HOW TO READ INFINITE JEST

The following was drafted by Matt Bucher (maintainer of the wallace-l listserv and author of this post),
and augmented by input from Nick Maniatis (administrator of The Howling Fantods, a site devoted to
DFW), and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (professor at Pomona College, who teaches a course entitled David
Foster Wallace).

There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down,cut in half, or skipping around.
But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester.

1.Read the endnotes: Please. They are not boring bibliographic details, but rather an integral
part of the text. And the bouncing back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug.

2.Use bookmarks: Yes “bookmarks”, plural: one for the main text and one for the endnotes.
Doing so will save you hours of searching, and the aggravation of losing your place several
times an hour.

3.Persevere to page 200: There are several popular way stations on the road to
abandoning Infinite Jest. The most heavily trafficked by far is “The Wardine Section”. Where the
opening pages of IJ are among the best written in the book, page 37 (and many pages
thereafter) are in a tortured, faux-Ebonics type dialect. “Wardine say her momma ain’t treat her
right.” “Wardine be cry.” Potentially offensive (if one wants to be offended), and generally hard to
get through. Hang in there, ignore the regional parlance, and focus on what the characters are
doing. Like most things in the book, you’ll need to know this later. Likewise for the other rough
patches to be found in the first fifth of the novel.

4.Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns
on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going,
subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems
at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come
together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do
make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot
lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.

5.Flag, copy, or bookmark page 223: Page 223 of the novel contains some information that
you will either need to internalize or refer to frequently to make sense of the narrative. Once you
reach it, flag the page with a stickie, dogear the corner, photocopy the material, stick a (third)
bookmark there–whatever will ensure that you can find this information when you need it.

6.Don’t do the thing you’re dying to do right now: Namely, flip to page 223 to see what we’re
talking about. David Foster Wallace ordered the book the way he did for a reason, and part of
step 4 above is respecting that. In fact, we encourage you to take the fingers-in-the-ears “LA LA
LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” approach to spoilers in general.

7.Abuse your copy: When you are finished, 223 should be just one of many mutilated pages in
your novel. Liberal use of tape flags, post-it notes, highlighting, or your anal-retentive page
marking device of choice, as a means of keeping track of key passages you think you might like
to come back to (or share with others), is encouraged. (Note: the preceding advice is not
recommended for those reading on the Kindle.) If you can’t bring yourself to work over your only
 copy of Infinite Jest, consider investing in a second.

8.Keep notes: As if lugging around a book the size of a 2 br. 1¼ bath apartment isn’t enough,
you may want to carry a notebook as well. You won’t always have the requisite Oxford English
Dictionary within arm’s reach, you know.

9.Brush up on your Hamlet: It’s no coincidence that the first two words of Hamlet are “Who’s
there?” and the first two words ofInfinite Jest are “I am”. Even the novel’s title was lifted from the
play.

As you read, it behooves you keep in mind the relationships between the characters in
Shakespeare’s drama (the ghost, poor Yorick, etc.) and the central themes of the play. You can
find a brief primer here.

10.Employ a reader’s guide: There are two companion guides that you may find helpful. One
is Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Burn’s guide is
rather short (96 pages), but it includes a helpful chronology , as well as sections on the novel’s
critical reception and key plot points.

Another guide is Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest. [Full disclosure: Bucher is the editor & publisher of the Carlisle book.] Elegant
Complexity is different than the Burn guide in that it offers a summary and exegesis on every
section of the novel–and that it’s 512 pages long. Also included are chronologies, family trees,
thematic discussions, and a map of the tennis academy.

11.Use online references: There are copious webpages out there that the first-time Jesters will
find useful. Here are a a few:

•An IJ glossary.
•The Infinite Jest index.
•Infinite Jest Character Profiles.
•The Infinite Jest Utilities Page, which includes chapter thumbnails and an endnote
finder.
•The IJ page at The Howling Fantods.
•Posts on kottke.org with the infinitejest tag.
•The Infinite Jest wiki.
•the index page for Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s David Foster Wallace course, and the Wiki
her students built.

You can find links to more resources at The Howling Fantods.

Obviously many of these sites contain spoilers, so poke a hole in an index card and only view
your monitor through that while visiting one.

ROUNDUP
Michael made some Infinite Summer bookmarks with the schedule printed right on them. We were
totally going to do the same thing, but whatever we would have cooked up would have looked pretty
lame compared to those.
In addition to creating a Google Calendar and iCal calendar for the I.S. schedule, James
also says he’ll be blogging his reading of the novel at his website.

Ralph created a Google Apps Progress Tracker. “I’m not graphic designer, obviously, so it’s very very
plain right now,” he says. “But any and all suggestions welcome.”

At Infinite Zombies, five six seven writers intend to chronicle their reading of the book in a format they
describe as “part book club, partFight Club“.

Carolina created a Flickr pool. Photos are also being posted on theFacebook wall.

The Infinite Summer Ravelry group has hit 50 members. TheGoodreads page has 87.
The LiveJournal community continues to grow.

Bitch Ph.D says she’s on board. Marc says that, on June 21st, he’s going to turn his weblog into “my
own journal of the Infinite Summer project/book club.” Kev and Emily are going to “post our gchat
convos while we read infinite jest.

Katie is keeping track of her favorite DFW quotations of a Tumblelog. Someone is tweeting Infinite
Jest 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

Meg is trying to talk her wedding guests into reading the novel so everyone will have something to talk
about at the reception.

And here are some other folks who are talking about the project:

•Brittney of Sparkwood & 21.

•Jim of Wisdom of the West.
•Ian of The Anxiety of Influence.
•Scott of Scott Brenner.
•Colleen of Colleen Barrett.
•tlajous of pura pinche agua, who says that Infinite Summer was the inspiration for his blog.
•Lizzie of This is Geometry.
If you’ll be blogging along, let us know in the comments.

COLIN MELOY: WHY I AM READING

INFINITE JEST
Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album
is The Hazards of Love.
I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase.
Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a
book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so
long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12
years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines
that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic
and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from
its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer
book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came
from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nationwhen I was thirteen and I had
fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s
lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more
broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was
a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer
before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a
brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he
carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our
checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars
in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking
tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread
out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily
expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new
paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest.
Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved
those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those
tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite
Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t
think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun
Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-
cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex,
warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time
through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows
old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

Until now.

Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread,
the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee
shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I
was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m
being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and
feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.

JASON KOTTKE: FORWARD

Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. The archive of his Infinite Jest
commentary can be found here.
Is everyone in here yet? Yes? Ok.

I’m thrilled to kick off Infinite Summer with this here Forward. Before we get started, I have a disclaimer
to offer. Well, actually several related disclaimers which, taken together, should convince you that I am
not at all qualified to speak to you about the literary or cultural impact of Infinite Jest and its author on
contemporary American society. Apologies if that’s what you’re here for; in that case I can refer you
to Dave Eggers’ foreword in the new paperback copy of IJ.

Now, the first disclaimer: I was not an English major. In fact, I don’t even read that much fiction. In the
past five years, I have read The Corrections, Infinite Jest (for the second time), The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, Pride and Prejudice, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, nearly half of 2666, and that’s
about it, give or take some Lord of the Rings. I will be of little assistance in helping you to understand
how Infinite Jest fits into the canon of American literature, past or present.

Writing is something I don’t know a great deal about either. I earn my keep as a blogger, which
profession most people assume is synonymous with writing but really isn’t, in the same way that
basketball players run but aren’t runners and architects draw but aren’t, uh, drawers. I love Wallace’s
writing in IJ and elsewhere but beyond that, I can’t tell you why it’s good, who his writing was influenced
by, who he influences, or what the purpose of his complex sentence structure and grammatical tics is.
(Or should that be “are”? (See what I’m talking about?))

Furthermore, I do not play tennis, haven’t suffered from depression, have never been addicted to
anything (except perhaps Tetris on the original Game Boy), don’t know the Boston area that well,
haven’t attended an _______ Anonymous meeting, and did not go to a small college in New England,
all things that Wallace pulled from his life experience and wove together in the IJ narrative. Does
Wallace accurately convey to the reader the pressures felt by the exceptional junior tennis player? Does
the AA stuff ring true? What about the addiction aspects of the novel? I can help you with none of those
questions.

But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t
need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or
people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs.
Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if
you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s
grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is
more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own.
You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.

And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one
of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for
more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are
important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ,
how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire
run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons,
twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what
happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in
World of Warcraft.

And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.
MOUNTAINEERING
The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use
this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.
I don’t know why I own Infinite Jest.

Well, let me clarify. I know the reason I own it: it is, by all accounts, exactly the sort of narrative I most
enjoy. I love novels that bend, and then break, and then place into a woodchipper the conventional
narrative structure. I adore films where you spend the majority of your time wondering what in the hell
is going on. I am helplessly addicted to a TV show that has spent the last five years opening
matryoshkas, only to reveal smaller dolls within.

Reputably, Infinite Jest is all these and more.1 So the reasons for my ownership are obvious.

What I am unclear on is why I own it. Like, the actual mechanics by which the book came to be in my
possession. Presumably someone, at someone point, urged me to invest in a copy, but I don’t recall
purchasing it. Or borrowing it. Or finding it on a suitcase in a railway station, attached to a note reading
“Please look after this bear of a novel.”

Indeed, most of my memories of Infinite Jest revolve around bending over to retrieve something off the
floor of our computer room–a pen the cat has batted off the desk, say, or a sheet of paper the printer
has ejected with a whit too much enthusiasm–and seeing it, lurking on the bottom shelf, 2 wedged
between Underworld and Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days(the former with a spine suspiciously pristine,
the latter looking like it’s gone through the dryer). “Remember that night?” it asks. “The night we spent
on the redeye from Washington D.C.? You read 120 page of me, promised we would stay together until
the end. What happened?” I avert my eyes, quickly straighten, and flee. This may well explain why the
floor of the computer room is two inches deep in abandoned pens and Google Maps hard copies.

In addition to Infinite Jest, here is a list of other David Foster Wallace works that I have somehow failed
to read: all of them. Or at least that was the case two month ago, when I first envisioned this crazy
event. Since then I have been wolfing down DFW essays as a golden retriever would a dropped ice
cream sandwich.

Among the first was The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, which contains this train-wreck of a sentence:

The house I end up sitting with clots of dried shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding
Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler 74-year-olds and exactly the kind
of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over.

Honestly, if I hadn’t already announced Infinite Summer, that might have been its end. It’s not the worst
sentence I’ve ever seen,3 but I had to go over it three times just to parse, and thought of reading 1,079
pages thrice over the summer struck me as even more insane than the original proposal.

My trepidation lasted exactly 24 hours, until, halfway through his amazing essay Shipping Out (PDF), I
stumbled across this thing of wonder:

Only later do I learn that that little Lebanese Deck-l0 porter had his head just about chewed off by the
(also Lebanese) Deck-l0 Head Porter, who had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward,
who received confirmed reports that a passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the port
hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded a rolling Lebanese head for this clear indication of porterly
dereliction, and the Austrian Chief Steward had reported the incident to a ship’s officer in the Guest
Relations Department, a Greek guy with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and epaulets so complex I
never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009
after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to
assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various
corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.

Holy great jeezum crow almighty. It is clear that the peaks in Wallace’s writing are an order of
magnitude greater than the occasional valleys.

And based on the first 20 pages of Infinite Jest, at looks as though the peaks in this novel will be so
plentiful that altitude sickness will pose the biggest threat. Like a climber headed toward his first
summit, I am filled with an excitement tinged with apprehension, and a hope that I have enough oxygen
for the journey.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use
this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.
Way back awhile ago, Matthew e-mailed me and said, I’m thinking of doing this thing, would you like to
do it, too? And I was all, HELL NO. Why don’t you ask mimi smartypants, she’s the secretary/treasurer
of the David Foster Wallace Fan Club. It was my way of saying, thanks, but don’t you want a qualified
literary opinion-giver along on this trek? I can barely parse Dr. Seuss.

Then I didn’t hear from Matthew for like three months, so I was all, WHEW! Now I can go back to
knitting this sock. But then, of course, Matthew followed up 4 and said that mimi had declined — having
already read the book three times5 she wasn’t up for number four.

Then, sensing my reluctance to flaunt my intellectual weaknesses about the Internet, Matthew went on
to say a bunch of wildly flattering things about me, like that mine was one of the first blogs he ever read,
and that I gave him the idea upon which he built that Nobel Prize-winning physics thing he did about
God.

My only qualification for being an Infinite Summer guide seems to be that I, too, once picked up Infinite
Jest and failed to finish it. I didn’t even PAY for my copy, I was working in a bookstore at the time and
got one free from the Little, Brown rep. Apart from my anxiety about committing to a Big Book at the
time,6 what bothered me most about the book was the cheap advance-copy binding, the way the cover
curled up and over itself when the humidity rose above 15%. I eventually donated it to the Planned
Parenthood book sale.

I remember the book being about tennis, which is a sport I enjoy playing once or twice a year. I was
varsity in high school, but the coach said that even though I had some talent, I just didn’t appear to want
to work very hard.7

However, as your sherpa, I vow to come up with something moderately insightful to say each week. 8
FICTION’S DIRTY LITTLE
SECRET
The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use
this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.
When I was in college a novelist I admired made an appearance at my school and I was asked to
introduce him. I walked to the podium in front of a large student crowd and gave a brief summary of the
author’s recurring themes. Then I sat down and the author came out and told everyone I was an idiot.
Not in those words, exactly, but he claimed, with more than a little disdain, that all the things I had said
were in his books were products of my limited imagination, and he got a few good laughs at my
expense. Of course I was mortified, not only because there were any number of totally crushable
English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen, but also because I
was right. Everything I said about his work was absolutely true. I couldn’t figure out why he would deny
it.9

Fifteen years later I was on tour promoting my own novel and sat for an interview with Janet Taylor, an
extremely intelligent and thoughtful host for Oregon Public Radio. For the first ten minutes she asked
interesting questions and I gave more or less coherent answers. And then Janet said something like
this:

“In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown
killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I
find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been
very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware,
Kevin, but I’ll explain for our listeners—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and the
disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet
and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had
to call out, ‘Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are
doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say.’ And in Cast of Shadows, Martha
Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him
and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell
her.”

It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had known what she was talking
about.10

But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was terrific. And if we had never met she
would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a deliberate and clever allusion to the biblical
Martha of Bethany and not the result of that character having been named on the day Martha Stewart
was indicted for securities fraud. I’m not a radical relativist when it comes to critical theory but that
observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads
his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and
each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands
the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader
gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your
otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it.

Earlier this week Jason Kottke made this important point about Infinite Jest: You’re never going to get
half of what Wallace intended the first time you read it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll add a corollary to that: A lot
of what youdo get, isn’t anything that even occurred to Wallace in the first place. Don’t sweat that either.

We have a tendency to think of novels, especially novels we admire, as being like timepieces with every
moving part dropped in its place with expert precision. I suppose writers would like people to think that
sometimes, but even the most brilliant novels are far messier than that. Writing a novel is less like
watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.

I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come because even after only 100 pages Infinite Jest is
almost the perfect novel for this discussion, but think of the reader and author as partners. Wallace has
constructed this novel with a lot of care and left pieces of the puzzle in ingenious (and unexpected)
places and there is great conspiratorial pleasure in finding those clues where others might miss them.
But the reader brings his own ingenuity to the project as well and in the many places where Wallace
has left gaps, the reader will fill them in herself. Often brilliantly.

In fact (and I say this in a whisper because it’s the dirty secret of writing fiction) the author is counting
on you for it.

POOCHIE
The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use
this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.
“He was forty, and she was twenty. Big age difference. Especially at that age. But they had a baby, and
she turned into a completely different person. She punched him. Kicked him in the privates.”

Oh, sorry. That’s part of a conversation I overhead this morning in a diner 11 as I waited for my order to
arrive and tried pretty darn hard to read Infinite Jest.

I figured since I had to sit through some middle-aged woman’s not-so-elegant discussion of postpartum
depression, you should too. Hope you enjoyed it.

Of course, this is something I’ll have to get used to. I’m not the fastest reader, and I’ve never dealt with
such a lengthy book before12 so my method of getting to the end of this thing will be to read it whenever
possible, no matter what (possibly loud and obnoxious) company I’m in.

Diner table. Bus stop. Therapy. Wait, scratch that last one. Or maybe not — considering the themes
already touched upon in the first hundred pages of IJ, maybe the pretence that I read the tome in the
company of my mental health practitioner will be taken as some deep, insightful tying-in of commentary
and commented-upon.

Which would certainly not be any kind of misrepresentation on my part. I am insightful as balls. 13

This space was meant to be taken to introduce myself to you all. There’s a chance I’m failing. In
fairness, I’m a little nervous, realizing that if this were Sesame Street, I’d be the kid singled out as the
one “doing her own thing”. My fellow guides are all distinctly proven entities, whereas I’m the plucky
newcomer with the lucky bat and the sports metaphor that doesn’t make sense in the context of
literature discussion.

If you’re wondering, I’m told I’m here to provide a youthful perspective, which I can only read as
meaning that the other guides are decrepit and irrelevant, and I’m the cool, young chick that’ll bring in
the 18-35 demographic we so desperately crave so that we can make muchos advertising dollars off of
David Foster Wallace’s back.

To recap: we’re shills; I’m the only guide worth reading, because I’m young; and having babies makes
you hit your husband. I hope you’re taking notes.

MARCUS SAKEY: DECODING

INFINITE JEST; OR, DON’T
Marcus Sakey is the award-winning author of Good People, The Blade Itself: A Novel, and At the
City’s Edge, all of which are in development as feature films. His new novel, The Amateurs, comes
out August 6th.His website features excerpts, contests, and tips for writers.
I picked up IJ the same way I imagine a lot of you did—while browsing, I was caught by the cover, the
hyperbolic quote, and the heft of the thing. This was 1997, an era when I was more likely to be willing to
invest in a doorstop novel. But even then, 1079 pages was going to take some persuading, so I opened
to the reviews: “Uproarious,” “Exhilarating,” “Truly remarkable,” “Spectacularly good.”

Okay. You win.

My first read of the novel was by and large a pleasure. I’ll admit that there were moments when I
wondered if I could trust Wallace to deliver the goods. And at that time, I thought that the book could
have benefited from a sterner editor (although the submitted manuscript was apparently significantly
longer.)

Still, I labored through the rough spots, and found more than enough to tickle me and keep me going.
But while I don’t want to reveal too much, I will say that when I got to the end, my initial reaction was,
“Huh.”

Not in a bad way. There had been moments of such startling brilliance along the way, episodes so
hilariously sad and tragically funny, that I knew even at the time that it was something special. But still,
at the very end, there was a “Huh” factor.

Fast-forward two months and ten books, and here’s the thing—I was still thinking about Infinite Jest. In
fact, I found myself seeing it more clearly, getting more seduced by it, than when I was actually reading
the thing.

With distance what at first seemed sprawling begins to come into a more cohesive, if still massive,
picture. Wallace is a writer who does not spare you the full force of his brain; in fact, he demands your
effort like a brilliant professor who expects that you show up every week, well-rested, on time, and with
the reading done.

However, novels aren’t read that way. They’re read in sips and gulps, sometimes a sleepy page before
bed, sometimes a hundred with a pot of coffee. Not only that, but because Wallace believes in
complexity, he doesn’t always reveal the structure of things all at once; doesn’t make obvious the
nature of the world he’s building.

But finish the book, let it stew, and it will all come together, I promise. And it’s more than worth the effort.
So much so in fact, that about a year later I decided to read it again.

And brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you, on a second read, there wasn’t a word I would cut. Once
you’ve got a sense of the greater whole, and once you trust Wallace, the thing is fucking genius. I write
a very different style of book, but even so, it makes me want to pack it in and go home. He’s that good.

But I made a mistake the second time. I thought that because I had puzzled out certain aspects, the
rest of the book was a riddle, a code I needed to crack. So I went at it that way. I took notes on
characters and relationships. I annotated. I formulated guesses about what “The Entertainment” was,
and where it showed up, and how what happened at the end played into what happened at the
beginning. I visited message boards and forums and the Wallace discussion list. I spent as much time
taking notes on the novel as I did reading the damn thing.

And here’s what I learned: There is no secret.

Fundamentally, IJ is a novel about two things: the pursuit of happiness, and the impossibilities of
communication. Wallace explores those themes and their intersections in a hundred different ways. And
because he was a genius who didn’t believe there were answers to these questions, he also contradicts
himself over and over and over. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that there are no assertions of importance in
the text that aren’t contradicted somewhere else.

I realize that sounds annoying. But that’s why I’m writing this piece. It’s only annoying if you look at the
novel as a code to crack, if you see everything as a clue.

After a second read, there were many things I understood more clearly. And damn, how I loved it. But
could I tell you, unequivocally, “what happened”?

Nope.

It’s not about that. There aren’t easy answers in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. There
aren’t single perspectives in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. The world can’t be
summed up in a sentence, and so Wallace not only didn’t try—he demonstrated some of the reasons
why the world is the way it is.

Last year, David Foster Wallace hung himself. I’d never met the man, but it threw me into a funk. After a
week of moping about, I picked up Infinite Jest again as a sort of personal tribute, and read it for the
third time. Read it trusting him, read it feeling the sorrow and the joy and the sheer intellectual pleasure.

And finally, I read it right.

INFINITE SUMMERY – WEEK 1
Milestone Reached: Page 73 (7%)
Chapters Read:
Chapter
YEAR OF GLAD
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE
TUCKS MEDICATED PAD
9 MAY — YEAR OF THE
DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE
DOVE BAR
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE
DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY
PRODUCTS FROM THE 55
AMERICAN HEARTLAND
3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF
THE DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND
63
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
YEAR OF THE DEPEND
ADULT UNDERGARMENT
Beginning
Synopsis
Page
Hal interviews at the University of Arizona; in
3
a flashback, Hal eats mold as a child.
17 Erdedy awaits a delivery of pot.
Hal speaks with a “professional
27
conversationalist”.
Hal, sharing a room with his older brother
32 Mario, receives a call from the eldest brother
Orin
A medical attaché discovers that his wife is
33 out, and so selects an unmarked entertainment
cartridge to watch.
Clenette describes Wardine, Wardine’s mother,
37 and Roy Tony; Bruce Green falls in love with
and eventually woos Mildred Bonk.
Hal and Mario reminisce about their father
39 (Himself) and his death; medical attaché
continues to watch cartridge.
Orin kills roaches and wishes he could get rid
42
of last night’s “Subject”.
49 Hal smokes pot in the Pump Room.
Don Gatley accidentally kills a man while
robbing his home.
Jim Troelsch–a student at the Enfield Tennis
Academy (ETA)–is sick; someone has a
60
nightmare about a face in the floor (told in
first-person).
The history of ETA and its founder James Orin
Incandenza (father to Hal, Orin, and Mario).
Orin glides into Mile High Stadium in a
Cardinals costume; Michael Pemulis talks to
65
his “Little Buddies” at ETA about drugs; Hal
relates a dream that he used to have nightly.
68 (continues Kate Gompert is in the hospital, speaks about
to page 85) the depression her addition to pot engenders.
New Characters:

Characters in bold appear to be major.

YEAR OF GLAD (page 3)

•Harold (Hal) James Incandenza: Protagonist. Student at the Enfield Tennis Academy; son of
James Orin Incandenza and Avril Incandenza; younger brother to Orin Incandenza and Mario
Incandenza.
•Dr. Charles Tavis: Hal’s mother’s “adoptive brother”; accompanies Hal to University of Arizona
interview.
•Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza (“The Moms”): Wife to James Orin Incandenza, Mother
to Orin, Mario, and Hal. Dean of Academic Affairs at ETA; grammarian supreme.
•Aubrey F. deLint: ETA prorector.
•Kirk White: University of Arizona Varsity Coach.
•Mr. Sawyer: University of Arizona Dean of Academics.
•Bill: University of Arizona Dean of Athletics.
•Unnamed: Dean of Admissions, Dean of Composition.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 17)

•Erdedy – Pot addict, who swears that each pot binge will be his last.
•Unnamed: Female who promised to deliver pot to Eldedy.

1 APRIL — YEAR OF THE TUCKS MEDICATED PAD (page 27)

•“Conversational Professional”: Possibly Himself in disguise.

9 MAY — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 32)

•Mario Incandenza: Older brother to Hal; has some sort of deformity.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 33)

•Unnamed: Medical attaché (first to watch the mysterious, unnamed cartridge), Medical
attaché’s wife.

YEAR OF THE TRIAL-SIZE DOVE BAR (page 37)

•Clenette Henderson: Relates the story of Wardine.

•Wardine: Clenette’s half-sister and friend who is beaten by Roy Tony.
•Reginald: Wardine’s boyfriend.
•Roy Tony: Dealer; Wardine’s mother’s “man”.
•Delores Epps – Clenette’s friend.
•Columbus Epps – Delores’ brother, killed by Roy Tony four years ago (over Clenette’s mother).
•Unnamed: Wardine’s mother.
•Bruce Green: Husband to Mildred L. Bonk; father to Harriet Bonk-Green.
•Mildred L. Bonk: Wife to Bruce Green; mother to Harriet Bonk-Green.
•Tommy Doocey: Harelipped pot-dealer (possibly the source of Erdedy’s pot).
•Harriet Bonk-Green: Mildred and Bruce’s daughter

OCTOBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 42)

•Orin Incandenza: Eldest Incandenza brother. Plays football, sleeps with “subjects”, hates
 roaches.

AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND (page 55)

•Donald “Don” W. Gately: Enormous guy (over 6 ft., close to 300 lbs), thief, murderer (albeit by
accident), and “active drug addict”.
•Guillaume DuPlessis: Homeowner killed by Gately.
•Trent ‘Quo Vadis’ Kite: Gately’s “associate”.

3 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 60)

•Jim Troelsch: Ill member of the 18s B squad at ETA.

AS OF YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 63)

•Dr. James Orin Incandenza (“Himself”): Husband of Avril, father to Orin, Mario, and Hal.
Founder of ETA, filmmaker, inventor. Died in The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar.

DENVER CO, 1 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 65)

•Michael Pemulis: Member of the 18s B squad at ETA; friend to Hal and Mario.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 68)

•Kathrine “Kate” Ann Gompert: Pot addict, depressive. First seen in hospital.
•Unnamed: Kate’s doctor.
•Gerhardt Schtitt: Head Coach and Athletic Director at E.T.A. Old; borderline fascist; friends
with Mario.

Vocabulary: We we originally planning to have a weekly “vocab dump” as part of the summaries, but
that now strikes us as unnecessary. For one thing, most readers appear to have have taken to heart the
suggestion that IJ be read with the OED at hand. For another, the Infinite Jest Wikilists most 37¢-
words and definitions by page number, and the Infinite Jest Vocabulary Glossary is also available for
perusal.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character
Profiles (author unknown), Ben’s Infinite Spreadsheet, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s
Guide, and Steve Russillo’sChapter Thumbnails.
ROUNDUP
The National Post’s Afterword interviewed Matthew Baldwin about the genesis of Infinite Summer.
At A Supposedly Fun Blog, several writers (including Erza Klein of the Washington Post) have
assembled to blog their reading of Infinite Jest. They join Infinite Zombies, which has been doing so
for the last two weeks.

Sonja describes her reading methodology. William boasts that his weblog Human Complex is “Now
Infinitely Summerier”. Christine has been posting an “IJ Quote of the Day” on Naptime Writing. Ray
says he’ll be writing about Infinite Jest every Wednesday at Love, Your Copyeditor.

Political blogger Atrios reveals that the title of his blog is taken from the novel.

And speaking of political bloggers, Matthew Yglesias is reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle:

I think I stumbled upon an inadvertent flaw in the Kindle. Namely, that when you read really long books
—particularly as part of a quasi-group enterprise—you want to either brag about how many pages
you’ve read or else whine about how many pages you’ve fallen behind. But the Kindle doesn’t have
pages! Just, um, locations.

So I read 1,100 locations worth of the book. But nobody knows what that means. Normal
people won’t even know if that’s a lot or a little.

In general, the Kindle strikes me as somewhat hobbled by an overly generous view of why
people buy books. Not only is there this problematic lack of bragging, but with the kindle
edition of the book I can’t have a handsome volume laying around the house as if to say to
visitors, “why, yes, I may be a professional political pundit but I’m also a man of culture.”
And I’ll have nothing on my shelf. Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy
a book on Kindle so you can maintain some kind of display wall of all the impressive books
you’ve read.

According to this page, Skylight Books in LA will give you a 15% book club discount if you mention
“Infinite Summer” when buying IJ. They also say their facilities are available for meet-ups.

Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

•Melissa of Broken Nerves.

•Croz of Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.
•Brandon of Bookstorm.
•Lonita of All the Lonita that’s unfit to print.
•Paul of I Just Read About That …
•Chad of Uncertain Principles.
•Peter of of Brain Hammer.
 •Rebecca of Of Books and Bicycles.
•Martin of Emdashes.
•Kirsten of Now or Never.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.

DEAD SEA DIVING

Fun fact I learned from the last book I read: the Dead Sea, with a salt concentration of 32%, is so
saline that it practically precludes swimming. You can dive in (though heaven forbid you do so without
hermetically-sealed goggles), but the density of the water will pop you back to the surface like a cork.
Remaining underwater for any period of time requires a Herculean effort.
That’s an apt analogy for the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest.14 I’ve found it easy, in the pre-coffee
morning or the laying-in-bed night, to simply float upon the surface of the narrative, consuming
paragraphs without much regard as to whether or where or when we’ve seen a character before, or
what major and minor motifs are currently being explored, or how this eight page filmography fits into
the whole.15

At other times, when I am fully lucid and engaged (i.e., between the hours of Last Latte of the Day and
First Beer of the Evening), I try to submerge myself in the text. But it is not without exertion, and I have
to come up for air every 20-30 minutes. Indeed, it feels like exercise. Not “work” mind you, but an
endorphin-producing, man-I-feel-better-about-myself-for-having-done-that workout.

Each dip into the novel also feels like a completely separate excursion. When I take a break from a
conventional novel it’s like pressing pause on a video, with the narrative flow frozen on the screen,
awaiting my return. But in reading Infinite Jest I have tended to stop at the chapter divisions, and nearly
every chapter of the first 100 pages starts in a new place, with new characters, and often in a new time.
It’s akin to reading a collection of short stories, set in a shared universe but with little else in common. I
can see why many people–including myself a decade ago–put this novel down and never pick it up
again. There is so little connective tissue thus far that the end of each chapter feels like a natural place
to stop reading, forever.

And yet, 100 pages in, I sense engrossment on the horizon. With each additional chapter I find myself
sinking into the salty tide. It’s probably only a matter of time before I disappear below the waves for
good.

Some other observations:

Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better
than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.

Confession: Endnote 40 marks my first genuine irritation at Wallace’s “pretentiousness” (real or

perceived). It (the endnote) begins with “In other words”, implying that it is going to help the reader
understand Marathe’s true allegiance, and then provides an explanation even more opaque than that
found in the body of the novel. Maybe it just caught me in a bad mood, but I was confused, I wanted
clarity, and phrases such as “the even-numbered total of his final loyalties” failed to provide.
Question: Has anyone yet deduced the meaning of the glyphs that sometimes precede chapter
headings?

I have a sneaking suspicion that these are the true chapter delimiters, and that the year headings are
but chyrons.

BREATHING INTO A PAPER

BAG
I’m so far behind where I’m supposed to be and I’m trying not to panic, though that didn’t work out too
well last night at 9:00 p.m.

Me: I can’t do this! I have nothing to say! I’m an underqualified blogging hack with no literary grasp, or
scope, and this was all just a horrible mistake so you’d better FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO POST ON
INFINITE SUMMER, OH GOD.

Matthew: Buh-wha?

A series of talk-her-down e-mails ensued, wrapping up with a YouTube video of Feist on Sesame
Street, singing about the number four. Then I slept for ten hours. Hey! Things are looking up.

I may have several points to make here, but number one is: how the fuck are you people finding time to
read? Do none of you have jobs? Certainly you don’t have families, or children belonging to an age
group that is defined by its inability to successfully manipulate a fresh band-aid. Too many people need
me for too many things, and I suddenly see why it’s all I can do to throw up a blog post and then run
screaming to put out another dryer lint fire, or keep a neglected dog from peeing In someone’s shoe, or
sadly buttoning up another unironed shirt as I dash out the door to a job where a minor office sport is
trying to guess how old I am.

But let’s think about this sentence for a moment:

A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness non-pareil with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the
medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations as the DeBakey of
maxillofaial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly ad valorem.

SHRINKing UPPer CLASSes of PETro-ARab NAtions whose STAGGering FEEs are WHOLly AD
vaLORem.

I feel like Rex Harrison ought to burst in and start singing that. 16 And somewhere in Nova Scotia there’s
a soundproof bunker where some poor b-list Shakespearean actor has been subsisting on Jell-O and
hand-rolled American Spirits, recording an unabridged audio version of Infinite Jestfor the last thirteen
years.
“I don’t mind,” Hal said softly. “I could wait forever.”

I hope he wraps it up soon and turns it into an 80-gig podcast or this book is going to become a
doorstop. Again.

THROUGH ALL THE DEAD

ENDS AND BAD SCENES
There is this thing they do on the first day of medical school orientation to help the students understand
what to expect. They gather all the first-years into an auditorium and the dean or whoever comes out
and he says to them, “Turn and look at the person on your left. Now turn and look at the person on your
right. Because in just a few years, both of those dudes are going to be doctors.” Then everyone high-
fives and they all make out with each other.
Don’t let your girlfriend go to med school, is all I’m saying. She will totally dump you for one of those
guys.

On an unrelated note, I wonder how many of our fellow infsumalians have dropped out already. I was
thinking about them as I read my friend Marcus Sakey’s guest essay on Friday.

Like Matt Bucher and Jason Kottke, Marcus stressed the importance of trusting David Foster Wallace
as you read Infinite Jest, and this touches on the most important important connections between writer
and reader. When I teach writing workshops I tell students that one of the biggest mistakes I think
writers make, even some experienced writers, is not doing enough from the start to build the trust of the
reader. Many writers seem to expect people will read their novel just because they wrote it, which is
insane. Reading a novel of any kind requires a commitment and in a marketplace of infinite choices a
novelist needs to convince the reader that he not only has a great story to tell but that he can be relied
on to tell it well. And he has to do that immediately. He has to promise.

Having written a book like Infinite Jest Wallace is something like a science fair partner who says to you,
“Forget about that corn still you were planning to make with some other writer on your shelf. Let’s build
a cold-fusion reactor.” And you’re suspicious because you’ve been burned by ambitious partners
before, ones who tell you they want to build a cold-fusion reactor, thus requiring that you do more work
than you really wanted to do, but halfway through they’ve blown you off to get high with the Spanish
club and left you with a lot of indecipherable notes and not a clue how they’re supposed to go together.

How do you know Wallace can deliver before you’ve already blown the whole summer?

We have a number of reasons to trust Wallace. We have the word of smart people who have read the
book, like Marcus, Jason, and Matt. We have almost 15 years of people reading and rereading, mining
the book for its pleasures. We have the place to which this book has rapidly ascended in my
generation’s unconscious.

But best of all we have the first ten pages.

The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes
frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and he deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to
make you a promise.
‘I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let
me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is
underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just
Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you
guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows
high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.

‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.

He could have just said this: Listen up. I have a freaking great story to tell you.

If you feel yourself getting frustrated in parts, or lost. If you feel Wallace has lost your trust, stop, go
back and read the first ten pages. You’ll find a promise.

NOT THE BEST STUDENT

The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators
watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’
eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in
chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to
invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations,
they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.
I know we passed endnote 24 last week, but I want to return to it. And I will do so because when I type
things here you have to read them poop ha ha ha I made you read poop.

In 2006 I went away to film school17 fully expecting to pop out of it again three years later as the most
visionary writer/director of my generation. Dream big, kids. I left three weeks later, in part because of
some assigned reading that very closely resembled endnote 24, only longer, and with that gross shiny-
textbook smell.

So I would like to extend my thanks to David Foster Wallace for making me relive that experience, albeit
shorter and in the comfort of my own home, as opposed to hunched over a library table desperately
trying to read as fast as possible so I can do my essay/s. I was there three weeks — how did I get
behind on so many essays? And why were there essays in a supposedly practice-based course? And
why am I still bitter about this?

I wasn’t sold on endnote 24 until I read the above passage. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The summary
for Cage III – Free Show is an amazing concept. It’s funny and twisted and exciting and everything you
thinkInfinite Jest will be when you first hear about it.

I can’t help but view the whole book in a different light, with Free Show in mind. I would actively
discourage myself from such a conscious process, but I’m so obsessed with the quote at the top of this
post that I would rather interpret IJ the wrong way than try to put it at the back of my mind.

“Fine, Avery” I hear you say, “you liked a tiny portion of an endnote we all slogged through. Well done.
But what about the rest of the book so far?”

I’m enjoying it.

Oh, you want more than that, right? Okay. Well, I’m having great fun with the Marathe/Steeply segment.
Although that’s not to say I have any idea what the hell is going on (sentences like “have I merely
pretended to pretend to pretend to betray” put paid to that notion). I don’t know if it’s my status as a
trans-individual that grants me such delight in Steeply’s extremely poor disguise (re: the lopsided boobs
— we’ve all been there), or if we’re all having a good time reading it but I’m not going to question my
enjoyment. Especially since I have so little time for such questions after scrawling acronyms from the
section onto my arm in a failed effort to remember them.

If you’re interested, having such epidermal annotations publicly visible in a crowded mall will draw the
attention of security agents desperate to know if QFP is some kind of terrorist organisation with a
vendetta againstSears.

Just, y’know. FYI.

MICHAEL PIETSCH: EDITING

INFINITE JEST
Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, and was
David Foster Wallace’s editor. He adapted the following from “Editing Wallace,” a Q&A with Rick Moody,
published in Sonora Review 55, May 2009.
In April 1992 I received on submission from David Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, around 150 pages
of Infinite Jest, the opening section. They were wild, smart, funny, sad, and unlike any pages of
manuscript I'd ever held in my hands. The range of voices and settings sent me reeling. The
transvestite breakdown on the subway, the kid in the doctor's office. The Year of the Depend Adult
Undergarment. The Lung. Young Hal with his little brass one-hitter. Gately, Troelsch, Schacht. The
names! Erdedy, Wardine, Madame Psychosis. I’d read chapters from it published as short stories in
magazines and here at last was the gigantic construct that linked those wildly disparate pieces. What I
remember is that David knew his book was going to be very, very long, and he was looking for
someone whose editorial suggestions he thought he might listen to. I was lucky enough to be working
at Little, Brown, a company that was willing to support this kind of endeavor. We signed a contract and
waited.

When he was around two-thirds through the novel David sent me a giant stack of pages and asked for
my thoughts. I protested that without the whole story it would be impossible to know what ultimately
mattered. But I tried to give him an accounting of when I found it intolerably confusing or slow or just too
hard to make sense of. I banged my head hardest against the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and
the Orin Incandenza football stories and David revised those strands considerably.

We’d agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can
the book possibly live without this? Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and
how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that
many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of
themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them.

Every decision was David's. I made suggestions and recommendations and tried to make the reasons
for them as clear as possible. But every change was his. It is a common misconception that the writer
turns the manuscript over to the editor, who then revises, shapes, and cuts at will. In fact the editor’s job
is to earn the writer’s agreement that changes he or she suggests are worth making. David accepted
many cuts—around 250 manuscript pages is what I recall. But he resisted others, for reasons that he
usually explained.

Here are a few of those responses and explanations. They give a sense of how engaged David was in
this process and of how much fun it was to work with him.

p. 52—This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you
rotter.

p. 82—I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back.

p. 133—Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up
disc so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding.)

pp. 327-330. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on
your part, my canines are bared on this one.

Ppp. 739-748. I’ve rewritten it—for about the 11th time—for clarity, but I bare teeth all the
way back to the 2nd molar on cutting it.

P. 785ff—I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let’s
spare one another, shall we?

I keep trying to imagine encountering David’s books separate from the tall, athletic, casual, brilliant,
concerned, funny man I knew—the way we encounter most writing, bodies of work whose creators we
never meet, complete years before we encounter them. It is one of the great miracles of life, our ability
to apprehend a human spirit through the sequences of words they leave behind. And I have to say that
the David we encounter through Infinite Jest is pretty amazingly like the David I knew. When for a
moment I manage to imagine myself as a reader opening up a copy ofInfinite Jest for the first time, the
way I opened V or Soldier’s Pay orSuttree or A Handful of Dust or The Canterbury Tales, I think Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.
INFINITE SUMMERY – WEEK 2
Milestone Reached: Page 147 (14%)
Chapters Read:

Beginning
Chapter Synopsis
Page
Tiny Ewell travels to the Enfield Marine VA
Hospital Complex via cab.
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT
85 A list of people gathered in the living room of
UNDERGARMENT
the medical attaché house watching the
Entertainment.

Remy Marathe of the Assassins des Fauteuils

Rollents(wheelchair assassins) and M. Hugh
Steeply of the Office of Unspecified Services
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE (OUS) converse on a bluff outside Tucson, AZ.
DEPEND ADULT 87
UNDERGARMENT A herd of feral hamsters rampages in the Great
Concavity (which used to be Vermont, and is
now owned by Canada)

Banter and exhaustion in the ETA lockeroom.

Present: Hal Incandenza, John (N.R.) Wayne,
Jim Troelsch, Michael Pemulis, Ted Schacht,
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT Ortho Stice, Jim Struck, Keith Freer.
95
UNDERGARMENT
Marathe and Steeply continue their
conversation through sunset.

Big Buddy meetings: first Hal (with Kent

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U
MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST
AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY
ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE,
THUS FAR
30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE
DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
30 April — YEAR OF THE
DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
109 Blott, Idris Arslanian, Evan Ingersol), then
Wayne, Troelsch, Struck, and Stice.
121 Mario is seduced by USS Millicent Kent.
Marathe and Steeply discuss the
126 Entertainment, and possibility of an antidote
(the anti-Entertainment).
127 “Lyle”, the sweat-licking guru who lives in the
ETA weight room.
yrstruly, Poor Tony, and C go on a crime spree,
acquire heroin from Dr. Wo. The heroin is
 laced with Drano and C dies after shooting up.

Orin speaks to Hal by phone.

Background of the Ennet House Drug and

Alcohol Recovery House.

Bricklayer story.

Hal’s paper on active and passive heroes.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. 135
Steeply’s article about the woman who had an
artificial heart in her purse when it was
snatched.

List of Anti-O.N.A.N. groups.

Why videography never took off.

Characters:

Characters in bold appear to be major.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 85)

•Tiny Ewell: Diminutive recovering alcoholic, being driven to the Enfield Marine VA Hospital
Complex.

30 APRIL — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT (page 87)

•Remy Marathe: Member of the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents(AFR); is working as a

quadruple agent–that is, his superior, M. Fortier, thinks that Marthe is working as a triple agent
(pretending to work with the Office of Unspecified Services, while in reality reporting back to
AFR), but Marthe is actually collaborating with OUS to secure medical services for his wife.
•M. Hugh Steeply: Agent the Office of Unspecified Services. Current operating in disguise as a
large woman; Marathe’s contact.

MARIO INCANDENZA’S FIRST AND ONLY EVEN REMOTELY ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, THUS FAR
(page 121)

•U.S.S. Millicent Kent: Girls 16′s Singles player who attempts to seduce Mario Incandenza.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U

•“Lyle”: Guru who lives in ETA weight room and apparently subsists off other people’s sweat.
•yrstruly: Narrator of the “dopesick” chapter. Addict, criminal.
•C: yrstruly’s companion who dies after shooting up with heroin laced with Drano.
•Dr. Wo: Provide Poor Tony with the the heroin, laced with Drano to punish him (Tony) for past
grievance.
•Poor Tony: yrstruly’s companion, possibly suspected that heroin was laced but said nothing as
C. shot up.

3 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. (page 135)

Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name: So into the “anonymous” scene that he remained
completely so. Founded the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character
Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s
Guide, and Steve Russillo’sChapter Thumbnails.

ROUNDUP
Jacket Copy, the LA Times literary organ, interviewed Matthew Baldwin.The Story Behind Infinite
Summer. The Valve, meanwhile, finds the project “a little morbid“.
Unbeknownst to us, Infinite Summer was mentioned on television at some point.

Mark Flannigan, the Contemporary Literature Guide of About.com, is on-board.

Says Whitney of Feet on Polished Floor: “Reading David Foster Wallace is like punching yourself
repeatedly in the face. But in a good way.”

Danielle started late but is determined to finish by August 12th. Cynthia of Catching Days was also
tardy, but has already caught up.

Gerry Canavan, on the narrative shift that begins on page 140

The multiple perspectives characteristic of Infinite Jest have now, suddenly, infected the text itself; the
chapter headings that had previously presented themselves as objective and reliable third-person-
omniscient narration are now uncovered as subjective and perspectival, opinionated, excitable, and
frankly a little confused.

Michael posted an “Infinite Summer playlist” at Trials & Tribulations. He also pointed out another
playlist made by Señor Cisco.

Many bloggers are providing regular updates of their reading. Among them:

•Paul of I Just Read About That … , who provides character profiles, synopsies of plot
developments, and more.

•The Feminist Texan.

•Charles & Leah of Ashcan Rantings.
•Ward at Brain Health Hacks.
•Sarah of Sarah’s Books
•Chris of Pandemonium of the Sun.
•Jennifer of Piano & Scene.
•Erica is using her MySpace page to track her progress through the novel.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.
LETTERS OF ACCEPTANCE
Fifteen years ago I told an acquaintance of my aspiration to become a Peace Corps volunteer.
“Good luck,” was her reply. “Did you know that only one out of every nine people who apply gets in?”
As this was five years before the Internet-As-We-Know-It, and even more before the debut of Snopes,
there was no obvious way to confirm or falsify such a claim. 18 And so, as someone who has never been
a “Top 11 Percentile” kind of guy, I marched through the application process with a grim sense of
defeatism.

And then, of course, when I was accepted, my ego ballooned like a nervous Tetraodontidae, as my
status as one of the elite few who could weather the merciless vetting process was officially recognized.

Sadly for my overinflated self-regard, I mentioned the “one of nine that apply get in” figure to a member
of the Peace Corps staff while serving. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that too,” he said. “Except, I wouldn’t state
it like that. It’s more like: for every nine people that apply for the Peace Corps, only one winds up in-
country.”

“What’s the difference,” I asked.

“The difference is that of those nine people, five or six voluntarily withdraw after sending in their ap,
because they got a job or a house or girlfriend or whatever. And a couple more drop out after the
interviews or in the middle of training, for one reason or another. You guys are what’s left.”

Infinite Jest also has a “one in nine” reputation about it, a book that thwarts most attempts to conquer.
But as we stand on the summit of page 168 and look back on the pages before, we see now that
process by which the potential readership is whittled down is one of self-selection. It’s eminently
readable, if you’re resolved to read it.

Indeed, the first 150 pages are something an application process: will you apply yourself to this
Brobdingnagian novel, or will you drop out for reason or another? If you’ve made it this far:
congratulations. You’re what’s left.

And at this point in the novel, Wallace rewards us for our perseverance. It’s as if he’d been holding a
somewhat awkward get-together until the party-hoppers people left, then cranked the stereo and rolled
out the keg. Here’s what we’ve been treated to since page 144:

•The hilarious “Why Video-Phones Failed” essay, tangential to the plot but perfect encapsulating
many of the themes. As with “Erdedy waits for Pot”, I would have been perfectly happy reading
this as a self-contained short story.

•The “sterile urine” section which, in addition to being funny and interesting in its own right, also
provides us with some background information on Mario, the Incandenzas, and ETA in a
remarkably straightforward manner, unencrypted by acronyms or allusions or endnotes.

•A whole chapter set in the familiar B.S. era. This may not be one of the
promised Hamlet parallels, but this is surely one of the most amazing monologues in
literature.19 If I ever audition for a local production of Our Town, pages 157-169 are totally going
to be my reading.

It’s the literary equivalent of hearty pat on the back and “welcome to the club”. For good or ill, you’re in it
for the long-haul now.

Misc:

Controversy: Over on infsum Twitter channel, the debate continues to rage: is a “trial-size Dove bar”
ice cream or soap?

Vexation: Despite seeing the word “map” used at least a score of times, and in a variety of different
contexts, I still cannot figure out exactly what Wallace means by it. Head, face, brain, personality?

Paradox: I love that Wallace–a man who wrote the initial, 1,700 page draft of Infinite Jest by hand–
cannot be bothered to spell out words “with”, “without”, or “with respect to”.

THE TRICK IS KEEPING THE

TRUTH UP-FRONT
Thanks for all your comments last week — despite the fact that my question (“how the fuck are you
people finding time to read?”) was fundamentally rhetorical, your descriptions of how you’re
fitting Infinite Jest into your lives were fascinating. I am still behind, but thanks to a weekend spent back
and forth from LAX to DEN combined with a few late nights using IJ to stave off the dread before my
mother’s funeral, I got well past page 100, as well as my despair at ever catching up.
Funerals are funny things. I’ve found getting through them, or any difficult emotional event, without
losing your shit requires a shift in attention. If I stayed in my head and let memories of my mother and
all her kindnesses take over my thoughts, the result was miserable weeping. If instead I stayed in the
present — fussy baby being soothed by his grandmother, vaguely sexy tortured Christ over the altar,
my brother saying things about my mother that were absolutely untrue — I found that (a) I wasn’t
horrified to be in church, and (b) I could fully participate in the moment.

Here’s a small portion of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché
about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning
how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It
means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you
construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you
will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible
master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and
terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost
always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long
before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts
education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous,
respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of
being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

He goes on the describe a trip to the grocery store after a long day at work — the sort of adult
experience most college graduates don’t include in their glossy visions of the future — as an exercise in
choices. You can stand in line, tired, starving, and frustrated as shit, and wonder why all these
ridiculous, bovine jerks are standing between you and a hot meal at home, or you can remember that
everyone has their own heroic battles to fight, and cut them some slack.

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to
consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship . . .

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is
actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody
worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for
choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it
Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of
ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you
worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will
never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start
showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all
know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides,
epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front
in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need
ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as
smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
And so on.

The more I read of this guy, the more I like him, and the sorrier I am that he’s dead.

WE’RE TOGETHER EVERYBODY KNOWS AND

HERE’S HOW THE STORY GOES
So, the bricklayer story.
On page 139, Wallace gives us a very funny memo sent from one State Farm employee to another. The
memo quotes from an insurance claim. Because I know there are folks who aren’t quite caught up yet,
and because this discussion is specifically about Wallace’s choices in telling it, here is the passage as it
appears in the novel:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the

accident reporting form, I put “trying to do the job alone”, as the cause of my accident. You
said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following details will be
sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on
 the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had
about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by hand, I
decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the
side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the
roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and
untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will
note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind
and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of
the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the
fractured skull and the broken collar bone.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right
hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my
presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of considerable pain. At
approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom
fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground.

Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you
again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I
began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of
the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and
the laceration of my legs and lower body.

The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn
ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable
pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again
lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin
a… endtranslNTCOM626

Like a lot of folks I’m sure, I read that piece with an acute sense of deja vu. I not only knew the story, I
knew specific phrases were coming even before I read them.

My uncle was in the insurance business and he often sent me and my dad and my brothers funny
things he encountered (this was in the actual mail, before the days of the casual email forward). I not
only remembered getting this story, an alleged insurance claim from somewhere, but I remembered it
being identical to Wallace’s text, almost word-for-word.

My first inclination was that Wallace could not have possibly just cut-and-pasted this whole episode
from somewhere else. I considered that maybe my memory was faulty–that Wallace had rewritten an
old urban legend with such skill that his version had since become the definitive one. And that my Uncle
Tom had sent this to me, not in the late 80s when I was in college, but in the late 90s after Infinite
Jest had been released.

Except.
You can find this story in all corners of the Internet with just minor variations. The following appeared on
a University of Vermont ListServdated February of 1996, the same month Infinite Jest was published.
The words in bold also appear in the IJ version:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the

accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a
fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a
new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left
over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks
down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to
the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the
roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the
rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on
the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind
and forgot to let go of the rope.Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of
the building.

In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an
equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and the broken
collarbone, as listed in Section 3 of the accident reporting form.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right
hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in Paragraph 2 of this
correspondence.Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mind and was able
to hold tightly to the rope, in spite of the excruciatingpain I was now beginning to
experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground,
and the bottom fell out of the barrel.

Now devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel weighed approximately 50 lbs. I refer you
again to my weight. As you mightimagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the
building.In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the
two fractured ankles, broken tooth and severelacerations of my legs and lower body.

Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me
enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three
vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, as I lay there on the pile ofbricks, in
pain, unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost
 my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope.

This is a very old story, one apparently even better known in the British Isles, where it’s said that most
comedians of the mid-century had some version of it in their repertoire. 20 The insurance claim conceit
seems to be a more recent development. It appears in Mike Metcalfe’s 1996 textbook Reading
Critically in a form almost identical to the one inInfinite Jest. This version also appeared in a 1982
Louisville Courier-Journal column by Byron Crawford. It’s not available on the internet, but except for a
few minor details the text of that article is virtually identical to the text in Infinite Jest. 21

All of that was to confirm what many of you already know–David Foster Wallace lifted the text of the
entire episode from a pass-around joke. And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t sure how I felt about
it. It surprised me because if a writer had copied someone else’s words so blatantly and without
acknowledgment into any other novel I would have been indignant. I wouldn’t have seen any grey area
at all. I would have said it was wrong.

But in this particular context, Wallace’s use of this old story is awfully effective. It’s just one of a series of
references to urban legends throughout the book, including one to a famous story about toothbrush
mischief that Wallace appropriates with more originality. I suppose he’s trying to point out the unreliable
nature of any narrative, that our faith in them is something of an illusion. There is also a recurring theme
about control that is explicitly described in an earlier scene, 22 which takes place in the ETA weight
room. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book so far: “Everyone should get at least one good look at the
eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down.”

I dig all of that.

Still I’m not entirely convinced the ends justify the means. Borrowing and sampling might be done
casually by other artists, but words are still sacred to writers. There were a lot ways Wallace might have
rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s
words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it. 23

Of course Wallace knew all that, and so we have to conclude that he didn’t do it to deceive and had
some other purpose in mind. I suppose he was hoping that readers who knew the story would
recognize it, but readers who didn’t know it (which was probably most of them in the nascent days of
the Internet when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to
the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will
probably react to its appearance differently than one who thinks it’s the product of Wallace’s original wit.
I suspect Wallace would have anticipated that, too.

Arrgh.

So I’m curious what all y’all think. Those who are reading IJ for the third time and those who are reading
it for the first. Those who recognized the bricklayer story when they read it and those who didn’t. Where
do you come down on this? Is this appropriation of another (unknown) person’s material valid? Or not?
Is it okay because it’s a piece of narrative flotsam, the cultural equivalent of abandoned property? If we
could attribute authorship to someone, would claiming it be less acceptable? 24 Is it because Infinite
Jest seems to be so singular an accomplishment that it frustrates our desire to apply these kinds of
standards to it? 25

Maybe no one cares about this stuff except me, in which case you can just enjoy a recreation of the
accident on Mythbusters.
POST OF THE POP-TART BROWN SUGAR
CINNAMON TOASTER PASTRY
This post subsidized by Kellogg’s.26
Everyone knows that Sunday evening feeling.27 The pit in your stomach that grows and grows while
you watch crappy TV shows that you’re not really watching because school is tomorrow and you have.
Not. Done. Your. Homework.

Those who read my post last week (“Not the best student“) will not be shocked to learn that I suffered
heavily from the Sunday evening feeling. I do not believe that I ever, in my school career, did a single
piece of homework until the night before it was due.

How does this relate to Infinite Jest? Please. Like you even have to ask.

I’ve just finished some blast processing, reading all 75 of this week’s pages in one sitting, which MAN I
do not recommend. It’s certainly lucky that, as Matthew mentioned, these pages were a lot more easy
going than earlier fare. But still, that’s a lot of pages. I’m looking to Infinite Summer as an exercise in
reading and writing, sure, but more than anything I’m hoping to learn some time-management skills,
too.

I can’t help but be jealous of Hal’s routine at Enfield Tennis Academy – there’s very little space there to
mess up or miss a deadline. I suppose it could be that I’m just jealous of his life, of course — what I
wouldn’t give to be moneyed, super-intelligent and a tennis ace. Well, maybe scratch the tennis part,
I’m not really one for sports. And his smarts seem like a bit of a burden at times, actually.

Okay, so I just want the money. Big deal.

The more we delve into Hal’s (mis)adventures at ETA, the more anxious I grow about that first chapter.
I’m really liking this guy, guys. And I don’t want him to become that trapped soul, that shell of a person.

I really feel like this post is lacking a unifying theme, but I’m sure that’s to be expected after cramming
that much IJ into my head. And the whole Madame Psychosis section did some damage all by itself. I
can’t quite work out if I like it or not. Or even if I like the idea of her show or not.

I mean, it’s certainly a great concept — this mysterious figure, the only paid host of a college radio
station, sending out whatever she feels like to MIT students and anyone else who can pick it up. I’m just
not sure I’d be one of the students who tuned in with any kind of regularity.

The show we ‘overheard’ seemed deliberately opaque, and hard to parse — I’m presuming even more
so delivered to your ears. I’m wondering if the show is Foster Wallace’s way of commenting on the
difficulty of reading his own work. I’m wondering if that’s too shallow an interpretation on my part. I’m
wondering if my pop tarts are finished cooking yet.

Okay, that last one isn’t really relevant, I’ll grant you. Unless it’s somehow telling that I finished that
chunk of Infinite Jest and immediately craved cinnamon pop tarts?

(Note: I request silence from those of you who know that I always crave cinnamon pop tarts.)

So: is everyone doing better than me, or are you guys having to indulge in massive catch-up sessions,
too? Did you like the Madame Psychosis section, and if you did can you tell me why and what it’s about
so I can steal your words and use them at parties to sound clever? And are my pop tarts done? (Yes.)
NICK MANIATIS: THE HOWLING FANTODS
Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling
Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the
fourth time he stopped counting.
The Howling Fantods was inspired by Infinite Jest. I bought a discounted first edition of Infinite Jest in
response to a review I had read in what I think was the Melbourne Age. My first Wallace reading
experience was on public transport, on my way home one evening, in Canberra, Australia. The opening
pages of that novel changed me.

It was 1996 and I was in my third year of university. An icon for the program NCSA Mosaic had
appeared on the desktop of computers at the Australian National University and opened my eyes to the
world wide web. In late ’96 or early ’97 I made a free personal “me” page using the geocities (ugh)
hosting environment. I loved reading Wallace. I loved the idea of this web thing. I merged the two and
the SCREAMING FANTODS was born. (I was emailed a correction a few days later)

Around this time I discovered wallace-l the Wallace mailing list back then appeared to be mostly
academics and students. There were a number of amazing group reads of Infinite Jest co-ordinated
through wallace-l. Another just finished up prior to Infinite Summer (IJIM – Infinite Jest, In Memorial).
Right now the focus over at wallace-l is Oblivion.

I don’t think I’d ever been privy to such articulate, academic, and passionate discussion about a text.
Ever. There were people there who were just as internet aware as me, if not more so. They were also
much, much smarter. It was scary. It was fantastic. And all their discussions were searchable. They still
are.

Infinite Jest was, I think, published at just the right time. The blossoming world wide web brought
readers, academics and fans together using a common, digital, user-created medium that seemed
designed to discuss this book.

I feel terribly lucky to have been part of that early online community. I’m glad they were there for me in
September last year.

And now we have Infinite Summer. There’s not much more exciting than seeing your favourite author
mentioned all over the web. And not only that, the focus is on his writing, not what happened in his life.
There is no way I’d be ever able to find the time to organise something as mammoth as a large scale
Infinite Jest group read, so it is wonderful to see the dedicated team here managing spectacularly.

The best bit, readers, is that you’ve all made it this far. You’re almost over the hump. Once you get
through the first 250 or so pages the bigger payoffs start hitting in droves. I’m keeping an eye on the
forums and blogs and quite clearly many of you out there are finding this much easier and more
entertaining than you thought it would be. I’ll let you in on another secret:

It gets better.

I’ll be surprised if you can keep to as little as 75 pages a week after page 500. That will certainly be the
biggest challenge.
Bits that I think are worth mentioning / revisiting from the first 210 pages:

p37 Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: I’m sorry everyone, it’s the ice-cream. Confirmed by a trusted
Wallace-l member who asked David Foster Wallace personally. Sorry. It was even harder for me to
accept because when I was reading IJ on release I hadn’t ever seen Dove ice cream or chocolate in
Australia. I thought soap was the only option.

p37-38 Clenette and p128-135 Yrstruly: I know a number of you skipped these two sections. You’re
not the first. You won’t be the last. Honestly? I’d prefer you skip them if it means you don’t close the
book and never open it again. I found them hard the first time too. I also had an inner urge to find them
offensive. Was Wallace making fun of these people? How come the other sections don’t read like this?
What is he trying to accomplish? Who is narrating? Wait a minute, who was narrating before?

My advice? When you read IJ again (or if you flick back for a second attempt) just go with the Clenette
and Yrstruly sections. Don’t try to parse everything, they don’t work if you slow down and read carefully.
Both sections work more effectively when you are already vaguely familiar with their content because
then the voices and rhythms start to wash over you. When that happens so do the characters. And then
you’re inside their heads and THAT is not comfortable. In fact it is very, very uncomfortable. I’m not
going to try for a moment to argue that they are realistic voices or heads to be in. But these two
sections do their jobs very well if you just let go and trust Wallace. Does this sound familiar?

It wasn’t until a few years ago did I get a flicker of how spot-on Wallace is with these sections. Post
schoolyard fight, I had some students write reports of the incident they witnessed. In their rush to get
everything out of their heads and onto the page they seemed to forget about formal English grammar,
or formal anything, for that matter. It was stream of consciousness stuff. Emotion mixed with description
mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue mixed with unusual, but workable, phonetic
transpositions. These kids were not illiterate by any means. If anything the stress of the situation had
messed with their ability to express themselves using the English expected of them. The reports
reminded me instantly of Infinite Jest and made me appreciate it even more.

If you want to see if Wallace can make this work in greater length try ‘John Billy’ in Wallace’s short story
collection ‘Girl With Curious Hair’. There’s also another example of this voice in another of his stories.
But to tell you which one would actually mess with the impact of it. I know you’ll find it yourself.

p105-109 Marathe and Steeply on choice: Which character do you side with? Are you actively
choosing? Or just going with your gut reaction? Is it impossible to choose? Double-bind maybe? When I
first read IJ I didn’t find the Steeply and Marathe sections particularly compelling.

On the second read they were my focus. It is so easy to sweep the Steeply and Marathe conversations
to the side when you want to know more about the entertainment. I think they’re some of the most
underrated parts of the book. Read them.

p144-151 Videophony: I find it impossible to use Skype without thinking about this section. Particularly
when I want to check my email or surf the web at the same time as the current video chat and feel I
can’t without being rude. I’ve also become aware of how often I relax with my arms folded above my
head while sitting upright, how often I scratch my nose, and how often I pick at my right ear.

p157-169: Every single line of this section is pure gold and leads perfectly to page 169′s time slowed
down can’t look at the page (but can’t look away either) moment.
p196: HELP WANTED. I don’t think I need to explain this.

The very best thing about Infinite Summer so far, for someone who has read the book way more times
than is healthy, is re-living my first read via all of your comments and posts. The Infinite
Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog are doing a mighty fine job too.

Infinite Jest is my favourite book and I have not stopped reading it for any length of time since I opened
it to the first page all those years ago. Be careful, or else this Infinite Summer thing might live up to just
a little more than its name…

INFINITE SUMMERY – WEEK 3

Milestone Reached: Page 221 (22%)
Chapters Read:

Page 151: Drug tests at E.T.A; Mike Pemulis sells sterile urine.

Page 157 – WINTER B.S. 1960 — TUCSON AZ: Himself’s father (Hal’s grandfather) prepares to teach
Himself how to play tennis, tells of the incident that ended his own tennis career, and drinks heavily.

Page 169 – 4 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis
acquires some “incredibly potent” DMZ.

Page 172 – TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY, NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA (etc.): Hal
narrates a film made by Mario. The narration consists of a series of how-to instructions “Here is how to
do individual drills …”)

Page 176 – SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS … WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND

ADULT UNDERGARMENT: A series of statements made by recovering addicts at Ennet House.

Page 181 – LATE OCTOBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Madame
Psychosis begins her show at 109-WYYY FM; Hal and Mario listen at the Headmaster’s House.

Page 193: A description of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the other six
buildings on the Enfield Marine Public Heath Hospital complex (down the hill from ETA).

Page 198 – 6 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: ETA weight room;
introduction to Lyle, the sweat-licking guru.

Page 200: An overview of the residents of Ennet House, including a long discursion on Tiny Ewell and
his fascination with tattoos.
Page 211: Michael Pemulis hypes up the DMZ to the other members of ETA.

New Characters: Really just one: Madam Psychosis, the host of “Sixty Minutes More or Less with…”
on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station 109-WYYY FM, a program to which Mario listens religiously.

ROUNDUP
Infinite Summer was mentioned in Newsweek, both the online and print edition. Related: hello one
zillion new visitors. More info about the event can be found here, and the forums are over yonder. And
in case you are wondering: a dedicated reader could pick up Infinite Jest today and still finish by
September 21st if they chose to do so, no sweat. (Well, maybe a little sweat. But Lyle can take care of
that for you.)
Infinite Summer also graced the pages of The New York Times Book Blog, Phawker, and The
EphBlog.

Gayla of Beautiful Screaming Lady views the many exhortations on this site to “trust the author” with
skepticism:

I have to admit–and this makes me feel like Ebenezer Scrooge on a deadline at a Christmas parade–I
don’t find … these arguments particularly compelling. I agree that the first ten pages are great. There is
a lot of great writing in this book. The problem is that there’s also a lot of–not bad writing, but
problematic writing, and there are a lot of paragraphs where I feel that Wallace’s point is not so much to
communicate with me as to show me what a virtuoso he is…

And that’s why I don’t trust David Foster Wallace. I’m not going to stop reading the book,
because its truly fabulous moments are worth slogging through Wardine and yrstruly. But I
don’t believe he was in control of his talent.

In an interview with The Aspen Times, the Old 97′s frontman Rhett Miller says he’s about to jump in
the fray. At this point we’re only a drummer shy of a house band.

William.K.H and Jeffrey Paris argue that Infinite Jest is not “science-fiction”. Jim Brown and Robert
Sharp wonder if the novel qualifies as a “new media object”

On Infinite Detox, a blogger struggles to overcome a dependency on tramadol while reading Infinite
Jest. He writes: “Six or so months ago I found the book’s treatment of addiction and recovery
compelling enough to inspire me to quit cold turkey for several weeks over the Christmas holidays …
With Wallace’s book, again, acting as something of a guide and mentor, I hope also to give my drug
habit the boot.”

Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

•Laura of The Book Life.

•Patti of White Pebble.
 •Nicola of Nicola’s Blog.
•Mark of The Kaedrin Weblog.
•Geoffrey of Geoffrey Werner Challen.
•Gina of So Silky, So Round.
•Ex Kathedra of The Arbiters of Taste.
•Sarah and Joe of Drunken Bee.
•Ruby of WordWacky.
•Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness.
If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.

MISSED CONNECTIONS
Warning: This post does not contain spoilers in the traditional sense of the word (i.e., information to
which you have not yet been privy), but it does synthesize some data points to reveal a (IMO, non-
critical) fact to which you may not have tumbled yourself. There are likely many more in the comments.
If you prefer to make all the connections yourself, feel free to skip today’s entry.
Consider the following:

1.On page 64 it says “Professor James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s untimely suicide at fifty-four was
held a great loss in at least three worlds.”

2.On page 157 the header is “WINTER B.S. 1960“.

3.On page 159, James O. Incandenza, Jr.’s age is given as ten.
4.One page 172, the (abridged) header is “TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY … IN THE
YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-
MOTHERBOARD [etc.] … ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O.
INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE”.

5.On page 223 we learn that the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar fell three years before
YY2007MRCVMETIUFI/ITPSFH,O,OM(s).

So, let’s see. James was 10 in 1960, so he was born in 1950 (or possibly 1949, if the passage set in
1960 transpired before his birthdate). He died 54 years later, in the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar.
1950 + 54 = 2004. Therefore, the Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar is 2004, and The Year of the Depend
Adult Undergarment (which falls five years later) is 2004 + 5 = 2009. Plus or minus a year, depending
on the exact date of his birth.

I feel compelled to tout this particular instance of deductive excellence on my part because it is the only
one I have successfully completed.28

Meanwhile, in the forums, readers blithely mention connections that I totally, completely missed. “X
said Y and Z said Y, therefore X is Z.” That kind of stuff. It makes me want to turn back to page 3 and
just start over, and this time transcribe the novel into a notebook line-by-line, to ensure that I don’t miss
a thing.

It also makes me feel like George Michael. No, the other George Michael.

(Just mentally replace the phrase “math problem” with “contemporary post-modern masterpiece”.) 29

I love a good mystery as much as the next guy, but finding clues in Infinite Jest sometimes feels like
trying to find a pattern in the digits of pi, or solving various quests in an adventure video game (“You
seek the Crown of Midas? Alas, it was broken in seven pieces, each of which was placed in a different
world. Run around for the next 35 hours and collect them all, why don’t you?”). 30

How say you? Do you like the treasure hunt aspect of the novel, or do you occasionally find yourself
wishing Wallace would quit with the coy and give us the straight dope? What connections have you
unearthed thus far?

Misc:

Thunder Stolen: My original topic for today’s post was going to be the Wardine and yrstruly sections,
but on Friday that particular discussion broke out like a brawl in a soccer bar. It’s even spilled over to
yesterday’s Roundup thread and, frankly, I am now kind of relieved that I wasn’t the one to first throw a
folding chair.

Self-PUNK’D: I finished the 14-page endnote 110 (yeah, I’m a bit ahead of schedule–shhhh!). It’s so
long that I had to take a break in the middle of it. When I returned and saw my bookmark one
centimeter from the endof the novel rather than the beginning, I had a momentary, electric thrill. It was
like finding a $20 bill on the ground, and then remembering that you are in your own bedroom.

