Infinite Summer

Category: Guides

  • Michael Wendling: Good Old Wireless

    Michael Wendling is a writer and producer. He is currently producing From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC World Service, and is working on a novel.

    Pretty much every form of media gets slammed in IJ, even the forms that don’t actually exist. The students at Enfield T.A. and the addicts at Ennet House mong out in front of mind-numbing cartridge-eating TPs. Video telephones are on the shelves for five sales quarters before, in one of the funniest riffs in the book, human paranoia and insecurity crush the whole industry. Movies – well, one in particular – kill. And yet radio, that good old wireless, is somehow still around, unchanged, strangely and hopefully connective.

    I’m talking mostly here about the scene which begins on page 181. Joelle/Madame Psychosis is hosting Sixty Minutes More or Less on WYYY. There’s fresh air in the studio and Madame Psychosis gets paid for doing a midnight slot with ‘solid’ ratings on a student run station, cushiness which stretches things a bit even by IJ standards.

    Anyway, the point is that Sixty Minutes +/- is soothing, comforting, familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to the radio late at night pretty much anywhere in the world. MP shouts out to tortured M.I.T. geeks and U.H.I.D. freaks. Up the hill Mario is listening “the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to tone of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like” while the rest of the family gathers for dinner. Leaving aside the weird UV plant lights and the connections between the radio host and the people around the table, it could be a scene from decades ago – or “three generations past”, to be specific. The frantic pace of the novel slows for a while as MP rattles off deformities in a grotesque, hypnotic intermission.

    Radio’s not really a main theme in IJ, but it does tie a few plot strands together (if you’re reading for the first time you haven’t got to that bit yet so I won’t give it away). It’s also a subject Wallace returned to later, most notably in his Atlantic profile of right-wing jock John Ziegler.

    But here’s the interesting thing. These days, radio in general is on a bit of a winning streak. It’s not dying like newspapers, or inane and shouty like television. Corporate stations are dull as ever, but now we can listen to underground podcasts, news from foreign countries, hipsters telling stories, community broadcasting. And that wasn’t really the case when Wallace was writing the book. In the mid-90s, US radio was in a perilous state. Anodyne, heavily formatted music stations were, in Thom Yorke’s phrase, “buzzing like a fridge.” Clear Channel had started gobbling up stations and installing geography-less robo-DJs. Cash-strapped NPR was constantly under threat of becoming even more cash-strapped by a hostile Republican Congress. There were few breaks in the clouds and only a very small inkling of how technology would soon transform not only the way we access auditory information but indeed the whole idea of what we think of as radio.

    I think it’s reaching to credit Wallace with any sort of prescience in this area – after all, WYYY is old-school, the ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band’. And when Madame Psychosis is gone from the airways, Mario and the rest of her audience is bereft: “The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better.”

    Still, at least for a few pages, Wallace taps into a pretty fundamental idea: radio is the only medium that can be as simple as one human being speaking to another. And sometimes, that’s just enough.

  • Andrew Womack: Love

    Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • infinitedetox: Waving the White Flag: Reading as Rehabilitation

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

    My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Nick Douglas: Skim is for Wimps

    Nick Douglas is the editor of “Twitter Wit,” a collection of witty tweets coming out on August 25. In 2006, he was the founding editor of Valleywag.com. He’s probably writing a screenplay.

    I finished about two-thirds of the books assigned me in my three years as an English major. The department head was right to ask me, when I first switched from political science, “Do you read quickly?” I don’t, and I’d like to blame that on my inability to skim. The less I like a passage, the more I claw at it, wasting my time, because I can’t understand that a published work of prose may still contain unnecessary digressions. And so I’ll often grind to a halt. I’m glad for this flaw in my reading habits, because skimming Infinite Jest is stupid.

    Someone saw me struggling over one dull page of IJ this week, the description of Enfield MA and its institutions (tax-paying and -exempt), and recommended I skim it. She hasn’t, of course, read her copy of the book.

    Because if she had, she’d know that skimmers miss out. Had I skimmed the Wardine and yrstruly sections, would I still have understood that Poor Tony stole the artificial heart that Steeply-as-Helen wrote about? Had I skimmed endnote 24 — well, I’m sure I’m not alone in reading 24 with alacrity, then re-reading each synopsis as I caught references, and soon probably going back to read the whole list in case I’ve missed something.

    Because like Eggers said in his foreword, this book is an exercise for the mind, and Wallace gives us the chance to piece things together before he explicitly synthesizes. He leaves some aspects of the world of O.N.A.N. foggy, so that we must pull a Supreme-Court-Justice-building-the-right-to-privacy-piecemeal-from-the-Bill-of-Rights maneuver to understand that our nation has dug a giant pit in the Northeast and flings its garbage there through the upper atmosphere, and maybe later we’ll be sure whether these catapulted garbage vessels are, once launched, self-propelling, or whether they’re shot out with sufficient force to arc across the continent into Hamster Country.

