Infinite Summer

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  • Infinite Summery – Week 4

    Milestone Reached: Page 295 (30%). A third of the way there, people.

    Chapters Read:

    Page 219: Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a, Madam Psychosis, who dated Orin and starred in many of James Incandenza’s films (in addition to whatever other relationship they may have had), attends a party and attempts suicide by overdose in the bathroom.

    Page 223: The chronology (cue voices from on high):

    Year of the Whopper
    Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
    Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
    Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
    Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
    Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
    Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
    Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
    Year of Glad

    Page 227: Helen P. Steeply’s (Putative) Curriculum Vitae.

    Page 240: A description of Enfield.

    Page 242: Hal and Orin speak on the phone. Hal describes the bizarre mechanics by which their father committed suicide, and his horror upon discovering the body.

    Page 256: ETA plays Port Washington in a tennis match.

    Page 270: Don Gately, now on staff at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, councils the newest resident Geoffrey Day.

    Page 281: Having defeated Port Washington, the ETA gang returns home on a bus.

    Page 283: All about Orin: how he made the transition from tennis to football, and his relationship with the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne.

    Page 299: Poor Tony undergoes a week of withdraw (most of which is spent in a library restroom), culminating in a seizure while riding the train.

    Characters: We get the sense that almost all of the major characters have been introduced by this point (fingers crossed!). We’ll do a complete rundown next week.

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

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick: On Teaching Infinite Jest

    Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College; she’s the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, and co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons. She blogs there and at Planned Obsolescence.

    As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it–the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction–with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it). It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

    And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out–okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret–every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

    My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them–or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing–we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

    I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

    But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule–for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading–was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

    The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

    I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

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

    Before I dive into the main body of this post, there are a few notes I should get out of the way.

    Firstly, I realize that the topic I’m to write about — suicide in IJ — is a little unseemly in light of David Foster Wallace’s own departure from this plane of existence just last year. I apologize for that, but it really can’t be helped.

    Second, I will make — every now and then — statements about suicide that I will appear to present as fact. I should clarify (without going into detail) that I have some experience with the whole horrible concept, and am speaking with personal insight, albeit not professional.

    Lastly, I totally spent like, ten minutes trying to make a pun out of a combination of the word “unseemly” and the “seam” of a tennis ball, for the purposes of titling this post. This is similar to last week’s endeavor, which saw me spend an equal — perhaps greater — amount of time ruminating on how I could fit the phrase “I decided to call an audible and call Audible” into my post.38

    This week’s massive-chunk-of-IJ-that-I-had-to-read-all-at-once39 featured not one but two suicides: a third person look at Madame Pychosis’ — possibly successful — purposeful overdose; and a discussion between Hal and Orin on the cause of their late father’s… well, lateness.

    I was struck that Wallace seemed to take great pains to make sure that we saw these two examples of suicide as wildly different from the normal perception of the act. Madame P’s method of choice might seem terribly familiar to anyone who knows much about drug addicts (or watches a whole bunch of CSI), but Wallace — from the beginning of the section — assures you that you don’t know jack:

    Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

    James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction is, of course, more obviously unique — a perversion of the already perverse act of sticking one’s head in an oven. It is the last great technical achievement of a lifelong genius. There is sometimes a desire accompanying suicide to do it as efficiently as possible, which can be at odds with an occasional wish to inflict greater psychic damage than normal on those who have ‘driven you to it’. Incandenza’s method meets both requirements.

    These are probably just a couple of literary flourishes in a book already full of them — Infinite Jest is not one for standard deaths of characters, as we learned when reading of Guillaume DuPlessis’ accidental suffocation. But still, there is irony to be found in the fact that Wallace spends such time developing these off-the-wall methods of suicide for his characters, and then ended his own life with a simple belt.

    Hal and Orin’s discussion of Himself’s death strays into a discussion of grief itself, and how to handle it. Hal, prodigy that he is, refuses to submit to the prescribed process of loss. He sees his grief counselor as an enemy combatant, to be studied and conquered. This battle appears to be the very method with which he chooses to deal with his grief — Hal cannot see things other than as academic or athletic challenges to be overcome — and we are given no opinion from our narrator (whomever he or she is) on whether or not this is healthy.

