The Pandemonium Of The Sun

A few first thoughts on my reading of Infinite Jest:
1. At the end of the second week, I am already behind. I kinda figured this would be the case, but, at the end of the second week, I am only up to where I should be at the end of the first week. Note to self: Uninstall Civ 4, Uninstall Morrowind. Read the box score instead of watching the game on DVR every night when I get home from work. The pace is about 75 pages per week, which shouldn’t be tough, but baseball season calls when your boyhood team and your adopted city’s team are both in first place at nearly the all-star break. I’ve built up enough vacation time at my job that I’ve been taking a weeks vacation every month for almost a year now…next vacation is in a few days….must catch up and move a little ahead.
2. David Foster Wallace is known, if for nothing else, his use (and some may say overuse of footnotes. Although there is nearly a hundred pages of footnotes, in the first forty pages of the book, I think there waws only one footnote. The pace has started to increase, and although everyone recommends (insists) that you have to read the footnotes,so far they appear to just be explicating notes….further clarifications of prescription drugs and translations of bits that are not in English. So far, no shadow narrative (at least that I have been able to detect) like in Pale Fire.
3. There’s been a lot of drug use/addiction explored so far and Wallace does a pretty amazing job at capturing the mania/paranoia involved, whether he is writing aobout the rituals of surreptitious weed smoking or the response to clinical depression.
4. Wallace’s research is impressive. Whether writing about prescription drugs or spending several pages footnoting someone’s filmography, he knows his shit. Infinite Jest came out in 1996 (written between 1993 and 1996 I believe). Not quite pre-internet, but certainly well before the internet was a useful research tool.

Infinite Summer