    Why anyone would want to read this book without the satisfying click (not steady, but in waves, like the click-clack-click of Joelle’s internal monologue, the disappointment at page 223 quickly counteracted by the deductive satisfaction of the next sixteen pages) is beyond me.

    Those digressions that don’t serve the plot (or at least provide a satisfying coincidence that may or may not serve the plot, such as Gately’s role in a separatist’s death or Steeply’s putative puff piece on Poor Tony’s heart-snatchery) serve the theme. Since most of these thematic moments are so subtle, I’m sure we’re particularly required to remember the ones Wallace mentions twice, just as the Biblical God repeats his most important commands three times. So we should definitely remember Hal’s rhetorical flourish at the end of his comparison of Chief Steve McGarrett of “Hawaii Five-0” and Captain Frank Furillo of “Hill Street Blues.” I’m not sure if we’re meant to agree with the teacher who downgraded the paper to a B/B+, or if the only point of that part of the chapter heading is to tell the reader, “Hey moron, pay attention to this part, okay?”

    Which he says so lovingly (and it’s been almost a quarter of the book since he said it last), while warming us up for the meet against Port Washington: “It all tends to get complicated, and probably not all that interesting – unless you play.”

    Which he hits us with again at the end of that section, sneering at the Port Washington parents who wear “the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play.” Almost makes me regret not marking up my book with a pen, lest I embarrass myself with a copy of Infinite Jest sitting on the shelf in good condition like a backslider’s Bible.

    The ill-earned ending to Hal’s essay, the part to which we morons must pay attention, posits that the culture’s next great hero will be passive. And how chilling is that? We’ve now spent three hundred pages biting our lips over the impending death of Hal’s communicative abilities, and our curiosity over the titular Infinite Jest has for the last few dozen of those pages only been answered with clues about its origin and content, but clearly we’re waiting to see how many people Wallace is going to mow down with Chekhov’s gun.

    Hal, don’t tell us we need a passive hero, don’t jinx yourself in a grade school essay, don’t go catatonic on us! Don’t end up like the frozen attentive faces in videophone dioramas or Kate Gompert in the doctor’s office or the zombie that John Wayne resembles to Schacht or the Basilisked statues of your father’s victims-by-film! Keep your face moving, and I’ll keep reading every single page, like Bastian keeping Atreyu alive and saving Fantasia from the Nothing.

    Except, like, smarter.

  • Brittney Gilbert: You Have Chosen To Be In Here

    Brittney Gilbert is the blogger for San Francisco’s CBS 5; she also mouths off at her long running personal blog, Sparkwood & 21. This is her first time reading a David Foster Wallace novel.

    Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time did it to me. It made me fall in love with fiction. I’d been an early reader, and a frequent reader, but when I discovered L’Engle’s Wrinkle in 5th grade there were sparks, complete with a speeding heart, sweaty palms and butterflies knocking around in my stomach until I get back to that engrossing book.

    That long torrid affair with fiction came to a horrible halt when I started reading material online all day long for pay.

    I am a blogger by trade. I’m a blogger who blogs about blogs for a living for a local television news station. Part of that job entails monitoring 300, 400, 500 blogs every day (I lost count.), so that I may recommend content written by locals to locals. I’m a human aggregator. I scan and skim and skip big chunks of text so that I can crank out 10, 20, sometimes 25 posts in a single day. I cannot read all the posts made by local bloggers in a single day. It would be impossible. That means I never get to the end of what Google Reader pipes in to me, and I start it all over again the following morning with more scanning, skipping, skimming until some post pegged with bullet points or strategically placed bolded text catches my attention enough to single it out for suggestion. Large, long, thoughtful posts don’t get read in full, so much as passed on to others to read simply due to the length.

    I likely skim over a good 20,000 words a day. Lots of them register, but many do not. I’ve had to become a masterful scanner of reading material, a skill that is essential when monitoring a huge amount of content every day, but one that will utterly annihilate your ability to sit down and read an actual book. Infinite Jest is the first book I’ve taken on to read in a long, long time. Because my job requires a good eight hours a day of reading (scanning, whatever), I just don’t have the drive or stamina to come home and read some more. It’s usually “The Bachelor” or “Real Housewives” or “People Who Think They Can Dance” running around in my brain once I’ve clocked out for the day. But the reading I do for my work isn’t reading at all, not really, and so by diving into Infinite Jest after having avoided novels for so long I have slowly, and almost by accident, gotten my attention span back.