    I didn’t know David Foster Wallace, and have only read 274 pages of his masterwork, but already I grieve for him and for the books he will never write. I’m sure that part of the process of dealing with this minute amount of grief is to look for clues or hints in the author’s work. Such a cliche way of dealing with this loss would be frowned upon by Hal. But I think that’s okay, because maybe Hal is kind of a jerk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    At least until August 21 when Inglorious Basterds comes out.

  • And Zac Ephron as Mario Incandenza

    While browsing through the forums I was delighted to find the beginnings of a discussion about something that had crossed my mind as I read: would it be possible to make a movie out of Infinite Jest that wasn’t a tragic flop?

    User “Good Old Neon” jumped right to the question of who would dare to direct such a thing, and his suggestions tickled me pink: either Wes or Paul Thomas Anderson. I can hear laptops banging shut from coast to coast at the mere suggestion that Wes Anderson be allowed within ten feet of the book, but it’s not a bad idea. Who better to create a reality just a few degrees off from our own, as we see in IJ? I have nothing but love for P.T. Anderson and I’d let him at the script in a heartbeat, but I’d also be afraid that I’d die a lonely old woman before he finished it.

    Before we starting casting the Incandenza brothers,31 or discussing the very real film adaptation of another DFW book that is scheduled to be released four days after we all finish reading this one, let’s look at a few non-fatal attempts in the history of cinema to adapt a beloved and word-tastic classic novel to a ruthlessly visual medium.

    Ulysses (1967) starring Milo O’Shea; directed by Joseph Strick (who somewhat ironically was fresh from being fired from the set of Justine, an adaptation of a Lawrence Durrell novel; Strick also produced an adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — the guy wouldn’t give up on literary sources, god bless him); screenplay adapted by Fred Haines (who was also responsible for an adaptation of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). Critical concensus: The screenplay got nominated for an Oscar and the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which honors mean both something and nothing. Imdb users seem to agree that what makes the film work is brilliant casting and use of location; it’s when whole swaths of literature are forced out of actors’ mouths that you begin to remember, uncomfortably, that you’re watching a book.

    Catch-22 (1970) starring Alan Arkin, directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay adapted from the Joseph Heller novel by Buck Henry. Critical concensus: Nichols et al. did a brilliant job of capturing the essence of the book, and you’re a ninny if you expect a movie to be exactly like the book it’s based on.

    Clockwork Orange (1971) starring Malcolm McDowell, directed and screenplay adapted by Stanley Kubrick. That worked out pretty well, if memory serves, though to be fair this and Catch-22 are somewhat thinner and plot-heavier than IJ.

    Conclusion: Michael Cera and a locker room filled with gawky teen heartthrobs discussing their exhaustion. Meryl Streep as Madame Psychosis. Soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright? Get Michel Gondry on the phone, right now.

  • Missed Connections

    Warning: This post does not contain spoilers in the traditional sense of the word (i.e., information to which you have not yet been privy), but it does synthesize some data points to reveal a (IMO, non-critical) fact to which you may not have tumbled yourself. There are likely many more in the comments. If you prefer to make all the connections yourself, feel free to skip today’s entry.

    Consider the following:

    1. On page 64 it says “Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was held a great loss in at least three worlds.”

    2. On page 157 the header is “WINTER B.S. 1960“.

    3. On page 159, James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s age is given as ten.

    4. One page 172, the (abridged) header is “TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY … IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD [etc.] … ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE”.

    5. On page 223 we learn that the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar fell three years before YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

    So, let’s see. James was 10 in 1960, so he was born in 1950 (or possibly 1949, if the passage set in 1960 transpired before his birthdate). He died 54 years later, in the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar. 1950 + 54 = 2004. Therefore, the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar is 2004, and The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (which falls five years later) is 2004 + 5 = 2009. Plus or minus a year, depending on the exact date of his birth.

    I feel compelled to tout this particular instance of deductive excellence on my part because it is the only one I have successfully completed.28

    Meanwhile, in the forums, readers blithely mention connections that I totally, completely missed. “X said Y and Z said Y, therefore X is Z.” That kind of stuff. It makes me want to turn back to page 3 and just start over, and this time transcribe the novel into a notebook line-by-line, to ensure that I don’t miss a thing.

    It also makes me feel like George Michael. No, the other George Michael.

