pp 317-320 Marathe and Steeply begin to get at the tactical purpose of the Entertainment. While Marathe is vague about his cell’s involvement in the samizdat’s dissemination, he does speculate about why it is the most effective weapon an anti-US terrorist could employ: because there’s no coercion involved. The Entertainment can simply be offered, and the people of the United States—a society which has repeatedly demonstrated that it will choose that which is both most pleasurable and most lethal, that it will reliably act against its best interests—will choose it. The first deliberate choice to consume the Entertainment is all it takes; like an addict’s first hit of a Substance, the self-control will immediately begin to slip away.

“Now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. … Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.” (318)

Wallace also presages the Bush era (very cleverly and presciently, by having a future [2009] character voice a fictionalized version of a real-world eventuality that hadn’t yet transpired in 1992-1995, when Wallace was writing the book) and the Bush doctrine’s response to 9/11, when Marathe says, “Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: ‘Someone is to blame‘” (319). An enemy must be identified, and blame must be placed. But never internally; never on the Self. Always externally, on the Other. Us versus them, with us or against us, etc.

Likewise with the platitudinous appeals to Freedom, wielded like a cudgel against dissent and dissatisfaction: “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do” (320).

So what happens when no one tells our precious selves what to do, and we are more or less able to do pretty much whatever we want? We confuse the ability to do something with an imperative to do it. Self-will run riot, in the language of AA, produces a nation of people out of control, indulging every appetite without limits. Marathe observes the way postmodern American culture turned its back on God and religion during the latter half of the 20th century: “Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples” (319).

By Marathe’s lights, we threw the baby out with the bathwater—getting rid of spirituality’s good bits along with religion’s bad ones, supplanting our temples with the religion of the Self and the primacy of individual appetite fulfillment until we had no spiritual compass. “And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible” (320).

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Posted: August 29th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 2

You probably thought I’d given up on the IJOSASa-oBC.

But no, I’m just dragging my feet a little, while at the same time streamlining things: addressing bigger chunks while skipping others, in an effort to really focus on what I’m finding most important and striking during this particular read-through.

pp 219-240 One of a handful of darkly epic chapters, like the 1960 Junior and Senior Incandenza scene, from which all the book’s themes radiate outward, triangles cut from the gasket. The drizzle accompanying Joelle to Molly’s party fits the mood of what she’s about to do, and the description of her walk toward the party portrays a slice of outdoor urban Boston even as the narration deepens in its interiority, going further and further into the mind of the woman about to demap herself.

Joelle is walking toward “that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high [high, like an arrow that must return to earth] that she’s going to fall down [the descent of the arrow] and stop breathing and turn blue and die” (222)—turning blue, going back into the blue, from where so many things in this book spring but where people go to die and where Joelle’s headed, to join Jim himself—Himself—in the blue.

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Posted: August 18th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: none

Wow. A guy takes a week off and the IJOSASa/oBC just keeps going: Laura reports having finished the book, which I think is just ridiculous of her, but what can you expect from a Canadian? Meanwhile, I am thrilled to hear from Dan that his "leave the book at work and only read it during lunch" initiative was a miserable failure.

Maria has found time in the midst of returning to the States from Japan to post a couple of really thorough and thoughtful entries. Katie, an IJ veteran, provides a nice snapshot, literally, of her initial experience reading the book. And while in Chicago last weekend I was able to touch base with a few IJOSASa/oBC members like Aden, Joe, Ransom, Chad, and Mark, who are reading the book even if they're not blogging about it, which I think is just fantastic. (I asked Aden, who's from Tempe, if the city-wide shadow-casting phenomenon is accurate as described in the Marathe/Steeply scenes, and he said it's probably not possible, at least in any of the Arizonan cities or mountain ranges he's familiar with. But I'm not yet ready to give up hope.)

For my own part, I suppose that I am flagging, as Laura pointed out in response to my last post. Perhaps my initial goal of documenting every single chapter and page was overly ambitious, though I do think it was important for the first couple chunks I covered. Now that my notes are a couple hundred pages in, the book has plateaued a little, and I think most of the introductory matter is behind us.

So forgive me if my notes going forward aren't as thorough as they have been. I'm still going to try and pick up a few threads from my first two posts, and continue to provide background that first-time readers will find helpful.

This time around I want to focus on pp. 135-211, a relatively small chunk that still dispenses a wealth of information and also begins to effect the narrative's circling/looping/settling motion that I tried to describe earlier. Maria and Laura have done a better job that I at articulating the book's fractal nature, so I won't try to flog that dead barrel of pigeons any longer. But I think you'll find—I hope you'll see—that here is where the chapters begin to pool, balloon, ferment, etc. so that we're returning to already-established characters and themes: getting deeper rather than broader. And then the next time around I'll hope to cover even more pages.

pp. 137-138. The introduction to Ennet House, with some background on the Boston Metro AA community. As far as I've been able to tell, the anonymous founder of Ennet is not someone who appears anywhere else in the book—it's not Himself, or anyone else we already know. Though I welcome efforts from anyone who'd like to challenge me on this or offer theories as to the identity of the Guy Who Didn't Even Use His First Name.

pp. 138-139. This is the beginning of a section of seemingly miscellaneous documentation from various sources. Notice that the chapter headings in this chapter swell in length and contain rampant editorialization, even as the sections they head seem to shrink. This first one is a hilarious email thread in which an insurance claims adjuster passes along the first page of a claim from Dwayne "Dooney" Glynn, who will later show up as a recovering addict at Ennet House. His problem, aside from getting into an accident at his construction job, is that "he was trying to do the job alone." This reinforces the theme of the isolation and loneliness from which so many of the novel's characters suffer. More to the point, his problem is that he was trying do exactly that which Lyle proscribes on p. 128—"Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight"—resulting in another instance of hyperbolic, Looney-Toonsesque physical comedy. A lot of people in this book fail to heed Lyle's advice.