    For someone who hasn’t read anything longer than a New Yorker article in a solid six months, IJ is an unmerciful beast to bring me back into the fiction fold. I began my Infinite Summer journey like an excited elementary student on her first day back to school in fall. I packed my enormous book in my backpack, along with a fresh steno notepad and capped pen, so that I could read on the bus or on the train or on my break at work. I was going to win at Infinite Summer! I was pumped! I was going to do this! But I learned very soon a few things: 1) You carry that book around on your back every day and you will need a spinal alignment. 2) People look at you funny when you read that tome in public. 3) Infinite Jest cannot be read in ten minute spurts on the back of a bumpy, crowded bus barreling down Mission Street. I was going to have to really commit to this book the way one commits to a college course or a part-time job or a new lover.

    That’s when the magic happened. When I took the book to my room and closed the door and even lit some candles, because, dammit this was a date, part of me that was lost to internet reading peaked its head up. I was spending serious one-on-one time with a big, beautiful book, and when I really gave myself over to it, and fought the urge to skim and won, I knew IJ had become more than my latest reading project, it had became the rebirth of my much-missed attention span.

    Infinite Jest takes focus. I cannot listen to music while reading this novel, nor can I take it in with television on in the background. I can’t skim parts and still get the gist. The text requires 100% participation on my part. It has become a meditation. I have to be present and mindful in order to fully ingest the words before me. I cannot click to open a new tab, to check to Twitter to see if anyone famous has died, or refresh D-Listed.40 It’s just me and the lavish landscape Wallace created.

    “I am in here.”

    I have chosen to care about this book, to give it a place in my life. In doing so I am rewarded with messages in IJ about the importance of being present. Of just breathing. Themes abound in IJ about focus, about choosing what it is that you pay attention to, and how crucial it is to do that with the utmost care. If only because our whole lives depend on it.

    By virtue of being what it is, a dense, complicated, scattered work of immense volume, Infinite Jest enforces its own themes. Focus, presence of mind and conscious choice are all things thrust upon the reader when they enter into a contract to finish DFW’s IJ. Having wine before reading makes the trek a little too muddy. Reading with a clear mind, free of adulterants, will allow the book to bring you its own incredible high. There is keen insight embedded in nearly every page, but you have to be fully present to see them.

    “Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticsm with great care.”

    The non-linear (to say the least) structure, the constant change in voice, forced flipping, always flipping, to the back of the book for endnotes are elements that don’t allow you to get lost in a story. “You are reading a book,” you are often reminded. You are in here. You are not Cinderella at the ball or Hermione at Hogwarts, you are reading Infinite Jest. You may get caught up in the frenzy of Erdedy’s panicked wait for pot, but not for long. Soon you are reading Infinite Jest again.

    It’s easy to see that Wallace had a difficult time with focus, what with the sprawling nature of his most famous novel. It’s almost as easy to see that he knew the vast importance of mental discipline and presence of mind, if you can manage to have some of that yourself. With Infinite Jest Wallace was able to let his mind roam in fantastic, spooling, brilliant ways, yet did so within the confines of a single book. Sure, it’s a really long book, but he was able to box his thoughts. And by offering that book to you he is giving you the same opportunity, the chance to see just how difficult but but ultimately freeing that can be.

  • Aren’t I Meant to be the Funny One?

    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.

  • I Pushed My Soul in a Deep Dark Hole and I Followed It In

    1. On one of the early pages of Infinite Jest, Wallace uses the old-fashioned word “twitter”.32 This of course triggered a number of jokes in the forums (and on Twitter, of course) that DFW had even predicted social networking. Ha ha.

    Except today I’m not so sure he didn’t.

    2. There is an almost unbearable (for the author) amount of time between the day the manuscript is “finished” and the day it is published. I’m not sure when Wallace handed in the complete manuscript to Little Brown, but with a book as big as Infinite Jest–both in terms of heft and hype–you could easily expect a couple of birthdays to pass through the edits and the copyedits and the sales efforts and the marketing push. This period can be pretty anxious for writers, and one of the fears that can obsess a novelist during this time is that some part of his book he thinks particularly clever or original is going to be preempted by a similar plot or character or conceit in another book, film, or TV show. Or real life, even. When you spend years working on the same project everything about it, no matter how innovative, begins to feel obvious and banal to you. If you hear an author pull out that old cliché about worrying he’ll be “exposed as a fraud” it’s a good bet somebody interviewed him after he could no longer make changes to a manuscript but before his novel had actually been published.