Art Imitates Life: My friend J. was going to participate in Infinite Summer, but then she decided that
she had too many other books that she wanted to read . “Funny thing, though,” she told me over the
weekend. “The first book I read was The Emperor’s Children, which had a character who was trying to
read Infinite Jest to impress people on the Internet.”

AND ZAC EPHRON AS MARIO

INCANDENZA
While browsing through the forums I was delighted to find the beginnings of a discussion about
something that had crossed my mind as I read: would it be possible to make a movie out of Infinite
Jest that wasn’t a tragic flop?
User “Good Old Neon” jumped right to the question of who would dare to direct such a thing, and his
suggestions tickled me pink: either Wes or Paul Thomas Anderson. I can hear laptops banging shut
from coast to coast at the mere suggestion that Wes Anderson be allowed within ten feet of the book,
but it’s not a bad idea. Who better to create a reality just a few degrees off from our own, as we see
in IJ? I have nothing but love for P.T. Anderson and I’d let him at the script in a heartbeat, but I’d also be
afraid that I’d die a lonely old woman before he finished it.

Before we starting casting the Incandenza brothers, 31 or discussing the very real film adaptation of
another DFW book that is scheduled to be released four days after we all finish reading this one, let’s
look at a few non-fatal attempts in the history of cinema to adapt a beloved and word-tastic classic
novel to a ruthlessly visual medium.

Ulysses (1967) starring Milo O’Shea; directed by Joseph Strick (who somewhat ironically was fresh
from being fired from the set of Justine, an adaptation of a Lawrence Durrell novel; Strick also produced
an adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer – the guy wouldn’t give up on literary sources, god
bless him); screenplay adapted by Fred Haines (who was also responsible for an adaptation of Herman
Hesse’sSteppenwolf). Critical concensus: The screenplay got nominated for an Oscar and the film was
nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which honors mean both something and nothing. Imdb users
seem to agree that what makes the film work is brilliant casting and use of location; it’s when whole
swaths of literature are forced out of actors’ mouths that you begin to remember, uncomfortably, that
you’re watching a book.

Catch-22 (1970) starring Alan Arkin, directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay adapted from the Joseph
Heller novel by Buck Henry. Critical concensus: Nichols et al. did a brilliant job of capturing the essence
of the book, and you’re a ninny if you expect a movie to be exactly like the book it’s based on.

Clockwork Orange (1971) starring Malcolm McDowell, directed and screenplay adapted by Stanley
Kubrick. That worked out pretty well, if memory serves, though to be fair this and Catch-22 are
somewhat thinner and plot-heavier than IJ.

Conclusion: Michael Cera and a locker room filled with gawky teen heartthrobs discussing their
exhaustion. Meryl Streep as Madame Psychosis. Soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright? Get Michel Gondry
on the phone, right now.

I PUSHED MY SOUL IN A DEEP

DARK HOLE AND I FOLLOWED
IT IN
1. On one of the early pages of Infinite Jest, Wallace uses the old-fashioned word “twitter”.32 This of
course triggered a number of jokes in the forums (and on Twitter, of course) that DFW had even
predicted social networking. Ha ha.
Except today I’m not so sure he didn’t.

2. There is an almost unbearable (for the author) amount of time between the day the manuscript is
“finished” and the day it is published. I’m not sure when Wallace handed in the complete manuscript to
Little Brown, but with a book as big as Infinite Jest–both in terms of heft and hype–you could easily
expect a couple of birthdays to pass through the edits and the copyedits and the sales efforts and the
marketing push. This period can be pretty anxious for writers, and one of the fears that can obsess a
novelist during this time is that some part of his book he thinks particularly clever or original is going to
be preempted by a similar plot or character or conceit in another book, film, or TV show. Or real life,
even. When you spend years working on the same project everything about it, no matter how
innovative, begins to feel obvious and banal to you. If you hear an author pull out that old cliché about
worrying he’ll be “exposed as a fraud” it’s a good bet somebody interviewed him after he could no
longer make changes to a manuscript but before his novel had actually been published.

3. I was reading the Madame Psychosis section and this bit caused me to stop for a sec:

There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s
maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist
celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and -down on
Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky.
Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre
Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the
subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-
garde digital cartridges, anti-confluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc.

I thought, rather casually, “How did Tarantino get in there?”

Not because he doesn’t belong. In 2009 (or in the Y.D.A.U.) you would nod at that reference without
giving it a thought. But when Pulp Fictioncame out in the fall of 1994, Infinite Jest was less than 18
months away from publication, and the manuscript had to have been more or less complete. Before the
sensation of that film, Tarantino was certainly on many lists of young directors to watch, but he wasn’t
on anybody’s auteur radar yet.

So I’m assuming Tarantino’s name was probably a late addition to the manuscript. Probably no more
meaningful than Wallace wanting his references to be as updated as possible. 33

4. I’m not exactly sure what Wallace thought of Tarantino, but shortly after the publication of Infinite
Jest, Wallace wrote a profile of film director David Lynch. 34 I remember reading it at the time (and
especially DFW’s hilarious rant about his personal dislike for the actor Balthazar Getty) because I’m a
big Lynch fan. In it Wallace talks about the unacknowledged debt Tarantino owes to Lynch.

Tarantino has made as much of a career out of ripping off Lynch as he has out of converting French
New Wave film into commercially palatable U.S. paste….In a way, what Tarantino has done with the
French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found
(ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and
homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption.Reservoir
Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive
soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and
with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., “hiply”) surreal….Or consider the
granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael
Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s Top 40 tune, cuts off a hostage’s ear-I mean, think about it.]

So maybe he didn’t like him much. Actually, beyond these comments I don’t know what DFW thought of
Tarantino, but the general critical rap against QT–that the excessive violence in his films celebrates
nihilism and that the infinitely reflexive references to other movies, while fun, tend to elevate the trivial–
would seem to be right in the crosshairs of Infinite Jest. The following is Wallace speaking about IJ in
an interview with Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt, also from 1996:

“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you
know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more
general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it
seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing
principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse,
which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a
kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger.
And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very
“become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the
academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is
saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And
part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it
seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re
really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating
principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going
to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing
about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”

I happen to love Tarantino, so I could be part of the problem. Which brings me to

5. The front page of this morning’s35 Chicago Trib business section isalmost entirely dedicated to the
story of Dave Carroll, who wrote a song about how a United Airlines baggage handler broke the neck
of his guitar. Carroll posted a video on YouTube and thanks to Twitter and Facebook almost 3 million
people have watched it in just a couple weeks and now United is donating a few grand in his name to
charity. Certainly I’m happy for the dude. The song is pretty catchy and yay for the little guy striking a
blow to humongous indifferent corporations. But airlines break shit all the time.36 One of them lost my
kid’s car seat over the Fourth. This can’t be the most important business story of the day. And it’s not
just this story because if I were writing this next Tuesday it would be some other online obsession of the
week sprawled all over Page One and I would have already forgotten about this guy’s guitar. More and
more news reporting seems to be increasingly Twitter- and Facebook-based. I’m not talking about
protesters Tweeting from Iran, which is actually newsworthy, but it’s Ashton vs. CNNBRK, and an
Australian TV network says Jeff Goldblum is dead because somebody tweeted it and oh my Demi got
fooled by that rumor too, and look this homely British person is a surprisingly good singer, and in yet
another section of today’s actual paper–the actual newsy news section even–there’s a story
aboutlifestreamers (or lifecasters) as well as a woman who spends seven hours a day on social
networking sites, a woman so addicted to social networking that she wants to Twitter as she walks
down the aisle at her wedding and the more we Twitter the more the actual news is about how much
we’re all Twittering, and when I think about how much time we (me too) spend on this stuff and how
much of the shared experience of our culture is just completely disposable and pointless it really does
make me sad and at just that moment I’m reading this book and I also come across that interview and
what he says strikes me as just so true it makes my stomach hurt.

6. I don’t mean this to be an anti social networking rant. It’s not these particular tools that are to blame.
If anything they are newfangled thermometers that are helping to measure our fever. I’m grateful that
Facebook allows me to stay in touch with people who were once very important in my life and who
would otherwise be completely absent. And I find Twitter to be incredibly useful. I was captivated with it
during the Iranian protests and had great fun a few months ago using Twitter to follow the Edgar
Awards37 in real time. Even this project would not be anything like what it is without Facebook and
Twitter especially, and if I understand the success of Infinite Summer correctly it is about the desire of a
group of people to have a shared, cultural experience that is actually kind of meaningful. There really is
a void there and because we fill it too often with shit that is just disposable and endlessly self-referential
and auto-deleting the maw constantly needs feeding.

The problem is not the seductive addiction of social networks or the laziness of the news media but the
deepening cultural void Wallace identified 13 years ago. And right now I’m grateful that this particular
book feels big enough to temporarily fill the hole.

At least until August 21 when Inglorious Basterds comes out.

AREN’T I MEANT TO BE THE

FUNNY ONE?
Before I dive into the main body of this post, there are a few notes I should get out of the way.
Firstly, I realize that the topic I’m to write about — suicide in IJ — is a little unseemly in light of David
Foster Wallace’s own departure from this plane of existence just last year. I apologize for that, but it
really can’t be helped.

Second, I will make — every now and then — statements about suicide that I will appear to present as
fact. I should clarify (without going into detail) that I have some experience with the whole horrible
concept, and am speaking with personal insight, albeit not professional.

Lastly, I totally spent like, ten minutes trying to make a pun out of a combination of the word “unseemly”
and the “seam” of a tennis ball, for the purposes of titling this post. This is similar to last week’s
endeavor, which saw me spend an equal — perhaps greater — amount of time ruminating on how I
could fit the phrase “I decided to call an audible and call Audible” into my post. 38

This week’s massive-chunk-of-IJ-that-I-had-to-read-all-at-once39 featured not one but two suicides: a

third person look at Madame Pychosis’ — possibly successful — purposeful overdose; and a discussion
between Hal and Orin on the cause of their late father’s… well, lateness.

I was struck that Wallace seemed to take great pains to make sure that we saw these two examples of
suicide as wildly different from the normal perception of the act. Madame P’s method of
choice might seem terribly familiar to anyone who knows much about drug addicts (or watches a whole
bunch of CSI), but Wallace — from the beginning of the section — assures you that you don’t know
jack:

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-
directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide
are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

James Incandenza’s own method of self-destruction is, of course, more obviously unique — a
perversion of the already perverse act of sticking one’s head in an oven. It is the last great technical
achievement of a lifelong genius. There is sometimes a desire accompanying suicide to do it as
efficiently as possible, which can be at odds with an occasional wish to inflict greater psychic damage
than normal on those who have ‘driven you to it’. Incandenza’s method meets both requirements.

These are probably just a couple of literary flourishes in a book already full of them — Infinite Jest is not
one for standard deaths of characters, as we learned when reading of Guillaume DuPlessis’ accidental
suffocation. But still, there is irony to be found in the fact that Wallace spends such time developing
these off-the-wall methods of suicide for his characters, and then ended his own life with a simple belt.

Hal and Orin’s discussion of Himself’s death strays into a discussion of grief itself, and how to handle it.
Hal, prodigy that he is, refuses to submit to the prescribed process of loss. He sees his grief counselor
as an enemy combatant, to be studied and conquered. This battle appears to be the very method with
which he chooses to deal with his grief — Hal cannot see things other than as academic or athletic
challenges to be overcome — and we are given no opinion from our narrator (whomever he or she is)
on whether or not this is healthy.

I didn’t know David Foster Wallace, and have only read 274 pages of his masterwork, but already I
grieve for him and for the books he will never write. I’m sure that part of the process of dealing with this
minute amount of grief is to look for clues or hints in the author’s work. Such a cliche way of dealing
with this loss would be frowned upon by Hal. But I think that’s okay, because maybe Hal is kind of a
jerk.

KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: ON
TEACHING INFINITE JEST
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College; she’s the
author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, and co-
coordinating editor of MediaCommons. She blogs there and at Planned Obsolescence.
As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-
author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we
read pretty much all of it–the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction–with the exception of a few
uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually
finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation
on it). It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply
enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience,
emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and
a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy
that Dave left us.

And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching
experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an
overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-
reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then
there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of
Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting
out–okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret–every reference to suicide or depression or more
generalized anomie.
My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the
semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on
Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we
had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and
more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text
and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class
was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class
strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving
from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text
and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that
because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his
biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather
than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them–or worse, to use the texts in an attempt
to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting
and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing–we needed to use the texts themselves, and the
references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s
what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that
reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to
come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of
imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and
that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we
read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the
impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have
to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was
both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right
now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t
watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the
context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular
forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur
throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by
language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you
mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological
sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind
out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the
culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally
settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological
sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week
on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it
worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest
part of that schedule–for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading–was trying to
figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing
attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much
about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots
they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering
questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I
hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so
surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I
was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the
very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest.
Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for
him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a
very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to
function. So no. No visits from Dave.

I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best
class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with
that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

INFINITE SUMMERY – WEEK 4

Milestone Reached: Page 295 (30%). A third of the way there, people.
Chapters Read:

Page 219: Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a, Madam Psychosis, who dated Orin and starred in many of James
Incandenza’s films (in addition to whatever other relationship they may have had), attends a party and
attempts suicide by overdose in the bathroom.

Page 223: The chronology (cue voices from on high):

Year of the Whopper

Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade
For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
Year of Glad

Page 227: Helen P. Steeply’s (Putative) Curriculum Vitae.

Page 240: A description of Enfield.

Page 242: Hal and Orin speak on the phone. Hal describes the bizarre mechanics by which their father
committed suicide, and his horror upon discovering the body.

Page 256: ETA plays Port Washington in a tennis match.

Page 270: Don Gately, now on staff at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, councils
the newest resident Geoffrey Day.

Page 281: Having defeated Port Washington, the ETA gang returns home on a bus.

Page 283: All about Orin: how he made the transition from tennis to football, and his relationship with
the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne.

Page 299: Poor Tony undergoes a week of withdraw (most of which is spent in a library restroom),
culminating in a seizure while riding the train.

Characters: We get the sense that almost all of the major characters have been introduced by this
point (fingers crossed!). We’ll do a complete rundown next week.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character
Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s
Guide, and Steve Russillo’sChapter Thumbnails.

ODDS AND ENDS

Media: There was a piece about Infinite Summer in Salon last week. Other mentions in the media: a
lengthy article in the Globe and Mail, and mention in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Blog (our new motto is
“Infinite Summer: Spanning the Globes”), and a feature in the Kentucky Courier-Journal.
Spoilers: We hates them, we hates them forever! That’s why we have implemented spoiler tags, both
here and in the forums. Ideally you’ll never have occasion to use them, because you’ll be scrupulously
adhering to the Spoiler Line. But if you ever find yourself wondering if something constitutes a spoiler
(hint: if you feel the impulse to preface a statement with “I swear this is not a spoiler, but …”, it almost
certainly is), please enclose it in <spoiler> tags, like so:

Show Spoiler▼

For the lowdown on the forum spoiler tags and restrictions, please seethis topic.

Summer Vacation: Matthew, Eden, Kevin, and Avery are taking the week off, but we have four Guest
Guides to pick up the slack. We’ll see you all in a week.
BRITTNEY GILBERT: YOU HAVE
CHOSEN TO BE IN HERE
Brittney Gilbert is the blogger for San Francisco’s CBS 5; she also mouths off at her long running
personal blog, Sparkwood & 21. This is her first time reading a David Foster Wallace novel.
Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time did it to me. It made me fall in love with fiction. I’d been an early
reader, and a frequent reader, but when I discovered L’Engle’s Wrinkle in 5th grade there were sparks,
complete with a speeding heart, sweaty palms and butterflies knocking around in my stomach until I get
back to that engrossing book.

That long torrid affair with fiction came to a horrible halt when I started reading material online all day
long for pay.

I am a blogger by trade. I’m a blogger who blogs about blogs for a living for a local television news
station. Part of that job entails monitoring 300, 400, 500 blogs every day (I lost count.), so that I may
recommend content written by locals to locals. I’m a human aggregator. I scan and skim and skip big
chunks of text so that I can crank out 10, 20, sometimes 25 posts in a single day. I cannot read all the
posts made by local bloggers in a single day. It would be impossible. That means I never get to the end
of what Google Reader pipes in to me, and I start it all over again the following morning with more
scanning, skipping, skimming until some post pegged with bullet points or strategically placed bolded
text catches my attention enough to single it out for suggestion. Large, long, thoughtful posts don’t get
read in full, so much as passed on to others to read simply due to the length.

I likely skim over a good 20,000 words a day. Lots of them register, but many do not. I’ve had to
become a masterful scanner of reading material, a skill that is essential when monitoring a huge
amount of content every day, but one that will utterly annihilate your ability to sit down and read an
actual book. Infinite Jest is the first book I’ve taken on to read in a long, long time. Because my job
requires a good eight hours a day of reading (scanning, whatever), I just don’t have the drive or stamina
to come home and read some more. It’s usually “The Bachelor” or “Real Housewives” or “People Who
Think They Can Dance” running around in my brain once I’ve clocked out for the day. But the reading I
do for my work isn’t reading at all, not really, and so by diving into Infinite Jest after having avoided
novels for so long I have slowly, and almost by accident, gotten my attention span back.

For someone who hasn’t read anything longer than a New Yorker article in a solid six months, IJ is an
unmerciful beast to bring me back into the fiction fold. I began my Infinite Summer journey like an
excited elementary student on her first day back to school in fall. I packed my enormous book in my
backpack, along with a fresh steno notepad and capped pen, so that I could read on the bus or on the
train or on my break at work. I was going to win at Infinite Summer! I was pumped! I was going to do
this! But I learned very soon a few things: 1) You carry that book around on your back every day and
you will need a spinal alignment. 2) People look at you funny when you read that tome in public. 3)
Infinite Jest cannot be read in ten minute spurts on the back of a bumpy, crowded bus barreling down
Mission Street. I was going to have to really commit to this book the way one commits to a college
course or a part-time job or a new lover.

That’s when the magic happened. When I took the book to my room and closed the door and even lit
some candles, because, dammit this was a date, part of me that was lost to internet reading peaked its
head up. I was spending serious one-on-one time with a big, beautiful book, and when I really gave
myself over to it, and fought the urge to skim and won, I knew IJ had become more than my latest
reading project, it had became the rebirth of my much-missed attention span.

Infinite Jest takes focus. I cannot listen to music while reading this novel, nor can I take it in with
television on in the background. I can’t skim parts and still get the gist. The text requires 100%
participation on my part. It has become a meditation. I have to be present and mindful in order to fully
ingest the words before me. I cannot click to open a new tab, to check to Twitter to see if anyone
famous has died, or refresh D-Listed.40It’s just me and the lavish landscape Wallace created.

“I am in here.”
I have chosen to care about this book, to give it a place in my life. In doing so I am rewarded with
messages in IJ about the importance of being present. Of just breathing. Themes abound in IJ about
focus, about choosing what it is that you pay attention to, and how crucial it is to do that with the utmost
care. If only because our whole lives depend on it.

By virtue of being what it is, a dense, complicated, scattered work of immense volume, Infinite
Jest enforces its own themes. Focus, presence of mind and conscious choice are all things thrust upon
the reader when they enter into a contract to finish DFW’s IJ. Having wine before reading makes the
trek a little too muddy. Reading with a clear mind, free of adulterants, will allow the book to bring you its
own incredible high. There is keen insight embedded in nearly every page, but you have to be fully
present to see them.

“Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of
fanaticsm with great care.”

The non-linear (to say the least) structure, the constant change in voice, forced flipping, always flipping,
to the back of the book for endnotes are elements that don’t allow you to get lost in a story. “You are
reading a book,” you are often reminded. You are in here. You are not Cinderella at the ball or Hermione
at Hogwarts, you are reading Infinite Jest. You may get caught up in the frenzy of Erdedy’s panicked
wait for pot, but not for long. Soon you are reading Infinite Jest again.

It’s easy to see that Wallace had a difficult time with focus, what with the sprawling nature of his most
famous novel. It’s almost as easy to see that he knew the vast importance of mental discipline and
presence of mind, if you can manage to have some of that yourself. With Infinite Jest Wallace was able
to let his mind roam in fantastic, spooling, brilliant ways, yet did so within the confines of a single book.
Sure, it’s a really long book, but he was able to box his thoughts. And by offering that book to you he is
giving you the same opportunity, the chance to see just how difficult but but ultimately freeing that can
be.

NICK DOUGLAS: SKIM IS FOR

WIMPS
Nick Douglas is the editor of “Twitter Wit,” a collection of witty tweets coming out on August 25. In 2006,
he was the founding editor ofValleywag.com. He’s probably writing a screenplay.
I finished about two-thirds of the books assigned me in my three years as an English major. The
department head was right to ask me, when I first switched from political science, “Do you read
quickly?” I don’t, and I’d like to blame that on my inability to skim. The less I like a passage, the more I
claw at it, wasting my time, because I can’t understand that a published work of prose may still contain
unnecessary digressions. And so I’ll often grind to a halt. I’m glad for this flaw in my reading habits,
because skimming Infinite Jest is stupid.

Someone saw me struggling over one dull page of IJ this week, the description of Enfield MA and its
institutions (tax-paying and -exempt), and recommended I skim it. She hasn’t, of course, read her copy
of the book.

Because if she had, she’d know that skimmers miss out. Had I skimmed the Wardine and yrstruly
sections, would I still have understood that Poor Tony stole the artificial heart that Steeply-as-Helen
wrote about? Had I skimmed endnote 24 — well, I’m sure I’m not alone in reading 24 with alacrity, then
re-reading each synopsis as I caught references, and soon probably going back to read the whole list in
case I’ve missed something.

Because like Eggers said in his foreword, this book is an exercise for the mind, and Wallace gives us
the chance to piece things together before he explicitly synthesizes. He leaves some aspects of the
world of O.N.A.N. foggy, so that we must pull a Supreme-Court-Justice-building-the-right-to-privacy-
piecemeal-from-the-Bill-of-Rights maneuver to understand that our nation has dug a giant pit in the
Northeast and flings its garbage there through the upper atmosphere, and maybe later we’ll be sure
whether these catapulted garbage vessels are, once launched, self-propelling, or whether they’re shot
out with sufficient force to arc across the continent into Hamster Country.

Why anyone would want to read this book without the satisfying click (not steady, but in waves, like the
click-clack-click of Joelle’s internal monologue, the disappointment at page 223 quickly counteracted by
the deductive satisfaction of the next sixteen pages) is beyond me.

Those digressions that don’t serve the plot (or at least provide a satisfying coincidence that may or may
not serve the plot, such as Gately’s role in a separatist’s death or Steeply’s putative puff piece on Poor
Tony’s heart-snatchery) serve the theme. Since most of these thematic moments are so subtle, I’m sure
we’re particularly required to remember the ones Wallace mentions twice, just as the Biblical God
repeats his most important commands three times. So we should definitely remember Hal’s rhetorical
flourish at the end of his comparison of Chief Steve McGarrett of “Hawaii Five-0″ and Captain Frank
Furillo of “Hill Street Blues.” I’m not sure if we’re meant to agree with the teacher who downgraded the
paper to a B/B+, or if the only point of that part of the chapter heading is to tell the reader, “Hey moron,
pay attention to this part, okay?”

Which he says so lovingly (and it’s been almost a quarter of the book since he said it last), while
warming us up for the meet against Port Washington: “It all tends to get complicated, and probably not
all that interesting – unless you play.”

Which he hits us with again at the end of that section, sneering at the Port Washington parents who
wear “the high white socks and tucked-in shirts of people who do not really play.” Almost makes me
regret not marking up my book with a pen, lest I embarrass myself with a copy of Infinite Jestsitting on
the shelf in good condition like a backslider’s Bible.

The ill-earned ending to Hal’s essay, the part to which we morons must pay attention, posits that the
culture’s next great hero will be passive. And how chilling is that? We’ve now spent three hundred
pages biting our lips over the impending death of Hal’s communicative abilities, and our curiosity over
the titular Infinite Jest has for the last few dozen of those pages only been answered with clues about
its origin and content, but clearly we’re waiting to see how many people Wallace is going to mow down
with Chekhov’s gun.

Hal, don’t tell us we need a passive hero, don’t jinx yourself in a grade school essay, don’t go catatonic
on us! Don’t end up like the frozen attentive faces in videophone dioramas or Kate Gompert in the
doctor’s office or the zombie that John Wayne resembles to Schacht or the Basilisked statues of your
father’s victims-by-film! Keep your face moving, and I’ll keep reading every single page, like Bastian
keeping Atreyu alive and saving Fantasia from the Nothing.

Except, like, smarter.

INFINITEDETOX: WAVING THE

WHITE FLAG: READING AS
REHABILITATION
infinitedetox is blogging about addiction and Infinite Jest atinfinitedetox.wordpress.com.
My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.

Some time around May, 2004, I willfully entered into a relationship with pharmaceutical opiates. It
began as a sort of experiment, quickly escalated into a recreation, and from there vectored toward
present-day dependency on a straight line whose slope was gradual, but unwavering.

In December of last year it became apparent that this line would never flatten out or stabilize on its own,
that it would just keep trundling on upwards, tending toward infinity given infinite time. This is when I
started to get scared.

David Foster Wallace had just passed away and I decided to re-read 41Infinite Jest over the holidays,
and something difficult to explain happened to me when I began digging into the book again. Somehow
the book–and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ–
made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the
Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating. But let me give it a stab anyway.

You’ve probably noticed that the idea of self-surrender is treated as a sort of grand, motivating force
throughout Infinite Jest – cf. “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited
in their need to give themselves away” (p. 53); cf. the Ennet House’s unnamed founder’s “sudden
experience of total self-surrender”; and especially cf. every addicted character’s surrender to their
enslaving Substance, every recovering character’s surrender to a Higher Power, and can it be just a
coincidence that Don Gately’s very own AA group goes by the name White Flag?

Now let’s take a book. Any book will do, but I think Big Books like Infinite Jest or Gravity’s
Rainbow or Ulysses work particularly well.42 The thing with books – the more you put into them, the
more you get out of them (“Give It Away To Keep It”). You may not care about junior tennis or
Quebecois separatism or avant-garde film or AA cliché-mongering, but if you’re going to make any
sense of Infinite Jest you’re probably going to have to start caring, a lot. You’re going to have to accept
that proto-fascist tennis instructors and disabled pistol-toting terrorists are capable of
delivering frighteningly insightful critiques of U.S. culture. You’re going to have to lay aside your
Irony Shields and believe, with all your heart, that clichés can be just as potent as Don Gately says they
are. In other words, you’re going to have to surrender to the book.

Be careful not to confuse surrender with passivity. I’m talking about an active surrender here. The
actively-surrendered reader will sift through reams of mathematical arcana in order to tease out the
implications of an oblique reference, or follow an obscure narrative thread deep into the bowels of
Greek mythology to flesh out the author’s hinted-at ideas. Surrendered readers develop an eye for the
author’s shortcomings. They share in the author’s failings. They are engaged, but not encaged. 43 It may
be instructive to compare active surrender with the drooling, pants-soiling passivity of Substance abuse
and Entertainment addiction as portrayed in IJ.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. What happened to me, on December 26, 2008, is that I
surrendered myself completely to Infinite Jest. I signed some sort of metaphorical blood-oath
committing myself to looking at the world through David Foster Wallace’s eyes. And what happened
then was that I saw myself as DFW would have seen me, refracted through the wobbly nystagmic lens
of Infinite Jest. Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and
something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness
toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit
Together.

Of course, the book ended, and vacation along with it. The circumstances of life returned to normal, and
life’s normal stresses and anxieties returned along with them. I stayed clean for exactly two weeks, after
which the addiction vector resumed its patient acclivation at precisely the same point it left off. My Shit
went back into diaspora.

Fast-forward six months or so and here we are: another reading of Infinite Jest, another Total
Surrender, another attempt to Starve the Beast. I don’t know, though – I’ve got a good feeling about this
one. The circumstances, before which I admit complete powerlessness, are different, perhaps
permanently so. As of this writing I am 10 days, 4 hours and 22 minutes sober, with some 758 pages
of Infinite Jest left to go. But as they say — one day at a time.

ANDREW WOMACK: LOVE

Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.
I grew up in a tennis household, amidst gleaming trophies of miniature champions immortalized in mid-
serve. In my house, tennis dominated our television viewing, closets were stuffed with retired racquets,
and the hampers always reeked.

To this day, my father is a tremendous player, with a game so solid you can’t pick it apart. Return his
serve (good luck), and he’ll reply with dizzying spin. He complains about arthritis in his rotator cuff, then
sends a lob to wherever you aren’t.

To be fair, his ability is hardly innate. Long before I was born, he began practicing at least every other
night. (Playing actual matches was reserved for the weekends.) He would hone his serve by setting up
empty tennis-ball cans in the service courts, knocking them down until he could place the ball with the
kind of precision that squeezes a laugh out of a nervous opponent. At 76 years of age, his game is still
tight (even if his speed on the court is reduced—osteopath’s orders); though when talking about diehard
players, assessing whether 76 is young or old is missing the point: The important fact is he’s now been
playing for 57 years. That’s a level of experience few amateur players will ever have time to catch up to.

It’s true that I have not and never will beat my father at tennis. I am probably more OK with this than he
is; his coaching over the years has been a constant source of positive reinforcement, but despite his
best efforts it has only gone far enough to turn me from a bad sport (it was years before he’d let me
swing one of his new racquets again) into a serious appreciator, if not a player, of the game. I’ll give
credit to my forehand as pretty devastating, but everything else is succotash.

I first came to Wallace through his David Lynch piece—which hooked me with its descriptions of the
director’s constant coffee drinking and resultant urinating behind nearby trees during the filming of Lost
Highway—which I read in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. But it was the
adjacent story in the book, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of
Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness”
(published as “The String Theory” in Esquire in 1996), that sealed Wallace’s place in my mind.
Because finally, here was someone who could write, really write, about tennis. Someone who finds the
joy in the game’s enduring physical and mental struggle, and the humor in realizing there are only a few
people in the world who possess the dedication it takes to truly excel at the sport—and that you will
never be one of those people. Because it is very funny to come face to face with your limitations. It’s the
same kind of funny as when your father, 40 years your senior, places a serve to your backhand and all
you can do is laugh it off.

I was taken so much with the article that I Xeroxed and mailed it to my father, who I knew would enjoy it
as much as I did, and for much the same reasons. It’s widely lamented that there are no decent tennis
movies,44 though there aren’t as many complaints about tennis books—this is both to do with the fact
that tennis books center on the psychology of the game (as in, how to freak out other players and how
to keep yourself from getting freaked out by other players) and because articles and excerpts fit more
neatly into the rare holes that open in a player’s practice schedule.

I phoned a couple of weeks later, and asked how he’d liked it, and he said the footnotes threw him, and
that he couldn’t finish it.45

Throughout the piece and in Infinite Jest, Wallace—who, as is widely noted, was a ranked junior player
—distinguishes between “serious players” and the rest of us. (I weigh in more at the seriously unserious
end of this scale.) In both works, he needs to draw this distinction because, of course, we can all guess
that most readers are not tennis appreciators, much less tennis players, much less amateur players,
much less professional players, much less the very best of the best, the Top 10, the Grand Slam
winners. And while it’s partly out of reverence for the serious players’ ability, it’s also because,
concentrically speaking, the vast majority of his audience will not fully get that reverence unless he
spells it out. Certainly, Wallace’s style is powerful, muscular—he’s unafraid to force a point home. 46

Which is why Wallace’s tennis writing is so dead-on, why it has always struck me so specially. Because
I too love the game, and love knowing I will never be much of a tennis player (much less a serious
player)—because I would rather watch and marvel at the ability of others. That is what I love. And I
suppose Wallace has a character in Infinite Jest who does just that, too.
MICHAEL WENDLING: GOOD OLD
WIRELESS
Michael Wendling is a writer and producer. He is currently producingFrom Our Own
Correspondent for the BBC World Service, and is working on a novel.
Pretty much every form of media gets slammed in IJ, even the forms that don’t actually exist. The
students at Enfield T.A. and the addicts at Ennet House mong out in front of mind-numbing cartridge-
eating TPs. Video telephones are on the shelves for five sales quarters before, in one of the funniest
riffs in the book, human paranoia and insecurity crush the whole industry. Movies – well, one in
particular – kill. And yet radio, that good old wireless, is somehow still around, unchanged, strangely
and hopefully connective.

I’m talking mostly here about the scene which begins on page 181. Joelle/Madame Psychosis is
hosting Sixty Minutes More or Less on WYYY. There’s fresh air in the studio and Madame Psychosis
gets paid for doing a midnight slot with ‘solid’ ratings on a student run station, cushiness which
stretches things a bit even by IJ standards.

Anyway, the point is that Sixty Minutes +/- is soothing, comforting, familiar to anyone who’s ever
listened to the radio late at night pretty much anywhere in the world. MP shouts out to tortured M.I.T.
geeks and U.H.I.D. freaks. Up the hill Mario is listening “the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono
and sitting right up close to tone of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like” while the rest of the
family gathers for dinner. Leaving aside the weird UV plant lights and the connections between the
radio host and the people around the table, it could be a scene from decades ago – or “three
generations past”, to be specific. The frantic pace of the novel slows for a while as MP rattles off
deformities in a grotesque, hypnotic intermission.

Radio’s not really a main theme in IJ, but it does tie a few plot strands together (if you’re reading for the
first time you haven’t got to that bit yet so I won’t give it away). It’s also a subject Wallace returned to
later, most notably in his Atlantic profile of right-wing jock John Ziegler.

But here’s the interesting thing. These days, radio in general is on a bit of a winning streak. It’s not
dying like newspapers, or inane and shouty like television. Corporate stations are dull as ever, but now
we can listen to underground podcasts, news from foreign countries, hipsters telling stories, community
broadcasting. And that wasn’t really the case when Wallace was writing the book. In the mid-90s, US
radio was in a perilous state. Anodyne, heavily formatted music stations were, in Thom Yorke’s phrase,
“buzzing like a fridge.” Clear Channel had started gobbling up stations and installing geography-less
robo-DJs. Cash-strapped NPR was constantly under threat of becoming even more cash-strapped by a
hostile Republican Congress. There were few breaks in the clouds and only a very small inkling of how
technology would soon transform not only the way we access auditory information but indeed the whole
idea of what we think of as radio.

I think it’s reaching to credit Wallace with any sort of prescience in this area – after all, WYYY is old-
school, the ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band’. And when Madame Psychosis is gone from the
airways, Mario and the rest of her audience is bereft: “The disappearance of someone who’s been only
a voice is somehow worse instead of better.”

Still, at least for a few pages, Wallace taps into a pretty fundamental idea: radio is the only medium that
can be as simple as one human being speaking to another. And sometimes, that’s just enough.
INFINITE SUMMERY – WEEK 5
Milestone Reached: 369 (37%)
Chapters Read:

Page 306: An overview of the prorectors’ weekend courses (including “The Toothless Predator: Breast-
Feeding as Sexual Assault”!), plus a description of some anti-O.N.A.N. activity by the separatists
(mirrors across the road). This section includes the 14 112 17-page “endnote 110″, a conversation
between Hal and Orin regarding the true motives of the separatists.