pp. 140-142. More insight into Hal in the form of a paper he wrote in seventh-grade. Pretty funny stuff here, but also instructive. Whenever I read this passage I end up trying to fit the novel's main characters into one of the two hero-categories Hal describes, McGarrett or Furillo. They don't map over perfectly, but these are the incomplete formulations I've come up with: McGarrett = people of action = Don, Orin, Pemulis, Mario, Marathe, Lenz, terrorists. Then, Furillo = people of reaction and/or inaction = Hal, Himself, Erdedy, Gompert, Steeply, Joelle. Again, these aren't perfect, and maybe I'm trying to force too much into too narrow a category.

pp. 143-144. Special Agent Hugh Steeply goes undercover and into drag as journalist "Helen" Steeply to write a hilariously bad article for Moment magazine about a woman whose exterior artificial heart was stolen by a transvestive who happens to be Poor Tony, in case you didn't catch that.

pp. 144-151. This is a really entertaining chapter that I can envision being part of a separate abortive short-story idea by DFW (this might also be true of the preceding short and seemingly random snippets). This is the first time I've read this passage since the advent and near-ubiquity of iSight built-in video cameras, video-chat technology, and online telephony, and I am astounded at how accurately DFW characterizes this technology and the culture to which it gave rise.

A coupla-three examples: I don't video-chat very often, for precisely the reasons DFW gives: it requires full-on engagement with my interlocutor and nothing less than total attention to the conversation. I can't wash the dishes, do my laundry, or be naked while I'm chatting through video. Video-chat is crappy for multi-tasking.

Also, we haven't gotten quite to the point of polyurethane masks to wear while we video-chat, but Apple does offer its silly Eiffel Tower backdrops for iSight users, along with various other imaging effects.

Finally, while the technology may not have run its course, the impulse to eschew video- and other forms of online chatting is strong among many people I know, and I share it. We're not reverting to rotary-telephones and landlines or handwritten letters, by any means, but good old cellphone conversations and the relatively leisurely prose of emails is beginning to seem more attractive in direct proportion to the ubiquity and convenience of videophony—for me, at least.

pp. 151-156 give us more of ETA and some wonderful little scenes with Pemulis' clean-urine business etc. I am curious about the paragraph at the top of p. 156, where the narrator acknowledges that Himself was "revered as a genius in his original profession [optics?] without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive." Would that thing that he turned out to be a genius at be film? More to the point, the genius required to create a lethally entertaining film?

pp. 156-169. As if to answer those questions, this chapter provides one of the book's most sustained scenes, presented entirely as a monologue delivered by James Incandenza, Sr., to his ten-year-old son Jim, aka Himself. I can't overstate how important this chapter is, though you probably had no trouble twigging to that.

For one thing, we now have a more or less conclusive way of sussing out the chronology of Subsidized Time—something that many lazy reviewers, including Dale "Peckerhead" Peck, have claimed is impossible (Burn 26). If Himself is fifty-four at the time of his death in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, and ten in 1960, that means that the YT-SDB is 2004. According to the listing of Subsidized Years provided later in the book, the first year of Subsidized Time was the Year of the Purdue Wonderchicken, which would place that year in 2002. Most of the novel's main action occurs in the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, which is 2009. The Year of Glad is 2010. Stephen Burn is particularly helpful in figuring this out, and the chronolgy at the end of his book is indispensable.

Meanwhile, Carlisle points out that, given the timeline of Subsidized years, the lengthy chapter headings on p. 140, p. 142, and p. 172 contain glaring errors in chronology (presumably intentional on DFW's part) when they state the years since Himself "passed from this life" (140, 172) and "took his own life by putting his head in a microwave oven" (142). What do these discrepancies, not to mention the aforementioned editorialization within the chapter headings' authorial voice, say about the narrative reliability and identity of the novel's third-person, omniscient narrator?

Anyway. The James Incandenza Senior/Junior chapter in the Winter of 1960 is dense with thematic information. There's the physical/body theme: the way Senior chastises his son and Marlon Brando for an apparent lack of grace and the careless way they yank objects to them—echoing Lyle's advice about pulling great weights—though it turns out Senior actually reveres Marlon Brando's kinesthetic awareness, which only appears careless. By telling his son to table his intellectual/optics pursuits—urging him to put down his Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition and pick up a tennis racket—is Senior trying to erase the Cartesian mind/body distinction and make him (Junior) into a MacGarretesque man of action? Stephen Burn argues that "the elder Incandenza" (Himself, or Junior in this chapter) grows up to continue collapsing the Cartesian duality, a "reductionist strategy" that is "recognizably materialist" (Burn 44). Incandenza Senior wanted to figuratively divorce his excessively cerebral son from his head, a task Junior would take upon himself forty-four years later—quite literally, and with a microwave.

There's the ubiquity of spiders in the garage and in Senior's flashback—he obviously loathes them, yet he knows the species name of the black widow—Latrodectus mactans, which ends up being the name of one of Himself's production companies. He (Senior) even believes, rather ludicrously, that it may have been a spider he slipped on when experienced his career-ending injury as a youngster.

There's the omnipresent theme of paternal lineage, expectations, and failure. This passage contains a variation on one of my favorite lines in the book: "Talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost" (173). Senior says: "Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever" (168).

We get the story of Senior's spectacular and painful failure during the one and only tennis game his father ever attended. (Maria has written beautifully about this scene.) He is insistent that he was "in [his] body"—again, that materialistic invocation that also echoes Hal's deceptively simple statement "I am in here," from the first chapter.