    3. I was reading the Madame Psychosis section and this bit caused me to stop for a sec:

    There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-garde digital cartridges, anti-confluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc.

    I thought, rather casually, “How did Tarantino get in there?”

    Not because he doesn’t belong. In 2009 (or in the Y.D.A.U.) you would nod at that reference without giving it a thought. But when Pulp Fiction came out in the fall of 1994, Infinite Jest was less than 18 months away from publication, and the manuscript had to have been more or less complete. Before the sensation of that film, Tarantino was certainly on many lists of young directors to watch, but he wasn’t on anybody’s auteur radar yet.

    So I’m assuming Tarantino’s name was probably a late addition to the manuscript. Probably no more meaningful than Wallace wanting his references to be as updated as possible. 33

    4. I’m not exactly sure what Wallace thought of Tarantino, but shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote a profile of film director David Lynch. 34 I remember reading it at the time (and especially DFW’s hilarious rant about his personal dislike for the actor Balthazar Getty) because I’m a big Lynch fan. In it Wallace talks about the unacknowledged debt Tarantino owes to Lynch.

    Tarantino has made as much of a career out of ripping off Lynch as he has out of converting French New Wave film into commercially palatable U.S. paste….In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., “hiply”) surreal….Or consider the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s Top 40 tune, cuts off a hostage’s ear-I mean, think about it.]

    So maybe he didn’t like him much. Actually, beyond these comments I don’t know what DFW thought of Tarantino, but the general critical rap against QT–that the excessive violence in his films celebrates nihilism and that the infinitely reflexive references to other movies, while fun, tend to elevate the trivial–would seem to be right in the crosshairs of Infinite Jest. The following is Wallace speaking about IJ in an interview with Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt, also from 1996:

    “So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”

    I happen to love Tarantino, so I could be part of the problem. Which brings me to

    5. The front page of this morning’s35 Chicago Trib business section is almost entirely dedicated to the story of Dave Carroll, who wrote a song about how a United Airlines baggage handler broke the neck of his guitar. Carroll posted a video on YouTube and thanks to Twitter and Facebook almost 3 million people have watched it in just a couple weeks and now United is donating a few grand in his name to charity. Certainly I’m happy for the dude. The song is pretty catchy and yay for the little guy striking a blow to humongous indifferent corporations. But airlines break shit all the time.36 One of them lost my kid’s car seat over the Fourth. This can’t be the most important business story of the day. And it’s not just this story because if I were writing this next Tuesday it would be some other online obsession of the week sprawled all over Page One and I would have already forgotten about this guy’s guitar. More and more news reporting seems to be increasingly Twitter- and Facebook-based. I’m not talking about protesters Tweeting from Iran, which is actually newsworthy, but it’s Ashton vs. CNNBRK, and an Australian TV network says Jeff Goldblum is dead because somebody tweeted it and oh my Demi got fooled by that rumor too, and look this homely British person is a surprisingly good singer, and in yet another section of today’s actual paper–the actual newsy news section even–there’s a story about lifestreamers (or lifecasters) as well as a woman who spends seven hours a day on social networking sites, a woman so addicted to social networking that she wants to Twitter as she walks down the aisle at her wedding and the more we Twitter the more the actual news is about how much we’re all Twittering, and when I think about how much time we (me too) spend on this stuff and how much of the shared experience of our culture is just completely disposable and pointless it really does make me sad and at just that moment I’m reading this book and I also come across that interview and what he says strikes me as just so true it makes my stomach hurt.

    6. I don’t mean this to be an anti social networking rant. It’s not these particular tools that are to blame. If anything they are newfangled thermometers that are helping to measure our fever. I’m grateful that Facebook allows me to stay in touch with people who were once very important in my life and who would otherwise be completely absent. And I find Twitter to be incredibly useful. I was captivated with it during the Iranian protests and had great fun a few months ago using Twitter to follow the Edgar Awards37 in real time. Even this project would not be anything like what it is without Facebook and Twitter especially, and if I understand the success of Infinite Summer correctly it is about the desire of a group of people to have a shared, cultural experience that is actually kind of meaningful. There really is a void there and because we fill it too often with shit that is just disposable and endlessly self-referential and auto-deleting the maw constantly needs feeding.

    The problem is not the seductive addiction of social networks or the laziness of the news media but the deepening cultural void Wallace identified 13 years ago. And right now I’m grateful that this particular book feels big enough to temporarily fill the hole.

    At least until August 21 when Inglorious Basterds comes out.

  • And Zac Ephron as Mario Incandenza

    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.

  • Missed Connections

    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.”

  • Post of the Pop-Tart Brown Sugar Cinnamon Toaster Pastry

    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.)