Plain Text Version:
<picture of Infinite Jest>
Join us in discussing this book!
If you’ve already read Infinite Jest, bring along your favorite passages to share and discuss. If you haven’t read it, come anyway and feel free to offer your reactions as we discuss one of the saddest and funniest and most memorable books of the 20th century. Passages up for discussion will include:
On community: We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.
On politics: A sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus is the acknowledged primacy of pursuing the short-sighted idea of personal happiness.
On recovery from addiction: I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable....Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers: Easy does it. Remember to remember. Turn it over. Terse, hard-boiled. Monosyllabic. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliché-pool? “No inflection necessary”? Too many syllables, probably.
On sports training: The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head.... You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball. The ball starts being something that you just know ought to be in the air, spinning.
Lower level meeting room
Appleton Public Library
Appleton, Wisconsin
7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
For more information, contact
billcoan@wordsite.com
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