Infinite Summer

Category: Guides

  • We’re Together Everybody Knows And Here’s How The Story Goes

    So, the bricklayer story.

    On page 139, Wallace gives us a very funny memo sent from one State Farm employee to another. The memo quotes from an insurance claim. Because I know there are folks who aren’t quite caught up yet, and because this discussion is specifically about Wallace’s choices in telling it, here is the passage as it appears in the novel:

    Dear Sir:

    I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the accident reporting form, I put “trying to do the job alone”, as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following details will be sufficient.

    I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.

    Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone.

    Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground.

    Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body.

    The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a… endtranslNTCOM626

    Like a lot of folks I’m sure, I read that piece with an acute sense of deja vu. I not only knew the story, I knew specific phrases were coming even before I read them.

    My uncle was in the insurance business and he often sent me and my dad and my brothers funny things he encountered (this was in the actual mail, before the days of the casual email forward). I not only remembered getting this story, an alleged insurance claim from somewhere, but I remembered it being identical to Wallace’s text, almost word-for-word.

    My first inclination was that Wallace could not have possibly just cut-and-pasted this whole episode from somewhere else. I considered that maybe my memory was faulty–that Wallace had rewritten an old urban legend with such skill that his version had since become the definitive one. And that my Uncle Tom had sent this to me, not in the late 80s when I was in college, but in the late 90s after Infinite Jest had been released.

    Except.

    You can find this story in all corners of the Internet with just minor variations. The following appeared on a University of Vermont ListServ dated February of 1996, the same month Infinite Jest was published. The words in bold also appear in the IJ version:

    Dear Sir:

    I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

    I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

    Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building.

    In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and the broken collarbone, as listed in Section 3 of the accident reporting form.

    Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in Paragraph 2 of this correspondence. Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mind and was able to hold tightly to the rope, in spite of the excruciating pain I was now beginning to experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground, and the bottom fell out of the barrel.

    Now devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel weighed approximately 50 lbs. I refer you again to my weight. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, broken tooth and severe lacerations of my legs and lower body.

    Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, as I lay there on the pile of bricks, in pain, unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope.

    This is a very old story, one apparently even better known in the British Isles, where it’s said that most comedians of the mid-century had some version of it in their repertoire.20 The insurance claim conceit seems to be a more recent development. It appears in Mike Metcalfe’s 1996 textbook Reading Critically in a form almost identical to the one in Infinite Jest. This version also appeared in a 1982 Louisville Courier-Journal column by Byron Crawford. It’s not available on the internet, but except for a few minor details the text of that article is virtually identical to the text in Infinite Jest. 21

    All of that was to confirm what many of you already know–David Foster Wallace lifted the text of the entire episode from a pass-around joke. And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It surprised me because if a writer had copied someone else’s words so blatantly and without acknowledgment into any other novel I would have been indignant. I wouldn’t have seen any grey area at all. I would have said it was wrong.

    But in this particular context, Wallace’s use of this old story is awfully effective. It’s just one of a series of references to urban legends throughout the book, including one to a famous story about toothbrush mischief that Wallace appropriates with more originality. I suppose he’s trying to point out the unreliable nature of any narrative, that our faith in them is something of an illusion. There is also a recurring theme about control that is explicitly described in an earlier scene,22 which takes place in the ETA weight room. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book so far: “Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down.”

    I dig all of that.

    Still I’m not entirely convinced the ends justify the means. Borrowing and sampling might be done casually by other artists, but words are still sacred to writers. There were a lot ways Wallace might have rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it. 23

    Of course Wallace knew all that, and so we have to conclude that he didn’t do it to deceive and had some other purpose in mind. I suppose he was hoping that readers who knew the story would recognize it, but readers who didn’t know it (which was probably most of them in the nascent days of the Internet when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will probably react to its appearance differently than one who thinks it’s the product of Wallace’s original wit. I suspect Wallace would have anticipated that, too.

    Arrgh.

    So I’m curious what all y’all think. Those who are reading IJ for the third time and those who are reading it for the first. Those who recognized the bricklayer story when they read it and those who didn’t. Where do you come down on this? Is this appropriation of another (unknown) person’s material valid? Or not? Is it okay because it’s a piece of narrative flotsam, the cultural equivalent of abandoned property? If we could attribute authorship to someone, would claiming it be less acceptable? 24 Is it because Infinite Jest seems to be so singular an accomplishment that it frustrates our desire to apply these kinds of standards to it? 25

    Maybe no one cares about this stuff except me, in which case you can just enjoy a recreation of the accident on Mythbusters.

  • The Trick is Keeping the Truth Up-Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Letters of Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

    “What’s the difference,” I asked.

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

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

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

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

    • The hilarious “Why Video-Phones Failed” essay, tangential to the plot but perfect encapsulating many of the themes. As with “Erdedy waits for Pot”, I would have been perfectly happy reading this as a self-contained short story.

    • The “sterile urine” section which, in addition to being funny and interesting in its own right, also provides us with some background information on Mario, the Incandenzas, and ETA in a remarkably straightforward manner, unencrypted by acronyms or allusions or endnotes.