    (Just mentally replace the phrase “math problem” with “contemporary post-modern masterpiece”.)29

    I love a good mystery as much as the next guy, but finding clues in Infinite Jest sometimes feels like trying to find a pattern in the digits of pi, or solving various quests in an adventure video game (“You seek the Crown of Midas? Alas, it was broken in seven pieces, each of which was placed in a different world. Run around for the next 35 hours and collect them all, why don’t you?”).30

    How say you? Do you like the treasure hunt aspect of the novel, or do you occasionally find yourself wishing Wallace would quit with the coy and give us the straight dope? What connections have you unearthed thus far?

    Misc:

    Thunder Stolen: My original topic for today’s post was going to be the Wardine and yrstruly sections, but on Friday that particular discussion broke out like a brawl in a soccer bar. It’s even spilled over to yesterday’s Roundup thread and, frankly, I am now kind of relieved that I wasn’t the one to first throw a folding chair.

    Self-PUNK’D: I finished the 14-page endnote 110 (yeah, I’m a bit ahead of schedule–shhhh!). It’s so long that I had to take a break in the middle of it. When I returned and saw my bookmark one centimeter from the end of the novel rather than the beginning, I had a momentary, electric thrill. It was like finding a $20 bill on the ground, and then remembering that you are in your own bedroom.

    Art Imitates Life: My friend J. was going to participate in Infinite Summer, but then she decided that she had too many other books that she wanted to read . “Funny thing, though,” she told me over the weekend. “The first book I read was The Emperor’s Children, which had a character who was trying to read Infinite Jest to impress people on the Internet.”

  • Roundup

    Infinite Summer was mentioned in Newsweek, both the online and print edition. Related: hello one zillion new visitors. More info about the event can be found here, and the forums are over yonder. And in case you are wondering: a dedicated reader could pick up Infinite Jest today and still finish by September 21st if they chose to do so, no sweat. (Well, maybe a little sweat. But Lyle can take care of that for you.)

    Infinite Summer also graced the pages of The New York Times Book Blog, Phawker, and The EphBlog.

    Gayla of Beautiful Screaming Lady views the many exhortations on this site to “trust the author” with skepticism:

    I have to admit–and this makes me feel like Ebenezer Scrooge on a deadline at a Christmas parade–I don’t find … these arguments particularly compelling. I agree that the first ten pages are great. There is a lot of great writing in this book. The problem is that there’s also a lot of–not bad writing, but problematic writing, and there are a lot of paragraphs where I feel that Wallace’s point is not so much to communicate with me as to show me what a virtuoso he is…

    And that’s why I don’t trust David Foster Wallace. I’m not going to stop reading the book, because its truly fabulous moments are worth slogging through Wardine and yrstruly. But I don’t believe he was in control of his talent.

    In an interview with The Aspen Times, the Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller says he’s about to jump in the fray. At this point we’re only a drummer shy of a house band.

    William.K.H and Jeffrey Paris argue that Infinite Jest is not “science-fiction”. Jim Brown and Robert Sharp wonder if the novel qualifies as a “new media object”

    On Infinite Detox, a blogger struggles to overcome a dependency on tramadol while reading Infinite Jest. He writes: “Six or so months ago I found the book’s treatment of addiction and recovery compelling enough to inspire me to quit cold turkey for several weeks over the Christmas holidays … With Wallace’s book, again, acting as something of a guide and mentor, I hope also to give my drug habit the boot.”

    Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

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

  • Infinite Summery – Week 3

    Milestone Reached: Page 221 (22%)

    Chapters Read:

    Page 151: Drug tests at E.T.A; Mike Pemulis sells sterile urine.

    Page 157 – WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ: Himself’s father (Hal’s grandfather) prepares to teach Himself how to play tennis, tells of the incident that ended his own tennis career, and drinks heavily.

    Page 169 – 4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis acquires some “incredibly potent” DMZ.

    Page 172 – TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA (etc.): Hal narrates a film made by Mario. The narration consists of a series of how-to instructions “Here is how to do individual drills …”)

    Page 176 – SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS … WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: A series of statements made by recovering addicts at Ennet House.

    Page 181 – LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Madame Psychosis begins her show at 109-WYYY FM; Hal and Mario listen at the Headmaster’s House.

    Page 193: A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the other six buildings on the Enfield Marine Public Heath Hospital complex (down the hill from ETA).

    Page 198 – 6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: ETA weight room; introduction to Lyle, the sweat-licking guru.

    Page 200: An overview of the residents of Ennet House, including a long discursion on Tiny Ewell and his fascination with tattoos.

    Page 211: Michael Pemulis hypes up the DMZ to the other members of ETA.

