c/d: 'infinite jest'

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

I read this in the summer of '99 (mostly taking the long way to and from my job and reading while I walked through my mostly-empty college campus). Long before I ever heard another human utter his name. Loved it at the time and still vividly recall certain portions, but I'd be interested to see how it holds up now that I'm twice as old as I was then.

it's amazing how much of it sticks in your memory, i even kinda remember the order of scenes. it's been ten years!

also a little more fun to read now that i've been to boston several times

guess I should give it a try, eh?

why not? imo it goes fast for 1000 pages

Having grown up and lived in the places he describes was a big part of my enjoyment of the book. The school and half way house were situated just down the road from where my parents lived at the time.

It was my favorite book when I was a college. Recommended to me, a c-average high school honors student, by my straight-a AP friends. I always thought that despite its length and footnotes and digressions, all of which I still hear it assailed for to this day, it was incredibly readable in ways that other recommendations from them, such as Gravity's Rainbow, were not. I'm sure that, as a 19-year-old community college burnout, I didn't understand everything about this book, but I fell absolutely in love with it. It was the most important book in my choosing Literature as a major (regrets regrets regrets), hoping maybe to recapture the high I felt reading it.

My hardcover copy is one of the only books that I've held onto from that era that I've held onto throughout every move and life transition, but I haven't actually cracked it since the mid-2000s. I was incredibly disillusioned when Wallace committed suicide and the outpouring of his biographical details in the press afterward. It hadn't occured to me that this guy writing about depression, suicide, and drug addiction was actually experiencing these problems in his life. I had created this stupid platonic ideal in my head that he was just creating all of this, and supplementing his fantasical creation with research. That the acknowledgement of AA on the copyright page was just part of a totally-immersive, exhaustively journalistic research ethic.

So I haven't read it since then, and the Lit major broke me of my urge to ever read anything vaguely literary again. I stick mostly to true crime and rockstar autobiographies these days. But I thought about him last week when David Berman died. I had no such illusions about Berman's relationship with the depression - it all seemed very obvious to me that he was writing from a very real, very dark place. Wallace just seemed more academic, more removed to me. But they both had such warm voices and good humor, bringing me comfort in their discomfort.

When I first read this, as 20-year-old in the late 90s, I was thrilled by exactly the showy-precocious-clever angles that Wallace was nursing some embarrassment and dissatisfaction with, and I did not, I don’t think, properly absorb nearly enough of the useful stuff he was trying to push past those angles to get into. (This is an uncontroversial way to see Wallace, right? As someone who understood he had inbuilt impulses toward the brainy-funny-thinky stuff, worried those impulses were glib and empty and juvenile, and wanted to find a way to something more sustaining?)

So for a long time, whenever I’d go back and reread sections, it was with a similar sense of how dumb and dweeby and irritating and point-missing I have been, a lot, in life, which I guess you could call an index of better reading and personal growth but doesn’t always feel positive or great, sort of like reading one’s own ILX posts from 2002 and marveling at what a shitty little disordered high-handed weasel one spent too much of one’s life being without even really realizing it.

If this sounds suspiciously like an account of someone’s personal stuff wrapped around another guy’s fiction, well, yeah, and that is something I personally will probably always find interesting about this book.

But an interesting thing is that maybe a year ago I looked at it again and I had finally come around, a little, and felt protective of some of the impulses the author may have worried about but clearly enjoyed and could not escape, because they are pleasurable and have that certain energy that was maybe more common and acceptable in fiction at the time — the pure pleasure of making up fun or funny or strange or dazzling things, playing with words and ideas and images in interesting ways, pulling off tricks because why not. Which clearly isn’t some kind of vestigial problem with this book, or a drag on some deeper or more sustaining thing. It’s its own joy, maybe, with its own value.

Whoa, welcome back man <3

nabisco......otm

feels good

Love the list of films by James incandenza

Re reading this ten years after a first run
Eminently readable

I sometimes wonder if this would hit me as hard as it did 20+ years ago

Yeah I liked that stuff. Pretty acute avant-garde film riffing, didn’t seem cheap or clueless like parodies of that sorta thing almost always are. Fun, funny, interesting way of building out that character and his timeline.

xposts

it's fun to go back to that footnote every time one of incandenza's movies is described in the text. those little summaries in the footnote are often very reductive in hilarious ways

i did finally finish this reread a few months ago, was kinda blown away all over again by it

ten years ago i must've had the "hm... i only have a few pages left but it doesn't seem like the book is ending... oh... ohhhhh.... ok THIS is how he's ending it????" experience but i had it all over again