Page 312: The birth and life of Mario Incandenza.

page 317 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marathe and
Steeply discuss the American concept of freedom (e.g., freedom from, not freedom to).

Page 321 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: The E.T.A. students play Eschaton, The Atavistic
Global-Nuclear-Conflict Game™.

Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: An exhaustive description of the Boston AA
chapter and a meeting in which several speakers relate unthinkable horrors.

Characters The below is an abridgment of the Wikipedia Infinite Jest“Characters” section (with all
spoilers stripped out):

The Incandenzas

•James Orin Incandenza: Filmmaker, founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, committed
suicide by putting his head in a microwave over. Nicknames include Himself, The Mad Stork,
and The Sad Stork.
•Avril Incandenza (née Mondragon): Jame’s Widow, heavily involved in the running of E.T.A.,
affiliated with the Militant Grammarians. Nickname: The Moms.

•Hal Incandenza: The youngest of the three Incandenza children. One of the novel’s
protagonists.

•Mario Incandenza: The middle child. Born with deformities; also a filmmaker (like his father).

•Orin Incandenza: The elder Incandenza. A punter for the Arizona Cardinals, serial womanizer,
and cockroach killer.

•Charles Tavis: The head of E.T.A. since James Incandenza’s death. Avril’s half- or adoptive
brother.
The Enfield Tennis Academy

•Michael Pemulis: Hal’s best friend; prankster, drug dealer, undisputed Eschaton champion,
and not destine for The Show.

•John “No Relation” Wayne: The top-ranked player at ETA. John Wayne was discovered by
James Incandenza during interviews of men named John Wayne for a film.

•Other Prominent E.T.A. Students: Ortho “The Darkness” Stice, Jim Troelsch, Trevor (“The
Axhandle”) Axford, Ann Kittenplan, Ted Schacht, LaMont Chu, U.S.S. Millicent Kent (tried to
seduce Mario!).

•Lyle: Sweat-licking guru who lives in the E.T.A. weight room and dispenses advice.

The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House

•Don Gately: Former thief and Demerol addict, now counselor in residence at the Ennet House.

•Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a “Madame Psychosis and P.G.O.A.T, The Prettiest Girl of All
Time”): Radio talkshow host; former lover to Orin, starred in many of James Incandenza films;
wears a veil.

•Kate Gompert: A cannabinoid addict who suffers from extreme unipolar depression.

•Pat Montesian: The Ennet House manager.

•Ken Erdedy: A cannabinoid addict.

•Bruce Green: Ex-husband of Mildred Bonk-Green.

•Tiny Ewell A lawyer with dwarfism who is obsessed with tattoos.

•Other Prominent Ennet House residents: Randy Lenz, Geoffrey Day, Emil Minty.

Others

•Hugh Steeply (a.k.a. Helen Steeply): Agent for the Office of Unspecified Services; currently in
disguise as a female reporter profiling Orin.

•Remy Marathe: Member of the Wheelchair Assassins (separatists) and quadruple-agent who
secretly talks to Hugh Steeply.

•Poor Tony Krause (P.T. Krause): Almost killed by Drano-spiked heroin, accidentally steals a
woman’s artificial heart, has a seizure while in withdrawal.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Wikipedia page,
the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

ROUNDUP
Gerry Canavan continues to crank out stellar essays on the novel. Ditto for Paul Debraski, The
Feminist Texican, and Aaron Riccio.
In the Crossover Event of 2009, Andrew of Blographia Literaria posts on Scott’s Conversational
Reading, about DFW’s habitual use of parenthetical names in many of his (Wallace’s) more convoluted
sentences. Ray of “Love, Your Copyeditor”, meanwhile, demands to know “who signed off on all the
hyphens“. And Mo Pie need someone toexplain the likes.

Ellen of “Wormbook” provides a two part progress report on her reading thus far: How, Why.

The Infinite Summer Flickr pool now has over 70 photos and 100 members.

Chris of “UInterview” wonders if all the attention Infinite Summer has been receiving lately is just a fad–
and if that is necessarily a bad thing. R.J. of “A Litany of Nonsense” isn’t giving up on the novel, but
has just about had it with Infinite Summer. And now, in week five, we are seeing our first concession
speeches, such as this one from “Literata”.

Jim Donaldson sent us email:

Here is something you may wish to post in the weekly round up. Or maybe not.

Neighborhoodies, of Brooklyn NY, makes an Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirt and sweatshirt.
The t shirts are all custom made so you can get any combination of colors you want,
though it seems to me purists would want it in regulation red and gray.

They can be found here and here.

When I asked them to make a couple of proofreading corrections in their copy and
mentioned Infinite Summer, they responded by saying that we can get $5 off any purchase
if we put the code considerthemobster (yes, “mobster”) in the coupon field.

I have no connection with the company at all, other than being a prior satisfied customer–
and sufficiently SNOOTY to copy edit their web page and tell them about it.

Jim sent a similar message to the wallace-l listserv, which spawned a thread on Infinite Jest related
merchandise. Some other items that were mentioned:

•“I am in here” bumperstickers.

•Assorted Infinite Jest paraphernalia, including some pretty sweet “I am in here” t-shirts.
•wallace-l “Bottle Jerseys”
Like Jim, we have no connection to the folks selling this stuff. But, in the bottom of this topic the the
forums, someone proposes Infinite Summer t-shirts. If you have an idea for a design, or the graphical
chops to create a print-ready image, let us know in this topic devoted to the subject.

You can also use the forums to let us know if you have recently written about Infinite Jest, or mention it
in the the comments of this post.
THE BULLY PULPIT
A few weeks ago I was speaking to a journalist and struggling to explain how a novel so revered by
people who have read it could also be so off-putting for those wading through it for the first time. I
mentioned the length of course, and the endnotes, and the 84¢-words, and the sentences that go on for
so long that they begin make you feel anxious, as if you are watching someone who has been
underwater for longer than you reckon they can hold their breath. I mentioned all that, and then there
was some dead air on the line (this was a phone interview), and I just blurted out something to fill the
silence. “The thing is,” I said, “Wallace doesn’t teach you a little bit about tennis and then start talking
about tennis. He just sort of starts talking about tennis.”
Not my most articulate moment, I’ll be the first to admit. But thinking back on this statement later, it
struck me as perhaps the most insightful thing I said during the interview (a low bar, to be sure). Most
authors will ease you into a subject, provide some background and context before going in-depth.
Television serials preface episodes with a “Previously on” primers. Hell, even videos games begin with
a tutorial these days. But when Wallace “introduces” a topic, it’s like you’ve walked into a lecture having
missed the first hour.

He is, to be honest, something of a bully. Not in a beat-you-up-take-your-lunch-money kind of way, but

in the same sense that the President of the United States is said to occupy the “bully pulpit”. The term,
coined by Theodore Roosevelt, refers to the fact that the President can talk about the issues he cares
about, and the rest of the country has no choice but to listen. If a President wants to start a national
conversation on health care (say), we converse about health care.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace wants to talk about tennis and football and addiction and depression and
mathematics and the many ways in which one may murder a cockroach, and your options, as a reader,
are (a) like it or (b) lump it. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone droning on and on about his
hobbies, someone who follows you around and thwarts you evasive maneuvers, until you only options
are to give up and listen or leave the party altogether.

Any many people do. Leave the party, that is. By which I mean they close the book on page 77 and go
back to being interested in the things they are interested in. That’s what did a decade or so ago.

But here’s the amazing thing, at least in my experience of the last month. If you let Wallace bully you for
a few hundred pages, if you let him just ramble on amicably about the things he’s passionate about, you
finally know so much about the subject matter that you start to care about it, even if against your will.
Last week, realizing that I had never in my entire life seen an entire tennis match, I actually watched a
torrent of the Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick Wimbledon 2009 Mens Final. Last night when an
alcoholic character in a TV show said she wouldn’t attend AA because “it ain’t nothing but a cult,” I felt
personally offended. Wallace is like the Lloyd Dobler of authors: he doesn’t woo you with flowers and
chocolates, he stands outside your window with a boombox over his head until you relent.

Except the boombox is so 20th century; it’s really more like an preloaded iPod. Which may be why, on
the #infsum Twitter channel, catchingdays called Infinite Jest “the first shuffle novel“. That’s a great
analogy. The book as like a compilation of Wallace’s favorites, semi-randomized to keep you on your
toes.

And do you know why shuffle mode is so popular? Because every once in a while, wholly by chance
and when you least expect it, you hear something that you’ve loved all your life. For me it was
Eschaton, falling, as it does, squarely on the intersection of two lifelong interests: Cold War
politics47 and games48. As the addiction material did for infinitedetox, and the tennis did for Andrew,
and the radio did for Michael, this was a portion of the novel that truly resonated with me.

And now, of course, I’ve become so versed in the author’s various obsessions that all the themes in the
novel resonate–and will continue to do so in future novels I read. Thanks a lot David Foster Wallace, ya
big ol’ bully you.

P.S. ALLSTON RULES

I have to admit, I had doubts that I would reach the point where I’d have the privilege of telling you that I
have finally, really started loving this book.
Speaking as a somewhat emotionally stunted adult, a lot of the ETA scenes are my favorites, how the
gravely serious roots of an Eschaton scenario go ass over teacup when Air Marshal Kittenplan
(Kittenplan!) takes a nuclear warhead tennis ball in the neck and the whole event devolves chaotically,
balletically, and in super slo-mo, into rubble. That scene is a golden piece of deadly serious yet juvenile
tit-for-tat the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last time I watched The Bad News Bears. And how
Pemulis may be some sort of elegant, raw math genius but he also gives in to the happy impulse to
label his Eschaton diagram of available combatant megatonnage HALSADICK. My inner thirteen-year-
old boy is delighted and relieved when this kind of stuff goes down. I’d make a terrible politician.

Gately helped my romance with IJ to blossom, as well as Hal and Pemulis,49 and I want to think about
the AA stuff some more, and the theme of repetition and recovery that winds such a heartfelt 50 thread
through Infinite Jest.

I was really affected by infinitedetox’s post about his own dependencies and how he was viewing his
recovery through the lens of IJ. The section where Gately is lying on the couch at Ennet House listening
to a newly admitted addict argue against the daily drill of meetings required by AA struck a chord with
me. (I’m not an addict, though I’ve lived with addicts — they tended to disappear my books, and I
wonder if they might have rationalized the thefts by arguing that since at the time I worked in a
bookstore, I could therefore more readily steal51 replacement copies of whatever had gone
missing52 So I’m not an addict, no, but I do understand the need to come to terms with small losses,
and to try to learn not to be so defensive in the face of the world’s most ordinary demands.)

I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but reading this book has been like a yoga for me, in the sense
that it’s become an almost-daily practice for which it’s necessary to find a quiet space to focus my mind
on an object outside itself. I’ve been practicing ashtanga yoga for more than ten years and I’ve found
that over time there’s a cumulative and deeply grounding effect gained after regularly, dutifully, and
unquestioningly attempting those weirdly liberating knots yoga ask you to tie yourself into. Much like
this book.

So when a newly sober fellow demands that an old timer explain to him why AA wants him to keep
going to these goddamn MEETINGS all the time, why can’t they just tell you the answer right from the
get-go? my first non-AA-going thought was that maybe the point of AA meetings is just to keep going to
the meetings. It’s a practice like any other, like going to yoga and listening and stretching until hey, you
can touch your toes, or create more space around your heart just by using your breath; or if you don’t
like that analogy, like slowly working a piece of wood until over time it becomes shapely and smooth.
There are things that are only revealed over time, after doing the work, and those things are sort of the
point, yes, but the process of showing up every day is also the point, showing up to your life, to your
work, to your family, to your meetings, to the book you’re reading — just doing the work is also sort of
the point.

Ninety per cent of life is just showing up, I’ve heard it said, and I’ve always kind of hated that saying
because it implies that you can just shamble into class in your sweats without having done the reading.
But I also love that saying because if you show up you’re allowing for one of at least two possibilities:
that you may be called on and exposed as unprepared, or that you may go uncalled-on and retain your
facade of preparedness, but either way you’re still in the position to learn something new about the
subject at hand that you wouldn’t have, had you stayed in bed. This weekend my friend Danielle told
me that she once had a frustrated professor who stood up in front of her half-empty Friday morning
lecture and rewarded everyone who’d come instead of sleeping in or skipping off to Stowe for another
in a series of three-day weekends.53 The professor rewarded the students in attendance by saying,
“Everyone who showed up today gets an A in this class.”

So I’m glad I keep showing up for Infinite Jest, ready or not. Hey, you showed up, too! So what if you’re
behind, or lost, or didn’t look up the word “eschatology” until ten minutes ago. Keep going. We get an A
just for being here today.

CAUSE I GOT THE REAL LOVE,

THE KIND THAT YOU NEED
When I started writing my second novel,54 I imagined it would be structured like a teraktys, an ancient
Pythagorean symbol that plays a role in the story. Specifically, the second section would be twice as
long as the first, the third three times as long as the first, and the final section four times as long as the
first. Fiction has a way of defying mathematical precepts, however, and the final version doesn’t really
resemble a tetraktys at all, except that the fourth part is still at least somewhat longer than the first one.
I think most writers start out with a Platonic ideal in their head of what their novel might look like when
it’s done. For some it might be a mathematical model. For others it might be a quote from some future,
hypothetical critic, wrapping the relevant themes in praise. For others it might be the physical thing
itself. I think writers do a lot of visualizing in general. 55 The craft of writing is forming and massaging
words into a whole that hopefully approaches, but never actually becomes, something like the thing you
had imagined.

Anyway, I was struck by this Bookworm discussion with Wallace(different, BTW, from the last
Bookworm interview I quoted). Michael Silverblatt started the interview by saying that reading Infinite
Jest he was reminded of fractals. Wallace responded by saying:

I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually
structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal,
although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to
Michael in ’94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided
Sierpinski Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to kind of
come together.

It’s illustrative of the gap between our intellects that my ideal novel looked like this and Wallace’s
looked like this. Still I understood what he meant. The concept of the Sierpinski Gasket was this
organizing metaphor, the avatar of the novel in his head he was trying to make real. And despite DFW’s
suggestion that he never expected any reader to notice this, or that the final version of the book doesn’t
much resemble a Sierpinski Gasket, there are plenty of surface similarities (and this is what Silverblatt
was referring to) in that the main themes and storylines reoccur and replicate in non-linear ways large
and small throughout the novel.

Novelists often talk about seducing the reader into following the story all the way to the end. Structure is
one of the tools of that seduction. At its most basic level, structure is the way the author reveals and
withholds information–much like the way you reveal and withhold information about yourself on a date
in order to create some level of personal intrigue.

One of the things that makes other writers go nuts up with envy when they read Infinite Jest is that the
structure of it is aggressively anti-seductive. I know there are people who are going to say that Wallace
had them at I am in here but obviously this novel is very intriguing at the outset and then kind of veers
off into insanity for awhile, with constant interruptions and tangents. For a good portion of the first 200
pages,you’re really not sure what the hell he’s talking about, and frankly you’re getting kind of
exhausted and frustrated, maybe even offended. Certainly there are many many sections in that period
that are brilliant and funny and sexy, but if you think of Infinite Jest as a first date, there are ample
opportunities during the appetizers for the reader to excuse herself, head for the Ladies but then veer
toward the exit, never to return.

And certainly a lot of readers over the years have done just that.

Wallace uses the structure of this novel to a very different purpose. It isn’t designed to lead you, with
one hand in your ass pocket, from the beginning to the end. He structured the novel specifically to
control the experience of reading it. To disrupt you. To disorient you. To rudely interrupt you. Wallace
didn’t want this book to just be about these themes of miscommunication and the impermanence of
pleasure, he wanted the book itself to a simulacrum of the characters’ experience. Read this section
from the most recent week’s pages and think of it simultaneously as a description of AA speakers and
their audience, as a metaphor for writers and readers, and also a humble apologia for the kind of hoops
Wallace has so far put the reader through:

Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then supplying it find
out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it
wants….Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing
him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when
this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so
sincere it’s almost painful.

But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics speaker–
this tall baggy sack of a man, also painfully new, but this poor bastard here completely and
openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face shiny with sweat and his
talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps….(and) the White Flaggers all fell
about, they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and
 roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone
roaring with Identification and pleasure.56

Most people come to this novel sincerely wanting to have read it. And the journey itself is extremely
rewarding. But Wallace makes it very easy to quit this book. In fact, by abdicating the traditional
authorial role as seducer, he allows the idea of quitting to become seductive instead.

Wallace clearly wanted the reader not just to understand, but to feel some simulacrum of the emotions
felt by the characters sitting in those AA meetings.57 In just the first half of the novel, the characters
enjoin each other (and the reader) to “Keep Coming,” or to “Keep Coming Back” 17 times.

I am truly enjoying this novel. I am finding it completely immersive, entertaining, and eye-opening. It’s a
marvel to read. But if it weren’t for this project, I’m not sure I would have gotten this far. The stack of
other, unread books in my pile is so high and appealing that I might have just decided, Murtaugh-style,
that I’m too old for this shit. And I was thinking this morning how grateful I am that this is happening
because I want to read this book, and I want to have read it but I don’t think I would have finished it on
my own.

Obviously Matthew wasn’t thinking about any of this when he organized Infinite Summer. How could he
when he didn’t know much what the book was about? And no author could imagine that his book would
be read exactly this way58 Strictly by accident Matthew kind of stumbled on a method of approaching
this novel–a structure for reading it–that actually magnifies and complements the very experience
Wallace tried to manipulate within his structure for the novel. For me at least, as it does for Gately, the
pressure of the group on the individual (not to mention thatone-day-at-a-time schedule of
responsibilities) serves as a counter to the seductiveness of Out There, where all those shorter
unread books are waiting for me.

Keep Coming Back because It Works.

Crazy.

I AM NOT ENJOYING THIS

BOOK
(Note: This post was not a reaction to Kevin’s post from yesterday, but works in tandem with it, I think.
Although it’s safe to say that we each draw very different conclusions.)
I am not enjoying Infinite Jest.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not going to quit. I’m going to read the whole thing and talk about it over the
summer because I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I have to lie and pretend I’m having a super-fun
experience, right? So here it is. Confession time.

I resent that I’m having to work this hard, that I feel like I’m indulging the author. I resent having to read
enormous blocks of text, with no paragraph breaks, for pages and pages at a time. I resent the
endnotes that (more often than not) only serve to either waste my time or confuse me even further. I
resent that I’m continually reaching supposed milestones (“just make it to page 100!” “get to 200!” “300
is where you get rewarded for all your effort!”) that don’t actually represent any appreciable change in
tone, style or plot.

I feel like my time is being wasted with an overabundance of technical explanations of subjects —
tennis, drugs — that are largely irrelevant. DFW is explaining the wrong stuff. I’m at page 310 (behind, I
know) and by now I’d have absolutely loved to see some explanation of the world these characters live
in. Instead, we’re only being given vague allusions to “the great concavity” that leave me itching to
check the wallacewiki just so I know what’s bloody going on.

Because that’s the thing — I don’t feel like anything actually is going on. I’ve gotten three hundred
pages into this book, and nothing at all has happened. I feel like I have read three hundred pages of
introductions to characters. Some of those characters (Hal, the folks at Ennet House) have been
introduced multiple times, to no further elucidation. Some of them (James Orin Incandenza Sr., Himself,
Guillaume DuPlessis) are freaking dead.

Instead of action, I’m getting portraits. Highly detailed — to a fault — portraits. And that would be
fantastic if I were in an art gallery, or reading a collection of biographies. But I’m not — this is supposed
to be a story, a series of interesting events told in a compelling manner. Not a bunch of descriptions of
people and locales presented in an outright hostile manner to weed out the ‘unworthy’.

This post sounds a lot more hate-fuelled than I intended it to, I’m sure. I don’t hate this book, otherwise I
would be quitting.59 But I am frustrated by it, and it is becoming more and more important that a payoff
arrive, and soon.

I’m sure it will. Many people I respect are having a great time readingInfinite Jest. I hope I can join
them.

MATT EARP: STANDING

WITNESS
Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.

THE BASICS
’97: I’m 18, a freshman at Wesleyan in Connecticut. My best friend gets me to read A Supposedly Fun
Thing. I go to see DFW speak at the Harvard Film Archive. I fall in love.

’99: Coming back from Australia, I’ve finished Infinite Jest on a six week road trip, and landing in San
Francisco, a friend, the same friend in fact, and I go see DFW again at A Clean Well Lighted Place for
Books (now sadly gone). I tell DFW I want to make a play out of IJ, and he laughs and says “Let me
know how it turns out.”

’00 (summer) – I do it. I sit in 100 degree heat sweating to death in an apartment on 11th and C in New
York, and trim, coax, and cajole the script from it’s 900 or 1000 pages down to 70, focusing entirely on
Enfield and Hal, because to take on any more would have been ludicrous.

Sept ’00 – March 6th of ’01: I turn 21 and we produce Infinite Jest, now called Standing Witness.
Bonnie Nadell, DFW literary agent, grants me permission to do it as long as it’s a one time event and
we don’t charge for it. My advisor cajoles me into making the script more coherent and understandable.
I cast my best friend and closest acting associate as Hal. My genius props designer not only makes
tennis balls drop from the ceiling during Eschaton, but makes it snow in the theater later in the play, and
a lot of other magic.

Eschaton

More photos from “Standing Witness” here.

Another friend turns Mario into a Bunraku puppet. Two further actresses and friends meld Madam
Pyschosis into a character that’s part radio host, part DFW’s narration, part Mario’s voice, and part an
excuse for me to try some of the Supercollider patches I was working on at the time to mess with her
vocal cadences. The whole cast shows up at 6AM to liberate the bleachers from a block of snow,
bleachers that eventually become the audience seats. We crank the sound system in the theater up at
2AM and play jungle into the wee hours when we can’t concentrate on building the set any more. The
staff hated us. The audience loved us, both those who’ve read the book and those that haven’t. We
finish the play. We have a ridiculous cast party, one of the stage runners singes her eyebrows off on a
flaming 151 shot, and we burn the set plans outside in the snow.

I never direct another piece of straight theater again.

ESCHATON
Eschaton was the crown jewel of the show – I mean, it’s probably the crown jewel of the book anyway,
but as a scene it’s got everything a director could want in it. It’s funny, it’s got drama, it’s got the dual
attention between the big kids and little kids, it’s got a huge build up, it turns into a fight … and it ends
with one of the most dramatic moments in literature, the infinitely long frozen arc of the computer as it
flies out of Lord’s hands through the air and onto the court.

Because it was a black box configuration, we had the opportunity to use one of the balconies as a
space for the big kids to sit and watch, and to me that way it was like Pemulis was conducting the
madness from on high. Not only was he above the kids but above the audience as well. He could
manically shout down at the little kids during the action from above while Hal fretted, Axford (who in my
version was sort of Peemster’s sidekick) smoked and Troeltsch narrated. Meanwhile the little kids
started pleasantly enough but slowly devolve into this elegant match that turns into a fight, then into a
wrestling match, then a melee, then a disaster. It all happened over the course of about 12 minutes.

So many details about it were just amazingly fun to engineer. Dressing everyone up in as much winter
gear as we could find, and making sure all the clothes were a little too short (to give the illusion that the
actors, all 18-21, were actually 12-14). The actor who played Otis P. Lord gave an awesome
performance in the perfect beanie, playing the most gigantic nerd on earth and carting around an old
monitor which we destroyed every night (no easy thing to engineer, throwing a heavy monitor about 20
feet over the heads of a bunch of fighting actors…). The impending sense of disaster as tennis balls
started to fly off in all directions, and the double horror and glee that all the designers and I felt as we
both watched the audience get (sort of intentionally) pelted with balls and held our breath hoping
nothing would knock a light or a piece of sound equipment out of alignment.

Not only did I direct the whole thing, I sound designed it as well (theater was always kind of just an
excuse for me to have access to loud toys and a place to use them in), and my favorite moment of the
whole play was the sonically enhanced crash of the monitor onto the floor that coincided with the
blackout at the end of the 1st act and the loudest noise I could make (I ripped it from the explosion at
the beginning of 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare). We spit it out through two giant subwoofers under the
audience. Literally earthshaking. It was magnificent. Every night we got some of the loudest and most
raucous applause I’ve ever heard at a theater.

CODA
I haven’t actually read the book since then … it was so very much of a particular time and place for me.
Since my life has taken me away from theater, I didn’t think about it much again till Infinite Summer
asked me for the use of the picture of the Eschaton game and Matthew offered me a chance to reflect
(by the way, the balls falling from the ceiling were more for visual effect than because the book calls for
them … dramatic liberties I suppose). In doing so, I found an old review of the play on Wallace-L…
read it if you care too, although definitely be warned of spoiler alerts about a few details:

Happy reading, I hope IJ gives you as much joy, wonder, happiness and sadness as it did for me all the
times I’ve read it.

INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 6

Milestone Reached: 443 (45%)
Chapters Read:

Page 343 – 8 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY / GAUDEAMUS IGTUR: Mario’s semi-fictional film “The ONANTiad”, which
documents (a) the rise of Johnny Gentle from Famous Crooner to head of the Clean U.S. Party and
then President of the (then) United States; (b) the establishment of the Organization of North American
Nations; (c) the creation and subsequent expatriation of the Great Con(cav|vex)ity; and (d) the origins
of subsidized time.

Page 394: Lyle dispenses advice to students down in the weight room, including “don’t underestimate
objects”.

Page 395: Descriptions of the James Incandeza films The Medusa vs. the Odalisque and THE JOKE.

Page 407: The story of E.T.A. Eric Clipperton, who won tennis matches by threatening to kill himself if
he loses. (And then does so anyway when he wins.)

Page 410: The origin of InterLace Entertainment.

Page 418 – 30 APRIL / 1 MAY YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Marthe and
Steeply have the “single-serving sized cup of soup” discussion (how do people weigh deriving their own
pleasure against inflicting pain on others).
Page 434: Gatley and Stavros Lobokulas clean the Shattuck Shelter.

Characters The characters have been given their own page, which will be updated weekly.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

AMANDA FRENCH: ∞/2

The midpoint of Infinite Jest is rapidly approaching (next Thursday, according to the schedule). What
better time to organize meet-ups, so that readers in various cities can discuss their progress through
the novel?
Militant Grammarians in the audience will notice a conspicuous lack of actor in the preceding sentence.
Specifically, we did not say that we would be organizing said meet-ups. Instead, we’re going to do what
we do best: come up with a snappy title (“∞/2″) and crowdsource the actual work.

So, if you’d like to organize a meet-up in Your Fair City, head on over to the forums and start
coordinating, champ. And here’s Amanda French–who has been hosting get-togethers from the get-
go, with some tips on ensuring that your meet-up doesn’t wind up as an Eschaton-scale debacle.

Putting together an Infinite Jest meetup just can’t be the same as putting together another kind of
reading group, can it? My mother used to belong to a book club that met monthly in one or another of
the members’ comfortable houses, with plenty of food and wine and good fellowship. They’d read books
such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Jane Austen Book Club and The Guernsey Literary and
Potato Peel Pie Society, which are all very good books, books that fit well into pleasant surroundings.
Reading Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is and should be a little uncomfortable sometimes. After
deciding to do Infinite Summer, I put together a weekly meetup in Greenwich Village in New York City,
and I’ve done my best to keep it just uncomfortable enough to be interesting. Here are my thoughts on
how to do something similar.

•Hold it in a bar. This a good place in which to discuss addiction to pleasure.

•Do not hold it in a sports bar, not even if they’re showing tennis on the TVs. Sports bars are too
loud for conversation.

•Name a place and time that seems reasonable and stick to that, even if some people find it
inconvenient. You’ll be arranging this with and for strangers via technologies that mediate
communication, and so it’s not the best time for group decision-making. Announce it on
the Infinite Summer forum for meetups, and if you use other means of publicity, include the
link to that announcement.

•Make up for this Schtittian intransigence by adopting the same policy as AA: No one can be
kicked out. Don’t try to get people to show up every time, or a certain number of times, or on
time, or having read as far as the Spoiler Line on the schedule, or not having read any farther
than the Spoiler Line on the schedule. Let people come when, if, and however they will.

•Promise to be there at the same time every time for the duration of Infinite Summer, even if no
 one shows up. If you wind up alone, you can always use the time to read. Veiled, if you prefer.

•At the first meeting, now that you’re all relatively unmediated, you can and should make a
group decision: how to run the discussions. Do they want you, as the organizer, to come up with
a central question or topic every week? Should a different person lead the discussion every
week? Are certain topics (such as David Foster Wallace’s life) off limits? Should it be entirely
free-form and unstructured?

•Also decide, at the first meeting, on the chief method of group communication. Twitter,
Facebook, e-mail, phone, Infinite Summer forums–or fora? Should it be fora?

•Ask every newcomer to say why they’re reading the book, whether they’ve read it before,
whether they’ve read any Wallace before, stuff like that. Just because all that turns out to be
very interesting.

•Send reminders a day or two before every meeting, with the time, place, and the proper page
number from the Infinite Summer schedule.

Here are some of the ways our discussions stay uncomfortable: we never know exactly what we’re
going to discuss, people have read to different places in the book, people talk at length about Wallace
books and short stories that others haven’t read, people talk at length about works that others haven’t
read like Ulysses and The Corrections, people talk at length about Infinite Summer blog posts and
forum threads that others haven’t read, people bring up the suicide, people recount tales of how they
once met David Foster Wallace, people talk about their own drug use, people show off how smart they
are, people admit that they don’t understand, people ask what the hell is up with Orin that he and all the
other football players are attracted to Steeply, people get completely grossed out by the formless blob
with the Raquel Welch mask and the hooker with the dead baby, people get completely annoyed by the
footnotes, people go off on boring technology tangents about how wrong Wallace was to think that we’d
still have viewing cartridges and floppy disks and telephones attached to walls, people start talking
about the movie The Ring, people feel that they’re on the verge of realizing something important about
the book but can’t put it into words, people stop all rational discussion and just sit around saying how
fucking great the book is and how about that Eschaton scene, man, my god, so funny.

Hope your discussions go half as well.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
At some point in Infinite Jest, around page 73, I abandoned my highlighter. There was simply too much
to absorb on the first read, I decided, and I would save the markup for the second pass.
But last week, on page 389, Old Yeller rode again:

‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their
photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense
meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning
they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that,
do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that
their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to
escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has
been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they
fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines.They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this
supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about
what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’

The conversation between LaMont Chu and Lyle–and the highlighted passage, specifically–was eerily
familiar. About a month ago I read an article entitled Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment, in
which a video game developer pointed out how easy it is to design titles that are addictive without being
especially fun. “There’s a vital question that is rarely asked,” he said. “Does our game make players
happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant
to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep
better at night selling one than the other.”

It’s more than just the similar choice of words that caused my spider-sense to tingle, of course. At the
heart of Infinite Jest is an entertainment so alluring that people are literally unable to pull themselves
away. In the novel it is (presumably) a film, which would have been a natural choice at the time the
book was written. After all, the most compelling video game in 1994 60 was Donkey Kong
County which, while fun, is not strap-on-a-dinner-tray-and-crap-your-pants addictive by any stretch.

But by the time Infinite Jest was released, 1996, the video game landscape was already changing. A
little company called Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo, a near-perfect distillation of addictive
video game elements. Eight years later Blizzard combined Diablo with another hit series and gave us
the closest real-life analog to The Entertainment: World of Warcraft.

I am not making the comparison in (um) jest. Tales of people neglecting themselves and their
dependence while playing World of Warcraft (WoW) are only a Google search away. And the game is
notorious for wreaking havoc on marriages, friendships, employment, bank accounts, and hygiene. 61

How did video games come to usurp television as entertainment’s most irresistible siren? Marathe
could tell you the answer to that one: choice, or the illusion thereof. Television ladles out its rewards for
free: excitement, romance, shock, horror. But you have to work to reap the same benefits from a video
game, and that investment of effort (no matter how minor) amplifies the pleasure, because you feel like
you’ve “earned it”. It’s a principle harnessed by everything from roulette tables to Choose-Your-Own-
Adventure books, but video game designers in particular have figured out how to hijack our innate risk-
reward mechanism for their own enrichment. Or as David puts it in the Creating the Illusion of
Accomplishment article cited above, “Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that
they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task.”

And this is one of the central themes of the Marathe / Steeply chapters. Steeply insists that choice is
what makes a people free; Marathe counters that choice can be used as a tool to enslave.

There is, of course, an even quicker way of stimulating our pleasure centers: rather than simulate an
experience that causes the production of mood-elevating substances, you injest chemical compounds
that will stimulate the production directly. But as the members of Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink
learned at cost, and LeMont Chu learned for free, what at first makes you happy when you have it may
eventually just make you sad when you don’t. In fact, to hear Infinite Jest tell it, Lyle’s warning applies to
nearly everything: drug use, success, entertainment, videophones. Even a family and the company of
the Pretty Girl of All Time isn’t enough to prevent a head / microwave rendezvous.
I am no scholar of Eastern religions (or Western, for that matter), but I get a distinctively Buddhist vibe
from Infinite Jest. That “attachment to a permanent self in this world of change is the cause of suffering
and the main obstacle to liberation” (Thanks Wikipedia!).That the body and it’s cravings are just the
map, and should not be confused with the territory. How else to interpret that only truly happy character
in the novel is the one at E.T.A. who will never be in The Show, who doesn’t use drugs (as far as we
know), and can’t even be said to at least have his health?

As for the rest, it seems that for every character that is grappling with their desire–be in Chu for success
or Erededy for pot–there is another feverishly working to undermine the efforts.

Charles Tavis knows what James Incandenza could not have cared about less: the key to the
successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-
Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

The truth will set our heroes free. But not until C.T., and NoCoat (purveyors of fine LinguaScraper
applications), and the Spider are finished with them.

SOMETHING SMELLS
DELICIOUS
I went out to our community swimming pool the other day festooned in sunscreen, reading glasses, and
a hat with a large brim, lugging my Giant Book. I put out my towel on a chair near one of my neighbors.
Neighbor: “Gosh, that’s a big book. What is it?”

Me: (Assembling a winch to hoist it high enough for her to see the cover) “Infinite Jest ? I’m reading it
for an online book . . . club, sort of thing.

Neighbor: “Wow, and I’m having trouble finishing my thin little book!” (She holds up Paulo Coehlo’s The
Alchemist.)

Me: “Want to trade?”

Neighbor: “Ha, ha. So, have you met any of the people who are reading along with you?”

Me: “No, actually. I’m not even sure they really exist.”

Neighbor: (Polite confusion)

Me: “I’ve actually been Internet-friends with the guy who organized the group for a long time.”

Neighbor: (Clearly she now suspects I troll “Married But Looking” AOL chat rooms after my family goes
to sleep at night)

SOME FAVORITE LINES SO FAR

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like,hurt. That you will become way
less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is
such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety
attack.

Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I
know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.

Here’s how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read
scholars’ reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the
rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and
forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the
pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for
spirited inquiry.

Or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned
garage of your familyless home.

The host White flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment:
they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without
effort. There’s no judgment. It’s clear she’s been punished enough. And it was basically the same all
over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and
Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just
at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure
this is, that none of them signed up for.

There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of
claret-colored silk.

