Early in Infinite Summer, we received an email from a participant (who requested anonymity):
I went to a David Foster Wallace talk/autograph signing in Boston years ago. I asked him to write a message of congratulations to the reader on the final page. I thought this would motivate me to re-read IJ, since his congratulatory note would be waiting at the end.
I will scan his message and autograph, and you can post the images on the site when Infinite Summer officially hits Page 981.
Infinite Summer: Dracula
… is a go. Please visit (and circulate) infinitesummer.org/dracula.
After Summer Parties
There are a number of post-I.S. parties in the works. Here are the ones of which we are aware:
Andbutso (Austin):
Skylight Books (Los Angeles): A party to celebrate the completion of Infinite Jest by people all over Los Angeles, the country and the world in conjunction with Infinite Summer 2009. We also would like to celebrate the life and work of David Foster Wallace, a writer who so many of us deeply admired. We are hoping to have people who knew DFW personally in addition to members of the media and the general public. We will have refreshments (both AA and non-AA versions) and desserts which will include a custom cake from StraightOuttaChocolate and cookies which DFW himself enjoyed when he read at Skylight a number of years back. There will be a limited number of custom commemorative tennis balls courtesy of Sideshow Media, publishers of Elegant Complexity (an Infinite Jest guide). Update: John Krasinski, actor/director/writer for the movie Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, will be joining us to promote the movie (which opens the same day). He will read a bit from the book and sign movie posters.
Booksmith (San Francisco): Monday, September 28 at 7:30 p.m.. Let your social life commence again! Join other IJ readers – face-to-face, this time — to discuss the intricate complexities of a novel that has changed your perception of light reading. Bring your beaten and battered copy of Infinite Jest to enter a contest to see whose copy has been most abused. Suggested $5 donation covers wine and food.
We’ll supplement this list as more celebrations are brought to our attention.
The Remaining Schedule
The Guides will provide one more week of essay-style posts, followed by an “End of Summer Roundtable” from the 21st to the 25th.
This is cross-posted to the forums.
We’ll be featuring guests for the remainder of the week, but I’m appropriating my Monday slot for a discussion on the future of Infinite Summer.
the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term); and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club.
Like The Tunnel Club, Infinite Summer’s raison d’etre is kind of vague. Well, not yet. But it will be in a month, after we’ve finished reading Infinite Jest.
The question of what would happen to Infinite Summer come autumn was one that I was frequently asked in interviews. And was always very coy in my responses so as not to tip my hand w/r/t the Master Plan … or, rather, the fact that I had no plan, Master or otherwise. The idea of transitioning the site into a perpetual online book club thingamaroo certainly occurred to me, but the amount of work the project entailed (at least until recently) prevented me from mapping out what such a future would look like.
It’s decision time now, though (it takes at least a month to line up Guides, guests, and so forth). And while I continue to have no solid plan, I am slowly tumbling to the realization that I am going to continue the site, at least for a while.
Right now I’m trying to figure out what direction to go after IJ. I am well aware that Infinite Jest is a unique artifact, and that Infinite Summer may implode without it at the core. That said, it seems to me there are a few distinct paths the site could take from here:
A mix of these themes would probably be best; perhaps a huge, postmodern opus every six months, and shorter, more conventional novels in between. Right now I am leaning toward 2666 for winter and Gravity’s Rainbow next summer (or The Pale King, depending on publication date). I would also love to tackle The Recognition and Underworld, devote a season to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and maybe have Dystopiathon (think 1984, Brave New World, and Clockwork Orange). For shorter works, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Housekeeping are at the top of my list (I have a literal list). And as a post Jest palate cleanser, I am tempted to devote October to Dracula, to conclude on Halloween Day.
But as much as Infinite Summer is about literature, it is also about community. And we’d love to get your input on the website’s future, in either the comments or the forums. We’d love for you to join The Tunnel Club and help us draft our very own version of Robert’s Rules.
And thank you for your continued participation–I hope the Infinite Summer experience has been as wonderful and engrossing for you as it has been for all of us.
Two months ago Matthew Baldwin told the Guides that August 24-28 would be devoted to guest posts and Kevin Guilfoile, who is a professional, wrote this on a calendar, and Matthew Baldwin, who is not, did not, and, long story short, Kevin doesn’t have a post prepared, so we’re running the weekly guest post today and Kevin will do the Friday slot, and all of this is pretty much 100% Matthew’s fault, although, to be fair, who expects people to write things onto calendars in this day and age, I mean really.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Media: There was a piece about Infinite Summer in Salon last week. Other mentions in the media: a lengthy article in the Globe and Mail, and mention in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Blog (our new motto is “Infinite Summer: Spanning the Globes”), and a feature in the Kentucky Courier-Journal.
Spoilers: We hates them, we hates them forever! That’s why we have implemented spoiler tags, both here and in the forums. Ideally you’ll never have occasion to use them, because you’ll be scrupulously adhering to the Spoiler Line. But if you ever find yourself wondering if something constitutes a spoiler (hint: if you feel the impulse to preface a statement with “I swear this is not a spoiler, but …”, it almost certainly is), please enclose it in <spoiler> tags, like so:
For the lowdown on the forum spoiler tags and restrictions, please see this topic.
Summer Vacation: Matthew, Eden, Kevin, and Avery are taking the week off, but we have four Guest Guides to pick up the slack. We’ll see you all in a week.