We get an exquisitely agonizing description of his drunkenness—the alcoholism he would bequeath to Himself. At the end of the chapter he is maudlin: clearly drunk, profusely apologetic and regretful. Here we see a distillation of so many of the book's other themes and characters: failures, losers, addicts, sinners. The chapter ends with Senior drawing the obvious but tragic parallel between his injured self being dragged off the court and his adult self being dragged into the house at the end of a bender: stooped, wounded, destroyed.

pp. 172-176. Tennis and the feral prodigy. A wealth of information about ETA and the formative years of a competitive tennis palyer. Also a rare glimpse inside Hal's head, assuming this monologue is a true representation of Hal's thoughts on tennis (which I'm going to go ahead and assume it is).

Notice that at the top of p. 174 there's reference to "justifying your seed," not for the first time. The multiple meanings of seed are pertinent. Consider what it would mean for fathers, specifically James Senior or Junior, to justify their seed, i.e. their offspring. Consider whether either of them succeeded in this. Consider that the biblical caracter Onan, after whom North America is now named, was guilty of spilling his seed frivolously, wasting it—of not justifying it.

On p. 175 we get the first of a couple references to Fellini's 8 1/2. Consider that during the main action of the novel, in November of YDAU, there have been eight and a half years of Subsidized Time. (I'm not suggesting that this neat little coincidence is anything more than a neat little coincidence—though it might be. This book is full of these neat little coincidences, of course, and I love them.)

pp. 176-181. More Ennet House. (I fucking love the Ennet House scenes; there could never be too many of them.) This is, of course, a series of one-sided dialogues—monologues, really, delivered by various residents. Using contextual information from here and elsewhere you can figure out who some of the speakers are, and the order is this, as near as I can tell: Nell Gunther, Tiny Ewell, Morris Hanley, [not sure], Alfonso, [not sure—maybe Gately], [not sure—maybe Gately], [not sure], Randy Lenz (probably), Bruce Green, Tiny (again), Lenz (probably) again (probably), Wardine (probably), [not sure], [not sure], Tiny (again), [not sure], [not sure], [not sure], [not sure].

pp. 181-193. Madame Psychosis! This is not the first we've heard of her, technically; we know that the "incredibly potent" drug DMZ, which Pemulis recently procured, also goes by the name Madame Psychosis. Now we know that she is the mysterious hostess of a cult-favorite late-night program on MIT's radio station FM 109-WYYY FM (which consider that, as far as I know, FM radio dials don't go that high). Also, Carlisle posits that horizontality is a recurring theme in this book: characters and objects are are often horizontal, lying down, inactive. Are the Ys in the station's call letters, then, supposed to indicate the Y (vertical) axis of a Cartesian coordinate system? Are we supposed to look for vertical divergences from the book’s prevailing horizontality, and what bearing does the Cartesian coordinate system have on the Incandenza's patrilineal obsession with the Cartesian mind/body distinction?

"Madame Psychosis" is an obvious pun on the Greek word metempsychosis, which means the migration of the soul from one body to another (Burn 57), a phenomena that occurs metaphorically throughout the book, and—the argument could be made—literally, on a couple of occasions. Madame Psychosis broadcasts from a radio studio deep within the MIT student union which is shaped and decorated, rather grotesquely, like a giant human head with various internal components—the tongue, the eyeballs, the brain and its parts—in various degrees of exposure. Here's that motif of disembodied heads again, rendered hugely and literally.

Consider that this chapter opens with the description—mediated through a radio performer's imitation of his father—of a football punter who we can all but assume is Orin. Consider that Madame Psychosis should know exactly who Orin is, given what we eventually learn about her. Consider that Mario, who is huge-headed much like Don Gately, is one of MP's most devoted listeners. Consider that Mario should also know exactly who MP is, given what we eventually learn about her.

Consider that the student engineer, who works within the aural medium of radio, would opt to enter/exit the union (head) through the side (ear) doors rather than the front (eye) doors. Consider the importance of televisual entertainment to this novel, and the significance of Mario's and MP's and the student engineer's apparent preference for the more esoteric and outmoded audio forms of entertainment.

The narrator's description of MP's show could also, at times, apply to Infinite Jest itself: "The monologues [chapters?] seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares" (185); "it tends to give you the feeling there's an in-joke that you and she [DFW?] alone are in on."

pp. 193-198. A description of the former military-hospital complex in which Ennet House is located. The seven buildings of the complex "resemble seven moons orbiting a dead planet" (193); I wonder if it's significant that on the previous page a caller to MP's show points out that "the moon, which of course as any sot knows revolves around the earth, does not itself revolve" (192).

On p. 194 we learn that Don Gately has never seen a ballet—consider his ignorance of ballet in light of his possibly balletic movements at a crucial moment later in the novel. On p. 197 we learn that the curtains in the female side's bedroom windows are almost always billowing; consider the significance of billowing movement elsewhere in the novel. (Kate Gompert knows from billowing, we'll later learn.)

Ennet is at the bottom of a hill, on whose flattened and denuded top we have ETA. This is about as blatant a metaphor for class divide as you can have in literature, and we see it in countless books, none of which come to mind right now. Ennet's residents, most of them indigent financially and otherwise, climb the hill to serve the needs of the wealthier Enfield residents, including the ETA community. This hill and other geographical features of Enfield will factor prominently into the class divide and the interaction of the Ennet and ETA populations.

pp. 200-211. This is one of my favorite passages in the novel. I have typed out the first few pages of this passage I don't know how many times over the past decade as I've quoted and reproduced it in various places. I remember being so taken with this chapter when I first read the book in my student flat in London in December 1998 that I immediately went up to the tiny cramped computer lab on the top floor of the flat and waited my turn at one of the obsolete-even-back-then-PCs so I could type this chapter into a Word document and save it on one of my little floppies and add it to my Canon of Excerpts from Brilliant Literature.