I LOVE YOU THOUGH YOU

HURT ME SO
Years ago when I was a creative director at an ad agency/design firm, I wrote a campaign for a wood-
fire Chicago steakhouse that included print ads and billboards featuring an illustration of Mrs. O’Leary’s
cow and the headline: “IT’S PAYBACK TIME.” Based on assorted letters to the editor there was virtually
no one who liked the ad itself. Vegans were outraged. Local historians raced to the defense of
the unfairly maligned cow. Even committed carnivores didn’t particularly like the idea of eating an
animal in an act of revenge, joke or no.
None of that hostility transferred to the restaurant, however. The campaign worked. Diner traffic to the
restaurant increased.62

In Infinite Jest, Wallace describes a series of television commercials so appalling they virtually destroy
broadcast television, even as sales of the products advertised in the spots soar.

(E)ven though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were denouncing the
LipoVac spots’ shots of rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures that resembled crosses
between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed autopsies and cholesterol conscious
cooking shows that involved a great deal of chicken-fat drainage, and even though audiences’ flights
from the LipoVac spots themselves were absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows
around them…the LipoVac string’s revenues were so obscenely enhanced by the ads that LipoVac
Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene, sums the
besieged Four now needed in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran and ran, and much
currency changed hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump as if punctured with something
blunt.

It’s a very funny and smart observation, and there are plenty of examples of this phenomenon
throughout advertising history. Currently there’s a series of spots for the Palm Pre that is pretty much
reviled by everybody, even as the early returns show a spike in the product’s profile. And I probably
don’t have to say anything more than “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!” to cause a cringing
face to appear as a reflection in your laptop screen. 63

Wallace anticipated the success of a number of technologies–time shifting and DVRs and On Demand
video, for instance–that have changed our relationship with television and more specifically with
advertising. But perhaps most relevant to Infinite Jest is a recent study published in the Journal of
Consumer Research suggesting that viewers enjoy television programs when commercial breaks are
included more than the same programs shown without commercials “by a decisive margin.” This is true
even though “at every given moment watching the sitcom will be more enjoyable than watching a
television commercial.” I’m not sure the authors of that study have a handle on exactly why that this
is.64

There would seem to be an interesting take on the subject within the pages of Infinite Jest, however.

The Steeply and Marathe sections explicitly establish the idea that freedom in the form of “choosing” is
supposed to make us happy, but is really a cage in itself. The Ennet House and ETA chapters are
concerned with the related paradox that, while “fascism” by its nature is clearly an immoral incursion on
the dignity of the individual, we must surrender to a kind of “personal fascism” (here in the form of AA or
sadistic conditioning drills) if we are serious about pursuing happiness. 65 “We are children, bullies but
still children inside, and will kill ourselves…if you put the candy within the arms’ reach,” Steeply says.
Without some authority looking after our better interests, and left to our own choosing, we will surely
follow the path of short-term gratification over long-term satisfaction–we will choose to watch The
Entertainment even knowing the dire consequences of that decision.

So isn’t it interesting that while very few of us would choose to watch commercials if given an
opportunity to skip them, almost all of us find the program with commercial interruptions forced upon us
more pleasurable than the program without them?

And isn’t it also interesting that, some 13 years before the surprising results of this study, Wallace
published a novel (a novel specifically about the inevitably fatal pursuit of uninterrupted pleasure) with
the interruptions mercifully built in?

HUMBLE PIE
Alright. You got me — I’m kind of enjoying this book now. And when I say “kind of”, I mean “a lot”. I’m
writing this post extremely late because I’ve been staying up at night to read Infinite Jest. I’ve skipped
out on plans with my family to stay in and read it. Heck — for the first time since starting, I’m ahead of
the Spoiler Line. Wow.
For what it’s worth, I feel like I should tell you that you guys would be terrible at AA. A lot of you told me
last week, in the comments, that I should just quit. Stop. Read no further. Some of you even had the
temerity to suggest that I suffered from some substantial lack of grey matter. An accusation I shall not
waste time repudiating, because I’ve already spent so much time leafing through the dictionary to make
sure I’m spelling “repudiate” right.

Thank you to all the people who told me to stick with the book. You guys galvanized me to come up with
a plan of action. I looked up how much I had to read, counted how many days I had until I had to write
this post, and then used the calculator on a phone smarter than myself to do math that a child could
manage. And then I sat down every day and read 30.667 pages. 66

It’s quite something to be learning a little self-discipline by committing to working on a task every day,
and during the course of that task read a summation of the same disciplinary tactics applied to
alcoholism. Many times I felt like not picking up IJ, either because I was slogging through Marathe and
Steeply, or because I wanted to play Mario Bros., but read the book anyway because I recalled the
words “for god’s sake Keep Coming Back”. It was a great insight into the power of committing to a goal
and actively working for it in spite of oneself.67

So. I’m reading the book every day, and enjoying the crap out of it. Even the Marathe and Steeply
sections that I mentioned just a few scant sentences ago. I’m also not counting page numbers
anymore, desperate to just meet my quota for the week. And the “portraits” of characters I mentioned
last week have stopped seeming superfluous, and instead started making everything that much more
real, just like they are intended to.

Long story short — I Kept Coming Back, Trusted in a Higher Power (DFW), and, well… It Just Worked.

Now, if only I could quit the booze.

INFINITE JESTS

The ranks of Infinite Summerians are thinning quickly, as participants drop out or finish early. For those
of us on the schedule, though, it’s time for a halftime celebration.

John Campbell drew the above two panels in his Hourly Comic Journal. They appeared in
the January 9th, 2008 entry. Mr. Campbell went on to write pictures of sad children, which David
Foster Wallace Stranded on a Desert Island:

The folks at The Onion clearly carried a torch for Wallace as well, as he was often featured in articles
such as Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20:

BLOOMINGTON, IL—Claire Thompson, author David Foster Wallace’s girlfriend of two years, stopped
reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday.
 “It was pretty good, I guess, but I just couldn’t get all the way through,” said Thompson, 32,
who was given the seven-chapter, heavily footnoted “Dear John” missive on Feb. 3. “I
always meant to pick it up again, but then I got busy and, oh, I don’t know. He’s talented,
but his letters can sometimes get a little self-indulgent…

Wallace also made cameos in U.S. Unenjoyment Rate At All-Time Highand New Cambodian Barnes
& Noble: Will It Threaten Cambodia’s Small Book Shops?. He even made it onto the cover of The
Weekender:

Last year, The Onion ran NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster
Wallace’s Death:

“I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the
Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and
earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences
that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his
yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that
when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that
achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective.”

Jason Kottke reprinted an essay entitled Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace, originally
written by James Tanner.

9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts.
(Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into
‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when
they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’?

The Howing Fantods held three David Foster Wallace parody competitions. The first two, held
in 2004 and 2007, were literary:

The1 car2 pulled3 up4 into5 the6 driveway.7 Daniel8 locked9 up,10and11 went12 inside.13

For the third, entrants were asked to create DFW-inspired Motivational Posters:

Warning: some of the motivational posters

contain spoilers.

If you know of more Infinite Jest or David Foster Wallace humor on the web, please let us know by
email or in the comments.

Update: In a recent post, infinitedetox proposed some Techno-Curmudgeonly Solutions for Life in
a Wallacian Dystopia.
INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 7
Milestone Reached: 516 (52%)
Chapters Read:

Page 442 – YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Gately ponders his relationship with
a possibly fictitious Higher Power, and remembers his mother’s alcoholism / cirrhosis.

Page 448 – VERY LATE OCTOBER Y.D.A.U: Hal has the “losing your teeth” dream; Mario continues to
listen to “Sixty Minutes More or Less”, even without Madame Psychosis.

Page 450 – 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Early morning drills
at E.T.A.; Schtitt delivers the “second world within this world” lecture (i.e., “suck it up, whiners”).

Page 461: Pat Montesian, and Gately reckless driving in her husband’s car.

Page 450 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A.,

STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the “pleasure centers of the brain” (p-terminals) experiments.

Page 475: Gately continues cruising in Pat M.’s car; the Wheelchair assassins kill Lucien and Bertraud
of Anitoi’s Entertainment.

Page 489 – PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY – Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON, AZ U.S.A.,

STILL: Steeply and Marathe discuss the possibility of an Entertainment “master”; Steeply asks if
Marathe has ever been temped to watch it.

Page 491 – WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA: James Incandenza helps his father isolate and fix
a squeak in a box spring.

Page 503: At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Ken Erdedy gets hugged by Roy Tony.

Page 507: Marathe admits to Steeply that some interns were “lost” while there were experimenting with
the Entertainment.

Page 508 – 10 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal and others
await punishment for the Eschaton disaster; an introduction to “Lateral” Alice Moore’s.

Characters The characters page has been updated.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.
ROUNDUP
Despite the Avery induced exodus, many folks tenaciously cling to theInfinite Jest bandwagon. The
most indefatigable chronicles are:
The fine folks over at Infinite Zombies Journeyman

Gerry Canavan Repat Blues

Infinite Detox Chris Forster

Infinite Tasks Brain Hammer

I Just Read About That Naptime Writing

Love, Your Copyeditor Infinite Jestation

The Feminist Texican A Supposed Fun Blog (although they haven’t

posted in a fortnight, so perhaps they have been
Conversational Reading defatigabled …)

Crystal Bae wrote a nice little entry about Infinite Summer on her blog,Aesthetics of Everywhere. Mike
Miley discussed Infinite Summer onThe Huffington Post. There was also an article in The Daily
Texan.

Reid Carlberg “Finished That Damn Book“. R.J. Adler of A Litany of Nonsense hit page 500 in the
novel and asked “Halfway to What?”

And Jeremy Stober can’t figure out why he likes Infinite Jest:

In the meat and heft, the narrative always seems just easy enough to read that you don’t even realize
how much of the novel’s world you are absorbing, as if it sort of slips in through osmosis and
entrenches itself in your metabolic pathways as you lug the physical weight of the book around.

Lastly, the students of ENG 590 at Albany’s College are reading Infinite Jest in three weeks (!!), and
keeping blogs all the while. You can read about the class here, and find the course website (including
links to the student blogs) at ijstrose.wordpress.com.

if you have written about Infinite Jest recently, please let us know in the forums or the comments.

MIDSUMMER ROUNDTABLE,
PART I
This is the first of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Congratulations on reaching the halfway point.
Eden M. Kennedy: Thanks.

Matthew Baldwin: Huzzah!

Avery Edison: Thank you. Although I think that once you factor in the endnotes, we technically haven’t
even started.

Kevin Guilfoile: I turned 40 last year, which is pretty much halfway to dead. This feels like that in a “I’ve
been reading this same novel for so long I’m not sure what I’m going to do after I finish it” way.

IS: What do you think of the novel so far?

KG: I really love this book, and not in a way I can remember ever loving a book before. Last summer I
read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which is also in the 1,000-page range and is about as beautiful
a traditional novel as I can imagine. On some sort of linear scale I would tell you I liked both of these
books about equally, but if you were charting my feelings about these novels in three dimensions the
plots marking my feelings would be pretty distant from one another. Man, so different.

MB: I am also enjoying it immensely. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also find it taxing. I once likened
reading Infinite Jest to exercising, and that opinion hasn’t changed: I’m happy while I’m doing it, I’m
happy having done it, but getting myself to do it everyday is something of a challenge. I also find myself
eager to be done reading the novel the first time so I can start reading it the allegedly more rewarding
second.

AE: I’ve very recently started enjoying the book, although I’m having trouble articulating just what about
it that I’m so enjoying. I had a lot of frustrations related to the lack of information we’d received in the
first few hundred pages, and now that we’ve learned a little more about the ‘world’ of the book I’m
happier to plow through it.

EMK: I feel as though it really took getting past page 400 for the book to open up for me, and I don’t
know if it’s because I’m a crummy reader or because patterns are beginning to take shape or because
the characters are familiar enough to me now, or what. But despite some rocky weeks, I know I’ll finish
it now, and I’m looking forward to finding out what it is that happens at the end that makes some people
turn right back to page one and immediately start over again.

IS: And the endnotes?

MB: I have gone back and forth on the issue about two dozen times in the last month, and right now I’m
learning away from “essential literary device” and toward “gratuitous pain in the ass”. Plus I just don’t
buy any of the rationales I’ve heard for them: that they simulate the game of tennis, that they simulate
the fractured way we’d be receiving information in Wallace’s imagined future, that they are there to
constantly remind you that you are reading a book, etc. I’d be more inclined to believe these
theories Infinite Jest was the only thing Wallace had written that included them. But the more you read
his other works, the more it becomes obvious that Wallace couldn’t even sign a credit card slip without
bolting on an addendum. The dude loved endnotes–I’m pretty sure that’s the only real reason they are
there.

KG: Everything DFW writes is in some way about this difficulty we have communicating. I mean I don’t
think it’s as contrived as that—I think he finds endnotes practical as a way of imparting information
without interrupting the primary narrative—but I think they are useful in the context of these themes that
he’s always returning to.
MB: Why do you always take David’s side?

EMK: I’ve completely gotten used to the endnotes and I actually look forward to them, as they often turn
into little punchlines for jokes you had no idea you were being set up for.

AE: I’m not really that bothered by the them. I can definitely see where they could have been included
in the text (either as parenthetical asides, or as footnotes on the page), but it is nice to have a break
from the main text now and then. I think I also like that, whilst everything else about DFW’s style is so
subtle and cultured, there’s something rather in-your-face about his use of endnotes. I like that it’s a
very clear “eff you” to the reader.

MIDSUMMER ROUNDTABLE,
PART II
This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Have you been sticking to the schedule?

Avery Edison: For the first time since the project started I’m sticking to the schedule. I had been
catching up in 75-page burst the day before my posts were due to be written. It’s not a great way to
read the book – the feeling that IJ was a homework assignment was only intensified and the fact that I
didn’t have time to take breaks from the harder-to-read sections was stressful.

Last week I was getting through about thirty pages a day, and now I’ve decreased to around 15. I’m a
little ahead of the schedule, which has added a nice, relaxed tone to my reading.

I mean, as relaxed as you can feel reading about something like the Eschaton game.

Matthew Baldwin: My trajectory has been the inverse. I was consistently ahead of schedule, by as
much as 150 pages a few weeks ago. Then I stalled out for a spell.

The main thing that stymied me was the passage about Lucien and Bertraud, before the arrival of the
Wheelchair Assassins. Every night I picked up the novel, read one or two paragraphs of that section,
and gave up. It took me a literal week to get through four pages, 480-484.

Instead, I occupied my evenings reading everything else by David Foster Wallace I could furtively send
to my workplace printer: the David Lynch profile and E Unibus Plurum and Host and The Planet
Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing and two (count ‘em: one, two) long essays
about tennis.

Also, at some point during that period I came down with a cold, and discovered that it is nearly
impossible to read Infinite Jest (at least for me) when fatigued, even in the slightest.

AE: I’ve found totally the opposite – I make the most progress reading the book when I’m sleepy.
Usually I read for half an hour to forty-five minutes just after I wake up and just before I go to bed. I
think maybe my brain is still relaxed enough to let the words just wash over me, rather than allow me to
interrupt myself by over-analyzing the book.

Kevin Guilfoile: I have actually never been behind, although a couple times the days have caught up
to my bookmark. I’m enjoying the book so much, and especially now, that I’ve never not wanted to read
it. Right now I’m about a week ahead, I think, which is probably average.

AE: Kevin, reading ahead doesn’t get you any extra credit. I checked.

IS: None of you addressed the Wardine / yrstruly sections. Care to do so now?

AE: I was upset by the Wardine section, but more by its content than style. It’s tough to get through, but
both of those sections cropped up during my “read it all in one go” sessions, and so I just kept reading
and tried to ignore the language.

Eden M. Kennedy: I guess the Wardine writing style didn’t worry me too much. Certainly DFW’s not the
first white author to write in blackface, so to speak, and I think that whatever you as a reader bring to
those sections will determine whether or how much you cringe when you read them. I got into the
rhythm of the yrstruly section pretty quickly and just began to follow the action, rather than getting too
hung up on the style. I’m just going to trust that there’s a reason for the radical style change that sets
those sections apart, and that something will happen to bring everything together in a meaningful way
later on.

MB: The Wardine section didn’t bother me a whit. For one thing, I never made the assumption that
Wallace was trying to emulate an entire race’s locution, only that of a specific person. I mean, if he had
every black character speaking in that style then there might be cause for alarm, but this section fell 30
pages into a 1000 pages novel–a little early to go all torch-and-pitchfork on the guy.

And I loved the yrstruly chapter. Very A Clockwork Orangeian.

AE: Yeah, the yrstruly stuff really pulled me in — the text felt more frenetic than cumbersome. I felt like I
really was in the mind of an addict, although — as a middle-class white girl who tried pot just once and
felt sick for two days after — that could say more about my perception of drugs users than it does about
Wallace’s writing.

Have any of you been to Boston? Can you visualize the city as you read?

MB: I think this is the first fiction I’ve read about Boston and its environs that wasn’t written by H. P.
Lovecraft, of whom I am a huge fan. So, while reading Infinite Jest, I keep waiting for E.T.A. to play
Akham University, or a cult to be discovered holding rituals in the Ennet House basement, or Johnny
Gentle to be unmasked as Nyarlathotep. I am pretty sure that Mario’s conception is going to involve the
town of Innsmouth.

EMK: I lived on the east coast from the early eighties to the early nineties and had a few Boston
boyfriends, so I feel like I can peg several of the locations he uses in the book, as well as the look of
some of the people he describes, especially the Crocodiles and the ETA kids. And now that I think of it, I
wonder if some of my ETA associations are tinged by other east coast prep novels, like Donna Tartt’s “A
Secret History,” and the dozen others I’ve read over the years. I’m sure that’s a topic for a term paper,
somewhere.

AE: My only exposure to Boston has been via. the film “Good Will Hunting”. I don’t think this affects my
reading of the book too much, other than the obvious downside that – in my head – every character
looks like Ben Affleck.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

KG: I grew up in the Northeast and my brother has lived in Boston for 20 years, so I’ve been there
dozens of times and so I have a pretty solid picture of the city as I read. If the characters would just ride
that little tourist trolley around a bunch, I’d be right there in my head with them.

MIDSUMMER ROUNDTABLE,
PART III
This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Does anyone have a favorite character?

Avery Edison: I’ve written before about liking Hal the most, whilst suspecting that he may be a dick.
That’s still holding true. I tend to like the smarter characters, and in a book full of drug addicts and
athletes, Hal is standing out a fair bit.

Eden M. Kennedy: I like Hal, too.

Matthew Baldwin: Hal?! I thought you and I shared a crush on Pemulis in common. You’ve changed so
much since this project started Eden, it’s like I don’t even know you any more.

Two of my favorite sections–”Erdedy Waits for Pot” and “Erdedy Gets a Hug”–star the same person, so
I guess Ken is at the top of my list as well. I hope the second half of the book is peppered with more of
his comic misadventures. Oh Ken Erdedy, will you ever win?

EMK: I’m also gaining some affection for Steeply, surprisingly. I want to hear more from Avril. In a novel
that’s mainly focused on male characters, it’s hard to find a woman to relate to. Apart from Air Marshal
Kittenplan, of course.

Avery, you raised some gender issues in your first post. What are your thoughts on them now?

AE: After learning more about the Office of Unspecified Services, and its strange M.O. of outfitting
operatives with highly inappropriate disguises, I feel a little better about Steeply. I have to believe that
DFW is going for something a little higher than “ha, ha, look at the man in the dress!” because he’s
obviously a smart guy and that would be an easy joke to make.

I hope Wallace ends up treating the infatuation Orin has for Steeply with respect and kindness, although
the fact that he’s drawn it out for so long worries me. I’m beginning to wonder if the point of Orin’s crush
is for us to laugh at him, as many other works of entertainment wish us to when they feature an un-
suspecting protagonist becoming romantically involved with a trans-person. It seems like an innocuous
trope, but it reinforces the concept that trans-women “trick” everyone they don’t explicitly divulge their
status to. The idea that people are entitled to such information leads to the “trans panic” defense, which
is used to justify violence against transgender people on a sadly routine basis.

Aaaaaand I’ve talked for far too long about this.

Speaking or Orin and Steeply, how do you feel about the mix of drama and comedy in the novel?

MB: I have no objection to the absurdity when it is “Out There” (subsidized years, the rise of Johnny
Gentle, the history of O.N.A.N., and so on), but find it jarring when it’s in close proximity to the more
realistic portions of the novel. I kind of consider Orin to be “Out There” so he’s exempt, but I was truly
annoyed at the Clipperton passages. How are we supposed to take the real characters seriously when
they are intermingling with cartoons?
EMK: The Clipperton stuff really felt like a parable or a philosophical exercise to me. “Let’s take this
premise and draw it out until it collapses.” It seems like it could have been the outgrowth of some
philosophical dilemma that Hal might have invented, just to toy with Orin late at night on the phone.

MB: And had it had been presented as such I would have no objection.

EMK: I keep asking myself, “How much disbelief are you willing to suspend in reading this novel? ”
Because so much of it is so emotionally real. But then what do we do with the fact that the woman
journalist Orin’s so intrigued by is actually a badly disguised man? I find it just so delightful and
ridiculous that I honestly don’t care how just plain impossible that would be, I just can’t wait to see how
it all shakes out. But still.

AE: To touch lightly (lest I type out another “trans-issues” screed) on the Steeply thing, I tend to assume
that Steeply is actually pretty well disguised, and it’s only the fact that Marathe is such an intelligent
man that he notices all the costume’s flaws. We also have to bear in mind that every description of
Steeply so far has been after he fell down a muddy slope on his way to meet with Marathe. For all we
know, his usual appearance is quite passable.

EMK: That’s good, I hadn’t thought about it that way at all, I was assuming that eventually someone like
Hal would see through Steeply’s terrible disguise and set Orin straight, so to speak (ahem). I certainly
hadn’t foreseen something tragic happening with Orin and Steeply. Now I’m a little worried.

AE: With regard to the mix of drama and comedy, I must say that I’m not finding the book at all laugh-
out-loud funny. Every now and then I’ll chuckle at a concept (I think the head-through-monitor part of
Eschaton got a giggle) but every attempt at humor by Wallace seems a little self-conscious. When I got
to the section with Lateral Alice Moore the other day, I threw up my hands and asked aloud “is there
anyone in this book that doesn’t have some ‘comical’ deformity?”

Kevin Guilfoile: It’s an old assumption that no one would recognize a perfect novel even if it were
possible for somebody to write one. If I had one major complaint about IJ it would be this inconsistency
of tone Eden and Matthew talk about, but that’s also inevitable given the scope of what Wallace is trying
to accomplish. When you write a novel of huge ambition you are, by definition, stretching beyond your
known abilities and so there are going to be occasional swings and misses along with the tape measure
home runs (and obviously readers will disagree about what works and what doesn’t). During
the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a
masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in
my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more
terrible.

MIDSUMMER ROUNDTABLE,
PART IV
This is the fourth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Kevin, do you find Wallace’s style influencing your own? Will the title of your
next novel (The Thousand) refer to the number of endnotes you went back and inserted?

Kevin Guilfoile: I’m pretty easily influenced by anything that I like, but usually within the parameters of
my own style. For instance, it’s not unusual for me to write long, run-on sentences when I’m trying to
change the pace of a passage (or when I’m deep inside someone’s train of thought) and I probably am
doing more of that right now, just because Wallace is so effective with it. The novel I’m currently working
on (the one after The Thousand) even has a character that’s rather Gately-like (big guy, ex-con, not an
alcoholic but a teetotaler) although I created him before I read IJ. Looking specifically at the stuff I’ve
written over the last month or so I can right away identify a lengthy passage in which a pickpocket is
rhapsodizing at some length about cargo shorts that seems pretty obviously influenced by IJ.

Matthew Baldwin: I actually used the word “demap” as a synonym for “kill” in a casual conversation the
other day. The person to whom I was speaking had no idea what I was saying.

Eden M. Kennedy: And I quoted Schtitt to my son on the tennis court. He was complaining how he
wanted to switch sides because the sun was in his eyes, and I totally paraphrased that whole section
about it always being too hot or too cold or too something on the court, you have to look inside, blah
blah. And then I switched and took the sunny side.

Avery Edison: The only thing I’ve taken away from the book is a pretty heavy ‘drine dependency. That,
and a fear of Canadians in wheelchairs.

And of course, as I typed that joke in I suddenly realize that I’m sitting at my computer in a bandanna.
Curse you David Foster Wallace!

IS: Are you enjoying some sections better than others (E.T.A. vs. Ennet v. Steeply & Marathe)?

MB: They say that a world class director could film someone reading the phonebook and make it
interesting. That’s how I feel about Wallace. In an interview, he talked about the challenge of “tak[ing]
something almost narcotizingly banal … and try[ing] to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense,
strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is.” Given that Infinite Jest is a
novel about a tennis academy, a bunch of AA meetings, and two guys chatting on a cliff, it’s clearly a
challenge that Wallace both relished and consistently met.

So I don’t find any of the storylines to be more engrossing than others. In fact, I don’t find
the narrative to be particularly engrossing at all. It’s Wallace’s style that I enjoy, and I am largely
indifferent as to what subject matter he is writing about at any given moment.

AE: I’m a big fan of banter, so I look forward to any section (usually an endnote) featuring Hal and Orin
on the phone to each other. A lot of information tends to get divulged during those pages, and there’s
some nice verbal sparring in the mean time.

The Marathe and Steeply sections have also grown on me, probably for much the same reason. It’s
also nice to see — in a novel that has almost avoided any discussion of its namesake – characters
having honest-to-God conversations about The Entertainment.

EMK: Something shifts in Marathe and Steeply’s conversations as we get deeper into the book; I can’t
put my finger on it but it’s definitely becoming easier to read and enjoy their passages.

AE: I think it’s that as we’re learning more about the world around them, the vague allusions to things
such as the Concavity or subsidised time are clearer. I’m sure that the conversation Marathe and
Steeply have regarding free will would’ve been impenetrable had we not learned more about the
Entertainment’s effects on its viewers. I may go back to the earlier Marathe and Steeply sections and
see if they make for easier reading now.
KG: It changes for me. I found the description of Mario’s puppet show movie to be a lot like being
trapped on an airplane listening to someone taking two-and-a-half hours to describe the plot of a two
hour movie, and so I wanted to got to Ennet House every minute of that section.

AE: I really enjoyed Mario’s movie, especially since it gave us a look into the wider community at ETA.
Up until then I feel like we’d just been focused on a small group of students (Hal, Pemulis, Troeltsch,
etc.) and it was nice to get everyone in that big hall and get little character moments with odd people.
The tradition of gathering around for the viewing and the rule that students can eat whatever they want
on Interdepence Day was a nice humanizing touch that made the ETA feel more like a school where
actual humans would go. Before I saw it as more of a tennis-robot factory, now I’m seeing it as more of
a family. Which would make C.T. proud, I’m sure.

KG: I love tennis and find the ETA stuff really enjoyable overall. On top of that there are set pieces, of
course, that are just stunning but I don’t think they are tied to any particular place or character, at least
not for me.

EMK: I love the ETA kids best when they’re giving each other shit, no doubt about it, but the AA stuff is
still fascinating to me. Sometimes this book feels sort of sterile, in a Stanley Kubrick way, just very
cerebral and cool, so I do tend to feel grateful for the warmer, more human stuff, I guess.

AE: An exception to that appreciation of the human stuff — at least for me — is anything dealing with
Himself’s childhood. Right now if feels like we’re getting background on a character we know is dead,
and whose legacy (the Entertainment) we already knew the motivations for. I understand that the scene
featuring Himself and The Man From Glad culminated in the origin of Himself’s fascination annulation,
but there were a lot of pages to get through for such a small detail. We couldn’t have learned that via.
one of Hal and Orin’s earlier conversations, or done without the knowledge entirely?

MB:: Probably. But those two passages are among my favorite, no doubt because they showcase
Wallace’s skill in teasing the interesting from the banal.

MIDSUMMER ROUNDTABLE,
PART V
This is the fifth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: Any predictions as to what will happen in the second half of the novel?

Matthew Baldwin: I’ll tell you what I’m not expecting: anything resembling a standard climax or
dénouement. In nearly all of Wallace’s non- and short-fiction I’ve read, the pieces just sort of end, often
abruptly, with no surprise twist or delivered moral, frequently without even a deft turn of phrase. I always
feel like there was an editor somewhere in the process who said, “Hey , David? This is a little too long,
so we’re going to just lop off the last third. Does that work?”

Eden M, Kennedy: I am waiting for some class conflict to bubble up. So far the book seems to gloss
over the fact that some Ennet House people work, almost invisibly, at ETA (kitchen; the towel girl), but
that leaves me thinking that something’s slowly brewing there, theme-wise. Because what about Pat M.,
a rich woman who seems to be sort of class-blind — yet finding common ground with all kinds of fucked
up people who simply share the will to conquer an addiction? She’s going to end up the Mother Theresa
of this novel, you watch.

Avery Edison: It seems like we’re drawing to the end of Marathe and Steeply’s conversation on the
mountainside, and I’d like to see some sort of confrontation between the two before they leave. We’ve
been constantly reminded of the gun lurking just under Marathe’s blanket, always in his hand, and so I
think it’d be nifty to see some action by Steeply to justify Marathe’s caution. At the moment it seems too
much like Marathe has the upper hand.

Kevin Guilfoile: I just realized that I’m not spending much time trying to figure out what’s going to
happen next. This book really is unfolding sort of like a dream for me, where I don’t have much vision of
it beyond the present. I think Wallace set up some early seeds of anticipation—we know Hal and Gately
are going to get together, for instance—but beyond that I’m not really trying to figure it out much.

Avery Edison: I’m similar to Kevin in that I’ve not given much thought to the future. So many odd
events have happened already, I feel like I have next to no shot at making any kind of accurate
prediction.

KG: I’m sort of letting it happen, and I’m enjoying it. I wish I could live my life that way more.

EMK: This was fun; can we do it again next week?

INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 8

Milestone Reached: 590 (60%)
Chapters Read:

Page 528 – PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON
AZ U.S.A., STILL: The Marathe and Steeply show continues. Steeply argues that America is not the
only culture in which people are drawn to things that could “entertain them to death”.

Page 531 – 0450H., 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT / FRONT
OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA: Don Gately tells Joelle Van Dyne of a bar fight in
which some of his friends “messed with a guy’s girl”; he also asks about the purpose of the veil and her
membership in the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.).

Page 538: How Randy Lenz became a Steel-Sak-wielding animal killer. (Aside: “Randy Lenz and his
Steel Sax” is the name of my new light-jazz quartet.)

Page 548 – EARLY NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND UNDERGARMENT: Rodney Tine, Chief of
U.O.U.S. and compulsive pecker checker.

Page 550 – LATE P.M., MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT: Michael Pemulis walks in on John Wayne (N.R.) and Arvil Incandenza in the middle
of … something. “‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting” rockets to the
top of the “Best Lines in the Book” list.
Page 553 – WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT:
Lenz and Bruce Green stroll around town. Lenz regales Green with stories, all while wondering how he
can ditch his companion in time to do his nefarious deeds. Eventually he manages to get away, and
Green observes the dog-killer in action.

Page 560: Troeltsch, Pemulis and Wayne visit Hal in turn, each for just a few moments.

Page 563 – SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE

MOMENTS OF D. W. GATELY, LIVE-IN STAFF, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY
HOUSE, ENFIELD MA, ON AND OFF FROM JUST AFTER THE BROOKLINE YOUNG PEOPLE’S
AA MTNG. UP TO ABOUT 2329H., WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U: As advertised.

Page 565: Orin gets it on with a Swiss hand-model. Endnote 234 is a long interview between Steeply
and Orin, in which much light is shed on Orin’s relationship with his parents and the mold-eating
incident.

Page 567: Michael Pemulis explains annulation to a blindfolded Idris Arslanian.

Page 574: Orin sees his first wheelchair-bound “punting-groupie” since Ms. Steeply left.

Characters The characters page has been updated.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

ROUNDUP
Every Happy Days needs a Laverne and Shirley, and maybe even aJoanie Loves Chachi for good
measure. So too is Infinite Summer spawning spin-offs.
Next week Infinite Jest will finally be published in German. At that time, the publisher is planning
an Infinite Summer like read-along, and has a bunch of writers all lined up to participate. The official
site 9all in German, natch) is http://www.unendlicherspass.de/.

For those who found I.J. a little too daunting (or too readable, and already finished), B. Mernit has
launched Infinite Water, which encourages folks to read and discuss David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon
Commencement Address.

Speaking of “This is Water”, the Telegraph has a long article on Infinite Jest, Infinite Summer, and
David Foster Wallace. In it, Michael Pietschspeaks a bit about Wallace’s final and incomplete
novel, The Pale King, to be published posthumously. The commencement is “very much a distillation” of
the novel’s theme, says Pietsch, as well as “attention and awareness and discipline, and being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways
every day.”

And at long last we have a blogroll. Chronic Infinite Jest bloggers are now listed here on the
mothership, for your pursuing pleasure.

Oh, and a big congratulations to Chaz Formichella, who became the 1000th member of the Infinite
Summer. We sent him a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide to
commemorate his achievement. Nice work!
THE PERIL OF A.P.
It’s always strange to hear a term you thought you “owned” in a complete different context. Case in
point: as a board gamer, I have been using the phrase “analysis paralysis” for years, completely
unaware that the term was affiliated (and perhaps originated) with A.A.

Most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and
unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking
is: Analysis-Paralysis … That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this
self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to
them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of
their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are
never good … In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving
shit out of itself.

The problem of analysis-paralysis crops up so often in board game discussion that it is usually just
abbreviated as “AP”. And we tend to use the term in two distinct ways: in reference to people, and in
reference to design.

A person who is, in our lingo, “AP-prone” is someone who freezes up on their turn as they mentally
traverse the entire decision tree, terrified of making a less than optimal move. Imagine a chess-playing
computer, that calculates every possible move and its outcome before taking its turn; now imagine
some guy who’s already had two beers and half a bag of Cheetos trying to do the same thing, looming
over the table with furrowed brow, stuck in a endless loop because, by the time he considers the last of
all possible choices, he has already forgotten the first, and must therefore start again. And meanwhile
the fun whooshes out of the room like atmosphere through an open airlock.

A game that is “AP-prone”, on the other hand, is a design that encourages exactly this kind of
minimaxing behavior.68 Whereas many players have learned to turn a deaf ear to AP’s siren song,
certain games can ossify even the most casual of gamers.

AP is such a problem in modern board games, that designers are taught ways to prevent it. The
quickest method is to throw a sand timer into the game and declare that each player only has x
seconds to complete their turn. Another is to introduce an element to chance into the game, thus
making it difficult or impossible to successfully predict future events. A third is to reduce the number of
options available to a player at any given time.

In other words, the solution to analysis-paralysis–at least in terms of board game design–is to reduce
freedom: reduce the amount of time, or the amount of information, or the amount of choices. Constraint
facilitates action.69

Even if you don’t play board games, you are surely familiar with the phenomenon. Your 8th Grade
English teacher says you can write an essay on anything, and your mind’s a blank; she instead says
you have to write it on leaf cutters ants, and at least you know which Wikipedia page to plagiarize. Or
consider Twitter: I would argue that the 140 character “limit” (no longer a technical necessity, by the
way) is precisely what makes the service so popular.

