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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 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 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 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 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.