c/d: 'infinite jest'

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

i don't know if i'll ever do it again but i had a blast reading infinite jest.

Ending is incredibly bleak and heartbreaking

i do not read it that way. don had to hit his bottom again but it's like a spiritual breakthrough

oh but the scene itself is incredibly bleak yeah

I read this maybe past the maximum impact age or just the right age. 30. I loved it. Kind of an impeccable balancing act. Burned through it like a teenager with a Stephen King book. All of DFW’s thoughts about the values and perils of entertainment and the unfair impenetrability but worthiness of ~srs art~ encapsulated in just the right way.

I know it’s a Lit Bro totem and I went in super skeptical, but it’s legitimately pretty great.

I conflate it in my mind with Gravity’s Rainbow for some reason but it’s so much more enjoyable. I should prob give GR another try though. My favorite Pynchon is inherent vice.

gravity’s rainbow > infinite jest but yes the former is more difficult

i wanna read mason & dixon i’m guessing that’d be my preferred pynchon epic

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

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, May 9, 2020 10:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i remember i had to recalibrate and reread the whole thing after having this reaction the first time

I did the same, but he passed when I was in the middle of my reread and I had to put it down

i swear there's a stupid twitter thread trending like every two months about how no one who has a copy of this book can be trusted and it's more annoying every time it happens

This was the best take I saw:

liberal feminists can’t imagine men being anything other than indifferent to them, which i guess is why they have contempt for goethe — an author whose male protagonists were so devoted to their one true loves they either sold their souls to the devil or killed themselves 💅 https://t.co/Qelqnt3itX

— hannah e. (@hurlinspiel) August 24, 2020

The offending tweet led to a lot of debate on the merits of Goethe on my TL. His poetry never did much for me but I think I'll give Sorrows...a go sometime.

Christ I had to block the initial tweet because my secondhand embarrassment was off the charts - does this shit have to be posted here too?

yes...yes it does

once at my old job a couple of my co-workers were sneerily agreeing with each other that dfw's essays were far superior to infinite jest and it felt as uncomfortably close to real-world twitter as i ever want to be

Of course twitter is actually lots people countering that narrative of DFW being terrible.

that McHugh comment and the replies are a solid reminder of why i stay the fuck away from Twitter.

seriously don't know why you'd bother posting shit like this (none of which are HOT FRESH TAKES except (lol?) Goethe) other than to shake the beehive.

we stan the tiktok turgenev teens

DFW was a terrible guy, by all accounts.

I have some fond memories of Infinite Jest from my only read, in the summer of 2002. I remember some scenes with the older brother tennis kid sort of sneaking around the school complex, and how his inner world was written with such precision... And of course, a lot about rehab.

I love a lot of DFWs essays, and his short story 'Incarnations of Burned Children' is among the best short shorts written in the past fifty years. Students are horrified but also love talking about it.

I should say, I thought they were very precise depictions at the time, and I was also 17 going on 18 at the time, so there's that.

if liking this book makes me undateable then so be it

So glad I had the chance to read and enjoy this years before everyone was required to voice an opinion about it.

it's pretty clear never having read Infinite Jest is not a barrier to having a big opinion about it

I haven't read this book but I have read 10000 posts about it

This came up recently in conversation with my core friend group and all of the women are IJ fans, but we're all mid to late 30s, which is probably the real dividing line here.

So glad I had the chance to read and enjoy this years before everyone was required to voice an opinion about it.

― the secret of sucess is to know all rules ...and brake them (Old Lunch), Tuesday, August 25, 2020 8:37 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

ditto, I read broom of the system when it came out and there was no cultural weight attached to it whatsoever, even when IJ made a splash it was still something that mostly weird lit people had an opinion about, if you were talking "books that might impede a hookup" in the 90s it was, like, ayn rand or the celestine prophecy

Yeah, it probably wasn't until at least the release of I guess Consider the Lobster that I got the impression that he made much of an impression on anyone beyond literary critics. I certainly didn't know anyone else who read his stuff.

if this happens with Pynchon I am quitting society

need to read IJ this winter

I've had an unread copy on my shelf for something like 15 years now.

me too but for gravity's rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is my Infinite Jest. Don't know how many times I've read those first 90 pages or so.

When Pynchon dies twitter will be great again

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.