Although the term “analysis-paralysis” only crops up on Infinite Jest a few times, in many ways it seems
to be the crux of the novel, the delicate balance between freedom and constraint, action and thought,
territory and map. Indeed, the recent passages about Randy Lenz and Bruce Green practically depict
the two men as incarnations of the extremes: Lenz with his gerbil-in-a-wheel logorrhea, Green clocking
in at “about one fully developed thought every sixty seconds, and then just one at a time, a thought,
each materializing already fully developed and sitting there and then melting back away like a languid
liquid-crystal display.”

It’s a theme present in all major storylines: Schtitt imposing his Draconian training regiment on the
unruly student, honing them into world class tennis players; A.A. teaching “Substance-addicted people”
how to stop overthinking and instead “fake it until you make it”; and Marathe lecturing Steeply about the
perils of too much choice.

The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out
“Freedom!” and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and
bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries “Freedom!” the good
father?

One has to wonder if Wallace wasn’t so keyed into the chaos v. order equipoise because of his own
relationship with editors, the tempering force to his own voluminous output, the catalyst between
madness and genius.

THANKS, BUT I DON’T

PARTICULARLY LIKE TO HUG
I’m a little behind in my reading, I’m smack in the middle of the whole Lenz thing and it’s kind of making
me sick, so I’m going to backtrack a little.
Last week I accused Infinite Jest of having kind of a Kubrickian sterility about it at times, but as I
continue reading and the novel continues to blossom for me, I realize how much life is flowing under
that apparently detached, often affectless surface.

The scene where James’ father asks for his help to move the mattress, of course, is a classic example
of the sort of achingly slow emotional reveal that takes place in small ways throughout the entire novel
— and is starting to encompass my experience of the entire book. In the bed scene you’re directed to
focus on the physical detail, at first seemingly for its own sake, until it all adds up to reveal a horror
recollected with not only the detachment of time but the precision of someone either so removed from
or else so overwhelmed by the emotional impact of the sudden, strange death of his father that the
physical details of the morning take on a ravishing Technicolor quality. They say time slows down for
some people when they’re in car accidents or disasters, they remember the strangest details later —
the song on the radio when the phone rang, the dust on the windshield before your head crashed
through it. And once you have the whole picture, no matter how blandly or sharply or affectlessly it’s
described, a boy running from his parents’ bedroom to his own and jumping on the bed, the slumped
mattress in the hallway and the ring of the glass pushed into the carpet all bear the emotional weight of
a man watching himself cope with tremendous loss from a distance. A man with a supremely focused
scientific mind that can compartmentalize information and zoom in on a detail — a slowly rolling
doorknob — that changes the course of his life.

The mirror cracks in the most delightful way, of course, in the very next scene, when Erdedy tries to
refuse a hug. All the hemming and hawing and sweaty palms of someone who doesn’t have Himself’s
muscular mind to use as a shield, or “Joe L.’s” veil, who uses drugs to keep the world at arm’s length
because the fragile infrastructure of his addiction can only remain intact if no one gets close enough to
breathe on it, it all gets crushed so shockingly and wonderfully by Roy Tony.

‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do
what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in
here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself,
which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on
Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the
fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even
try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-
wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and
shout ‘Talk about it!’

‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I
gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’. . .

‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing
gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I
gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

If Erdedy were a different man, a man whose mind was so strong it could shield his heart from both its
own needs and the needs of others, he wouldn’t have climbed up on Roy Tony’s neck and not let go, I
suppose. But I love that he had enough strength and trust to desperation to give himself over and let
Roy Tony destroy his pathetic facade. And we get to see that Roy Tony, as he clears his addiction away,
has the heart of a lion.

This is getting long so I’ll just add that I’m also very interested to see if Joelle can continue to justify her
own draped existence.

I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE,

BROTHER, IT IS MURDER
In the underrated Mike Judge film Idiocracy, Luke Wilson is unfrozen centuries in the future where
people have become so stupid that a two-hour video of a man’s naked, farting ass wins four Oscars,
and Wilson has to run around desperately trying to convince everyone on the planet that humans will go
extinct unless they stop irrigating their dying crops with Gatorade. 70
Which got me thinking: Will anybody still be reading Infinite Jest 100 years from now?

One of the enduring appeals of writing a book has always been that it doesn’t seem so ephemeral.
Especially in an age of new media, a book feels like a lasting creation, a thing of permanence. We still
have Bibles that rolled off Gutenberg’s press lying around our climate-controlled archives, and so
there’s no reason someone couldn’t be curled up with that romance novel of yours late at night in the
year 2525.

This is a self-delusion of authors, of course. Very few books outlive the people who wrote them. Looking
back at the publishing year 1896 (100 years before IJ) the only novels I can see that anyone’s still
reading with any regularity were both written by HG Wells. 71

In 2005, the Guardian polled 500 British book clubs book club readers and asked them which
novels written in the 20th Century (and the first few years of the 21st Century) would be considered
classics a century hence. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the sample, the list is about half-filled with
recent book club faves–The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Star of the Sea, The Time
Traveler’s Wife, Atonement,The Handmaid’s Tale.72 The Guardian kind of sneers at this result,738but it
might not be so far off. These are works of popular fiction with a lot of copies in print and a large group
of individuals evangelizing for them. There are reasons to think some might have a chance at enduring

Infinite Jest, at least in 2009, certainly has plenty of rabid evangelizers. It has some apparent obstacles
to its longevity, however. Infinite Summer started with thousands of enthusiastic and determined
readers. Based on activity in the comments and the forums and on Twitter, I’d guess that through
attrition we are already less than half what we were. That kind of drop-out rate could be punishing to the
book over the years. The amount of time and effort it takes to read, digest, and discuss makes it an
unlikely candidate to be taught widely in undergraduate classrooms (although obviously it can be
done). Wallace’s persistent, casual use of brand names and pop-culture references 74 would make this
novel considerably more difficult to read down the road–imagine what adding a full complement of
footnotes on top of the original endnotes would do the level of difficulty. 75 IJ is also distinctly American,
which cuts a couple of ways, I suspect.

As deliberately tempting as Wallace makes it to quit reading this book, you have to figure, in the long
run, that everyone might take him up on it eventually.

On the other hand.

I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a
kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be
related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of
deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who
connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the
possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the
intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be
endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be
ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now
understand it.

In Idiocracy, Luke Wilson eventually convinces the morons of the future that water isn’t poisonous.
Addressing them he says, “There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. 76 And neither was
writing. People wrote books and movies–movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it
was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!”

I might even work on a version of that speech when it’s time for me to start pushing Infinite Jest on my
friends.

EVERYBODY HURTS (EXCEPT

MARIO INCANDENZA)
I am coming to believe that there is not one normal character in this book.77 We see characters with
physical deformities (the wheelchair assassins, Mario); mental problems (Himself, Kate Gompert,
others); substance addictions (the Ennet house gang, a vast number of students at E.T.A); sociopathic
tendencies (Lenz, Lenz, Lenz); obsessive compulsions (Avril Incandenza, Lateral Alice Moore); and
gender dysphoria (Hugh Steeply, Poor Tony). But no one ‘normal’.
This has been distracting to me in the past. The world of Infinite Jest already requires such a
suspension of disbelief — what with the concavity, and the subsidization, and the idea that people are
scared by a group of assassins that could be thwarted by a set of stairs 78 that adding in a cast of
characters all so uniquely deviant stretches that disbelief just a mite too far. Of course, this can be a
problem with fiction in general, and is preferable to a set of perfect players. After all, “perfect
characters are boring, and sometimes even annoying … character flaws = sources of conflict.”

But these flaws are such an integral part of IJ that I’m beginning to think that David Foster Wallace is
trying to achieve some goal other than making sure no character is too idealized to be interesting.
Because it’s one thing to make a character too arrogant to achieve their own goals, or blinded by greed,
or any other of a number of common tropes. But Infinite Jest takes things to extremes, with Orin
engaging in ritualistic seductions to fulfill some Oedipal desire, with Joelle feeling the need to cover her
face due to severe deformity79 and with Lenz killing small animals at night.

These are all extremely negative deviancies. That’s what I keep getting caught up on. No one seems to
be particularly happy with how different they are, except Mario. And we really can’t trust his opinion on
such matters, because he has “a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well” (p.
589). Mario’s experiences with feeling — at a very base level — are so wildly different to every other
human that he cannot be counted on for a reliable comparison of relative happiness.

I feel like this theme of difference is meant to be a lesson — stray too far from the norm, and you will be
deeply, deeply unhappy. Do drugs, and you will be unhappy (like the majority of the Ennet House
residents). Be too much of a winner, and you will be unhappy (as demonstrated by Clipperton). Be too
smart, and you might well erase your own map (perhaps with Himself’s microwave method).

This unhappiness will be permanent, too. No one in the book so far has managed to deviate from a
societal norm and come back from the other side unscathed. The addicts are eternal addicts, doomed
to become the old men of Boston AA — forever believing that they must Keep Coming Back, lest they
fall back into addiction. And even doing that may not be able to save them from true, visceral
hideousness; Lenz is hitting meetings like a champ, but they’re not stopping him from killing small
creatures on the way home.

The tennis players are incessantly protected from hype, lest they come to see themselves as
exceptional — as beyond the average, the normal — and lose their on-court edge. The novel’s many
geniuses fall victim to punishments for their difference, too. If we’re not watching Himself kill himself,
we’re seeing the hyper-smart and closed-off Avril having sex with under-age boys (p. 553 if you don’t
believe me), or listening to Hal assure us the he is “in there”, as the world around him sees nothing but
a seizing, “sub-animalistic” boy.

Which brings me to my real concern in all this: Hal. I’ve mentioned before that I’m curious as to how Hal
comes by the disability that serves as this book’s very first ‘shocker’. I’ve been hoping that it will be
something temporary — perhaps a drug dose that I can hope he one day recovers from, or a stray
tennis ball to the head that may cause brain damage that science or time may one day fix. But you see,
Hal is committing a number of ‘crimes of difference’ throughout this novel. He’s exceptionally smart.
He’s a superb athlete. And he’s using drugs.

Going by the established pattern, that’s a trifecta of deviancy that Infinite Jest can only punish. And I’m
worrying that — like Himself’s death, Marathe’s disability, and Don Gately’s addiction — it will be a very
permanent punishment indeed.

JOHN GREEN: WHY I’M

BEHIND
John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska,
and An Abundance of Katherines. He is also the co-creator (with his brother, Hank) of the
popular vlogbrothers channel on youtube, which spawned the nerdfighter community, a tight-knit
group of a hundred thousand nerds who use the internet to celebrate intellectualism and nerd culture.
Okay, so full disclosure: I am behind. (I’m only on page 350.)

I first read Infinite Jest in the summer of 1996, the summer after my freshman year of college. I had a
beautiful first edition80 that I’d bought entirely because of a review in Time Magazine. (Off-topic, but
remember magazines?) I lived that summer with three friends from high school and a juvenile pet
squirrel named Trippy in a two-bedroom apartment in Birmingham, Alabama. We slept on these four
full-sized mattresses we had kind of half-stolen from our friend’s dad, who owned a Days Inn.

My memories of that summer:

1.The squirrel died. I came home from work one day, and the squirrel was dead in its cage, and
I knew I had to tell my roommate Todd, who was particularly attached to Trippy and who was
also readingIJ. I When he came home that day, I said, “I think Lenz got a hold of Trippy,” which
in the end was, like, way too casual a way of telling Todd that his squirrel had died.

2.I spent a lot of time lying on the bare Days Inn mattress, an unzipped sleeping bag over me,
my forearms aching from the size of the book.

This time around, reading Infinite Jest has been an exercise in delighted confusion. But for me, in
1996, all reading was a matter of delighted confusion, and if I didn’t understand something, I just kept
reading. Of course, I had no idea what was happening in the book. 81 All I knew was that I liked Hal, and
that I liked mmmyellow, and that even though it was horrible and all I kinda wished I was good at tennis.
When I finished the book, I immediately flipped to the first page and started reading again. For me, that
summer, IJ achieved its craziest ambition: It became my Entertainment.

When I got back to school that Fall, one of the first things I did was get on the Internet, which was then
capitalized, to find out what other people who’d read IJ had thought of it, whereupon I learned that even
though I’d read IJ three times in three months, I’d had absolutely no idea what the book was about and
had totally misunderstood everything. So it has been nice to read it with y’all this time around, because
it keeps me on track.

I write novels for teenagers now—such books are colloquially called “Young Adult books” or just YA—
and whenever I’ve had about two beers and find myself with other YA authors, I always start in on this
soliloquy about how the contemporary young adult novel was not invented by J. D. Salinger or Judy
Blume or Robert Cormier but by David Foster Wallace, whose ETA scenes more closely resemble what
most YA writers are after. Like, for one thing, the best contemporary young adult fiction moves
effortlessly between high and low culture in that way that only teenagers and David Foster Wallace can.
I mean, my favorite books when I was eighteen were IJ and The Babysitters’ Club #43: Claudia’s Sad
Goodbye.82 DFW proved that one way to bring readers to complex ideas is to utilize the sentence
structures they hear every day; YA fiction has been trying to do this ever since.

Also, there’s the whole thing of treating teenagers as intellectually capable and genuinely funny people,
which IJ did not invent but did master. Plus, YA novels on average are more likely to use footnotes than
novels for adults.83 It’s actually pretty stunning how massively so many YA writers (I mean, me
especially, but also other people) have ripped off ETA and Pemulis and Hal, how deeply DFW has
shaped our understanding of what it means to be smart and talented and scared and 17.

So now, 13 years after first reading the book, I find myself treasuring the ETA scenes more than I did
when I was of the age when I should have been treasuring them. Any book worth its salt has any many
readings as it does readers. My reading has been slow going because it is such an awful pleasure to be
in the shadow of my 18-year-old self, that skinny kid who was learning that unprecedented intellectual
feats were not resigned to history.

But this makes it sound like reading IJ has been some rosy-fogged visit to the past. What I’m savoring
so much, I think, is not remembering the me who first read the words, but … well, here is the truth: It is
the lamest thing in the world to feel like you are alone and then to read a story that makes you feel
unalone. Great books like IJ can and do accomplish so much more than this small trick of direct
identification, but even so: For me to read a book that so expertly articulated the obsession and
narcissism and sadness of the glass eye turned in on itself kind of made my life that summer and
moving forward more bearable.

That was no small gift to me at the time—and it is no small gift this time, either.

INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 9

Milestone Reached: 664 (67%)
Sections Read:
Page 575:: Randy Lenz and Bruce Green continue strolling around Boston. We learn that Green’s
mother died of fright after opening a novelty snake-in-a-fake-can-of-nuts gift that young Bruce had given
her at his father’s urging, and that Green’s father went insane (and was executed for sending out
deadly exploding cigars) sometime thereafter. Green and Lenz are separated; when Green next sees
Lenz, the latter is killing a dog belonging to some partygoers. The partygoers see the killing and give
chase, but Lenz manages to evade them.

Page 589: Mario’s nineteenth birthday approaches. He strolls near Ennet House, and we learn: (1) he
“can’t feel physical pain very well”, (2) he can no longer read Hal like he once was able, and (3) Mario
doesn’t understand why the E.T.A. students are embarrassed by genuine emotion.

Page 593: Don Gately’s Ennet House duties, divided into the “picayune and the unpleasant”.

Page 596: Orin answers survey questions from a man in a wheelchair, while the “putatively Swiss hand-
model” hides under sheets of the bed.

Page 601: As Gately supervises the reparking of the cars in front of Ennet House, the partygoers arrive
in search of Lenz. A confrontation ensues, and Gately is shot while apparently beating several of the
assailants to death.

Page 620: An engineer for WYYY is kidnapped by a man in a wheelchair.

Page 627 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: E.T.A. students in
the cafeteria, discussing a Hal / The Darkness match that Stice nearly won, and debating whether the
milk is powdered.

Page 638 – 1 MAY Y.D.A.U. / OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A.: Steeply reveals
that his father had a literal and life-destroying obsession with the television show M*A*S*H.

Page 648 – 13 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: At Ennet House,
Geoffrey Day describes a dark, billowing shape that he accidentally summoned as a child, the shadow
of which left him bereft of hope.

Page 651 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Steeply and deLint
watch the Hal / Stice match. Steeply pushes for an exclusive interview with Hal, but is rebuffed.

Pages 663, 664, and 665: A correspondence between Steeply and Marlon Bain of Saprogenic
Greetings. Endnote 269 contains extended excerpts from Bain’s replies.

Characters The characters page has been updated.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.
ROUNDUP
Man, everyone is doing this Infinite Summer thing. Here is a still from this week’s episode of Weeds.

“I’ll do that delivery for mom after I finish my chapter.

I’m sure this Erdedy guy won’t mind waiting ten minutes.”

(Thanks to Ed for sending us the screenshot.)

Matt of Wood-Tang is on page 700 of the novel. Jazz is also ahead. Mo Pie finished, as have a
whole host of people on Twitter.

Recent posts from the folks on our blogroll:

•Repat Blues: Both to die and to live in Paris

•Naptime Writing: IJ quote of the day 45
•Gerry Canavan: A Brief Comment on the Narcissism of Grad Students and My Own
Arrested Adolescence

•I Just Read About That: Infinite Jest Week 9

•Infinite Zombies: Underground
•Infinite Detox: Tramadol Tales, Brought to You by AOL
•A Supposedly Fun Blog: Expectation and Ecstasy
•Infinite Tasks: Scorn of Death
•Love, Your Copyeditor: Got Semicolon?
•Sarah’s Books: Infinite Summer Week 9
 •That Sounds Cool: Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (p. 562-619)
Earlier this week, the NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledgedevoted an entire episode to David
Foster Wallace. In it they speak with (among many others) Michael Pietsch, Rolling Stone contributing
editor David Lipsky, and David’s sister Amy Wallace-Haven.

And Dennis Cooper discovered something magical about the “statistically improbable phrases” that
Amazon.com provides for its books. “What Amazon doesn’t tell you is that, in the case of fiction, their
SIP feature does not merely hint at important plot elements but MAGICALLY DISTILLS THE ESSENCE
OF THE WORK.” He then lists 69 books in SIP form. At #1:

medical attaché, annular fusion, entertainment cartridge, improbably deformed, howling fantods, feral
hamsters, dawn drills, tough nun, professional conversationalist, new bong, ceiling bulged, metro
boston, tennis academy, red leather coat, soupe aux pois, red beanie, addicted man, magnetic video,
littler kids, little rotter, technical interview, police lock, oral narcotics, sober time, veiled girl

ELSE { DEFAULT }
As details emerge about The Pale King, it’s becoming clear that the 2005 commencement speech
David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College is something of a bridge between Infinite Jest and his
final, unfinished novel. Michael Piesch, Wallace’s editor, goes so far as to call “This Is Water” (as the
commencement speech is commonly known) “very much a distillation” of The Pale King’s major motifs.
But if you look closely, you can see a lot of Jest in that commencement speech as well. Take, for
instance, Wallace’s repeated references to our “default settings”:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of:
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of
the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of
natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all
of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth…

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-
directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my
choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired
default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret
everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this
way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an
accidental term.

Don Gately reminded me of this quotation, around the time he reverted to his default setting and beat
the holy living shit out of them wayward partygoers.

Gately had been portrayed so sympathetically that his abrupt reversion to type feels almost like a
betrayal. And in any other novel the transformation would have been shocking. But so much of Infinite
Jest (as with nearly everything Wallace wrote) is about our perpetual war with our default settings, that
it’s unsurprising that his characters lose a battle once in a while.

And this was not the first time I noticed the “default settings” undercurrent in Infinite Jest. The Eschaton
set piece, in particular, struck me as something of an elaborate analogy for civilization’s struggle against
primacy. Here stand dozens of teens in close proximity, armed with buckets of denuded tennis balls,
playing at negotiation and diplomacy. But you know those tennis balls are eventually going to fly.
There’s never any doubt. The reams of rules and elegant complexity and Extreme Value Theorem can
stave off the descent into mayhem for a while, but cannot hold it back forever.

Of course the kids really have no incentive not to start lobbing warheads, and one gets the sense that
Armageddon is the unspoken point of Eschaton. But in real life the consequences of surrender are
considerably more dire (as Gately is presumably going to learn). Wallace makes it clear that the
struggle against our genetic heritage–against territorialism and aggression and intoxication and
passivity– isn’t easy. But he at least seems to believe that it is possible, if only barely.

And he clearly thinks that it’s something worth fighting for. Perhaps the only thing worth fighting for.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is
unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost,
some infinite thing.

Misc:

Hooked: During the roundtable I confessed that, while I enjoy the novel and love reading Wallace’s
writing, “I don’t find the narrative to be particularly engrossing”. That is no longer true: I am now dying to
know what is going to happen to Gately after his startling metamorphosis. Will he be forced to drift from
town to town, letting the world think that he is dead until he can find a way to control the raging spirit
that dwells within him?

Object 1

The Stars Are Right: Also during that roundtable, I predicted that the Bostons of H. P. Lovecraft and
David Foster Wallace would eventually intersect. And:

‘But on this one afternoon, the fan’s vibration combined with some certain set of notes I was practicing
on the violin, and the two vibrations set up a resonance that made something happen in my head … As
the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner
of my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping
out of some backwater of my psyche I not had the slightest inkling was there.”

Yeah, well, called that one.

Lost and Profound: I’m slightly behind because I somehow managed to misplace my copy of Infinite
Jest. I’m going to wear a button that says, “I Lost 12 Pounds–Ask Me How!”
IT DIDN’T MAKE ME HAPPY
BUT I COULDN’T STOP
WATCHING
As your least insightful and hands-down laziest guide, I fully admit that I’m 100 pages behind this week
and I’m not even going to try to fake it. But I did spend a fruitful hour this morning browsing DFW
reviews and interviews.
This from Newsweek:

NEWSWEEK: What’s your history with tennis?

WALLACE: I played serious Juniors, but I burned out. I play twice a week with friends.

And with 12-step groups?

I went with friends to an open AA meeting and got addicted to them. It was completely
riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was
when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

Was it therapeutic?

At that point, I was paralyzed about writing, and I was watching too much TV. Here were
these guys in leather and tattoos sounding like Norman Vincent Peale, but week after week
they were getting better. And I’d go home and work. Going to coffee houses and talking
about literary theory certainly hadn’t helped any. Have you read the book?

I haven’t had the chance, but our reviewer just finished.

My hat’s off to him. Tell him Excedrin works best for eyestrain.

From The Chicago Tribune, a surprising claim about DFW’s familiarity with the Internet:

The research reaped personal as well as professional dividends. “If I hadn’t gone to a bunch of AA
meetings, I wouldn’t have gotten rid of my TV, because I started to realize the TV didn’t make me
happy, but I couldn’t stop watching it,” he said.

Still, he’s been fascinated by some reader reactions so far, including some who liken its
jump-cut style and information bombardment to cruising the Internet. “I’ve never been on
 the Internet,” he said. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive. You don’t have to be on the
Internet for life to feel this way. . . .

“The image in my mind — and I actually had dreams about it all the time — was that this
book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the 20th story of a
building.”

Here Wallace and the director Gus Van Sant have a delightful phone conversation about Good Will
Hunting and it makes me think about the similarities between Will and Hal Incandenza:

DFW: …The thing that interested me about Will — and of course this is like a stroke movie for me — is
you’ve got like a total nerd who is incredibly good looking, can beat people up and has Minnie Driver in
love with him, so I’m, like I saw it twice voluntarily. Most of the serious math weenies who I’ve met, and
I’ve met a few, like who’ve graduated from college at 12 and stuff, they’re not all that smart in other
areas. I’ve like never met any who’ve had photographic memories with respect to stuff like agrarian
social histories of the American South or legal precedent in the American judicial system and stuff, and
so he seemed as if he could almost have done anything that he wanted to do and that math was almost
a kind of accident.

GVS: That’s the way we thought of him. But I always felt that his memory was something
that was kind of like a bonus. And that mathematics was something that he had done when
say he was alone as a child.

DFW: Uh-huh.

GVS: And he had learned and he had become very advanced but that his memory was
maybe separate — the memory was like the trick part. So he remembered certain things
that he had read in different books his retention was so phenomenal but it was almost like a
trick so when he is defeating the guy in the Harvard bar by quoting from text books this sort
of capitalist versus socialist…

DFW: Which trust me is every bonehead kid’s fantasy of being able to do that. (Gus laughs)
Fuckwad with a pony tail in a Harvard bar, I’ve met that guy. The girl I went and saw the
movie with first thought that the guy was like too icky and villainous to be realistic and I
hastened to disagree with her.

And this is just funny, from an online chat Wallace participated in with a random sampling of users who
had a lot of trouble staying on topic:

dfw: A carbuncle’s fucking HUGE, esse. Like an eggplant or something. Actually life-threatening — it
can apparently explode like an appendix and spread toxins throughout your bloodstream. A small but
riveting history of cases on death-by-carbuncle is avail
 Marisa: I could beat Keats up if I wanted to.

dfw: able in back issues of “Mortality and Morbidity” magazine.

Keats: Oh well, in that case, dfw, I should not have made the comparison.

Keats: Since what I have doesn’t approach the gravity of a carbuncle.

Keats: I think I’m just going to ignore Marisa. She’s one of those live-chat troublemakers.

OOPS
Two months ago Matthew Baldwin told the Guides that August 24-28 would be devoted to guest posts
and Kevin Guilfoile, who is a professional, wrote this on a calendar, and Matthew Baldwin, who is not,
did not, and, long story short, Kevin doesn’t have a post prepared, so we’re running the weekly guest
post today and Kevin will do the Friday slot, and all of this is pretty much 100% Matthew’s fault,
although, to be fair, who expects people to write things onto calendars in this day and age, I mean
really.

MATT BUCHER: THE ANXIETY

OF INFLUENCE
Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant
Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at
least three times.
Infinite Jest is an original novel. I mean that in every sense of the word. Wallace has constructed an
original novel that is imaginative and fresh; each storyline drips with his distinctive style. It also is the
origin point for a new type of novel writing, a path others want to follow. Let me go back and repeat part
of that: Wallace has constructed an original novel. The act of constructing a novel of this size and scope
invariably involves some degree of borrowing bits and pieces–either from one’s own drafts and
notebooks, or from the writing of others–and stitching together many smaller pieces.

In addition to Wallace borrowing from his own work (c.f. Antitoi mentioned in his 1992 Harper’s essay
“Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays
and Arguments and available in PDF here), many of the details in Infinite Jest owe something to one
or other of the thousands of novels Wallace had digested up to that point. Some of these references are
homages, some are Nabokovian red herrings, most are just delightful. There are obvious references
like Hamlet and Marathe/Marat, but the four influences I’ve chosen to focus on below might not be
immediately apparent to the first-time reader.
These influences will be familiar to the members of wallace-l and I give that community credit for
unearthing most of these connections.

1.The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: The Bruce Green–Mildred Bonk scene early on (p. 39)
introduces us to Tommy Doocey, “the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept
several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t
notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.”
Compare that description with page 76 from The Liar’s Club (1995), (a memoir, by the way): “I
knew a drug dealer once who collected [snakes] in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a
harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering
over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all
sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: ‘You weally tink dis is
uncut?’ It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD
and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.” Now, Karr
and Wallace were an item (per The New Yorker and The Washington Post), but there’s no
telling if he picked that bit up from Karr’s book or if he himself went to one of those buys at the
real Doocey’s place. Karr’s version is arguably funnier.

2.End Zone by Don Delillo: It would not be unfair to call End Zonethe biggest literary influence
on Infinite Jest (at least the E.T.A. half). That is somewhat ironic since End Zone is only 250
pages long. Several key details from EZ show up in IJ, but the biggest is probably the concept
of Eschaton. The main character of EZ, Gary Harkness, is obsessed with nuclear strategy. He
repeatedly mentions the term eschatology. DT Max tells us that one of the original titles of End
Zone was “Modes of Disaster Technology.”

Some other similarities:

•The militaristic coach in a tower looming over the field;

•The players (football college rather than tennis academy) over-intellectualizing their
roles and future success;
•The widow of the founder is the president of the school;
•The powdered milk.

Wallace and Delillo both spent time in Texas (the setting for End Zone)–Wallace on a Lannan
grant in Marfa (you can read more about Wallace in Marfa in Sean Wilsey’s book Oh the Glory
of It All) and Delillo researching Libra in Dallas (Delillo’s wife is from Texas).

There are dozens of other nods to Delillo’s other books throughout Wallace’s work (“The Broom
of the System” is similar to a phrase inAmericana, the M.I.T. Language Riots are mentioned
in Ratner’s Star, etc.) and the Ransom Center in Austin owns a set of correspondence between
Wallace and Delillo.

3.Red Dragon by Thomas Harris: Consider these two passages:

Red Dragon: “[The gun] was a Bulldog .44 Special, short and ugly with its startling big bore. It
had been extensively modified by Mag Na Port. The barrel was vented near the muzzle to help
keep the muzzle down on recoil, the hammer was bobbed and it had a good set of fat grips. He
suspected it was throated for the speedloader.” (RD, p. 137)

Infinite Jest: “The Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special…blunt and ugly
with a bore like the mouth of a cave…The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise. The
 barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s
bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor…It’s not
a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader….” (IJ, pp. 609-610)

Wallace was admittedly a big fan of Harris’s writing. And he confesses that he loved the
technical details of Tom Clancy novels. In this list Wallace included two Thomas Harris novels
in his top 10. (A lot of people think DFW was joking or something when compiling that list, but
I’m telling you it’s sincere.) I think this is a place where Wallace needed a detail about a beefy
gun and either remembered or came across this in Red Dragon and ran with it.

4.Super Mario Brothers: OK, this seems like a stretch and it’s not literary, but bear with me.
Mario Incandenza, the middle child, is a “small hunched shape with a big head” (p. 32),
extremely short, but he has a big head, an oversized skull on a little body. He sort of looks like
Super Mario. And then there’s this on page 42:

“Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to
half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen
— one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though.
You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get
me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”

For those of you who lived without electricity in Siberia during the late 1980s, the game Super
Mario Brothers featured a character named Mario jumping up to a flagpole at the end of every
level.

Later, walking with Schtitt:

Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the
green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to
catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt says this game the
players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s
brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem:
life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.

So, Mario’s brothers play a game, but now Mario, not Hal, is the focal point–these are Mario’s
brothers. (With respect to the Incandenza brothers, another connection here is with The
Brothers Karamazov. Timothy Jacobs wrote his dissertation at McMaster University partly on
comparing the Brothers Incandenza with the Brothers Karamazov.) The connection between
Mario Incandenza and Super Mario Brothers is by no means rock solid, but the short, dark-
haired Mario concentrating on that flagpole sure does conjure an image worthy of it.

IRONY, IT HAS HAPPENED TO

ME
Someone recently sent me an unpublished manuscript to read and while the book itself had many
things to recommend it, there was one sentence that made me laugh. I won’t use the same context
because I don’t want to embarrass the author, but the gist of it was something like, “It’s so ironic that
you brought garlic bread because I made marinara sauce!”
In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of
ironic.

Of course, people have been misusing the word irony for a lot longer than Alanis Morrissette has been
writing songs, but this one tickled me in particular, creating as it did something of a set theory paradox–
a use of the word irony that did not mean irony but was nevertheless an unintended example of it.
Wallace would be pleased by the circular nature of that, I suspect.

Several of these posts have pointed to Wallace’s expressed distaste for irony, but you never cease to
find examples of people calling him an ironist. I’m sure this is related to his use of satire and especially
metafictional techniques, which have long been associated with irony. But it’s hard to imagine anyone
would read Infinite Jest with anything like a careful eye and not feel the earnestness with which it is
written. Even when Wallace uses the word irony, it’s usually in a pejorative sense, either from the POV
of the White Flaggers and their “irony free zone” or by a Canadian sneering at ironic Americans.

The introduction to my edition of IJ was written by Dave Eggers, who is often compared to Wallace.
That connection is usually made through Eggers’ use of footnotes in the front matter to A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius, which is a memoir not a novel. And like Wallace, Eggers is often used as
the critical poster boy for irony, despite the fact that Eggers might just be the most earnest writer we
have.84

The truth is my generation, which is also the generation of Wallace and Eggers, has had irony imprinted
on it. We grew up with Letterman and came of age with the Simpsons. In fact, with the 40th anniversary
of Woodstock this month, it’s been amusing for me and others my age to watch the seriousness with
which the boomers take their nostalgia. The popular music of our own youth was terrible and we know
it, but we have this arch fondness for Men at Work85 or whatever because it still triggers these sense
memories of being young and worry-free and gloriously hormonal. What you have in Wallace and
Eggers are writers who have instinctively appropriated this ironic reflex and put it in the service of
sincerity–the techniques other writers have used to distance the author from the text they use instead to
engage the reader with it.

On page 694, Wallace has a much more sophisticated take on the same idea:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness
as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means
world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-
weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art
but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be
hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called
peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact
that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this
age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The
U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded
irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And
then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated
naiveté.

The mask is stuck there even on Wallace, but he has found a way to put it to nobler use.

I’ve seen people refer to this as post-irony, but that does nothing to clarify the issue (is a post-modernist
not also modern?) and the issue needs clarification. Most people who have read neither writer (and
some who have) still think they are leading contemporary examples of ironists. 86And the problem with
that assumption is that everything they say then becomes suspect. Every time Eggers speaks, media-
types and bloggers parse his words for the real meaning when the real meaning couldn’t be
clearer.87 Wallace answers a simple question–What are ten books you like? 88–and half the people
don’t believe him.

I don’t think anybody hereabouts needs one, but here’s an irony palette cleanser: Roger Ebert’s
terrific essay this week in which he talks for the first time about his 30 years sober with AA. If
you have time, I encourage you to read the comments, especially the varied reactions from other AA
members (some are angry that Ebert has violatedTradition 11 by shedding his anonymity and talking
publicly about the meetings). It’s an excellent companion piece to IJ.

THE BIBLICAL EXPERIENCE

OF READING INFINITE JEST
Avery Edison is in transit today, so Nick Douglas is subbing in. Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit:
Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, a collection of witty tweets, which was released earlier this
week.
I’m an atheist – if I were in AA, I’d get on my knees with far less openness than Don Gately. But until I
“deconverted” in the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was a Christian. A Creationist, even.
(That made it easier to switch all the way at once, actually.)

At least twice, I tried to read the entire Bible. I failed both times. I hear that once you get through the
grueling books of law, it gets a lot more interesting and things start clicking.

So first let’s tick off the obvious similarities: Infinite Jest is big. It’s hard to read. There are many
characters. It has a cult of followers, and it’s best read with bookmarks in several spots so you can go
back and piece everything together.

But that’s trivia. What matters is, the story of IJ is deeply Biblical. Kind of. So far. (I’m on page 533.)

An evil threatens to destroy the world, and an insignificant person is called to become a hero to protect
it. This is the most pervasive theme in the Bible: The smallest, weakest hero must face the mightiest
forces of evil, because God has called him to. Joseph Campbell organized this archetype into the
Hero’s Journey, a prototype for western hero stories. It’s the story of nearly every memorable Biblical
hero.

When God calls Moses, the exiled Israelite asks, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I
should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? They will not believe me, nor hearken unto my
voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.” Judeo-christian scholars think Moses
was a stutterer. Imagine that, a hero who can’t communicate.

