I would not be a very good Infinite Jest/David Foster Wallace enthusiast if I didn’t observe the fact that SPOILER ALERT the primary action of his most famous novel takes place in what is established to be November of the year 2009.

Upon noting that a bulk of the novel’s action has transpired by November 23 of the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, I began wondering how our version of 2009 stacked up against DFW’s. Not as entertaining, or as dystopian, but equally unsettling, I bet. After all—to paraphrase Hal on page 12—Johnny Gentle is just Sarah Palin in a dark mirror.

With much thanks to Peter Levinson and Stephen Burn.

Posted: November 24th, 2009 under General, IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 1

I must admit, when I first heard about Infinite Summer, the online Infinite Jest book club guiding readers through the book at the rate of 75 pages per week, I was gripped by the same maddening combination of jealousy, pride, resentment, and exhilaration one feels upon hearing a song by one’s super-favorite semi-obscure indie band used in a television commercial or on a popular TV show: “Those bastards! They realized there are other people out there who like the same things I do, and now they’re going to capitalize on it! It will no longer be my special thing, enjoyed only by me and an elite few other obsessive, haughty individuals connected by Internet fan sites and tiny barroom gatherings in college towns.”

As so often happens with cult icons and subjects of small-scale but intense devotion, David Foster Wallace didn’t become really well-known until after his death, when he hanged himself last September. Before then, plenty of people had read Infinite Jest, even more had purchased it with the intent of doing so, and even more had at least heard of the book and its author. After DFW died, the mainstream encomia by Newsweek and the New York Times ensured that, in a culture predisposed to neither 1,089-page bestsellers nor frank discussions of suicide, he would now be widely known.

But with the same selfish, wounded pride that might accompany a hipster’s complaint that “I liked TV On The Radio way before they blew up and played Saturday Night Live,” around about September 13 of last year I found myself often thinking, bitterly, that I’d been on board the DFW bandwagon long before his suicide and the attendant surge of interest.

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Posted: July 15th, 2009 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 8

Check this out:

In Subsidized Time the Statue of Liberty is outfitted with a large-scale version of the subsidizing corporation’s signature product. To wit: in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, she’s wearing a giant diaper.

“NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes” (367).

The following year, largely elided by the novel’s main action but referenced ominously throughout, is the ironically named the Year of Glad, when the gigantic lady will be adorned with a giant black plastic garbage bag—or, a “large dark billowing shape,” q.v. Geoffrey Day and Kate Gompert’s conversation on 649.

Another indication that the Year of Glad is going to be very unpleasant indeed for a great number of people.

On a pretty much entirely unrelated note, here’s my debut on Minnesota Reads.

Posted: November 25th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: none

I’m not much for Halloween costumes, though I’ve had a couple smartass showings over the past few years, ranging from the esoteric to the extremely esoteric.

Far be it from me to discontinue a trend. And yet, my costume this year is esoteric while at the same time obnoxiously inevitable.

And it exists only in photographic form. Click here to see this year’s costume and groan accordingly.

Posted: October 29th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Images, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 8

Jodi at Minnesota Reads warned us that this Salon piece would break our hearts and probably make us cry.

Mornings were spent walking Wallace’s two dogs, Werner and Bella. Wallace and his parents strolled the streets of Claremont, talking of small things. In the afternoons, they spoke some more, and helped their son deal with the paperwork and insurance issues that had been piling up. “He was very glad we were there,” says his mother. “And he was very emotional. He was just terrified of so much. We would just try to hold him.” The memories bring tears. “He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom.”

—“The last days of David Foster Wallace,” Salon.com

Boy howdy, was she right.

Posted: September 26th, 2008 under General, IJOASa-oBC.
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All right, then. Fuck you, Dave. The sixth meeting of the fucking Infinite Jest Online Appreciation Society and/or Book Club is hereby called to fucking order.

pp 407 – 442 I’m going to try not to say anything elephant-in-the-room obvious about the Eric Clipperton chapter. In fact, I’m going to try and accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of getting through the rest of this novel, and my discussion of it, without mentioning the events of September 12 any more than necessary. Which might not be possible. And who’s to say how much is necessary? For now, I’m doing this for myself, for the selfishest reasons, because once I’ve started something, leaving it unfinished is horribly depressing, a sign of my failure to follow through; also, I’m clinging to some poorly reasoned notion that by staring into the center of the greatest work by a man who I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to think about as little as possible over the past week, by finally after a week’s embargo reading eloquent summaries that I wish were the last word but know are not, by going through it rather than around it, I’ll “get over” it all somehow.

But that’s all much easier said than done, so bear with me. Read more »

Posted: September 22nd, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 3

UPDATE: My piece for the Utne Reader about DFW.

For the past two months this site has functioned primarily as a repository for my thoughts as I slowly read, for the fourth time, my all-time favorite book, Infinite Jest.

Now that project, along with my read-through and a whole lot of other things, seems hopelessly inconsequential and trite. Read more »

Posted: September 13th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 9

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 IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 2

You probably thought I’d given up on the IJOASa-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 IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: none

Wow. A guy takes a week off and the IJOASa/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.

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Posted: July 25th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 4