    New Characters: Really just one: Madam Psychosis, the host of “Sixty Minutes More or Less with…” on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station 109-WYYY FM, a program to which Mario listens religiously.

  • Nick Maniatis: The Howling Fantods

    Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the fourth time he stopped counting.

    The Howling Fantods was inspired by Infinite Jest. I bought a discounted first edition of Infinite Jest in response to a review I had read in what I think was the Melbourne Age. My first Wallace reading experience was on public transport, on my way home one evening, in Canberra, Australia. The opening pages of that novel changed me.

    It was 1996 and I was in my third year of university. An icon for the program NCSA Mosaic had appeared on the desktop of computers at the Australian National University and opened my eyes to the world wide web. In late ’96 or early ’97 I made a free personal “me” page using the geocities (ugh) hosting environment. I loved reading Wallace. I loved the idea of this web thing. I merged the two and the SCREAMING FANTODS was born. (I was emailed a correction a few days later)

    Around this time I discovered wallace-l the Wallace mailing list back then appeared to be mostly academics and students. There were a number of amazing group reads of Infinite Jest co-ordinated through wallace-l. Another just finished up prior to Infinite Summer (IJIM – Infinite Jest, In Memorial). Right now the focus over at wallace-l is Oblivion.

    I don’t think I’d ever been privy to such articulate, academic, and passionate discussion about a text. Ever. There were people there who were just as internet aware as me, if not more so. They were also much, much smarter. It was scary. It was fantastic. And all their discussions were searchable. They still are.

    Infinite Jest was, I think, published at just the right time. The blossoming world wide web brought readers, academics and fans together using a common, digital, user-created medium that seemed designed to discuss this book.

    I feel terribly lucky to have been part of that early online community. I’m glad they were there for me in September last year.

    And now we have Infinite Summer. There’s not much more exciting than seeing your favourite author mentioned all over the web. And not only that, the focus is on his writing, not what happened in his life. There is no way I’d be ever able to find the time to organise something as mammoth as a large scale Infinite Jest group read, so it is wonderful to see the dedicated team here managing spectacularly.

    The best bit, readers, is that you’ve all made it this far. You’re almost over the hump. Once you get through the first 250 or so pages the bigger payoffs start hitting in droves. I’m keeping an eye on the forums and blogs and quite clearly many of you out there are finding this much easier and more entertaining than you thought it would be. I’ll let you in on another secret:

    It gets better.

    I’ll be surprised if you can keep to as little as 75 pages a week after page 500. That will certainly be the biggest challenge.

    Bits that I think are worth mentioning / revisiting from the first 210 pages:

    p37 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: I’m sorry everyone, it’s the ice-cream. Confirmed by a trusted Wallace-l member who asked David Foster Wallace personally. Sorry. It was even harder for me to accept because when I was reading IJ on release I hadn’t ever seen Dove ice cream or chocolate in Australia. I thought soap was the only option.

    p37-38 Clenette and p128-135 Yrstruly: I know a number of you skipped these two sections. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. Honestly? I’d prefer you skip them if it means you don’t close the book and never open it again. I found them hard the first time too. I also had an inner urge to find them offensive. Was Wallace making fun of these people? How come the other sections don’t read like this? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is narrating? Wait a minute, who was narrating before?

    My advice? When you read IJ again (or if you flick back for a second attempt) just go with the Clenette and Yrstruly sections. Don’t try to parse everything, they don’t work if you slow down and read carefully. Both sections work more effectively when you are already vaguely familiar with their content because then the voices and rhythms start to wash over you. When that happens so do the characters. And then you’re inside their heads and THAT is not comfortable. In fact it is very, very uncomfortable. I’m not going to try for a moment to argue that they are realistic voices or heads to be in. But these two sections do their jobs very well if you just let go and trust Wallace. Does this sound familiar?

    It wasn’t until a few years ago did I get a flicker of how spot-on Wallace is with these sections. Post schoolyard fight, I had some students write reports of the incident they witnessed. In their rush to get everything out of their heads and onto the page they seemed to forget about formal English grammar, or formal anything, for that matter. It was stream of consciousness stuff. Emotion mixed with description mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue mixed with unusual, but workable, phonetic transpositions. These kids were not illiterate by any means. If anything the stress of the situation had messed with their ability to express themselves using the English expected of them. The reports reminded me instantly of Infinite Jest and made me appreciate it even more.