And that's before I even knew Thing One about—or had any first-hand knowledge of or experience with—Substance dependency.

A lot of these "exotic new facts" (200) are obviously true, and even intuitive; some of them I'm not so sure about and wonder on whose authority DFW is reproducing them. Some of them are fictive—who really knows how much a forged passport will cost in the fictional 2009 of the novel?—and some of them must be based on research. But some of them seem so complex and true—especially the ones about Substances and addiction—that I can't imagine how DFW would know them without having immediate, graphic experience with them.

There's been a lot of speculation in critical literature and on the Internets about some pretty personal facets of DFW's biography and what his own experiences might have been with depression and/or Substance addiction. For my own money, I don't really care what they might have been—that's his business, and what matters here is how accurately and vividly he's rendered them within a work of fiction.

But I have to say, it's hard for me to imagine how any human intellect, however advanced, could produce passages so evocative, and observations about depression and addiction so dead-on, without having had some very up-close experiences with same.

As we know from the acknowledgments, DFW did a lot of research for this book—especially the staggeringly good AA passages coming up—by going to Boston Metro AA meetings. But this sort of stuff goes beyond that. This stuff is … well, I've done a lot of reading about addiction and alcoholism, both fictional and non-, most of it written by self-proclaimed experts, and none of it comes anywhere near this level of emotional acuity. Like depression, addiction is a disease and a cultural phenomenon that, at its most involved and advanced, defies verbal articulation. But there are a couple passages that come close, and this is one of them.

Posted: July 25th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 4

I want to begin the second meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Summertime Appreciation Society and/or Book Club with some shout-outs to other IJOSASa/oBC members who have already posted some great stuff to their blogs. Maria led the way with a couple entries, including an especially nice one highlighting the poetic qualities of DFW’s prose. Meanwhile Laura has accomplished the impressive hat trick of not only being from Tucson (allowing her to address the novel’s Arizonan settings), but also having attended the same MFA program as DFW, and being half-Canadian. (Which means that if we hear any squeaky wheelchair wheels, we’ll know it’s her. Har har, and so forth.)

Both Dan and Maria have written about encountering the book for the first time and how external circumstances affected their reading experience. I’m interested in this too, since tackling such a big book is inevitably going to impact one’s daily routine, and our memories make certain associations with our favorite books. (For example, I read it for the first time in the UK, and reading this Great American Novel overseas might have had some effect on the way I initially experienced it.)

Finally, I’m pleased to announce that Neil has started up a blog and added his voice to the fray. For some reason it bears a Blogger Content Warning, so I can’t wait to see what kind of licentious material Neil plans on putting up there.

Before I get into my notes on the next chunk of the book, I want to talk about Difficult Books and why we read them. Infinite Jest is undoubtedly a Difficult Book, but I would argue that it’s not unreasonably so. It’s just the right degree of Difficult.

Jonathan Franzen makes a distinction—in an old New Yorker essay called “Mr. Difficult” (abstract only; reprinted in his NF collection How to Be Alone) to which Burn refers on pp. 9-10—between “status” and “contract” novels. Status novels are books by the likes of Joyce, Gaddis, and Musil—books that Franzen feels are difficult for the sake of being difficult, as if their creation was fueled by some kind of authorial contempt for the reader. Contract novels, however, are difficult books that seek a connection with the reader, that reward the reader for sticking with them, that challenge but still respect the reader’s intelligence. Franzen categorizes Infinite Jest as a contract novel, and despite the possibility of bias arising from his being an old buddy of DFW’s, I agree with him (obviously).

Which isn’t to say a person could be blamed for beginning Infinite Jest, only to put it down after fifty or a hundred pages. It’s not an easy book to get into, and its first twenty (or hundred, or two hundred) pages are not immediately accessible.

I’m always interested in the various reasons people are or aren’t successful getting through this book, since for a while back when it was published, and maybe still today, whether or not you bothered with this book (or Underworld or Gravity’s Rainbow or the Recognitions or any of the other Difficult Books) was supposedly a barometer of your position in/on the Fraught State of Contemporary American Literature, not to mention a superficial indicator of your intellectual rigor and willingness to “engage” with a “text” and/or look like an “overserious” “douchebag” on the train in the morning.

I don’t worry too much about those things—I’m pretty confident in my ability to both engage with a text and look like an overserious douchebag in pretty much any context. I read (and re-read) Infinite Jest because it’s fun; it’s almost infinitely (GET IT?) entertaining. I wouldn’t waste my time with a difficult novel if it wasn’t going to be. Entertaining, that is. Despite my English degrees and love of reading, my patience for literature is finite, and I’ve put down a lot of Big Important Books I was supposed to read because people I either respected or feared told me I should. Read them, that is. So despite my best intentions and pretensions toward intellectual rigor, if a book doesn’t grab me right away, it doesn’t stand much of a chance. This is why I still haven’t read any Tolstoy, or made it all the way through Gravity’s Rainbow. When it comes right down to it, I’m a pretty lazy reader. So why have I succeeded in reading Infinite Jest four times when I’ve failed to conquer so many other books?

