c/d: 'infinite jest'

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

the narrator's white! and racist!

i'm reserving judgement on the actual ebonics bit, tho ("Wardine say her momma aint treat her right." etc.)

have this book taunting me from beside my bed for a while. its so fucking big and difficult to hold tho.

i wonder to what degree my tendency to enjoy this sort of overmassive encyclopedic stuff is biologically predicated by my ridiculously huge spider hands

oh duh i never linked mario's arachnodactyly with his father's fear of spiders before

"This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out."

i cant imagine reading this book 3x

its as plausible 2 me as physically eating the hardcover of it sitting on my shelf. thinking of it sitting inside me...

still thinking about that fast huh

"He invoked the raw numbers. The frenzy. He was thinking out loud here."

^ i think i quoted that on a thread a while back where ppl were posting favourite sentences and they were all p. over-egged; the conversation being reported is coming on from just where we (the reader) are starting to get the idea that Orin is more or less a pathological liar; plus also after the book's interest in the deep meaning and therapeutic value of cliché is starting to show up.

i mean: the book invests so much time i) in setting up these deeply-incapable-of-communication people ii) and then setting up these moments where they can redeem themselves: there's kind of a world of humanity in the slippage between "He said that he was thinking out loud" and "He was thinking out loud here."

"Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes -- there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part -- and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her own gizzard out, the mother's."

^ i could kind of go on for ages about how fantastically i think these sorts of sentences function, as well, but won't, yet

one of the things i like best abt the tastycake focus group story in oblivion is how much it seems like one long sentence, like a house of cards collapsing in on itself. p breathtaking

^^Once you get used to the archaisms, there are parts of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that function in v similar ways. Seventeenth century prose was sophisticated, but not yet rulebound.

i actually bought a copy of that about the same time i bought infinite jest, maybe even the same bookstore visit. that one i have not read three times.

(What I like about what's going on in the Avril sentence is to do with how you're getting Rusk's therapeutic-bromidish stuff refracted through Avril's sensibility and grammar-wonkishness, which then drops into the way more demotic register at the end — & how Wallace's grammatical tics (restating the subject after the parenthesis, and then again in this little like tag at the end) work to reinforce that.) (Plus also yes 'hey look it's me david wallace writing this thing!' — a lot of like unremarkable-seeming and non-showoffy passages manage to do this sort of thing, in this book.)

(The cake story in Oblivion is the one I always try and explain what's going on in it when people ask me (this has happened) 'so what's this david foster wallace guy all about then': though I don't know it's the best example, because it's kind of as-far-as-you-can-logically-go with all his tics. On one of the other wallace threads nabisco talks about him 'exhausting' his style, in that book, which I think is totally true and not necessarily a negative judgement on it.)

Mister Squishy is downright claustrophobic

stuff i'd forgotten got mentioned in this book: Wittgenstein, grammar-wonkishness, Cantor, the 'this is water' joke

"The left side of her face was very alive and kind."

some of the best descriptions of depression in any novel i've ever read.

just cracked this for the third attempt and its the first time i think its gonna take.

it occurs to me that in all the whacko plot-theorying on this i've seen on the internet, no one's ever tried to fill in the missing events with close reference to the hamlet parallels? which seems a weird omission?

though i guess it's probably been done in like the proper academic writing on it, somewhere

okay, it took a month but i did it

i kinda wanna reread it tho

yeah i had the same feeling - partly 'so wait what did happen in--', partly 'i just want to stay here'.

i got halfway through it in a weekend, this time, and then took a month to finish the rest

'take': we're meant to take the hyperbolic SFish dystopian stuff as a big Hitting Bottom story for the US, & extrapolate a recovery based on hints in the 'year of glad' section

-

i was kind of surprised (well, no, i thought 'oh, i guess that makes sense') to notice he'd written his thing on dostoyevsky, and frank's bio of d., and the difficulty of writing seriously moral fiction, the same year he'd finished infinite jest

how everything cataclysmic is only pointed towards (snatch of orin in the tumbler/the FLR arriving at ETA)

also, the final line

also found someone on a blog complaining that his attempt at "Ebonics" in that section was so bad as to be offensive, which uh

Ha, I think a lot of the Infinite Summer readers had problems with this too. I mean, here's the thing: he's not super-great at it! He's attempting something, and not entirely succeeding, and it's a little awkward and maybe embarrassing. But I also think that's kind of great. I mean, he could very easily have avoided trying to have this voice speak. I'm going to take a wild guess that he was hyper-aware and self-conscious about the potential pitfalls of trying to use it, and he didn't have to. So I actually really appreciate that he tried, for good reasons, with good motives, at great risk of personal embarrassment.

tbf a lot of the infinite summer readers were insufferable. though the entire thing was interesting in a "hipsters suckled at the warm, soft teat of eggers encounter DFW" sort of way

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/12/10/infinite-jest-visualized/

The flicker account's pretty dope!

ha, i think i'd seen all of those before? oh dear.