    • A whole chapter set in the familiar B.S. era. This may not be one of the promised Hamlet parallels, but this is surely one of the most amazing monologues in literature.19 If I ever audition for a local production of Our Town, pages 157-169 are totally going to be my reading.

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

    Misc:

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

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

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

  • Not the Best Student

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I’m enjoying it.

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

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

    Just, y’know. FYI.

  • Through All The Dead Ends And Bad Scenes

    There is this thing they do on the first day of medical school orientation to help the students understand what to expect. They gather all the first-years into an auditorium and the dean or whoever comes out and he says to them, “Turn and look at the person on your left. Now turn and look at the person on your right. Because in just a few years, both of those dudes are going to be doctors.” Then everyone high-fives and they all make out with each other.

    Don’t let your girlfriend go to med school, is all I’m saying. She will totally dump you for one of those guys.

    On an unrelated note, I wonder how many of our fellow infsumalians have dropped out already. I was thinking about them as I read my friend Marcus Sakey’s guest essay on Friday.

    Like Matt Bucher and Jason Kottke, Marcus stressed the importance of trusting David Foster Wallace as you read Infinite Jest, and this touches on the most important important connections between writer and reader. When I teach writing workshops I tell students that one of the biggest mistakes I think writers make, even some experienced writers, is not doing enough from the start to build the trust of the reader. Many writers seem to expect people will read their novel just because they wrote it, which is insane. Reading a novel of any kind requires a commitment and in a marketplace of infinite choices a novelist needs to convince the reader that he not only has a great story to tell but that he can be relied on to tell it well. And he has to do that immediately. He has to promise.

    Having written a book like Infinite Jest Wallace is something like a science fair partner who says to you, “Forget about that corn still you were planning to make with some other writer on your shelf. Let’s build a cold-fusion reactor.” And you’re suspicious because you’ve been burned by ambitious partners before, ones who tell you they want to build a cold-fusion reactor, thus requiring that you do more work than you really wanted to do, but halfway through they’ve blown you off to get high with the Spanish club and left you with a lot of indecipherable notes and not a clue how they’re supposed to go together.

    How do you know Wallace can deliver before you’ve already blown the whole summer?

    We have a number of reasons to trust Wallace. We have the word of smart people who have read the book, like Marcus, Jason, and Matt. We have almost 15 years of people reading and rereading, mining the book for its pleasures. We have the place to which this book has rapidly ascended in my generation’s unconscious.

    But best of all we have the first ten pages.

    The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and he deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to make you a promise.

    ‘I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

    I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

    I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.

    ‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.

    He could have just said this: Listen up. I have a freaking great story to tell you.

    If you feel yourself getting frustrated in parts, or lost. If you feel Wallace has lost your trust, stop, go back and read the first ten pages. You’ll find a promise.

  • Breathing Into a Paper Bag

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

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

    Matthew: Buh-wha?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Dead Sea Diving

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

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

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

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

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

    Some other observations:

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

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

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

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

  • Poochie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fiction’s Dirty Little Secret

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

    When I was in college a novelist I admired made an appearance at my school and I was asked to introduce him. I walked to the podium in front of a large student crowd and gave a brief summary of the author’s recurring themes. Then I sat down and the author came out and told everyone I was an idiot. Not in those words, exactly, but he claimed, with more than a little disdain, that all the things I had said were in his books were products of my limited imagination, and he got a few good laughs at my expense. Of course I was mortified, not only because there were any number of totally crushable English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen, but also because I was right. Everything I said about his work was absolutely true. I couldn’t figure out why he would deny it.9

    Fifteen years later I was on tour promoting my own novel and sat for an interview with Janet Taylor, an extremely intelligent and thoughtful host for Oregon Public Radio. For the first ten minutes she asked interesting questions and I gave more or less coherent answers. And then Janet said something like this:

    “In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware, Kevin, but I’ll explain for our listeners—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and the disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had to call out, ‘Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say.’ And in Cast of Shadows, Martha Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell her.”

    It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had known what she was talking about.10

    But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was terrific. And if we had never met she would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a deliberate and clever allusion to the biblical Martha of Bethany and not the result of that character having been named on the day Martha Stewart was indicted for securities fraud. I’m not a radical relativist when it comes to critical theory but that observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it.

    Earlier this week Jason Kottke made this important point about Infinite Jest: You’re never going to get half of what Wallace intended the first time you read it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll add a corollary to that: A lot of what you do get, isn’t anything that even occurred to Wallace in the first place. Don’t sweat that either.

    We have a tendency to think of novels, especially novels we admire, as being like timepieces with every moving part dropped in its place with expert precision. I suppose writers would like people to think that sometimes, but even the most brilliant novels are far messier than that. Writing a novel is less like watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.

    I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come because even after only 100 pages Infinite Jest is almost the perfect novel for this discussion, but think of the reader and author as partners. Wallace has constructed this novel with a lot of care and left pieces of the puzzle in ingenious (and unexpected) places and there is great conspiratorial pleasure in finding those clues where others might miss them. But the reader brings his own ingenuity to the project as well and in the many places where Wallace has left gaps, the reader will fill them in herself. Often brilliantly.

    In fact (and I say this in a whisper because it’s the dirty secret of writing fiction) the author is counting on you for it.

  • How Did I Get Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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