    If you want to see if Wallace can make this work in greater length try ‘John Billy’ in Wallace’s short story collection ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. There’s also another example of this voice in another of his stories. But to tell you which one would actually mess with the impact of it. I know you’ll find it yourself.

    p105-109 Marathe and Steeply on choice: Which character do you side with? Are you actively choosing? Or just going with your gut reaction? Is it impossible to choose? Double-bind maybe? When I first read IJ I didn’t find the Steeply and Marathe sections particularly compelling.

    On the second read they were my focus. It is so easy to sweep the Steeply and Marathe conversations to the side when you want to know more about the entertainment. I think they’re some of the most underrated parts of the book. Read them.

    p144-151 Videophony: I find it impossible to use Skype without thinking about this section. Particularly when I want to check my email or surf the web at the same time as the current video chat and feel I can’t without being rude. I’ve also become aware of how often I relax with my arms folded above my head while sitting upright, how often I scratch my nose, and how often I pick at my right ear.

    p157-169: Every single line of this section is pure gold and leads perfectly to page 169’s time slowed down can’t look at the page (but can’t look away either) moment.

    p196: HELP WANTED. I don’t think I need to explain this.

    The very best thing about Infinite Summer so far, for someone who has read the book way more times than is healthy, is re-living my first read via all of your comments and posts. The Infinite Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog are doing a mighty fine job too.

    Infinite Jest is my favourite book and I have not stopped reading it for any length of time since I opened it to the first page all those years ago. Be careful, or else this Infinite Summer thing might live up to just a little more than its name…

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

    This post subsidized by Kellogg’s.26

    Everyone knows that Sunday evening feeling.27 The pit in your stomach that grows and grows while you watch crappy TV shows that you’re not really watching because school is tomorrow and you have. Not. Done. Your. Homework.

    Those who read my post last week (“Not the best student“) will not be shocked to learn that I suffered heavily from the Sunday evening feeling. I do not believe that I ever, in my school career, did a single piece of homework until the night before it was due.

    How does this relate to Infinite Jest? Please. Like you even have to ask.

    I’ve just finished some blast processing, reading all 75 of this week’s pages in one sitting, which MAN I do not recommend. It’s certainly lucky that, as Matthew mentioned, these pages were a lot more easy going than earlier fare. But still, that’s a lot of pages. I’m looking to Infinite Summer as an exercise in reading and writing, sure, but more than anything I’m hoping to learn some time-management skills, too.

    I can’t help but be jealous of Hal’s routine at Enfield Tennis Academy  — there’s very little space there to mess up or miss a deadline. I suppose it could be that I’m just jealous of his life, of course — what I wouldn’t give to be moneyed, super-intelligent and a tennis ace. Well, maybe scratch the tennis part, I’m not really one for sports. And his smarts seem like a bit of a burden at times, actually.

    Okay, so I just want the money. Big deal.

    The more we delve into Hal’s (mis)adventures at ETA, the more anxious I grow about that first chapter. I’m really liking this guy, guys. And I don’t want him to become that trapped soul, that shell of a person.

    I really feel like this post is lacking a unifying theme, but I’m sure that’s to be expected after cramming that much IJ into my head. And the whole Madame Psychosis section did some damage all by itself. I can’t quite work out if I like it or not. Or even if I like the idea of her show or not.

    I mean, it’s certainly a great concept — this mysterious figure, the only paid host of a college radio station, sending out whatever she feels like to MIT students and anyone else who can pick it up. I’m just not sure I’d be one of the students who tuned in with any kind of regularity.

    The show we ‘overheard’ seemed deliberately opaque, and hard to parse — I’m presuming even more so delivered to your ears. I’m wondering if the show is Foster Wallace’s way of commenting on the difficulty of reading his own work. I’m wondering if that’s too shallow an interpretation on my part. I’m wondering if my pop tarts are finished cooking yet.

    Okay, that last one isn’t really relevant, I’ll grant you. Unless it’s somehow telling that I finished that chunk of Infinite Jest and immediately craved cinnamon pop tarts?

    (Note: I request silence from those of you who know that I always crave cinnamon pop tarts.)

    So: is everyone doing better than me, or are you guys having to indulge in massive catch-up sessions, too? Did you like the Madame Psychosis section, and if you did can you tell me why and what it’s about so I can steal your words and use them at parties to sound clever? And are my pop tarts done? (Yes.)