1. My copy of Infinite Jest is starting to get beaten up from being dragged to work every day. It seems like I do most of my reading during my lunch hour. I do like the fact that this thing is so big that, while reading the right page, i can fold the left page around and hold it in the middle and still not crack the spine. And I’m over 300 pages in.
2. Since I don’t have internet access during my lunch hour, I can’t use resources like the Infinite Jest Wiki. These online resources are invaluable, but fortunately I ‘get’ more than my fair share of references, especially having grown up in the greater Boston area.
3. I am still behind the schedule by about a week. At Least I haven’t fallen further behind. The schedule doesn’t include the footnotes, so I feel better about this, especially since I just finished the seventeen and a half page footnote in half sized font of the phone call from Orin to Hal on the subject or Quebec separatism.
4. Wallace continues to blow me away with his ease in handling just about any style. The only section that doesn’t really work for me so far is pages 157-169, in which Hal’s grandfather tells Himself of his own ennis career, and how it ended, all while getting more and more inebriated. The conversations between Hal and Orin are hilarious.
5. The footnotes, while still entertaining, still do not seem entirely revelatory. At work yesterday someone was talking about how they wanted to read Nabokov but someone told them that Pale Fire was way too hard. Please. To me this just points to someone who will go on the rest of their life reading average fiction. These are the people still extolling the virtues of Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut (author’s who I enjoyed when I was 18 but thought were full of shit when I re-read them in my late 20’s). There’s a blurb on the back of R.M. Koster’s Tineblas trilogy that says something like, “After reading this, everything else will seem absolutely ordinary.” There are very few people out there working on this level…Pynchon, of course, Vollmann (especially the Seven Dreams series and The Royal Family), Richard Powers, some of Delillo, the David Mitchell of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. I am sure there are a few others that I’ll think of as soon as I post this, but the list is mighty small.
Infinite Summer
Tag Archive for 'Infinite Jest'
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.
I can’t believe I just found out about Infinite Summer. I am a little behind on my reading schedule, but I think I will take a stab at the massive Infinite Jest
