2009

The Archives

Miscellaneous
Odds and Ends
07.19.09 | Permalink | 2 Comments

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 […]
Summaries
Infinite Summery – Week 4
07.18.09 | Permalink | 3 Comments

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 […]
Guests
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: On Teaching Infinite Jest
07.17.09 | Permalink | 58 Comments

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 […]
Avery Edison
Aren’t I Meant to be the Funny One?
07.15.09 | Permalink | 44 Comments

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 […]
Kevin Guilfoile
I Pushed My Soul in a Deep Dark Hole and I Followed It In
07.15.09 | Permalink | 44 Comments

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 […]
Eden M. Kennedy
And Zac Ephron as Mario Incandenza
07.14.09 | Permalink | 61 Comments

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 […]
Matthew Baldwin
Missed Connections
07.13.09 | Permalink | 78 Comments

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 […]