Like Franzen, I do believe there is a difference between Infinite Jest’s enduring reputation as a contract novel and certain other Big Important Books’ (possibly unfair) reputation as status novels. I heartily subscribe to the minority opinion that Infinite Jest is ultimately more accessible than many books a tenth its size. DFW takes a big, calculated risk by front-loading his novel with extremely scattered, dense material. He’s counting on you to tough it out for the first couple hundred pages, the implicit promise (or contract) being that if you can just do that, you’ll be rewarded. Around the 200th page, the book kind of levels out: nearly all its characters have been introduced, and we’re now revisiting narratives and characters with which we’re already at least glancingly familiar. The chapters get longer, the camera lingers a little longer on each scene, and the rewards begin to manifest themselves. If the book is a loop (and it is) then this is the point where the loop starts feeding back on itself. Or, in the Sierpinski scheme of things, we’re cutting small triangles out of bigger triangles we’ve already seen.

Maybe it begs the Russian-novel approach: i.e., “Please bear with us through these first few hundred pages of extremely dense prose and and unfamiliar locales and surnames with all but the first letter blanked out and two dozen characters with seven-syllable patronymics, and by page 300 or so you’ll be cruising. We promise.” (I don’t know why the voice became first-person plural there. Maybe I’m channeling the collective voice of all great Russian novelists ever, plus DFW.)

A few years ago I was on a long car trip with my brother. I was on my third pass through the book, and he was on his first, and he asked me what kept me coming back to the book, what it was I liked so much about it. You’d think I’d have had an answer to that question rehearsed and ready, but I hemmed and hawed and eventually just said, “It’s got everything.” I think I even raised the book in the air a little, sitting there in the passenger seat, as if its sheer heft were going to somehow prove my point.

But it does have damn near everything: it’s got humor, pathos, violence, romance, sex, ambition, avarice, intrigue, complex human emotions, self- and other-destructive behavior, drugs, alcohol, insightful pop-cultural and political commentary, wordplay, science fiction, science, giant feral hamsters, and tennis. And it address all of these things more artfully than any other book I’ve ever picked up. It does everything I want fiction to do and wish I could do if I ever wrote fiction, and also accomplishes a lot of the things I hope to one day do with nonfiction. It’s limitlessly appealing and, yes, addictive. I keep reading it instead of Proust or Dickens or Eat, Pray, Love because it keeps inviting me back.

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Posted: July 10th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 11

Mmmyellow. Happy In(ter)dependence Day. E Unibus Pluram, and so forth. Greetings and welcome to the first online meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Summertime Appreciation Society and/or Book Club.

The IJOSASa/oBC will be a loosely-constructed fellowship of people posting semi-regular updates to their blogs containing their notes about the novel, including observations, theories, questions, problems, and questions about the book, with links to online reading resources and to each others’ blogs, Tumblrs, Twitters, Flickrs, Bebos, BoingBlurgs, TopChefs, BarackObamas, and Zeitgeistrs.

THE NATURE OF THE PROJECT

For my own part, my posts will take the form of notes I’ve taken during this and previous readings of the novel. This time around I hope to focus on the themes and emotional resonance the book has for me, moreso than its cleverness or plot contortions, although there’ll inevitably be ample discussion of that, too.

Contrary to the buzz the novel received (and continues to receive) and David Foster Wallace’s earned reputation as a really smart smartass, Infinite Jest is at its heart a profoundly sad book. Wallace once said that when he began writing Infinite Jest his goal, having written some absurdly comic stories and his first novel, was to plot a different emotive course with nobler ambitions:

I wanted to do something sad. I think it’s a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It’s not TV’s fault, it’s not [Hollywood’s] fault, and it’s not the Net’s fault. It’s our fault. We’re choosing this. We are choosing to spend more time sneering at hype machines, [while still] being enmeshed in them, than we are living.

My secret pretension … I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn’t be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won’t be quite that … glittery but cold.

I think he’s succeeded in “do[ing] something sad,” though that tends to get lost in the noise. And don’t get me wrong; there are still some really fucking hilarious things in this book.

SECONDARY SOURCES

In my posts I’ll be making some references to secondary and tertiary sources. These include the extensive discussions, essays, dissertations, and compendia archived at the Infinite Jest section of The Howling Fantods—an excellent resource for me the first time I read the book and in the decade since.

In the print realm, there’s Stephen Burn’s excellent reader’s guide, part of the Continuum Contemporaries series. It’s a slim volume that packs in a surprising amount of analysis. I had this one at my side the last two times I read the novel. It’s probably best for second (or more)-time readers who are already familiar with the basic plot, and Burn is a genius when it comes to unpacking themes and pointing out Lost-ish coincidences (the French significance of Jim and Avril’s initials [AMI and JOI], the importance of November 8, nifty mythological parallels like Gately=Heracles/Marathe=Peracles) and the masterful ways he traces the dissemination of the Samizdat and successfully maps out the book’s chronology.

To the extend that time and stamina allow, I’ll try and dig up and refer to some of the articles and critical essays that Burn cites toward the end of his book, and most of which I’ve never read before. (I’m particularly interested in Tom LeClair’s “Prodigious Fiction of Powers, Vollman, and Wallace”, Frank Louis Cioffi’s “‘An Anguish Become Thing’”, and Timothy Jacobs’ “American Touchstone.”)

This time around, I also have Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity, published last year. This one is a scene-by-scene analysis, and as such, is over 500 pages long. Much of it is merely summative, and therefore ideal for the first-time reader, but also contains some ideas I hadn’t yet considered. Its main contributions are probably 1) the nifty map of the ETA grounds, rendered by Kyle Ware and based one what must have been exhaustive and exhausting study of the text’s references to the geography and layout of the academy; 2) Carlisle’s formulations of the novel’s plot and themes into Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal that Wallace himself has said inspired the novel’s structure; and 3) Carlisle’s ordering of the novel into roughly equal units, chapters, and section—no mean feat for a book with no table of contents and seemingly (but not actually) capricious use of chapter titles and section breaks, and incredibly useful for breaking the book down into more digestible chunks and citing scenes during discussion:

I. Chs. 1-15: main text pp. 3-181 and endnotes 1-59
II. Chs. 1-21: pp. 181-321 and notes 60-119
III. Chs. 22-24: pp. 321-489 and notes 120-207
IV. Chs. 25-26: pp. 489-619 and notes 208-256
V. Ch. 27: pp. 620-808 and notes 257-336
VI. Ch. 28: pp. 809-981 and notes 337-388

Even just glancing at this, I can see how elegant Carlisle’s breakdown is, and it reinforces a few things I’ve always believed about the novel’s structure: the almost-impossible-to-overstate importance of p. 489, for example, or that the novel really does wind down in two extremely long (about 200 pages each) chapters. My own citations will probably still be primarily page numbers, but I’ll make references to Carlisle’s breakdown where appropriate.

