotes, people go off on boring technology tangents about how wrong Wallace was to think that we’d still have viewing cartridges and floppy disks and telephones attached to walls, people start talking about the movie The Ring, people feel that they’re on the verge of realizing something important about the book but can’t put it into words, people stop all rational discussion and just sit around saying how fucking great the book is and how about that Eschaton scene, man, my god, so funny.

    Hope your discussions go half as well.

  • I Am Not Enjoying this Book

    (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.

  • Cause I Got the Real Love, The Kind That You Need

    When I started writing my second novel,54 I imagined it would be structured like a teraktys, an ancient Pythagorean symbol that plays a role in the story. Specifically, the second section would be twice as long as the first, the third three times as long as the first, and the final section four times as long as the first. Fiction has a way of defying mathematical precepts, however, and the final version doesn’t really resemble a tetraktys at all, except that the fourth part is still at least somewhat longer than the first one.

    I think most writers start out with a Platonic ideal in their head of what their novel might look like when it’s done. For some it might be a mathematical model. For others it might be a quote from some future, hypothetical critic, wrapping the relevant themes in praise. For others it might be the physical thing itself. I think writers do a lot of visualizing in general.55 The craft of writing is forming and massaging words into a whole that hopefully approaches, but never actually becomes, something like the thing you had imagined.

    Anyway, I was struck by this Bookworm discussion with Wallace (different, BTW, from the last Bookworm interview I quoted). Michael Silverblatt started the interview by saying that reading Infinite Jest he was reminded of fractals. Wallace responded by saying:

    I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ’94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to kind of come together.

    It’s illustrative of the gap between our intellects that my ideal novel looked like this and Wallace’s looked like this. Still I understood what he meant. The concept of the Sierpinski Gasket was this organizing metaphor, the avatar of the novel in his head he was trying to make real. And despite DFW’s suggestion that he never expected any reader to notice this, or that the final version of the book doesn’t much resemble a Sierpinski Gasket, there are plenty of surface similarities (and this is what Silverblatt was referring to) in that the main themes and storylines reoccur and replicate in non-linear ways large and small throughout the novel.

    Novelists often talk about seducing the reader into following the story all the way to the end. Structure is one of the tools of that seduction. At its most basic level, structure is the way the author reveals and withholds information–much like the way you reveal and withhold information about yourself on a date in order to create some level of personal intrigue.

    One of the things that makes other writers go nuts up with envy when they read Infinite Jest is that the structure of it is aggressively anti-seductive. I know there are people who are going to say that Wallace had them at I am in here but obviously this novel is very intriguing at the outset and then kind of veers off into insanity for awhile, with constant interruptions and tangents. For a good portion of the first 200 pages, you’re really not sure what the hell he’s talking about, and frankly you’re getting kind of exhausted and frustrated, maybe even offended. Certainly there are many many sections in that period that are brilliant and funny and sexy, but if you think of Infinite Jest as a first date, there are ample opportunities during the appetizers for the reader to excuse herself, head for the Ladies but then veer toward the exit, never to return.

    And certainly a lot of readers over the years have done just that.

    Wallace uses the structure of this novel to a very different purpose. It isn’t designed to lead you, with one hand in your ass pocket, from the beginning to the end. He structured the novel specifically to control the experience of reading it. To disrupt you. To disorient you. To rudely interrupt you. Wallace didn’t want this book to just be about these themes of miscommunication and the impermanence of pleasure, he wanted the book itself to a simulacrum of the characters’ experience. Read this section from the most recent week’s pages and think of it simultaneously as a description of AA speakers and their audience, as a metaphor for writers and readers, and also a humble apologia for the kind of hoops Wallace has so far put the reader through:

    Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants….Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so sincere it’s almost painful.

    But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics speaker–this tall baggy sack of a man, also painfully new, but this poor bastard here completely and openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face shiny with sweat and his talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps….(and) the White Flaggers all fell about, they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone roaring with Identification and pleasure.56

    Most people come to this novel sincerely wanting to have read it. And the journey itself is extremely rewarding. But Wallace makes it very easy to quit this book. In fact, by abdicating the traditional authorial role as seducer, he allows the idea of quitting to become seductive instead.

    Wallace clearly wanted the reader not just to understand, but to feel some simulacrum of the emotions felt by the characters sitting in those AA meetings.57 In just the first half of the novel, the characters enjoin each other (and the reader) to “Keep Coming,” or to “Keep Coming Back” 17 times.

    I am truly enjoying this novel. I am finding it completely immersive, entertaining, and eye-opening. It’s a marvel to read. But if it weren’t for this project, I’m not sure I would have gotten this far. The stack of other, unread books in my pile is so high and appealing that I might have just decided, Murtaugh-style, that I’m too old for this shit. And I was thinking this morning how grateful I am that this is happening because I want to read this book, and I want to have read it but I don’t think I would have finished it on my own.

    Obviously Matthew wasn’t thinking about any of this when he organized Infinite Summer. How could he when he didn’t know much what the book was about? And no author could imagine that his book would be read exactly this way58 Strictly by accident Matthew kind of stumbled on a method of approaching this novel–a structure for reading it–that actually magnifies and complements the very experience Wallace tried to manipulate within his structure for the novel. For me at least, as it does for Gately, the pressure of the group on the individual (not to mention that one-day-at-a-time schedule of responsibilities) serves as a counter to the seductiveness of Out There, where all those shorter unread books are waiting for me.

    Keep Coming Back because It Works.

    Crazy.

  • P.S. Allston Rules

    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.

  • The Bully Pulpit

    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.