Just finished this, it took me fucking ages.
I liked the complete immersion in that world.
I hated the word 'which' by the end.
I found it hard to read sentences with so many acronyms punctuated with full stops (like O.N.A.N.) that don't serve as full stops.
I didn't realise I was at the end when I was and am kind of sad that I am.

All the rivers that flow into the Great Basin of the western USA never make it to the sea. They just flow down until they stop somewhere.

i feel like i ought to make it clear that that "so uh" of mine was about people identifying the bit that's the testimony of an illiterate white person as being "ebonics", not me going "hey, what could people possibly see wrong in the bit where dfw does ebonics", which is a different bit

the other week my gf's dad gave me an annotated map of boston, which he said would 'make sense' once i finally read infinie jest.

Great thread

This book will always haunt me, I think.

this thread will always haunt me, certainly

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3e80b10a-b95c-11e1-b4d6-00144feabdc0.html

http://i.imgur.com/7C6pD1K.png

When you consider how desperately any public figure like Maggie wants to control their image, being willing to approve only the most flattering portraits for such use, that is one horrific pic.

thatcher is a really excellent text for considering the differences between now & then; to hear recordings of her speaking almost defies belief, & it is impossible to imagine her flourishing in her natural state today. I feel like we are not able to see that picture the way it was seen.

good post

enhhh i remember an argument with my sister where i was arguing that major and maybe heath were the only two PMs of the past 50 years who didn't have a good grip on their public image and the media, and it emerged she thought thatcher was bad at manipulating her image. which seemed crazy to me. otoh she was a teenager and i was a kid in the 80s so i dunno.

i am trying to remember why she's in infinite jest. there's a line about someone being sexually attracted to margaret thatcher that ends up in there i think? that wallace had been looking for a place for, maybe used somewhere else, for years?

i watched a bunch of youtubes of thatcher the day she died and i was kinda stunned by how brutally, blatantly uncaring she was willing to behave in public. there's a clip out there of a mother angrily asking her about cutting off milk to schoolkids and thatcher's attitude is basically just 'go fuck yourself, it's your problem.' conservatives may have gotten worse in a lot of ways but i can't honestly say they've gotten meaner.

they are just the same thing. they are the same thing with a tree rendered in the style of a child's crayon drawing affixed to the logo. as close as I can get to noticing change is in some of them perhaps acting through deep & insulating ignorance, cf IDS, like an obliviousness that makes empathy impossible. but they are the same thing, constitutively unable to see outside of their narrow parameters while deciding how things should be. disability benefits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/business/energy-environment/mountain-of-petroleum-coke-from-oil-sands-rises-in-detroit.html?hp

WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.

“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,” said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. “Nobody knew this was going to happen.” Almost 56 percent of Canada’s oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, more than 2,000 miles north.

...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/05/18/business/PILE/PILE-articleLarge.jpg

(Aha, Patricia Highsmith is the old lesbian mystery writer!)

― Come On, (Eazy), Friday, January 30, 2026 8:55 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago)

lol there's more than one, e, patricia cornwell is in fact the particular old lesbian mystery writer i was thinking of patricia highsmith died in 1995, and therefore is unlikely to have an opinion on _infinite jest_ :)

I would almost guarantee that however you're picturing Lockwood, socially, is gonna be a bit off, cuz her background's fairly odd, as captured in many profiles or her and a memoir and so on. But IIRC the short version might be, yeah, daughter of a convert married priest, eccentrically lower-middle-class midwestern upbringing and autodidactic streak, learns at the last minute that her family has no money to pay for college

― ን (nabisco), Friday, January 30, 2026 9:16 AM (seven minutes ago)

up until this point my background and lockwood's are, uh, _similarly unusual_, not in detail, but in overall shape. i do, as a result, have a unique voice (which i hate and have tried often, unsuccessfully, to suppress). the divergence point is that she met this guy and got into a relationship and for whatever reason, under whatever pressures, decided to pursue writing as a career. i chose instead to cultivate my own obscurity, which i have done fairly successfully. "you're a good writer, you should write" hits me in about the same way as "you're funny, you should do stand-up comedy", or "you're good at sucking cock, you should do sex work".