I’d be happy to lend either Carlisle or Burn to any book club members who are curious, except that I’m pretty sure there are approximately zero members residing in the same city as I am for the duration of the club.

Speaking of which:

THE PARTICIPANTS

Joining me in the endeavor will be a handful of friends and colleagues who have committed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to discussing the book via email and on their blogs. This distinguished array includes but is not limited to Joe, Aden (Aden: you need to give me your blog address. Also, you need to start a blog), Andrew, Dan, Toby, Sonya, Laura, Maria, and of course Neil:

From: Neil
Subject: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:26:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

attached is my homework assignment. I don’t know if you’re giving extra credit for handing in things in early. if you want, you can correct my essay in red pen and email a scan back to me. or not. whatever.

someday you might be an English teacher and I assume you would make some effort to teach on this book. just thought it would be fun to see what you thought was important and what you feel I should be getting out of this reading.

(click to enlarge)

From: Jake
Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 11:48:12 AM PDT
To: Neil

I started reading the first chapter this morning, and it was like re-watching a really great Simpsons episode. A great, dystopian, 1100-page Simpsons episode.

Your essay is brilliant, and exactly the kind of work I like to see from my students. A++++ (”Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it.”) plus extra credit for turning it in early.

I’ll pass it along to Jill Allen.

(click to enlarge)

From: Neil
Subject: Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:56:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

cool. my parents say they’ll give me $5 for every “A” I get this semester. I’m saving up for a boombox that can record music from CDs.

SPOILERS

I am going to try my darnedest to avoid revealing spoilers, making as few references as possible to things in the novel that haven’t happened yet. This will be more difficult than it sounds since, given the book’s nonlinear nature, it’s hard to tell what’s a spoiler and what isn’t, or what future information would truly spoil a first-time reader’s enjoyment of the novel. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum all the same, or at least give adequate warning (something along the lines of [SPOILER? ALERT] or [S?A]) when I’m about to reveal something that might be construed as a spoiler.

SO, LET’S GET STARTED, SHALL WE?

My first round of notes covers the first 49 pages, or the first six chapters in Carlisle’s formulation. I hope to tackle bigger chunks in future posts, simply because if I don’t, this will take fucking forever. (Do the maths.)

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Posted: July 4th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 12

Ever since I finished my thesis, whenever I talk to people about it, I’ve been joking half-jokingly that I’ll never write again. “Surely you’ll keep writing,” people will say. Or they’ll ask questions like, “Do you really think you’ll never write again?” or, “Why do you think you’ll never write again?” or, “Jake, why are you flinging your laptop into the turbid waters of the mighty Mississippi River? Is it because you intend to stop writing forever?”

I’m not serious, of course; I know I’ll keep writing. I can’t help myself, and I’m not really much good anything else (besides crossword puzzles, of course). But I will say that I’m ready to be done with the first-person voice for a while, and with the memoir. I’ve written a thick slice of unabashedly personal history in order to obtain a graduate degree, which is already kind of strange when I stop to think about it—which I’ve been doing a lot lately.

So I’m ready to be done casting back into the past, to finish scrutinizing and documenting an era that was hard enough the first time around. It’s been difficult, draining, depressing work to spend three years (re-)inhabiting what was arguably the worst year of my life. So I’m ready to be done with that. I’m ready to be done with reflection, and retrospect, now that they’ve served their purpose; I’m ready to be done with nostalgia, something that, I’ve recently discovered, isn’t actually that up to which it’s cracked.

Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses. Now that I’ve spent three years and a couple hundred pages dispatching a weird chunk of my own history, I’m ready to look outward, to draw my gaze up from my navel. The past may not be done with me, but I’m done with the past. (For now.)

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: 4

I just got back from the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (or, as I like to call, it NERDS!), held in New York City. The theme of this year’s conference was apparently Writers Who Are Assholes, which I realize might seem a redundant qualification, but some of these folks were really going above and beyond.

Like one fellow who stopped by the Dislocate table at the conference book fair (where I was stationed with two other writers of creative nonfiction) to chat with us about how he’d just written an essay explaining why “the genre of creative nonfiction sucks.” I’m generally averse to confrontation, but maybe it was the fact that I’d been in the surrounded by his ilk by four days, or was low on sleep, or was deep in the throes of conference fatigue, but I immediately challenged him on his elegantly-formed thesis and inquired as to the reasoning behind it (His answer: “It just seems like the genre has a lot of conventions you’re expected to follow” [right, because let’s keep in mind that no other genres make similar demands, and that there aren’t any exemplary instances of the form that succeed precisely because they transcend or flout those conventions (whatever this guy might perceive such conventions to be; I didn’t ask)]), and didn’t even bother to point out the apparent contradiction in the fact that he was supposedly skewering a literary form from within the form itself (i.e., the essay), instead pointing out to him the general dickheadedness of rolling up unsolicited to a table of three nonfiction writers to tell them that the form in which they’ve chosen to traffic “sucks,” with little in the way of a cogent argument to back it up, until he conceded that “there are some good examples. Like, have you read The Next American Essay?” and because arrogant oneupsmanship is contagious, especially among male writers, I said, “Yeah, I teach from it. It’s published by Graywolf, after all,” effectively snatching the Supercilious Cockswinger mantle off his person and affixing it to my own, until he shrank away from the table and I was feted by all and sundry present, a wreath of laurels placed upon my moistened brow.

