Infinite Summer

Month: August 2009

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part II

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

    Infinite Summer: Have you been sticking to the schedule?

    Avery Edison: For the first time since the project started I’m sticking to the schedule. I had been catching up in 75-page burst the day before my posts were due to be written. It’s not a great way to read the book – the feeling that IJ was a homework assignment was only intensified and the fact that I didn’t have time to take breaks from the harder-to-read sections was stressful.

    Last week I was getting through about thirty pages a day, and now I’ve decreased to around 15. I’m a little ahead of the schedule, which has added a nice, relaxed tone to my reading.

    I mean, as relaxed as you can feel reading about something like the Eschaton game.

    Matthew Baldwin: My trajectory has been the inverse. I was consistently ahead of schedule, by as much as 150 pages a few weeks ago. Then I stalled out for a spell.

    The main thing that stymied me was the passage about Lucien and Bertraud, before the arrival of the Wheelchair Assassins. Every night I picked up the novel, read one or two paragraphs of that section, and gave up. It took me a literal week to get through four pages, 480-484.

    Instead, I occupied my evenings reading everything else by David Foster Wallace I could furtively send to my workplace printer: the David Lynch profile and E Unibus Plurum and Host and The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing and two (count ’em: one, two) long essays about tennis.

    Also, at some point during that period I came down with a cold, and discovered that it is nearly impossible to read Infinite Jest (at least for me) when fatigued, even in the slightest.

    AE: I’ve found totally the opposite – I make the most progress reading the book when I’m sleepy. Usually I read for half an hour to forty-five minutes just after I wake up and just before I go to bed. I think maybe my brain is still relaxed enough to let the words just wash over me, rather than allow me to interrupt myself by over-analyzing the book.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I have actually never been behind, although a couple times the days have caught up to my bookmark. I’m enjoying the book so much, and especially now, that I’ve never not wanted to read it. Right now I’m about a week ahead, I think, which is probably average.

    AE: Kevin, reading ahead doesn’t get you any extra credit. I checked.

    IS: None of you addressed the Wardine / yrstruly sections. Care to do so now?

    AE: I was upset by the Wardine section, but more by its content than style. It’s tough to get through, but both of those sections cropped up during my “read it all in one go” sessions, and so I just kept reading and tried to ignore the language.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I guess the Wardine writing style didn’t worry me too much. Certainly DFW’s not the first white author to write in blackface, so to speak, and I think that whatever you as a reader bring to those sections will determine whether or how much you cringe when you read them. I got into the rhythm of the yrstruly section pretty quickly and just began to follow the action, rather than getting too hung up on the style. I’m just going to trust that there’s a reason for the radical style change that sets those sections apart, and that something will happen to bring everything together in a meaningful way later on.

    MB: The Wardine section didn’t bother me a whit. For one thing, I never made the assumption that Wallace was trying to emulate an entire race’s locution, only that of a specific person. I mean, if he had every black character speaking in that style then there might be cause for alarm, but this section fell 30 pages into a 1000 pages novel–a little early to go all torch-and-pitchfork on the guy.

    And I loved the yrstruly chapter. Very A Clockwork Orangeian.

    AE: Yeah, the yrstruly stuff really pulled me in — the text felt more frenetic than cumbersome. I felt like I really was in the mind of an addict, although — as a middle-class white girl who tried pot just once and felt sick for two days after — that could say more about my perception of drugs users than it does about Wallace’s writing.

    Have any of you been to Boston? Can you visualize the city as you read?

    MB: I think this is the first fiction I’ve read about Boston and its environs that wasn’t written by H. P. Lovecraft, of whom I am a huge fan. So, while reading Infinite Jest, I keep waiting for E.T.A. to play Akham University, or a cult to be discovered holding rituals in the Ennet House basement, or Johnny Gentle to be unmasked as Nyarlathotep. I am pretty sure that Mario’s conception is going to involve the town of Innsmouth.

    EMK: I lived on the east coast from the early eighties to the early nineties and had a few Boston boyfriends, so I feel like I can peg several of the locations he uses in the book, as well as the look of some of the people he describes, especially the Crocodiles and the ETA kids. And now that I think of it, I wonder if some of my ETA associations are tinged by other east coast prep novels, like Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History,” and the dozen others I’ve read over the years. I’m sure that’s a topic for a term paper, somewhere.

    AE: My only exposure to Boston has been via. the film “Good Will Hunting”. I don’t think this affects my reading of the book too much, other than the obvious downside that – in my head – every character looks like Ben Affleck.

    I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

    KG: I grew up in the Northeast and my brother has lived in Boston for 20 years, so I’ve been there dozens of times and so I have a pretty solid picture of the city as I read. If the characters would just ride that little tourist trolley around a bunch, I’d be right there in my head with them.

  • 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.

