c/d: 'infinite jest'

^^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

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