The “judges” who repeatedly rescued the ungrateful nation of Israel from its military enemies were all
similarly unimpressive. Gideon, whom God told to lead Israel’s army against the Midianites (spoiler
alert: he does; they win), was the weakest man in the weakest family in the smallest tribe of Israe. He
also made God prove his identity by performing little miracles with a sheepskin before he’d even listen
to the plan. Samson’s enemies didn’t know where he got his strength – so the man couldn’t have been
visibly muscle-bound; he was just a normal-looking guy who could overpower a lion and topple a
building. The warrior/judge Deborah was a woman, which in ancient Mesopotamia usually relegated
you to making babies, taking showers on the roof, and having poetry written at you.

Okay, here’s where things get complicated. Because while plenty of the Boston AA members are heroes
in their own personal stories, there’s one character who really strikes me as a weakened hero like the
above: Marathe.

Like Moses (or the opening-scene Hal Incandenza) he has trouble communicating, since his English is
still shaky. He comes from the most pathetic province (the one stuck downwind of the Great Convexity)
of a conquered nation (though the Israelites, who at one point complained that things were so bad
under Moses they’d rather go back to being slaves, seem a lot like IJ’s America). He faces temptation
and speaks with his counterpart on a mountaintop (like, you know, Jesus). I don’t know what to make of
his rejection of his holy mission. But he’s certainly the disadvantaged hero, what with having popped his
legs off in a game of beat-the-train-just-barely, and he’s the character most likely to change the whole
game here while musing about the nature of choice and freedom.

The book is Biblical in structure too. Marathe’s conversations with the devil Steeply are an example of
the meditative dialogs, monologues, and thought experiments with which David Foster Wallace chops
up the “story” part of the story, mimicking the Bible’s tendency to hop from history to lawbook to poetry.
(The Bible can also seem terribly self-indulgent, especially around the descriptions of temples and
bloodlines. But hey, what editor is going to call up God and ask for him to tone it down? He’s got a
fucking verse in there condemning anyone who changes a word of it to hell. Must be a real headache
for the copy editors at Zondervan.) As in the Bible, there are letters printed verbatim, oral histories being
codified – like the rules of Eschaton.

The Eschaton breakdown is another great Biblical section: The end of the world foretold. That happens
in more than the book of Revelation. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah make end-of-times prophecies in
their books. An assistant at my youth group once convinced a group of us to go around the table
reading the entire book of Daniel (a talented Israelite academic serving with his three friends in the
Persian king’s court) in one sitting. I don’t think he knew that this book included a big-ass prophetic
passage about the end of days. Well it does, and it’s really boring to read aloud. A lot less fun than
Eschaton’s breakdown.

But so the last similarity really is a stylistic trivium, but it’s my favorite: I know of one other author who
begins this many paragraphs with conjunctions, and that’s the Apostle Paul. Most of the Bible verses
that sound so profound because they begin with “For,” “So,” and “Therefore, brothers,” are from Paul (a
lawyer, kinda) in the middle of a letter to some church or another, in which the whole thing is one long
train of thought and every paragraph builds on the conclusions of the last. A structure like that probably
helps the author justify to the editor that he keep absolutely everything in, even as it glosses over all the
goddamn digressions.

So I think the lesson from all of this is that the author is God, the author can do no wrong, and anyone –
is Pemulis listening? – who tries to edit God while he’s on the job ends up in deep shit.

Amen.

INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 10

And welcome to week 10.
Milestone Reached: 738 (75%)

Sections Read:

Page 666 The Tunnel Club searches the catacombs under E.T.A. for rats.

Page 673: Thierry Poutrincourt joins Steeply and deLint in watching the Hal Incandenza v. Ortho Stice
match.

Page 682 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Matty Pemulis,
prostitute and brother to E.T.A.’s Michael, recalls sexual abuse at the hands of his father.

Page 686 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: After the Stice
match, Hal first runs into deLint, then spends the evening watching his father’s films.

Page 689 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: On the way to
Antitoi Brothers’, Poor Tony Kraus considers snatching the purse of the two women in front of him.

Page 692: Geoffrey Day ruminates on how male Ennet residents have names for their members, and
fond reminiscences about Lenz’s “Hog”

Page 692: A general discussion of depression, alternating between Kate Gompert (thinking about her
Ennet House friend who is addicted to train sets) and Hal (watching The American Century as Seen
Through a Brick).

Page 698 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Newer resident
Ruth van Cleve leaves E.T.A. in the company of Kate Gompert; P.T. Krause follows, eying their bags.

Pages 700-701Five brief vignettes:

•Jim Troeltsch prepares to narrate a wrestling cartridge in his room.

•Michael Pemulis moves a panel in the ceiling with a handle of a racquet.
•Lyle sits in his usual spot, atop the towel dispenser in the weight room.
•Coach Schtitt and Mario “tear-ass” down the road in Schtitt’s BMW.
•Arvil Incandenza calls a “journalistic business”.

Page 702: While Hal watches Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, other E.T.A. members invade the common
room. Joelle attends a cocaine Narcotics Anonymous meetings, hears about a man who walked out on
his wife and child.
Page 711: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun conclusion.

Page 714: P. T. Krause gives into temptation and snatches Kate Grompert’s purse.

Page 716 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Lenz, meanwhile,
high on cocaine, plans to rob two Asian women.

Page 719: The Wheelchair Assassins search Antitoi Brothers’, looking for The Entertainment master
copy.

Page 719 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: P. T. Krause flees
Ruth van Cleve.

Page 721: How the Wheelchair Assassins came to center their search on the Antitoi Brothers’ shop.

Page 723: Fortier and his prosthetic legs.

Page 723 – 14 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Joelle Van Dyne
worries about her teeth, dreams of Don Gately.

Page 724: Fortier goes to the Antitoi Brothers’ shop, where an Entertainment cartridge as been found. It
turns out not to be the master, however.

Page 728: Lenz robs the Asian woman and hides out in a back alley.

Page 729: Marathe arrives at Ennet house.

Characters The characters page has been updated.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

JOIN THE TUNNEL CLUB

This is cross-posted to the forums.
We’ll be featuring guests for the remainder of the week, but I’m appropriating my Monday slot for a
discussion on the future of Infinite Summer.

the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel
Club’s unifying raison d’etre is kind of vague. Tunnel Club activities mostly involve congregating
informally in the better-lit main tunnels and hanging out and catching each other in lies about their lives
and careers before E.T.A., and recapitulating the most recent Eschaton (usually only about five a term);
and the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly
refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club.

Like The Tunnel Club, Infinite Summer’s raison d’etre is kind of vague. Well, not yet. But it will be in a
month, after we’ve finished reading Infinite Jest.

The question of what would happen to Infinite Summer come autumn was one that I was frequently
asked in interviews. And was always very coy in my responses so as not to tip my hand w/r/t the Master
Plan … or, rather, the fact that I had no plan, Master or otherwise. The idea of transitioning the site into
a perpetual online book club thingamaroo certainly occurred to me, but the amount of work the project
entailed (at least until recently) prevented me from mapping out what such a future would look like.

It’s decision time now, though (it takes at least a month to line up Guides, guests, and so forth). And
while I continue to have no solid plan, I am slowly tumbling to the realization that I am going to continue
the site, at least for a while.

Right now I’m trying to figure out what direction to go after IJ. I am well aware that Infinite Jest is a
unique artifact, and that Infinite Summer may implode without it at the core. That said, it seems to me
there are a few distinct paths the site could take from here:

•Focus on the novels folks “have always meant to read”: That would be a mix of the
classics (Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby) and modern stuff (The Kite Runner, Beloved,
etc.).

•Do the postmoderns, those that stimulate and reward discussion: Labyrinths, House of
Leaves,The New York Trilogy–pretty much anything on this list.

•Keep the site DFW oriented: I recently learned that DFW taught a contemporary fiction
course at Illinois State, in which the syllabus was books that he himself had trouble reading.
Like me and I.S., he figured that imposing deadlines on himself would be a good way to trick
himself into finishing them. Novels included JR by Gaddis,Ratner’s Star by Delillo, Blood
Meridian by McCarthy, etc. In addition we could do other novels that Wallace expressed
admiration for (e.g., Dune & The Screwtape Letters).

•Pick books based solely on their conduciveness to catchphrases: Let’s face it: 65% of
Infinite Summer’s success is attributable to the phrase “Infinite Summer” itself. Going forward
we’ll only select books that lend themselves to catchy title + season project names, e.g.,
Autumn 2009: “Things Fall Apart!”, Winter 2009: “Snowlita!”; Spring 2010: “From Here to E-
vernal Equinoxy!”; and so forth

A mix of these themes would probably be best; perhaps a huge, postmodern opus every six months,
and shorter, more conventional novels in between. Right now I am leaning toward 2666 for winter
andGravity’s Rainbow next summer (or The Pale King, depending on publication date). I would also
love to tackle The Recognition andUnderworld, devote a season to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and
maybe have Dystopiathon (think 1984, Brave New World, and Clockwork Orange). For shorter
works, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao andHousekeeping are at the top of my list (I have a
literal list). And as a postJest palate cleanser, I am tempted to devote October to Dracula, to conclude
on Halloween Day.

But as much as Infinite Summer is about literature, it is also about community. And we’d love to get your
input on the website’s future, in either the comments or the forums. We’d love for you to join The
Tunnel Club and help us draft our very own version of Robert’s Rules.

And thank you for your continued participation–I hope the Infinite Summer experience has been as
wonderful and engrossing for you as it has been for all of us.
MARIA BUSTILLOS: THE
WONDER OF WALLACE-L
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork, in which Wallace fans may read the
author’s favorite chapter, “David Foster Wallace: the Dork Lord of American Letters.” Her next book, Act
Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman, is coming out in September. She lives in Los Angeles, can be
contacted at dorkismo@gmail.com, and is on Twitter as @mariabustillos.
My first post to wallace-l, the mailing list dedicated to David Foster Wallace, is dated 6th July 2001. I
had finished Infinite Jest only the week before, and spent the following days obsessively trolling the
Internet for clues to the mysteries that remained. wallace-l was quite obviously home to a ton of
devoted, knowledgeable Wallace fans, and I hoped that, through these sages, I would be able to unlock
the novel’s secrets without having to read and study it more closely. Which didn’t happen at all! Instead
I wound up studying the novel for years on end, and having the time of my life.

Though eager to tap the wisdom of the wallace-l membership, I was shy to post at first, intimidated by
their intimacy as well as their erudition. But on that day, Marcus Gray had asked the list about the likely
value of a set of signed Rushdie proofs he’d acquired somehow. I’d been an avocational bookseller for
some years, so I told Marcus what I could about his Rushdie proofs, and concluded with the following:

I just signed onto this list yesterday; finished Infinite Jest last week and am still kind of boggled, like I
could tie a handkerchief around my head and start moaning "my braim hurts." Anyway, I hope you guys
can all supply really concise Cliff's Notes-style answers to my many questions, so I don't have to read
the damn thing again right away ....

And so it began.

Right after my post on that day in July, Marco Carbone weighed in on Warp Records and their influence
on Kid A; Darcy James Argue (yes, thatDarcy James Argue) quoted Woody Allen and gave some guy
stick for dissing, on principle, music that was rapidly composed; Hillary Brown took up cudgels on
behalf of Salman Rushdie (“funny doesn’t equal baby food”); Stephen Schenkenberg described Sigur
Ros’s live show as a “caught-in-the-most-wonderful-snowglobe-ever experience” and praised Wallace’s
obviously-firsthand grasp of tennis lingo; and Steve McPherson lamented his inability to get hold of a
copy of The Lost Scrapbook(excellent novel, btw).

All this and so very much more came within three days of my first post. Such a high level of discourse,
such humor and fun, such omnivorous interest and delight in everything from Martin Amis’s teeth to the
sociological function of slang; and with room, too, for the goofiest observations and the worst puns, and
all leavened with the ineffable pleasure of baiting David Fleissig, who could invariably be counted on to
Blackberry in with exasperated exhortations to stay on topic (as if!)

wallace-l has served as my confessional, my local pub and my support group (the latter, especially,
after 9/11 and the 2004 elections.) There have been scraps and little list-dramas (there always are!) but
for me it has always been fun, always interesting.

The wildest episode of all came when Thomas Harris recommended a novel called The Last
Western by Thomas Klise to the list. It sounded great, so when I came across a copy I snapped it right
up, and reported back in March of 2002 that it bore all sorts of strange resemblances toInfinite Jest:

there is Herman Felder, the drug-addicted genius filmmaker, engineer and camera inventor whose
apocalyptic work ("Cowboys and Indians") tells the story of the human condition (along more martial
lines, maybe, than does the film 'Infinite Jest') in a stupendous, world-altering work of art whose
creation proves the auteur's undoing. (Incidentally, as in IJ, the title of the book refers to the film and
vice versa.)

And likewise, the story of the book and the story of the film are the same, intertwined and
sometimes indistinguishable one from the other.

There is also a fruitful comparison to be made between The Servants of the Used, Abused
and Utterly Screwed-up in TLW and the residents of Ennet House in IJ; the place apart (a
12th house enclosure, astrology fans), where the true business of the world takes place.
And there is a very Gately-like character in the mute pilot, Truman (né Bleeder).

I was in such a panic to discuss this book with other Wallace fans that I offered my copy to anyone on
the list who would care to read it, and someone took me up on this offer: one Erwin Hoesi of
Klosterberg, Germany, then living in a monastery (and now a financial analyst living in London, with
whom I had a many-splendored evening just a few weeks ago.)

Erwin, too, had found all sorts of weirdly evocative correspondences between The Last Western and IJ.
His remarks were so completely thrilling to me that when I read about a call for papers on Wallace from
the “Ball State University Project”, I thought I might throw down, though I hadn’t written anything similar
in years. Perhaps a closer study of Klise would unlock all the mysteries of Infinite Jest!

So I wrote to David Foster Wallace himself for the first time, asking for his remarks on The Last
Western. He wrote back, in his matey way, just a few days later. (He always wrote people back; I really
don’t know of anyone whom he didn’t write back.)

David Foster Wallace: “I am just about the world’s worst source of info on [Infinite Jest] …”

Dear Ms. Bustillos,

Thank you for your very very complimentary note. I regret that I’m not going to be able to
 help you with your project, for the following reasons: 1. I am wholly ignorant of The Last
Western—never heard of it before today* (if it turns out everyone else in the world has read
it, it’ll just be one more instance of my ignoramusness); 2. I tend, to the extent that I
remember IJ at all, to get all sorts of different mss. and draft and pre-edited versions of it
jumbled up with whatever version of it actually came out, and so I am just about the world’s
worst source of info on that book.

I’m flattered that you asked, though, and I wish you luck with your enterprise and the
German ex-monk. Yrs. Truly, David F. Wallace

*Same with the “Ball State University Project,” which manages to sound at once academic,
Blair Witch-ish, and prurient. I don’t think I want to know.

Imagine my total shock! My brains felt like they’d been plunged in ice water. This is what Ptolemy must
have felt like when he realized his orbits weren’t perfect! I had been so certain that Wallace had so
cleverly and magically transmuted half the themes in The Last Western into Infinite Jest. I dashed off a
note to him that began, “You’ve never heard of The Last Western?! Do I ever feel like the biggest idiot
going!” and I apologized, and went on to discuss The Blair Witch Project and a few other things, not
really expecting to hear from him again. But a matter of days later, I received this (embarrassing! but so
funny) postcard.

“Dear Ms. B.”, he began. He replied that he’d been terribly scared by The Blair Witch Project (as I had
been) and also by the Blair Witch “fake-documentary infomercial thing,” and finally concluded:

“You should maybe go ahead and do your paper if you want—I won’t tell anybody that I’d never heard
of ‘The Last Western.’ Cordially, David W.”

If I loved him before, for his work, I loved him again, so much more, even, for being like that. But I never
did write the paper. Too embarrassed! Maybe I will, though, someday.

A long time later, I gave Wallace a copy of The Last Western at a reading. He was wonderfully gracious
and kind. A fellow wallace-lister remembered this, and asked him a few months later if he’d read it yet;
he said it was almost at the top of his “fun pile.” I often wonder if he ever got to it, and if he liked it.

The moral of the story being, please join wallace-l. The list is now moderated by the gifted Matt Bucher,
a great Wallace scholar himself, who has long kept things welcoming and orderly over there. It’s a
gathering of people who value intellectual curiosity, humanity, candor and humility, like a mirror of
Wallace’s own qualities, and in that way is keeping something of him alive.

COLIN MELOY: THOUGHTS AT

PG. 750; OR, STAYING AT PACE
Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album
is The Hazards of Love.
First thing: Apparently summer is not infinite. It’s September 2nd and it’s cold in the mornings here and
the leaves are just starting to turn and our tomatoes are dying.

Second thing: I’m keeping at pace.89 That’s my stand. And it’s not like I’ve had to hold myself back or
anything – I’ve had kind of a busy summer and I’m not really a fast reader. However: I think another
guest commenter may have mentioned, flying a lot lends itself to marathon reading sessions. The most
traction I’ve had on the book has been achieved at 30K feet. So early on I actually had some breathing
room and I managed to get a few other books read during my infinite summer. 90Initially I thought it’d be
easy; that I’d get my 12 pages in IJ done and I’d be able to take on some light auxiliary reading. Things
got a little crazy; I went on rock tour and I’ve had to abandon that plan. And while I’m sure there were
folks who were pretty chuffed with themselves to be able to tweet “Finished. Think I’ll start in on 2666”
in mid-July, I think that keeping to the schedule91 is the proper way to do this thing. For one thing, 12
pages a day is a reasonable amount, especially considering that I end up reading at least 3 of those
pages more than once. And, more importantly, I’ve really loved reading all of the supplementary
blogging that everyone has been doing92 Rushing ahead would somehow lessen the experience, don’t
you think? So I’ve kept to pace.

Third thing: Okay: I’d like to just state that David Foster Wallace’s greatest achievement with this
novel, in my estimation, is that he has managed to create a book whose key plot components are an
elite tennis academy, a batty avant-garde film director, a dystopic future in which time is subsidized by
corporations, a vast addiction-recovery complex, a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois
separatists/assassins, a film that is so compelling to its viewers that it will literally reduce them to a
vegetable state, and a rampaging horde of feral hamsters and yet nothing has really happened. That’s
the genius of this novel. It’s like Wallace is pushing the very limit of what plot elements a story can
reasonably sustain, letting those elements wildly orbit one another until a kind of big bang occurs. One
hopes. When describing this book to others (my baffled tour-mates, for one, sitting in their bus-bunks
with their wrists unbent, blithely reading some slim novel or other) I’ve said that I’m well over ¾ of the
way through this 1000 page book and I think I’m still getting exposition. I’d become really accustomed
to the structure of the book and started to learn not to expect too much from the little plot pointers that
DFW would throw at me – I grew closer to the characters in the understanding that these disparate
worlds may never meet. And all of a sudden, things are changing: it was like witnessing the meeting of
two old friends, you know, like one from college and one from high school. When Steeply was watching
Hal play tennis. When one of the assassin roulants scoops up the unsuspecting engineer. When – holy
shit – Marathe infiltrates the Ennet house! These perilous orbits are crashing closer and closer together,
I think. We’re moving out of exposition, dear readers! The pages are starting to turn a little faster –
though I’ll still be keeping at pace, thanks very much.
JOHN WARNER: MY OWN
INFINITE SUMMER
John Warner is the author of the leading volume of fake writing advice,Fondling Your Muse: Infallible
Advice From a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant. He teaches at Clemson University.
Twice in my life, when I had no one, David Foster Wallace was there for me. The first time was Labor
Day weekend, 1988, my freshman year of college at the University of Illinois. 93 No one had told me that
even though it was only the second week of school that everyone was supposed to go home. My dorm
complex, “the six pack,”94 looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, space for many with
very few present. Occasionally I’d hear Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” coming from some
other lonely soul’s boom box echoing through the central courtyard, but for the most part it was me and
my six inch (not a misprint) black and white television and an advance copy of Wallace’s story
collection, Girl with Curious Hair.

My mom owned an independent bookstore at the time and one of her sales reps must’ve said
something like, “this is what the kids are reading these days,” and so she’d sent it to me. A week and a
half into school, I was off to an uninspired start, enrolled in 15 hours worth of gut courses, 1200 person
lectures with little accountability and even less intellectual stimulation. I enjoyed the free time they left
me to nap, but I was well on my way to sleepwalking through my education. Out of sheer boredom I
picked up the book and began reading and those stories became my companions through the long
weekend.

Since the English AP exam at the time stopped well short of postmodernism, I didn’t know that such
things existed, but the first story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” with Alex Trebek as a character
literally tickled me. I had an instant sensation that unlike most of what I’d been fed in high school, this
Wallace guy had things to say about the world I lived in. Even now there’s very few writers who manage
to write about the world we inhabit today instead of ones in the past.

His fascinations – television, politics, the way people can be casually cruel or unusually kind to each
other – were mine. While up to that time I might’ve said that I had an “interest” in writing, I didn’t really
know that these subjects were in bounds for a writer. I’d assumed they were too, I don’t know, small.
Wallace proved to me that the opposite was true.

Fast forward nine years when I had my own individual Infinite Summer. That interest in writing had
metastasized into an MFA degree from McNeese St. University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. 95 I’d turned
in a thesis that I’d begun to loath even as it came off the printer. The stories were primarily ersatz
Carver, the kind of competent, shapely tale that got through workshop with minimal fuss, but for sure
didn’t excite anyone, least of all me. I was a justifiably unpublished sub-mediocrity and it looked like it
was about time to pick up an LSAT prep book.

I had three months left on a lease and nowhere to live after that, so for the summer following graduation
I stayed in Lake Charles with the only possessions I hadn’t sold at a yard sale or shipped back home: a
bed roll, a lamp, and a copy of Infinite Jest, and my dog.96 Some friends had stuck around as well, so
days were spent shooting pool or watching movies, maybe drinking too early and too much and nights it
was me and the lamp and the dog and the book. I’d become a certified Wallace fan by that point, having
devoured A Supposedly Fun Thing… and Broom of the System. His essay on the Illinois State Fair
cemented our bond as Midwesterners. I thought he was, to put it plainly, a fucking genius. Nights, I
listened to the condensation drip from the window air-conditioner and read, sometimes just a few
pages, other times for hours. Where writing and creativity had begun to look hopelessly narrow, Infinite
Jest, cracked the world back open.

Once again, reading David Foster Wallace showed me what was possible. But as intimidating as his
brilliance was and is, above all, the book demonstrates that if you want to write something at all
compelling you’ve got to bore in on what interests you and just work that shit until the goods come out
the other side. During my graduate studies I’d lost that feeling, or more accurately, I’d never found it
because I was too wrapped up in what the circumscribed group of workshoppers were going to say. I’d
been keeping my neck firmly tucked toward my shell lest it get lopped off.

Summer over, having not written a word for better than three months I moved back to Chicago, into my
parents’ basement. I was twenty-seven, broke, jobless and imagined a future life as a kind of mole-man,
my eyes saucering from the lack of natural illumination as I spent more and more time underground.
One day I started typing a dialog between a man looking for a job and a career counselor and all of the
sudden the career counselor is talking about gung fu and the Ultimate Fighting Championships and a
poem by W.D. Snodgrass97 and there’s a little fillip in my stomach that I haven’t felt for quite some time.
That dialog and what followed it became the first story98 I ever published and it wouldn’t have
happened without Infinite Jest reminding me what’s possible (namely anything).

A couple of years later I had the chance to tell David Foster Wallace about all this, to thank him
personally for his example and inspiration, but I choked. I’d been invited to tag along to a dinner with
Wallace and about six others after a reading by a friend of mine at Illinois State where Wallace was
teaching at the time. He was low key and cool, obviously smart, but not showy about it and as the
dinner progressed, the words I might use to convey my admiration roiled around my head without
finding any purchase. The best I could do was telling him that I “really enjoyed” his writing at the time of
our farewells.

After his passing, as I read the tributes to the man that had been pouring into the McSweeney’s
website, more grief fell out of me than I thought possible for someone I’d met once, briefly. I told a friend
about this and very seriously he said, “It’s like he’s your Princess Diana.”

NICK MANIATIS: IN SEARCH OF

FIRM GROUND
Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling
Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher. Once he finished Infinite Jest for the
fourth time he stopped counting.
The final 200 pages always make me feel like I’m sliding down an ultra fast slippery-dip. I can see the
end, but I feel like I’m traveling way too quickly to stop in time. Is there firm ground to land on over the
edge?

This is so much fun. Things are whizzing by so quickly. I wish I could slow time and savour every
moment.

It does. I do.

One thing of which I am certain is that I don’t want this to end.

Ever.

So I run back and climb up the that steep, steep, ladder once more. Already forgetting what it was like
to launch off the end and hoping that it continues to be as exhilerating as before.

It is.

More recently I’ve learned to look up and away from the slide. Sweep my eyes from side to side and
take in the view. Enjoy the journey more than the destination. What I see is amazing.

There are slides all around me. More people. All engrossed. Worried. Entertained. Thoughtful. Crying.
Laughing. Some of them are staring right back at me.

I would never have guessed Infinite Jest would become such a large part of my life. In fact, I rarely
consider just how much time I have spent with this novel, because honestly, sometimes it scares me.

One thing I know for certain is that this book makes me feel connected to other people. I have
conversed with fellow readers electronically for years, many of them through Wallace-L. Listers,
journalists, bloggers, academics, fans, publishers, agents and friends. The experience of meeting other
David Wallace readers at the Sydney Writers’ Festivalearlier this year has me super excited about
the November conference in New York. I can’t wait to meet some of you.

This book builds networks and facilitates relationships.

Mark and Matt, two friends, 10 or so years (has it been that long?) apart. I shared with both of them, in
person, their first read of Infinite Jest.

Terrified. What if they don’t like it as much as me? Am I obsessed? A creepy fan? Addicted…? So, you
like it? Don’t let them see how elated I am. Why play it down?

I’m sorry we’ve fallen out of touch, Mark. I miss you. Email me. I know you have my address.

Thank you Infinite Summer. I love reading all of your comments in the infinite summer forums, a couple
of the threads in there have blown me away. I’m also loving the blogs: Infinite Detox, Infinite
Zombies, Infinite Tasks, and Kul. Thank you.

I can’t help but hope David Wallace realised what he achieved with this novel.

This novel speaks to me.

It make me feel more connected to my family and friends.

More connected to other fans and readers.

More connected to my world.

I better understand my faults and misgivings.

I am more generous and open to differing points of view.

I watch tennis with eyes I never knew I had.

I no longer laugh at AA.

I understand that letting go, saying no, and not being a slave to my desires is real freedom.

Double binds only make you stronger.

Connecting with others is connecting with yourself.

I understand that one can, simultaneously, fall in love and choose to love.

Enjoy what is left. You only get one first read.

INFINITE SUMMARY – WEEK 11

Milestone Reached: 812 (82%)
Sections Read:

Page 736: Joelle cleans her room, ponders her relationship with Himself and the movies she starred in,
and recollects the Thanksgiving she shared with the Incandenzas.

Page 747: Marathe speaks to Pat. M. regarding admittance to Ennet House. A discussion about
discovered cartridges piques his interest. Marathe ponders his various options (rush off to alert the
AFR, kill Pat M. outright, etc.)

Page 755 – 11 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Mario wanders
around E.T.A. with a camera strapped to his head, collecting footage for a documentary. He ends up
interviewing his mother, and asking her how one can tell if someone is sad. The Moms launches into an
extended monologue about disassociation, engulfment, and suppression.

Page 769: Hal and Mario are again sharing a room. They discuss their childhood dog S. Johnson, liars
(Orin and Pemulis in particular), and whether it even occurs to Mario that people might lie to him. Hal
admits that he would have failed the urine test, if Pemulis hadn’t extorted a 30 day reprieve.

Page 774: Kate and Marathe chat in a bar. Marathe tells Kate about how his met and married his wife,
and Kate is disappointed in the “love” story.

Page 785 – 17 NOVEMBER / YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT: Hal arrives at
Ennet house, and asks for a schedule of NA meetings.

Endnote 324: In the lockeroom, Pemulis consoles his little buddy Possathwaite, who is weeping and
declaiming “nothing is true”.
Page 784: Under interrogation from Rodney Tine, Molly Notkin tells everything all knows about
Madame Psychosis and J. O. Incandenza, including the disfigurement of Joelle during Thanksgiving
when her mother had flung acid at her father, the father (and Orin) had ducked, and Joelle had gotten it
in the face.

Endnote 332: Wayne does some “candid sharing” on Troeltsch student broadcast; deLint tells Pemulis
that he can either finish the term or hit the trail now, but that his tenure at E.T.A. is effectively over.

Page 795: Hal tries to go to an addicts meeting, but somehow winds up at it “Inner Infant”.

Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith
O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.

ROUNDUP
This week many readers saw the light at the end of the summer and sprinted toward it, finishing the
novel and writing about the end. If you are still behind the spoiler line, you should avoid:
•Gerry Canavan, On Endings.
•Kevin Carey of A Supposedly Fun Blog, So I Lied.
•Daryl Houston of Infinite Zombies, I Know a Good Book When I Want to Write One.
•Lefttothereader, Infinite Summer …?.
•Pages Turned, Couldn’t Keep to the Schedule.
•Girl Detective, 100%.
•Uncertain Principles, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
•Infinite Detox, Spoiler Line: ∞
Earlier, Infinite Detox was outraged at E.T.A. (and the novel’s) treatment of Michael Pemulis. Infinite
Tasks concurred.

Paul Debraski is sticking the schedule; his latest posts looks at Wallace’s prescience regarding
technology. Sarah observes that the book has become abruptly infantile.

HOLLOW MAN
I love Nashville. Not the city (I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting), but the 1975 film by Robert
Altman. Altman was something of a cinematic David Foster Wallace, creating long and sprawling
narratives that were superficially “rambling” and profoundly intricate, and which focused almost
exclusively on the characters and the relationships between them.Nashville tackles half a dozen stories
at least, some big and some small, and all in parallel. That is to say, it’s more like a collection of loosely
knitted short stories than a single chronicle–minor characters occasionally stray from one plotline to
another, but by and large the narratives are like strands in a rope, twined but distinct. The only thing
resembling convergence in Nashville is the end, when most of the characters find themselves attending
the same political rally (long story).
Twenty years later, Altman made a similarly structured film entitled Short Cuts and, in this one, there’s
no unifying event whatsoever.99 And Short Cuts is often cited as a progenitor for another of my all-time
favorite movies, Magnolia (this one by the wonderful Paul Thomas Anderson), which also features a
number of stories that fail to fully intersect.100

This type of film doesn’t really have a strict genre classification, but henceforth I shall call them:
anticonfluential.

Of course, I did not know such a word existed until recently. And maybe the term didn’t exists, until
Wallace-via-J. O. Incandenza, made it up. But once I saw it, the word, “anticonfluence”, in the pages
of Infinite Jest, I thought I knew what I was in for. I figured that the three storylines–E.T.A., Ennet, and
Marathe/Steeply–would never merge, that the rich kids would do their drills on the hill, and the down-
and-out would keep coming back, that Marathe and Steeply would talk and talk and talk, and never the
thrain would meet.101 And where this would catch others by surprise, I would close the book with the
smug satisfaction of having foreseen all this as early as endnote 24.

And then Steeply appeared in the stands of an E.T.A. game, and Marthe rolled into Ennet House. And
no sooner had I hastily adjusted my hypothesis to fit the new data (Steeply and Marathe will serve as
the bridge between E.T.A. and Ennet, but the school and the shelter will not directly interact) when Hal
arrives at Ennet, asking for NA brochure. Even Lenz and P. T. Kraus shared an alley, albeit briefly.

The moral here, methinks, is: stop trying to outguess Wallace, because that dude will punk you hard.

With all this anti-anti-confluence afoot, it would be easy to overlook what is, to my mind, the biggest
revelation in the book thus far. Waaaaay back on page 693, Hal muses on anhedonia:

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds
terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them
well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being —
but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that
Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy
one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.

Since the first page of Infinite Jest (or, rather, since page 223, when we learned that the first page falls
chronologically after the rest), the big question in my mind has been: what terrible thing happens to Hal,
that leaves him sounding like “Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet”? But this passage turns that
first chapter on its head. Because although Hal feels empty inside in Y.D.A.U., by Year of Glad he’ll be
saying “I am in here.” The question now becomes what wonderful thing happens to Hal, that makes his
life complete?

Misc.

Thumbs Up?: Of the aforementioned Nashville, Roger Ebert said: “after I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I
understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser.” And after his recent column about A.A.
garnered multiple recommendations for Infinite Jest, Ebert said of the novel “I have it right here.
Started it once, am starting again.” One can only imagine what kind of review he will provide at its end.

Zeno’s Paradoxes: As Kevin and others have noted, Wallace said he structure the novel “like
something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal”. By fractal, I
took Wallace to mean this: that there exist in the book large “things” (themes, motifs, situations, events)
that appear nearly identical to smaller “things”, save only scale (in much the same way that the large
triangular Sierpinski Gasket is composed of smaller triangles, which are composed of smaller triangles
still). But endnotes 324 and 332 are showing the novel to be fractal in yet another sense.

One property of fractals is that they can expand endlessly. 102 The example commonly given is the
coastline of a fjord. From a high altitude there is a ragged but definite coastline, of what appears to be
100 kilometers. But when you zoom in a bit you see that the ragged bits meander in and out to such a
degree that the true length of the coast is a few more kilometers than you had originally thought. You
zoom in more and discover that there is still more coastline, this adding additional meters to the total.
Zooming in further adds centimeters. And then millimeters. And then microns.

So too does the total page count of this novel seem to be growing right in front of our eyes, now that we
are finding entire chapters squirreled away in the endnotes. I get into bed, flip ahead to see how many
pages I have to read to read before reaching the next break, and discover it to be eight; 14 pages later I
close the book, having reached it. It’s like a house in a Harry Potter novel, that appears to be a hovel
from the outside and yet somehow contains 12,000 square feet inside.

Pre-quadrivial : Oh god, that “17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times” flier made me
laugh and laugh.

OFTEN HE RECKONS, IN THE

DAWN, THEM UP. NOBODY IS
EVER MISSING.
I recall going to see The Sheltering Sky, which was based on the novel by Paul Bowles, at a theater on
34th Street in New York. I found the film a little dull, frankly — like the book itself, I wanted to like it more
than I actually did. But there’s a scene at the end where Debra Winger’s in a bar and Paul Bowles
himself appears before her and asks her, “Are you lost?” And somehow the fact of the author himself
showing up in the film, the presence of the man through whom the story had actually flowed, reduced
me to tears. And not just a little wet-eyed sniffle, but true and gut-wrenching bawling. My embarrassed
boyfriend supported me for the entire walk to Paddy Reilley’s, a bar on 2nd Avenue which held a variety
of liquids he hoped one of which would calm me down. I did eventually, reluctantly, still unable to
explain what had hit me. I’d had a similar weeping fit sitting crumpled in a chair outside Poets’ Corner in
Westminster Abbey. I don’t know what it was, exactly, that got to me — all those writers! who mean so
much! right here! — but I know it hit me hard. I once told someone it felt like God was pressing his
thumb right down on my skull.
It’s true that while I’ve enjoyed Infinite Jest very much, this summer has been rough going for me in
ways that have tested my focus and resolve on several fronts, and it’s confirmed for me that I’m not
really cut out for this Guide business. I’m fascinated by other people’s analysis but I’m not much of an
analyzer myself, and I’m sorry if you’ve rolled your eyes more than once reading what I’ve had to offer.
I’m a fan of this book, but sometimes fans can’t always summon the kind of commentary that the object
of their, uh, fandom (that’s a word, right?) . . . oh, you know what I mean.