my great literary influence is stephen king's "danse macabre", in which - as i recall - he advised prospective writers to not possibly write professionally if they can possibly avoid it. from that, i took the message that becoming a professional writer was a fate worse than death, and strove mightily to avoid such a fate. it's not the only instance in which i've gotten some reasonable and well-intentioned advice completely backwards. for instance, i also noted, early on, that all of my favorite writers tried very hard to kill themselves, and concluded that if i didn't write, i'd quit wanting to kill myself. i have, for the record, since quit wanting to kill myself, for the most part. i didn't get to that point by not writing.

i do, though, fucking hate writing. i find it a useless waste of time, time that could be better spent doing the dishes or compulsively masturbating, and i continue to try to will myself to stop writing in about the same manner, and with about the same success, as i used to will myself into being a man.

https://bsky.app/profile/meo.bsky.social/post/3megwekrll22r

Ok I lolled

FWIW, I thought I would c&p my series of comments from I Love Books, as I read Infinite Jest back in 2009:

I started reading Infinite Jest last night. It appears to fall into the Walt Whitman / Thomas Wolfe / Henry Miller School of All-Embracing Word-Drunk Authorship. A fine old American tradition, but it remains to be seen if I can preserve enough momentum to ski past the uphill stretches.
---
I'm approx 200pp into Infinite Jest. DFW obv has the narrative-voice-thing going for him in spades, even if his narrators are all ventriloquist dummies for the language-obsessed voice in DFW's head and his characters exist mainly to give the narrator something to describe at greatly extended length.

With roughly another 800pp to go, it is increasingly obvious to me that, if DFW had any point to make about anything at all, he has already made his point, and if he has any story to tell, he is not very insistent upon telling it and not very interested in stories per se. So, it is either let myself be pulled along by his voice, or bag the whole business.

At this juncture, I plan to let myself be pulled along by his voice for a while yet.
---
thomp, I have only read some of DFW's essays. No short stories.

As for anyone's "radical distrust of narrative", although I am quite interested in reading and writing, I have never found much personal interest in critical theory. To give you the basic idea, I appreciate Duchamp and Dada at the level of "nudge-nudge, haha, it's just a joke, d'y'see?" So, whatever critical comments I make about a work, your view on my comments should be informed by this knowledge. If it is a gift to be simple, I am among the blessed.

As a reader, I care only if the author has given me an a cogent reason to continue reading. The pleasure of a developing narrative is only one possible form this reason might take.

Just to be catty, I do notice that DFW has taken the trouble to embed a narrative into his novel, so perhaps he somewhat distrusted his radical distrust. It is just that the narrative elements have been reduced to tiny particles and dispersed into the prose in the way poppyseeds are mixed into the batter of a poppyseed cake. In which case, the main pleasure must be taken in the sweet, cakey medium of the prose. He does this pretty well, so I am still reading.
---
I am about 500pp into Infinite Jest now. My main impressions are only becoming more confirmed as I wade in further.

The book can fairly be described as a comedy, but it is not especially funny so much as it is witty. And, like most wit, it provokes admiration more often than laughter. The only characters resembling humans are the AA drunks and other drug addicts. These he treats with care and affection. His other characters are more like placeholders, which, of course, is quite permissible in social satire.

I only wish I appreciated his wit more than I have so far. It is peculiar and personal and seems to tied to a milieu at the margins of my own experience. As it ages, I expect it will join such period pieces as Restoration Comedies and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as "good in its kind and very popular in its day".

I read IJ back in the late 90s. I remember thinking that the parts that were supposed to be funny were not really that funny. I have no idea what I would think of it now, but not sure I want to commit to a re-read.

I think younger aimless's distinction between funny and witty is important.

The wordplay and the pop culture melange and the silly voices and names are going for a knowing eyebrow-raise rather than a hearty laugh.

One shouldn't fault the author for failing to do something that he wasn't trying to do.

It took me a year to read it back in 2008 - I remember it being like a companion, by turns witty, dull, beautiful, thought provoking etc. In the end when it penetrated my thick skull that it was a novel about addiction I realised it had been like living with an addiction itself. I remember finding the ending lyrical and emotionally weighty despite its slightness, almost like the book had softened me up for the blow.

it had been like living with an addiction itself

Lol I just got my 5-year chip from Jestaholics Anonymous. I used to stay up all night flipping between chapters and the back, then feeling awful in the morning. I thought I could quit any time, it was just for relaxation, but no.

Now I'm not even tempted to read even a single footnote.