TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #4

Currently (as of yesterday) on page: 92

Footnotes read yesterday: 15

I have tried to write these reflections on today's reading five, six, seven different ways. None has worked. Usually when I blog or write a quick piece, I just dive in and begin and somehow shove and hobble my way around to all the points I wanted to hit. Frustratingly, each time I dive into this, I end up bringing up things I want to talk about... but not now.

So I will wait.

Today (well, tomorrow, because I intended to finish this on November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, but failed as spectacularly in my own way as Fawkes did) I will throw in the towel and just give you my favorite moments of today's reading. Little sweet rounded Timbits of text, fresh from the reading fryer.

"Katherine Ann" Gompert. [Her Christian names are the same as someone very near and dear to me. Shivering.]

"not always unless carefully titrated pleasant". Beautiful locution, if you are me, which most people are not.

"I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself."

"Momentumizers"

"they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently"

the footnoted translation of "te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est"

"Hope springs eternal"

"fluttery and slack" [a beautiful turn of phrase, that sentence]

"not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair"

One final cavil. Why is Wallace's French so thrashingly helpless? Is this some sort of wink that I don't get? It must be. I mean "fauteuils de rollents"? That is horrid. Are these snippets of German equally helpless, and I just don't realize it because I have next to no German? But then his Québecois English is also way off the mark, not so much barking up the wrong tree as digging a bone-hole to Indonesia.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #3

(Note: this entry was composed after yesterday's readings. Another entry will be written tonight for today's readings.)

Currently on page: 66

Footnote read today: 23

A slog today. Not without rewards. I have now passed the point where I seem to have abandoned the book; or at least the point where I abandoned it in spirit. The footnotes come fast and thick; the discussions of Hal's drug regimen and those of his classmates have some spectacularly good ones, discussions of drugs that put me in mind of Carleton University's magnificent psychologist Brian Little whose work on personality affects me deeply. Brian's discussion of personality types, basal neurochemistry, and drugs tends towards coffee/wine/beer examples but Wallace's typologies are essentially parallel.

I know that I am past the point where I checked out last time because there are insights that are coming thick and fast that I know I didn't have before; the work definitely takes place in the nearish future (nearish, within a generation anyway, to 1996) because the discussions of chronology in the (yes, interminable) filmography footnote indicate it quite clearly. Now, of course, the ruminations on the shape of future tech are only going to irritate me. It is ever thus with the near future.

Wallace is topping himself now with the Wallacery, writing in the second person which is something I always find vein-bustingly annoying. However, I am much more in tune with the comedy of the book than I thought I would be. That filmography is interminable, but it's a send-up with real bile and spirit. I enjoyed it immensely. The self-poke, also, I appreciate.

I'm glad Orin is back, at the end of today's reading.

One final housekeeping note. Godd Till (way to bork your site, by the way) suggests that I rename this series "A Jesty Questy". This is a name so transcendently awful, and yet totally cheese-platter irresistible. I shall adopt it as the label for the series though not as the title for the posts. But I am likely to refer to the "Jesty Questy" during the posts themselves. I already think of it thus.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #2

Currently on page: 49

Footnotes read today: 1

Today I reached the point where Infinite Jest begins to become seriously schizophrenic in tone.

I must note, here, that this isn't my first attempt at reading the book. I read a decent-sized chunk while staying with a friend, some years ago. My intention at the time was to borrow the book and finish it after my stay, but having gotten some way in I decided to give it up as a bad job, because I found the book irritating. Actually, I think I was not too far short of where I am now; I thought it was 100 pages but it seems to be somewhat less.

Well, this time I am not irritated, pleasingly enough. We've been through a number of internal narratives now, the story seeming to jump around between first and third person narration but always focusing on the lived experience of one person or other. I am finding the book much more interesting; determined to finish on deadline but taking the book only as a purely leisurely pursuit, I am free to hate it and mock it and I find that neither applies.

What I didn't remember about the book from my first reading, that is most obvious this time, is the puzzlers' delight of figuring out the temporal locus of the narrative. There is just enough (and I mean just enough) gibberus technologicus that it makes this interesting; putting oneself back into the mindset of the mid-90s is the most fun part of this. I still don't know if this is in the entertainingly-near future, or the exotically-nomenclatured present.

The best parts of today's reading were, easily, Orin's tales of bug horror, and the midnight conversation of Hal and Booboo. I have a stepbrother but not a "real" brother (I do have a sister) and I always look on my sons' relationship with a smidgen of envy. There was a breath of that in Hal and Booboo.

In fact, everything else today was a bit of a snooze. One cavil : no NFL team would ever trade a punter.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #1

I am reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and blogging my reflections here. Expect to see me once a day for the next month or two. I am sworn to finish by December 25th.

Page read to: 24.

Footnotes read today: 1.

In addition to the first 23 pages, I also read the blurbs, the foreword by Dave Eggers (which I enjoyed although perhaps it was a bit too Eggersly ravely for my taste) and even the publishing information page which has a great little nugget for those who have read the book (or not) but missed that page.

The book begins with a very good, near exceptional, set piece about tennis prodigy (and otherwise prodigy) Hal Incandenza. It is marvelous. Even if you have absolutely no intention of ever reading the entire book - and I will stop here and note that Infinite Jest is 1,079 pages long, inspiring awe and derision in equal measure - you should read the first 17 pages. There is no sense talking about this, other than suggesting that you read it. Right away, you can tell you are dealing with a heavy hitter of an author, because he words real damn good.

From there, I am halfway through the story of the (to now still unnamed) man preparing for his marijuana vacation and his doom. It's obsessive and self-absorbed in what I have come to know from his other writing as Wallacery. I think I am supposed to feel uncomfortable although I do not.

More tomorrow, and indeed every day until sometime in December.