c/d: 'infinite jest'

I think possibly if I were rereading Brief Interviews, rather than Infinite Jest, I'd not want to ask this question.

*the magazine articles as well as the novels! there's something (proceeds to speak from hindquarters) 19th-century magazine reportage about them, about their not quite knowing what's expected of confronting this particular form -

leaving aside the narrative absurdities, which might be a little harder to categorise, i'm quite curious about wallace's 'style': in that there are lots of bits of writing in Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews where wallace is deliberately not writing his 'style', and lots of bits where he exacerbates particular bits of his 'style', or at least particular stylistic tics, either with some kind of result in mind or just to see what happens.

his regular prose style involves kind of fuzzying out of direct pronouncements of things in favour of either an academic(?) or a how-regular-people-talk circumlocutory way of putting them. there's a peculiar fondness for these dangling (modifiers? i dunno) post-comma, ending a sentence, like (at random):

"The whole thing started out looking like tit-on-a-tray, burglary-wise."

(in which we have a common-speech usage or two stuck together in a way on the page where they look pretty much like something someone would never say.) (actually i could do with giving about half a dozen more examples here but then this starts to look a bit much like work.)

one of the upshots of it is that his prose is very rarely limpid in that stereotypical literary prose way; combined with a tendency to decompress, to refuse to reduce a scene to the essentials, i think this is what a lot of people see as "cold" or "robotic" about the writing, maybe - ? anyway i recall being disappointed with 'oblivion' because I realised, reading it, that Wallace really did have a very particular style, almost a schtick. This effect being in part i) because 'oblivion' unlike the previous two books didn't have any particular "here-i-am-writing-in-a-non-david-foster-wallace-idiom" bits ii) because with the most immediately schticky aspect removed (the footnotes, duh) the almost-schtickiness rest of the writing showed up a little more.

rereading this again. forgot i'd done this, the first time

by which i mean, started a thread to ramble on about it.

i do honestly think there's lots of stuff that's meant to look as if it's meant to be funny mostly as a kind of distraction

this has been popping out at me more and more. i think dfw uses this mode of, like, parodic science fiction (not parodic of science fiction, it's one that shows up in like 50s SF itself) to do these sweeping broad versions of his theme without having to invest them with seriousness or probability, which i think is valuable. the bit about the rise of videophones leading to downfall in self-confidence about how one looks leading to the demise of videophones is maybe the most striking example i guess. closing sentence:

"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern."

which i find it kind of interesting, actually, how this novel (conceived in what, the early 90s?), which is set in i think 2010, though it's hard to tell, doesn't get the internet entirely wrong ...

he gets the internet/mass entertainment totally right!

i kind of agree with you--the book takes a while to warm up. there's all this seemingly random stuff he throws at the reader. (the e-mail about the construction worker, the videophone stuff, filmography.) i think the book works better for me when he incorporates that sort of material into the story more--like, for example, Mario's movie about Interdependence Day.

this (third time) is the first time that i've read it and basically known where this stuff is going and how it's connected, like, reading stuff about Mildred Bonk and Ken Erdedy and remembering well enough to skip forward to the bit where the residents of Ennet House are enumerated; though ha i did just cheat and google to work out who 'yrstruly' is.

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

that Ebonics section is pretty bleh, tho

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.

I'm picturing these as notes tucked away in the bookshelf. Definitely suss.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:

6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."

The only comment I'll make about that reductive and generally stupid list is that any dude who fetishizes The Sorrows of Young Werther in particular or its skin-crawlingly creepy protagonist is probably someone to steer well clear of.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it's a big hit in incel circles, for example.

I don't get the impression the incel community are big on 18th-century German literature, but I could be wrong

yes, they just pretend to enjoy European culture, they're not reading Goethe, my dude

also 99% of people who complain about infinite jest hasn't read it and it's a great book and not a remotely challenging read (I read it back to back with gravity's rainbow, which broke my brain, and the recognitions - which was also a much more difficult read)

ok now you're just showing off

i mean was that your cooldown after finishing finnegans wake

ulysses took me several years iirc. finnegans lake I have read the first page lol

me too but for gravity's rainbow

I did that sneaky'comic book inside a textbook' thing but with a copy of Finnegan's Wake jammed between the pages of IJ.

Finnegan's Wake is great if you just read it aloud and don't pretend to understand it. IJ is not hard! Gravity's Rainbow was too hard for me

IJ isn't hard, just long and in a small font (analog edition)

I've been wanting to re-read Oblivion lately

Wait what? You didn’t read this specific copy or any copy ever?

started it a couple of times, never read it (the fact that I grimly made my way all the way through V and never started liking it affected my decision-making here)

The furthest I made it into GR was about 300 pages, but I'm not sure if my brain was even processing the words on the page at that point. I think I just don't like the way Pynchon uses language. Of his other books, I've only read Crying of Lot 49, which was a much easier read but in my recollection also immensely cheesy.

Infinite Jest is very readable and relatable and compassionate towards its characters, and while there are some digressions into subjects like math or tennis where I'm not entirely sure what's going on, mostly you just need a good dictionary on hand.

it was really easy for me to get bogged down in dfw's endless descriptions of place much as they're part of the pleasure of reading infinite jest. i was really losing it when hal was trying to attend the AA meeting that ends up being extremely-not-an-AA-meeting and he was just going on for a whole paragraph about what the carpet felt like, come on dude i am 700 pages in here throw me a bone

gravity's rainbow's shiftings between action-packed slapstick comedy and really dense description are kind of what kept me going through it

Top 7 warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf:
1. Dog-eared copy of The Second Sex
2. Too Much Sylvia Plath
3. Any amount of Margaret Atwood
4. JUDITH. BUTLER.
5. Angela Carter
6. ‘I’m so inspired by Hilary Clinton, have you read Rodham?’
7. Jack Monroe cookbooks in the kitchen https://t.co/SwPQVxfD2v

— Sebastian Milbank 🥀 (@JSMilbank) August 25, 2020

"Theology Graduate at Cambridge. Blue Labour."

My thoughts on S Milbank are best not conveyed in writing, but unsurprised he’s a wrong cunt on this as he is everything else.

ilx's bookshelf warning signs top 7 could probably be collated from our recent hatethread

The Goethe equivalent would be the hard one. Who's the most innocuously classic author that ILX despises?

Man, woman, ilxor, the three genders.