Or this individual, with whom I became acquainted while volunteering at the conference’s registration booth, looking up people’s names and locating their laminated, lanyarded ID badges. When a misspelling and subsequent reprinting mishap meant that this woman’s middle name would be abbreviated on her badge to a middle initial, she began stalking away from the table before wheeling around and demanding of me, “How many books do you have? How many books do you have?” Meaning, presumably, that because she is a published author and I am not, she is more important than I am. (It’s the literary equivalent of the starlet shrieking “Do you know who I am?!” at the bouncer.) Well played, madam. I am duly chastened.

Don’t get me wrong; the weekend had its share of edifying moments, too. Some of them even occurred during the conference. But one involved seeing the amazing Nick Burd again for the first time in far too long; several others involved good old Win and a private karaoke party.

And the unlikeliest, most satisfying moment actually occurred in a diner on the upper west side around four in the morning yesterday, and involved a long, tangential, often spirited (there were martinis) conversation I had with two old friends (I’m talking old, like, people who knew me when I was in my early twenties) who now work for, respectively, NPR and Google (the bastards), and with whom I was able to discuss Big Ideas and Concepts in both real and abstract terms in a manner so real as to give the lie to the notion that such conversations are always Absolute Bullshit, inasmuch as this was the rare one that was not. It gave me a vague yet real inkling of how I might make writing important in some way, not in the middle-to-distant future but soon, maybe even now, in a way that’s neither remote and theoretical nor incidental and precious, a way to be optimistic about writing and the future—about Writing and The Future, and possibly even the Future of Writing—in ways that I couldn’t be even a year ago, in ways that no conference could ever allow, not because I’ve suddenly figured out what I’m doing or what my plan is, but for reasons far less tangible—reasons that, as usual, I find myself unable to articulate.

Posted: February 4th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: 3

Over the weekend I finally got around to watching The Lives Of Others. Because it’s in German, with English subtitles, I couldn’t do crosswords while I watched it, which is what I normally do while watching movies at home. And so it had a much firmer grip on my attention than most movies viewed at home (on the warbly old eighties-vintage television bequeathed to me by one friend, while I lie on the surprisingly comfortable IKEA sofa bequeathed to me by another, in the comfort nook of my apartment, late at night, under a couple of blankets, crosswords in my lap) and, partly because of this and partly just due to the film’s tremendous impact, I found myself overwhelmed.

The Lives Of Others is one of those movies that makes it look easy to make excellent movies. Watching it, you wonder how anyone could ever make a bad movie, since this one is so effortlessly, organically good. But the effect is deceptive, I know, and I’ll never be a filmmaker but I know that when I’m reading a truly good piece of writing, it has a similarly effortless, assured quality, and I want to look under the hood to see how it’s done but of course there’s no latch to release the hood. You can’t even see the lines where the hood opens, or the stitching in the seams, or whatever other clumsy artisinal analogy I could make here. So it’s frustrating even as it’s inspiring. But I’ll take it.

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Posted: January 7th, 2008 under Film, Literature, Music, General.
Comments: 5

I love teaching, and I love my students. I’d never want to be perceived as a mean teacher. I don’t especially relish giving bad grades, and I don’t view my pedagogical role as an opportunity to punish or humiliate.

Which is why my students might have been a bit surprised last week (and in retrospect, I was too) by the two pieces I assigned for last night’s discussion: “Operation Gomorrah” by Marione Ingram and “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard—two of my favorite pieces ever, but also terribly bleak and violent. (If you’re not familiar with either of them, I highly recommend reading them. In the meantime, here’s a helpful combined summary of both pieces: Holocaust Shooting Spree.)

While I’ve already established that I have a penchant for depressing literature, I’m not sure that gives me carte blanche to make my students suffer. Then again, maybe it does—I am the teacher, after all.

So to my class, I say: you’re welcome. Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted: November 16th, 2007 under Literature.
Comments: none

Last night I read, in one sitting, the first 125 pages of a book called There Is No Me Without You, by a woman named Melissa Fay Greene, about the African AIDS crisis and its effects on children in Ethiopia who were orphaned when their parents died of the disease.

I imagine many readers—and I counted myself among them until last night—would be resistant to this sort of material for a couple of pretty huge reasons: 1) it’s depressing as hell; and 2) it’s not always terribly easy for me to engage with writing whose subject matter deals with—whose context is—is an entirely foreign culture. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the middle-class, First-World lot I’ve been fortunate enough to draw, and my subsequent insulation from non-Western, Third-World cultures and politics. (I am one of the ignorant, privileged, white Americans I expend so much of my liberal guilt deploring.) So if a writer’s going to break through that divide and dismantle my ignorance long enough to send a message that I will receive and absorb, the means of conveyance for that message—i.e., the writing itself—had better be damn near unassailable.

On this last count, Greene’s book doesn’t disappoint. Unlike so much other writing on the subject, it does not bog the narrative down with cloying sentimentality, or bombard the reader with impenetrable statistics and policy statements, or bludgeon the reader with litanies of horrific details about death and poverty. It does have traces of all of these things, but they are mediated and leavened adroitly.

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Posted: November 13th, 2007 under Literature.
Comments: 1

Possibly the best news I’ve received since 30 Rock was picked up for a second season.