  • Roundup

    Despite the Avery induced exodus, many folks tenaciously cling to the Infinite Jest bandwagon. The most indefatigable chronicles are:

    The fine folks over at Infinite Zombies

    Gerry Canavan

    Infinite Detox

    Infinite Tasks

    I Just Read About That

    Love, Your Copyeditor

    The Feminist Texican

    Conversational Reading

    		 Journeyman

    Repat Blues

    Chris Forster

    Brain Hammer

    Naptime Writing

    Infinite Jestation

    A Supposed Fun Blog (although they haven’t posted in a fortnight, so perhaps they have been defatigabled …)

    Crystal Bae wrote a nice little entry about Infinite Summer on her blog, Aesthetics of Everywhere. Mike Miley discussed Infinite Summer on The Huffington Post. There was also an article in The Daily Texan.

    Reid Carlberg “Finished That Damn Book“. R.J. Adler of A Litany of Nonsense hit page 500 in the novel and asked “Halfway to What?”

    And Jeremy Stober can’t figure out why he likes Infinite Jest:

    In the meat and heft, the narrative always seems just easy enough to read that you don’t even realize how much of the novel’s world you are absorbing, as if it sort of slips in through osmosis and entrenches itself in your metabolic pathways as you lug the physical weight of the book around.

    Lastly, the students of ENG 590 at Albany’s College are reading Infinite Jest in three weeks (!!), and keeping blogs all the while. You can read about the class here, and find the course website (including links to the student blogs) at ijstrose.wordpress.com.

    if you have written about Infinite Jest recently, please let us know in the forums or the comments.

  • Infinite Summary – Week 7

    Milestone Reached: 516 (52%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 442 – YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Gately ponders his relationship with a possibly fictitious Higher Power, and remembers his mother’s alcoholism / cirrhosis.

    Page 448 – VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U: Hal has the “losing your teeth” dream; Mario continues to listen to “Sixty Minutes More or Less”, even without Madame Psychosis.

    Page 450 – 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Early morning drills at E.T.A.; Schtitt delivers the “second world within this world” lecture (i.e., “suck it up, whiners”).

    Page 461: Pat Montesian, and Gately reckless driving in her husband’s car.

    Page 450 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the “pleasure centers of the brain” (p-terminals) experiments.

    Page 475: Gately continues cruising in Pat M.’s car; the Wheelchair assassins kill Lucien and Bertraud of Anitoi’s Entertainment.

    Page 489 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A., STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the possibility of an Entertainment “master”; Steeply asks if Marathe has ever been temped to watch it.

    Page 491 – WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA: James Incandenza helps his father isolate and fix a squeak in a box spring.

    Page 503: At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Ken Erdedy gets hugged by Roy Tony.

    Page 507: Marathe admits to Steeply that some interns were “lost” while there were experimenting with the Entertainment.

    Page 508 – 10 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal and others await punishment for the Eschaton disaster; an introduction to “Lateral” Alice Moore’s.

    Characters The characters page has been updated.

    Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

  • Infinite Jests

    The ranks of Infinite Summerians are thinning quickly, as participants drop out or finish early. For those of us on the schedule, though, it’s time for a halftime celebration.

    John Campbell drew the above two panels in his Hourly Comic Journal. They appeared in the January 9th, 2008 entry. Mr. Campbell went on to write pictures of sad children, which David Foster Wallace Stranded on a Desert Island:

    The folks at The Onion clearly carried a torch for Wallace as well, as he was often featured in articles such as Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20:

    BLOOMINGTON, IL—Claire Thompson, author David Foster Wallace’s girlfriend of two years, stopped reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday.

    “It was pretty good, I guess, but I just couldn’t get all the way through,” said Thompson, 32, who was given the seven-chapter, heavily footnoted “Dear John” missive on Feb. 3. “I always meant to pick it up again, but then I got busy and, oh, I don’t know. He’s talented, but his letters can sometimes get a little self-indulgent…

    Wallace also made cameos in U.S. Unenjoyment Rate At All-Time High and New Cambodian Barnes & Noble: Will It Threaten Cambodia’s Small Book Shops?. He even made it onto the cover of The Weekender:

    Last year, The Onion ran NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death:

    “I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective.”

    Jason Kottke reprinted an essay entitled Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace, originally written by James Tanner.

    9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’?

    The Howing Fantods held three David Foster Wallace parody competitions. The first two, held in 2004 and 2007, were literary:

    The1 car2 pulled3 up4 into5 the6 driveway.7 Daniel8 locked9 up,10 and11 went12 inside.13

    For the third, entrants were asked to create DFW-inspired Motivational Posters:


    Warning: some of the motivational posters
    contain spoilers.

    If you know of more Infinite Jest or David Foster Wallace humor on the web, please let us know by email or in the comments.

    Update: In a recent post, infinitedetox proposed some Techno-Curmudgeonly Solutions for Life in a Wallacian Dystopia.

  • 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) “I don’t do much online myself,” she offered, trying to bridge the sudden conversational gap by listing her own digital habits. “I mostly just check my emails or look at my niece’s travel photos. A virtual reading group seems awfully complicated.”

    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.