c/d: 'infinite jest'

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

christ

Ha yikes

http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/national_review_wonderland.jpg?w=470

that would be a much better illustration for the deluxe edition

Mark Steyn on Zombies

j i thought you were anti this book

you must have been projecting in order to feel more secure as you broke away from the core of the dfw community

reading this on a kindle screen feels quite different. the words have more precision, somehow. more of a center of gravity.

also i have been reading a lot of old timey english prose the past couple years and i have to say aimless otm above

xp

How do you go about navigating those footnotes on a Kindle? I don't use one so I'm curious as to its effectiveness. I'd like to try it, though imagine something might be lost through not carrying around a book that continues to remind you of its physical presence even when you're not reading it. I think I'm approaching a second read...

i haven't gotten to one yet

I read this on a Kindle like two years ago. Worked fairly well with a few hiccups. You'd click on the superscript in the main text and you'd get a pop-up of the endnote iirc. Issues arose when the endnote was too long which (lol DFW) happens a few times. You'd get to a line and then you'd get some programming babble and then everything past that was truncated. In these cases you'd have to manually navigate to the endnote instead of using that "pop-up" method.

IDK if this has been fixed/changed in the past two years.

cover of the 20th anniversary edition coming out in a few weeks is pretty ugly

http://www.themillions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/FINAL-COVER-IJ20-Anniversary-Editionlarge.jpg

why not stick with the sky motif? i really like the covers of the first three editions

are you serious

a very special christmas

I finished this 4 years ago and can't remember much about it! It's about tennis, right?

what the hell is that cover

It was a contest. This is the dude who won, big blog about his process and all the designs he came up with first. Pretty much all of them suck. I don't like the TV motif. The sky was perfect...but whatever. No need to buy another copy of Infinite Jest. http://www.joewalshdesign.com/#/infinite-jest/

Was he a Roky Erickson fan?

wow that's a bad cover

tbf it's better than all the designer's other attempts

i am... rereading this. idk why lol

it's delightful of course, so readable and accessible for something so forbidding in shape. some of the things that bothered me about the novel ten years ago (for example: anytime a man's focus zooms in on someone's breasts; uss millicent kent's central trauma being that her dad is a transvestite is not a funny joke) are worse now because idk they do not seem to be ugly reflections of human nature that still get at some essential truth much as they are projections that aren't even necessary to the characters that have them. realizing this is a rich critique of a novel that is in many ways about projection but for me it's distracting not illuminating

it's a small complaint. i did enjoy reading nabisco on the "wardine say" section upthread

novel definitely takes place in the interval of netflix still having mail-oriented dvd service but having also introduced netflix instant so yeah 2009-2010. i am usually not into determining what a speculative novel got "right" vs. what it got "wrong" (latter is way more interesting anyway) but the death of tv and the transition to all on-demand programming... that shit's pretty good