From the introduction:

Some of the book’s essays are quite beautiful indeed, and most are extremely well written and/or show a masterly awareness of craft (whatever exactly that is). But others aren’t, don’t, especially—but they have other virtues that make them valuable. And I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise. …

We, like diminished kings or rigidly insecure presidents, are reduced to being overwhelmed by info and interpretation, or else paralyzed by cynicism and anomie, or else—worst—seduced by some particular set of dogmatic talking-points, whether these be PC or NRA, rationalist or evangelical, ‘Cut and Run’ or ‘No Blood for Oil.’ The whole thing is (once again) way too complicated to do justice to in a guest intro, but one last, unabashed bias/preference in BAE ‘07 is for pieces that undercut reflexive dogma, that essay to do their own Decidering in good faith and full measure, that eschew the deletion of all parts of reality that do not fit the narrow aperture of, say for instance, those cretinous fundamentalists who insist that creationism should be taught alongside science in public schools, or those sneering materialists who insist that all serious Christians are as cretinous as the fundamentalists.

Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

Posted: September 19th, 2007 under Literature.
Comments: none

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
JoAnn Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter”
Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
F Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
Scott Russell Sanders, “Under the Influence”
Jonathan Franzen, “Caught”
Ian Frazier, “Out of Ohio”
Natalia Ginzburg, “He & I”
Patricia Hampl, “Other People’s Secrets”
Seymour Krim, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business”
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre”
John McPhee, “A Fleet of One”
David Sedaris, “Go Carolina”
David Foster Wallace, “Shipping Out”
Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting”

Posted: September 6th, 2007 under Literature.
Comments: 3

Infinite nerds will know exactly what is going on in this photo. (Click to enlarge)

(Thanks to Joe for the link)

Posted: March 15th, 2007 under Images, Literature.
Comments: 6

"[Elizabeth] Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity's a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve. Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with body."

—Alan Shapiro, "Why Write?"

"Every day includes more non-being than being. Yesterday for example . . . has it happened a good day; above the average in 'being.' It [the weather] was the fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like—there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton. . . . The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can, and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both."

—Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"

"And what happens in protest or civil disobedience, I think … is that moral questions are temporarily put to rest. Moral ambiguity is resolved; moral tension is diminished. The energies bound up in the tensions of moral doubt are again set free to fill, to power, the self. One finds oneself, simultaneously, at home in both the self and the world. … The very same feelings of connection or belonging or being fully used and alive that we feel sometimes in solitude or sex can also be experienced in protest or resistance—not as a smug certainty of virtue but as a deepened quality or resonance of being, a sense of being, for the moment, where we belong."

—Peter Marin, "Body Politic"

"A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to relect complexity."

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

—Joan Didion, "The White Album"

Posted: February 12th, 2007 under Literature, General.
Comments: 2

So I assigned my students a David Foster Wallace essay, and somehow lived to tell the tale.

I had always vowed that, as soon as I was given a chance to set my own curriculum, I’d assign something by DFW. He is my favorite writer, after all, and I feel he has important yet practical things to teach the readers and writers of the next generations, namely: how to use footnotes, a workable definition of cathectic, a speculative examination of U.S.-Canadian geopolitical relations in a dystopian near-future, etc.

But I was still apprehensive about having my semester’s reading list culminate with his famous essay, “Shipping Out” (aka “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”). He is, after all, not a writer to whom the descriptor “accessible” is often applied (though I happen to feel he is eminently so) and as a leading practitioner of literary maximalism, his pieces (and words and sentences) tend to be longer than most people can comfortably digest. My students have been real champs about fighting their way through occasionally difficult and esoteric pieces by Jamaica Kincaid and Joan Didion and Jonathan Franzen, but I figured if anyone was going to really test their patience and cause them to adopt that all-too-familiar glazed, three-p.m., middle-distance stare and/or drive them to mutiny, it would be Johnny Bandanahead himself.

To which I respond: fuck it. As a teaching assistant I spend a lot of time listening to woefully supercilious people in my line of work bitch about how today’s undergraduate college students are lazy, dumb, intellectually incurious, vapid, oversexed, drug-addled and alcoholic, apathetic, short-attention-spanned, poorly-read if not borderline illiterate, and generally doomed.

I won’t argue that there isn’t evidence to support some of these claims. But such characterizations are hardly new with this generation. They are the product of crotchety kids-these-days myopia, which grows old astonishingly fast and is generally practiced by people who should never have gone into teaching in the first place.

And even if I wanted to join in on the grousing, my students this semester have given me no point of entry into that particular toxic discourse. Where DFW is concerned, my students have risen to the occasion. In fact, they have risen to the occasion throughout the semester, even when we were reading far less engaging material, and when I was trying out assignments on them that didn’t necessarily get off the ground the way I’d hoped they would, and especially when it was glaringly obvious to everyone in the room that the disheveled sweaty man in the wrinkly sweater desperately clawing at the dry-erase board at the front of the cramped overheated subterranean classroom where we met T-Th 2:30-3:45 had no idea what in the fuck he was doing.

In my ridiculously short teaching career I have often considered myself lucky, fortunate, blessed, etc if, say, two out of every twenty students are conscientious, engaged, curious, and respectful enough to do the assigned work, come to class and ask questions, participate in discussions, and offer honest, reasonable feedback on the assigned readings, the class, my wardrobe, etc.

This semester, that proportion has been more like six or seven, and I’m ecstatic about that. I’d like to think I must have done something right to merit this sort of response, but I’m more inclined to think the registrar dealt me a good hand. Whatever the case, I no longer feel I have any reason to be anxious about assigning a 30-page (small-print) essay about the cruise ship industry—just as long as I get these exact same students, every semester, in perpetuity.

Posted: November 28th, 2006 under Literature.
Comments: 6