The last and maybe only big book I had trouble shutting up about in a way that compares to how many
people feel about IJ — the book I bought for friends who I’m sure never read it, and which I have no
doubt would have spawned a hideous number of mailing lists had the Internet existed when it was
published in 1982 — was James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. A 560-page long poem, is
what it is, and it changed my life.

I don’t think there are a lot of parallels between Sandover and IJ, though like many IJ fans, I’ve
read Sandover multiple times, and soon as I’ve finished the last page I loop right back to page one and
let the momentum carry me through the beginning all over again. Like IJ, Sandover has actual literary
critics who appreciate its many levels of intricate discourse (I just made that up! “Levels of intricate
discourse”! Jesus, I’m tired), but in Sandover‘s case, the more literary readers view the “fans” as
uncritical knuckle-draggers who believe in astrology and collect commemorative shot glasses. IJ‘s
community doesn’t seem to fall apart along those lines, and for that I’m grateful. Either that or
Matthew’s done a hell of a job of deleting the withering comments before I’ve ever seen them.

See, this is another mark of a terrible critic — I’m making this whole thing about me.

As we lead up to the first anniversary of DFW’s death (this Saturday), just the thought of that event
starts to choke me up. I get a tinge of that God-thumb-skull feeling, frankly, which is no good in public. I
try to let it ride. Breathe and keep reading. These last 200 pages are turning into exactly the kind of
steep-grade toboggan ride I’ve been hoping for, and I’m so grateful I stuck it out. Thanks, you guys.
Thanks Matthew, thanks Kevin and Avery, thanks and thanks again to Michael Pietsch, and to all the
guest commenters. Almost done. Almost ready to start again.

WHERE EVERYTHING WAS AS

FRESH AS THE BRIGHT BLUE
SKY
(Note: I’m going to bend the spoiler line in minor ways with this post, but we’re on the steep downhill to
the end and I think most of us are either ahead of the calendar or so far behind it the spoiler line is
almost meaningless.)

When I was young–at whatever age it was when I first had an awareness of sex, albeit one poorly
informed by nascent hormones and edited-for-TV James Bond films–I can remember being very
concerned that when I became old enough to have sex I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I was years
and years from having the means, motive, and opportunity to have sex with anyone, but I had this idea
of sex as being pleasurable to the exclusion of everything else. And it scared me a little bit because I
wanted to be a professional baseball player, which presumably involved a lot of practice time.
Kids are incredibly efficient pleasure seekers who spend every minute of the day trying to evade
boredom, so it’s probably not surprising or unusual that a child could conceive of a concept that so
mirrors The Entertainment. It’s far more surprising that Wallace had the empathy to conceive of it as an
adult.103

As ETA custodian Kenkle says to custodian Brandt on p. 874:

‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is
the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A
present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is
now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between
unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’

Kids have this incredible capacity for happiness. They can give themselves an endorphin rush the likes
of which you and I haven’t experienced in decades from just the sight of a new stuffed animal or the
mention of chicken nuggets. And although they get sad, for most kids sadness is fleeting. When one of
my kids cries because he doesn’t want to go to bed, all I have to do is remind him of some small thing
that makes him happy to start him trembling with joy. (“Guess what? We’re going to the dry cleaners
tomorrow and you know what they have at the dry cleaners? Lollipops!”) Most kids can choose to be
glad almost whenever they want.

To adults this ability to choose happiness seems like a superpower, as enviable as the ability to fly.

Because when you become an adult, the whole happy-sad axis gets inverted. Adults have a limited
capacity for happiness and that happiness is always fleeting. On the other hand, it seems like our
capacity for sadness is almost bottomless.

This (a little bit spoilery) is from a discussion on page 880 Show Spoiler▼

References to adult longing for the childhood capacity for happiness are everywhere in this book. Mute
in his hospital bed, in terrible pain, Gately alternates between feverish adult dreams conflating pleasure
and death, and persistent memories of childhood, where he watches TV and trades small kindnesses
with a neighbor who, feared by all the grown-ups, eventually hangs herself; Hal stumbles into what he
hopes is an NA meeting only to find a group of burly, hairy, sobbing men holding teddy bears and trying
to coax out their “inner infant”; Mario, who has managed to prolong childhood into adulthood is
worshipped by his mother (who is having sex with a student 40 years her junior) and envied by his
brother (who gave up his childhood to pursue greatness in tennis, a profession where you retire when
you’re still in your twenties), wonders how you can even confirm when someone is sad.

And of course there is Joelle:

(T)hings had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently;
specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were
getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex,
refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently
issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost
freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and
indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting
condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who
said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears,
addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her
childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship
to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained,
full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Barn-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.

Of course, it was her father’s attempts to regress her to childhood that eventually led to her disfiguring.

I don’t have anything to add on the subject that Wallace doesn’t say more eloquently. But one of the
real wonders of Infinite Jest is that DFW provides the reader with so many prisms through which to read
it–I won’t even pretend to believe I’ve discovered them all–and while the core themes of happiness and
sadness remain constant throughout, the experience of the book changes depending on the glass you
pick up.

GRAPES OF WRAITH
Yes, I’ll start off by apologizing for that post title. It’s an awful pun, rendered more awful when viewed in
light of the fact that it doesn’t even make sense. Still — we’ve just spent the summer reading Infinite
Jest, so hopefully we’re used to things not making sense.
I, for one, thought I was used to it. Wheelchair assassins, massive concavities, an institute full of jocks
who somehow posses higher brain function — these were all concepts that astounded and befuddled
me, but they were at least possible according to physics, if a little unlikely. Or a lotunlikely, in the case of
the clever athletes.

However.

To me — an avowed atheist who has occasionally been referred to as “too rational” — the wraith that
visits Don Gately in the hospital room doesn’t so much test my suspension of disbelief as it does rip it
apart and stomp on the broken remains whilst screaming “You’re damn right there’s ghosts now, Avery.
How you like me now!?”

Of course, this book is far from didactic and should not be taken literally. So it it’s okay with you
guys104, I’d like to explore some possibilites that could explain the presence of unusual words in
Gately’s head and the rather personal details of Himself’s life that have also found their way into Don’s
indestructible noggin’ without having to resort to The Haunting Of ICU Ward 7.

The most boring answer105 is Joelle. Pages 856-7 show her recounting — with no consideration of the
“anonymous” part of Alcoholics Anonymous — the partial life story of the hatchet-dented Little Wayne
chap. It’s not beyond the realm of rationality to conclude that she might also tell Don about the
Incandenzas, and that the bizarre and sudden appearance of the ‘wraith’ can be put down simply to the
delusions that accompany massive physical trauma.

We’ve already witnessed Don claiming that he doesn’t understand Joelle’s speech at times (during their
first few conversations at Ennet House), and it’s quite possible that this is another of those times —
hence the words appearing in Don’s head.

Alternatively, Joelle could have left behind some tapes of Sixty Minutes More or Less to keep him
company whilst she is gone, hoping that her voice is something that would comfort him. The show often
consists ofnothing but words that Don wouldn’t understand, often without context and daunting even to
those who haven’t just had their shoulder blown off.
Another explanation is that Gately, in his capacity as one of the Ennet House Staff, may have watched
some of J. O. Incandenza’s works and been subjected to some kind of info-dump. We already know
that Ennet House — care-of Clenette — has recently received some cartridges from E.T.A, and has
apparently been a beneficiary of the tennis academy’s generosity before. Perhaps Himself’s
experiments into the technical capabilities of film enabled him to create a Work that taught you things
on a strictly subconscious basis.

One can assume that, towards the end of his life, the Mad Stork was sufficiently mad enough to encode
his biography into the annular pulses of his movies. Perhaps Gately, reviewing cartridges donated
before his hospitalization, viewed just the right combination of entertainments to unlock this knowledge.
Perhaps the aforementioned trauma has done so instead.

My third theory106 is far more outlandish, while still fitting in to a world that doesn’t include supernatural
beings (yes, I’m still annoyed about the ghost. Okay?) Perhaps Don Gately has been unfortunate
enough, after assaulting the three Canadians, to fall into the hands of the Les Assassins des Fauteuils
Rollents.

Perhaps the A.F.R. are under the impression that Gately’s murder of Guillaume DuPleiss (infamous
anti-O.N.A.N. organizer) coupled with his association with Joelle, mean that Gately is some kind of
government operative or otherwise shady person with knowledge of the location of the master copy of
Infinite Jest. Perhaps the A.F.R. are — with their demonstrated ability to play the long game —
attempting to fool Gately into thinking he is in hospital, and are providing actors or masked decoys or
people he knows to try and coax this highly sought information from him. Perhaps the Wraith is Gately’s
mind’s reaction to such a terrible and insane situation.

Perhaps if you think such a plan is too outlandish or nonsensical for the AFR to enact, you have a
wonderful seventy-five pages ahead of you.

JOHN MOE: I DID NOT READ

INFINITE JEST THIS SUMMER
John Moe is a writer and public radio host now living in St Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the
book Conservatize Me and his short humor pieces appear in several anthologies as well as
onMcSweeneys.net.
I’m still upset at the author for being a thief. Ever been robbed? Like had your house burglarized and
your stuff rummaged through and stolen? There’s this period right after it happens when you can’t
believe that someone got into where you live, the space where you sleep and bathe and eat, and just
took stuff you had bought and taken care of. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all
the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the
promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still
walking around wanting to punch someone. Don’t bother calling the goddamn cops, they won’t do
anything.

Or, okay, different analogy. We’re an urban metropolis that’s collapsing under the weight of corruption
and moral degradation, gangs are everywhere and no one collects the garbage. Dystopia, right? But!
We do have this one super hero who occasionally rescues us and occasionally he can’t quite rescue us
but even then he provides us with the idea of hope, the idea of salvation and redemption being possible
from our little hell. Only now David Foster Wallace has hanged himself and so our superhero has just
announced that screw this city, I’m moving to Australia and you’ll never see me again and so we’re just
left with rot and sorrow and no one will even collect the garbage and the cops are shooting people for
no reason and everything’s on fire. Wallace left us. I hate that guy. And I love that guy, of course, but
you know that by now. Fucking guy. Fucking Wallace. I should explain. On April 4, 2007, I got a phone
call at work from my wife. She said my brother Rick had shot himself in San Diego where he was living.
I was sucked up out of my chair (never to return fully to Earth) and calmly asked if he was dead. She
didn’t know. Within a few hours, I was on a flight from Seattle to San Diego and drove straight to the
hospital where Rick was. His brain was already gone, his body soon followed. The next several days
were spent performing small tasks that all weighed a ton: collecting his personal effects at the hospital,
figuring out what was to be done with the apartment he shared, all his books. I had to get a ride to the
gun range where he had shot himself, talk to the manager who had been on duty about what happened,
he told me about the employees who were on duty that day who still hadn’t come back to work. I had to
drive my brother’s car from there back to the hotel where I was staying, leave it in the parking lot, and
figure out what the hell was to happen next. Some tasks weren’t so straight forward, like getting to know
the ex-girlfriend who would, in three months, give birth to a daughter Rick would never hold.

After a few days, I returned home to Seattle and all I was left with was, essentially, research material.
Accounts of friends and co-workers. I also had my memories of him. The early ones were all viewed
through a lens of him being The Greatest Guy Ever because he was my older brother and that’s how it
works. The later memories are more painful: Rick being high at family gatherings, Rick asking for
money, me not allowing Rick to meet my kids because I simply didn’t trust him any more, coming to the
beginnings of a reconciliation with him months before he died, confident there would be years and
years more time. The thing is, when someone decides not to go to work one day and instead puts a
bullet in their head, everything else they do is a prologue to that act. So every camping trip anecdote,
every story told by a trucking company co-worker about Rick’s penchant for adopting injured animals,
every joke shared by a fellow volunteer at the sobriety hotline where he dedicated his time, it all leads
up to what he did and that’s how you understand it. Their lives read like a suicide note. The howl Kurt
Cobain produces on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from the Unplugged in New York album is
terrifying to me, or would be if I could listen to Nirvana anymore. I picture every Wallace book I see on a
shelf as being soaked in tears. David Foster Wallace and Rick Moe, born just six months apart, were
completely different people. I know that, but I have pretty hard time drawing distinctions sometimes.
They both had brains that didn’t work in the same way as most other brains. I admired them both in
ways that transcended any other admiration I had felt. With Rick, it was, again, the golden glow that
older brothers have, on their bikes and skateboards, with their strength and jokes and cars. With
Wallace, it was reading some of those Harper’s essays and experiencing Shea Stadium Beatlemania
and a kind of loving fear all at once. Oh, sothat’s a writer, I thought, sweating, screaming on the inside.
As someone who wanted to be a writer, it was incredibly inspiring and absolutely soul crushing. Being a
writer in a world that features Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael
Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken
lacrosse equipment. A few years ago, I was working on a narrative non-fiction book and had a chance
to go on a cruise as part of my story gathering. I knew not to bother. Maybe someone else could dare
write about cruise ships, but what kind of sucker do I look like, you know? I loved my brother and I loved
Wallace.
Then on September 12, 2008, fucking Wallace fucking killed himself. Look, I know well that depression
is a disease. I know he fought it like a gladiator his whole life. I know, too, that he didn’t get the help he
needed from the rest of us. I know that if we as a society approached depression and mental health
with the same dedication and persistence with which we approached drunk driving or smoking or,
hell, littering in the past, we’d bury a lot fewer of our brothers and daughters and heroes. We might
have new Nirvana albums and Elliott Smith albums to enjoy. But I’m still angry at the events that took
place and I’m still angry with these two heroes of mine who killed these two heroes of mine. I’m still
angry for having my house burglarized. Wallace’s death brought for me a fresh version of the dread I
was already experiencing after Rick’s suicide, this knowledge that life will never be like it was, it will be
weirder and darker and happy at times and always always always more sad. I know now that everything
Wallace wrote will be different for me than it was before. Even memories of his funniest writing include
memories of the sorrow and desperation packed in there. My struggle when I do reach back into
Wallace’s words will be to see beyond the shovel to the gut I felt when I heard he had died. I’ll need to
get past the anger I feel for fucking ripping us off and denying us those future tomes. I’ll need to see
David Foster Wallace for more than just the last thing he did. I need to remember wrestling with my
brother in the rec room and going off jumps on bikes instead of his body hooked up to machines in a
San Diego hospital. A few months after Rick died, I was given a notebook that he had kept as part of his
ongoing recovery program. It was a journal of his fight to stay straight, to make a new life for himself
that wasn’t built around drugs. I kept this notebook on a high shelf in the back of my closet for weeks,
eyeing it once in a while as I passed through the room, thinking about it constantly. I had to know that
there was something to Rick that I had not yet discovered, maybe some insight, at least some
humanity. Finally, I took the notebook down, went to a Starbucks for some reason, got a big cup of
coffee and entered his loving and terrible world. Then closed it, went to my car, and wept. Then ran
some errands.

Infinite Jest is on my shelf now. Sure is big. Man, look at that thing. I hope to get to it soon. I hear it’s
really great.

IT’S WEIRD TO FEEL LIKE YOU

“

MISS SOMEONE YOU’RE NOT

EVEN SURE YOU KNOW”
You Are Loved

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Infinite Summer: Dracula
… is a go. Please visit (and circulate) infinitesummer.org/dracula.

After Summer Parties

There are a number of post-I.S. parties in the works. Here are the ones of which we are aware:

Andbutso (Austin):

Skylight Books (Los Angeles): A party to celebrate the completion of Infinite Jest by people all over
Los Angeles, the country and the world in conjunction with Infinite Summer 2009. We also would like to
celebrate the life and work of David Foster Wallace, a writer who so many of us deeply admired. We are
hoping to have people who knew DFW personally in addition to members of the media and the general
public. We will have refreshments (both AA and non-AA versions) and desserts which will include a
custom cake from StraightOuttaChocolate and cookies which DFW himself enjoyed when he read at
Skylight a number of years back. There will be a limited number of custom commemorative tennis balls
courtesy of Sideshow Media, publishers of Elegant Complexity (an Infinite Jest guide). Update: John
Krasinski, actor/director/writer for the movie Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, will be joining us to
promote the movie (which opens the same day). He will read a bit from the book and sign movie
posters.

Booksmith (San Francisco): Monday, September 28 at 7:30 p.m.. Let your social life commence again!
Join other IJ readers – face-to-face, this time — to discuss the intricate complexities of a novel that has
changed your perception of light reading. Bring your beaten and battered copy of Infinite Jest to enter a
contest to see whose copy has been most abused. Suggested $5 donation covers wine and food.

We’ll supplement this list as more celebrations are brought to our attention.

The Remaining Schedule

The Guides will provide one more week of essay-style posts, followed by an “End of Summer
Roundtable” from the 21st to the 25th.

SINCERELY YOURS, DAVID

FOSTER WALLACE
Until recently I had no idea what this book was about. I don’t mean to say that I couldn’t follow the plot
(although that happened on more than one occasion), but rather that it was unclear to me whether this
was a book about tennis or addiction or entertainment or families or friendships or pet-murdering
psychos or what. It seemed to be about all of the above, each in turn, but none for very long.
But from where I now stand–9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far–it
now seems obvious to me what the book is “about”. Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107

The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on
Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and
still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book–
having read only the first 50 pages before giving up, say, or basing their opinion solely on synopses of
the plot and setting–describe the book as the very opposite of sincere, as ironic and cynical and dark.

My theory is that Wallace has pulled a reverse Mary Poppins, here. Rather than using a spoonful of
sugar to disguise the medicine, he set his novel in a borderline dystopia, full of depression and suicide
and malcontents, effectively disguising the simple and (dare I say it?) sweet message at it’s core. And
he spreads it out over a solid k of pages so that, at no given moment, are you aware of what you’re
imbibing.

No moment except perhaps this one:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of
about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s
some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t
happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he
had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the
number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario
got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy
laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The
whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even
more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff
Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about
helping him change.

That passage is found just shy of 600 pages in. And I can’t help but wonder what my reaction would
have been if it had appeared on page 13. Would I have rolled my eyes, or laughed in a way that isn’t
happy, or chalked this novel up as just a bunch of glurge best suited for the Oprah bookclub? 108 Would
my Sincerity Deflector Shields been reflexively raised, and remained in battle position for the remaining
950 pages?

As Kevin noted earlier, my generation has been steeped in irony since the get-go, and plunging into a
novel that argued against such modes of thinking would have been the literary equivalent of Cold
Turkey, the Bird, white-knuckling. Instead, what Infinite Jest provides is a 13 week irony detox
program,109 designed to reduce the cynicism in your system at a slow enough rate that you don’t go all
P.T.-Kraus-on-a-subway.

And then at some point you realize that Wallace has been performing something like a spiritual
transfusion, that he hasn’t simply been leeching you of cynicism but also craftily impressing upon you
the usefulness, the importance, the utter necessity of sincerity. The dude is like a giant ATHSCME fan,
keeping the miasma of toxicity at bay.

As we reach the end of Infinite Jest the question becomes: can we retain the message that DFW
struggled so mightily to impart, or is a relapse inevitable? It’s too bad there isn’t something like an
Ennet House for IJveterans, designed to keep us from drifting to our old ways of thinking, our “default
settings” as it were. I can see now why people feel the need to reread the novel on a regular basis:
“Keep coming back”.

Living a life of sincerity is a challenge, but Wallace is going to be very patient about helping us change.

THE FLOOR DODGED HIS

FOOT AND RUSHED UP AT HIM
Over the course of my reading I became aware that DFW liked Cormac McCarthy’s novels a lot,
especially Blood Meridian and Suttree. As it happens, those are my two favorite Cormac McCarthy
novels as well, and even though it’s been fifteen years since I read either of them, once I became
aware of this bibliographical fact I began to pick up threads of McCarthy in Infinite Jest, and threads led
to whole hand-loomed rugs bordered with Byzantine pornography.
McCarthy’s and DFW’s writing share several things, including a keen attention to physical and
emotional detail, but it’s the way they delve into violence that seems to both unite and separate them.
McCarthy, for example, considers the whole scene but then gifts you with just a sketch of the worst
details — reading him is like looking at one of Bacon’s howling Popes, it’s the details you have to fill in
for yourself that make it ten times worse. But DFW doesn’t let you look away. Think about how the
Antitois brothers died. It’s horrible. But their deaths were described with so much detail that by the end I
had almost no emotion about them. The image of a man with a spike through his eye or a broomstick
shoved all the way through him is, on its own, nearly unbearable. But in IJ these images ride a wave of
words that’s already pounded us into submission, and we only come up for air when Lucien Antitois
floats cleanly away from his body over the Convexity toward home to the ringing of bells.

The scene where Gately takes the brunt of one Nuck’s aggression toward Lenz and the girls are on the
lawn working over the other one echoes this scene from early on in Blood Meridian:

. . . Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to
pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.

Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.

The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face.
Toadvine held his head back by the hair.

Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.

He kicked.

Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he
rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door
was completely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The
clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.

And so on.

Later on, the way the M.P. beats Gately’s mom in such a slow, considered fashion shows a little more of
McCarthy’s restraint. Ultimately I find McCarthy pretty much riveting because he leaves so much out,
but the world he creates is one I am heartily glad I don’t live in. Whereas the world of Infinite Jest,
despite the horrible things that can happen in it (the family dog being dragged to death and reduced to
a nubbin, my God), is one I feel I could navigate maybe just because the nape of the carpet is familiar
and I have an accurate sense of how high the nets are strung.

Or, as Gately learns in the midst of his agonizing stint in the hospital bed, focusing on the small things
helps you to endure the larger ones.

DFW also alludes to A Clockwork Orange a couple of times, which is well known for its own particular
brand of joyous degradation. I think Gately has the self-awareness not to get off on beating the shit out
of people the way Alex and his Droogs do — he doesn’t have the heart of a rapist – and the spoiler line
limits what I can say about Sorkin’s crew, but I do know that for me, Gately’s redemption and Hal’s
trying to Come In and Mario’s sweet nature and a thousand other moments of true humanity balance
out the psychic impact of all the brutality in this novel, described in numbing detail though it may be.

I GOT THIS FIRE IN MY HEART,

WON’T LET ME SLEEP, CAN’T
CONCENTRATE…
NOTE: I realize some Infsumerians didn’t like the (fully disclosed) spoilers in my last post. There’s a big
one (a nuclear one) in this post, too, but I’m wrapping up the novel this week and it would be difficult for
me to do that without making this point, so here’s my apology in advance. If you haven’t yet finished, I
would think twice before venturing past the spoiler tag.
I’m sure it never even occurred to Harper Lee that she could end To Kill a Mockingbird right before the
trial starts.

That’s because probably the most basic axiom of storytelling, so obvious it’s rarely said out loud, is that
you have to tell the best part. And another obvious thing you should especially never do is Show
Spoiler▼

MISSION IMPROBABLE
Yes, I know — the term “mission improbable” brings up around forty-five thousand results in Google. I
am, very decidedly, not the first person to think of it. Last week I went with the title “Grapes of Wraith”,
which was somewhat poorly received in the comments section. One commenter improved it, though,
changing the title to “Gripes of Wraith.” I think we can all agree that that’s a much better choice. So.
Let’s try again this week. I’ll need someone to play the part of “person who cares a little too much about
the title of Avery’s post” and someone else to play “person who does the extra two seconds of thinking
that Avery could have done and comes up with a pun that actually makes sense.”

Your reward will be fruit punch and pie, and international fame.

A consistent response to my last post was the assertion that the inclusion of a ghost in Infinite
Jest broke no established rules, since entirely impossible concepts had been appearing since the very
start of the book. One could guess from the title of this post that I’m going to argue that some of those
concepts are not impossible, just highly improbable. One would guess correctly.

Giant (and skull-less) babies are mentioned as being a result of the concavity, or rather the result of the
annularized fusion waste that is dumped into the concavity. I was hopeful (in the kindest way) that I
would find, through Googling, some evidence of elephantitis as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombings, but came short (much like the non-giant babies of Japa– heck, I’m not even gonna finish that
sentence. I already feel bad just thinking it.) However, studies in the use of x-radiation on gestating
mice have produced creatures with hydrocephalus — the scientific term for “dude, check out that huge
head.”

One could extrapolate that the radioactive waste produced by annular fusion could have exponentially
greater results, creating the giant babies and feral hamsters of IJ. One could extrapolate that, and I’m
going to. So there. Totally probable.

Dymphna, the blind tennis player who uses sonic balls (page 17), would seem to present a problem to
those trying to convince themselves of the plausability of this book. But anyone doubting the chances of
a vision-less tennis pro needs only to read this entirely scholarly People magazine article about “The
Boy Who Sees with Sound” to become convinced that in the land of the blind, the kid who can
echolocate using mouth clicks is King. Dymphna? Probable-phna. 113

Anyone with their finger on the pulse of the conspiracy-theory world should need not explanation for the
plausibility of O.N.A.N — IJ‘s unholy union of America, Canada and Mexico. The Amero has been
a cause for concern for wingnuts and kooks patriotic Americans since 1999. Arguably a “natural
extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America (SPP)”, the Amero is a theoretical currency that links the three
countries together.

The idea of a pan-Americas currency is based on the Euro, the coin of the realm for all of Europe.
Except England, because the fears of racistsconcerns of nationalists have kept it from invading our
shores. If it can work (kind of) in Europe, it can work in America. 114 O.N.A.N? Seems like it could
happen.

Do you have a problem with the idea of wheelchair assassins powerful enough to strike terror into the
hearts of all sensible humankind? If you think dudes in chairs can’t be hardcore, then you’ve never seen
the awesomeness that is Murderball (boring name: wheelchair rugby.) The terrifying blending of man
and machine that creates muscle-bound wheelchair athletes is all too plausible, friends.

Lastly, I’ve heard tell that Infinite Jest is about an entertainment that is too enthralling, too enticing, and
cannot be escaped once encountered. Whilst anyone with a child and access to Dora the Explorer
knows that human beings are more than capable of becoming almost pathologically addicted to
television, the idea of a film so powerful that you spent the rest of your life craving continual exposure to
it seems silly.

But. We know enough of Himself’s work that we can figure out that the effectiveness of Infinite Jest(the
film) relies on the distortion and/or manipulation of light. Of course, we hopefully all know of the
dangerous effect light can have on the human brain. If there’s part of the noggin that sees light and
decides to throw a fit, who is to say that there may not be another band, or wavelenth, or kind of light
that can trigger pleasure centres in the brain to such an extent that all thought from then on is based
around the desire for more of that stimulation?

Sure, we haven’t come across that kind of light yet, but David Foster Wallace predicted Skype, human
beings who were born to play tennis, and Alcoholics Anonymous.115 Maybe he predicted the
discovery of addictive light, too.

I mean, he probably didn’t. But how else am I meant to conclude this post? With a frickin’ emoticon?

GREG CARLISLE: READING

INFINITE JEST CHANGED MY
LIFE (AND NOW IT WILL
CHANGE YOURS)
Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite
Jest and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University.

When my friend Brian handed me A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and told me I had to
read it, I immediately recognized the name of the author whose story “The Depressed Person” was
featured in Harper’smagazine: David Foster Wallace. “Oh yeah, I want to read more of this guy.” When I
returned the book, Brian then told me I had to read Infinite Jest. Not wanting to deprive him of his
unread copy (NB: Brian has still never read Infinite Jest), I went to my local library in downtown
Lexington KY and checked out the book. Fortunately, no one was on a waiting list, so I got more than
the standard number of renewals.

I remember reading a lot of the book lying in my bed (like Gately in the home stretch of the book),
flipping back to try and keep all the plot threads and chronologies straight, and then giving up on that
about page 200 or so and just enjoying it. I remember being thankful that I was sick in January 2001 so
I could read large chunks of the book instead of going to work. I remember sitting and reading at this
very table that my wife hates (transferred to Morehead KY solely as a frugal gesture) and being utterly
blown away by the Eschaton section. After Gately got shot, I would only put the book down to go to
work or to the bathroom or to sleep. With two days to go, if you are still sticking to a pages-per-day
schedule, I just don’t see how you’re doing that.

Reading Infinite Jest was the most extraordinary reading experience of my life. I find the depth of the
last sentence to be unparalleled in literature. Only the endings of Ulysses and Beloved come close to
affecting me so profoundly. Thankfully in that sentence, Wallace leads Gately and us out of the hell of
that last sequence into a transcendent moment of peace, cold and fleeting but also unbearably
beautiful, striking a chord of sadness that still rings deep inside me.

After I finished the book, I could not stop thinking about it. I knew thatInfinite Jest was immaculately
structured and cohesive, and I wanted to figure out how to articulate Wallace’s achievement. Finally for
Christmas 2001 I ordered a remaindered copy of the hardcover from Hamilton Books for about $4 and
had it delivered to my in-laws’ house. I wrote numbers 1-28 (and an N) in the shadowed circles of that
copy and numbered all the sections. I was given a scrap of paper (in the home of my mother-in-law’s
late parents, whose inheritance has just helped us purchase our first home, a home that this hated table
will never see) and sketched out a diagram with notes that would become, over the next six years, the
512-page book, Elegant Complexity. Without the daily inspiration of Wallace-l and The Howling
Fantods, I might not have finished the task.

Four days before my glorious daughter was born, Matt Bucher said he and his brother John wanted to
publish Elegant Complexity (and for the record, that perfect title is actually Matt’s). Because they
published that book, I got invited to submit an article to the Sonora Review and to attend a tribute event
for Wallace in Arizona, where I met people Wallace knew and loved. I got invited to speak on talk radio
in Ireland. I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the Consider David Foster Wallace conference in
Liverpool and got to take my first trip to Europe. Matthew Baldwin invited me to contribute the very thing
you are reading right now. Reading Infinite Jest changed my life.

Since finishing Infinite Jest, I have read just about everything Wallace has ever written and have also
been motivated to read Barth and Pynchon and an author I’d never heard of, William Gaddis. It is a
crime that Gaddis is not as revered an American author as Faulkner or Hemingway or anybody you
want to name. I have been motivated to read a 600-page anthology of Modern and Postmodern
philosophy (although it took me 14 months). I ordered a Vollmann anthology after reading a Wallace
interview. As my wife reminded me when I read this to her, I don’t get nauseous anymore, only
nauseated. I own and frequently consult Garner’s Modern American Usage, a treasured gift from my
mother-in-law. I tell my students (and everyone else, too) that not using that final serial comma before
the conjunction is just insane and irresponsible. I think This Is Water is one of the most amazing,
beautiful things I’ve ever read and am considering just taking entire class periods at the end of the
semester to read it to students. When I want to be a jerk in public, the phrase “this is water” runs
through my head and I get calm. ReadingInfinite Jest changed my life, and now it’s going to change
yours. I promise you. Congratulations to everyone who has participated in Infinite Summer.

ROUNDUP
As Infinite Summer draws to a close, many have penned their “final thoughts” post:

•Sarah’s Books: “But and so and but so I finished IJ.”

•I Just Read About That: “So, obviously, the first reaction isWHAT?!“
•Infinite Zombies: “I’ve probably tended to race down the hill of those last 200 pages and just
lost the end amid the swirling thoughts of how ambitious and crazy and good the whole book is,
and I’ve never given the actual end — the stuff about Gately specifically — very much thought.”
(Daryl Houston).

•Of Books and Bikes: “Wow, people. Infinite Jest is a great book, and it’s going on my list of
favorite novels ever.”

•Magnificent Octopus: “At some point, about a week ago, I was ready to say this is an
awesome book, this Infinite Jest, and while I spent much of the first couple hundred pages
admiring it, I was also somewhat confused and not really relating to it … So but, right, I’m done
now, and yup, awesome book.”

•Shelf Life: “This brings me to my primary problem with Infinite Jest. The excess. Wallace’s
writing is amazing. It’s funny and insightful and rich with amusing references and even
intentional, revealing mistakes. I loved his narrative voice, but it’s just too much. Too much story,
too many characters, too many walls of text.”

•A Supposedly Fun Blog: “AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH. I was expecting that. But not that.”
(Erza Klein) and “I enjoyed it to the end, although I started to resent it about three weeks ago,
not because the quality flagged (it didn’t) but because my stack of unread books began to reach
truly frightening heights.” (Kevin Carey)
 •Catching Days: “I am shocked at how much I loved Infinite Jest.”
•Aaron Swartz: “The whole book is laced through with mocking cracks at this disconnected
style, like a preemptive apology. And the ending really doesn’t help matters. But in the middle it
is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever.”

•Thinking Without a Box: “A brilliant, earnest, and an enriching piece of fiction. Every time I
read pages in the book, I was always amazed by the sheer genius of David Foster Wallace. He
was truly a great one.”

•Verbatim: “I did not want it to end, because now I will never again get to read about Don
Gately, Joelle Van Dyne, Hal Incandenza, and all the rest—until I reread, that is.”

•Jazz … In Strange Places: “when i realized i had only 50 pages left i knew i was screwed in
the resolution department.”

•A Hyperanaphylaxis Universal Mean: “I read Jest in about 10-25 page increments over the
past three months; sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but always just like a
mule. Plodding along through the hills and the dark down there caverns of this tumultuous,
twisting book.”

•Ongoing: “I’m glad I read it. I would never dream of recommending it to anyone.”
•Prozac: “Each character, though all seemingly reflective of the author, was so painfully
individual and human that I felt I knew them better than I know my own friends and family.”

•Tape Noise Diary: “Wallace’s inside joke and wink is that what’s entertaining about the story
it’s is non-entertainment and unsatisfying story arc. It’s like a very long thesis about addiction
and entertainment that uses plot and characters as props.”

And in case you missed it, much of our blogroll finished the book early (infinitedetox, Gerry Canavan,
members of Infinite Zombies, and so forth). We listed their final reactions in the previous Roundup
post.

Also in the last fortnight, a lot of rumination about Infinite Summer and the future of reading. Matthew
Battles, of the Hermenautic Circle Blog, writes:

When I think of Infinite Summer, I remember that the liberal arts are at their heart not a profession or a
civic medicine but a disposition.

The institutions of the life of the mind are in a bad way—and they always have been! I
wouldn’t have given you two cents for the institutions at any point in the history of
civilization. But the life of the mind isn’t really about institutions, is it?

I know I’m simplifying things; it could be argued that without institutional exposure to the
liberal arts, Infinite Summer’s far-flung participants would never have undertaken
conversation.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, associate professor of media studies at Pomona College (and I.S. guest)
discussed the “death of literature withHumanities Magazine. The Missouri Review ponders Book
Clubs in the World of Tomorrow!.
If you have recently written something about Infinite Jest, pelase let us know in the comments.

THE END
Early in Infinite Summer, we received an email from a participant (who requested anonymity):

I went to a David Foster Wallace talk/autograph signing in Boston years ago. I asked him to write a
message of congratulations to the reader on the final page. I thought this would motivate me to re-read
IJ, since his congratulatory note would be waiting at the end.

I will scan his message and autograph, and you can post the images on the site when
Infinite Summer officially hits Page 981.
SUMMER’S END ROUNDTABLE,
PART I
This is the first of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

Infinite Summer: How about that ending, huh?

Matthew Baldwin: I found the ending to be incredible. Literally quote “incredible”, as in straining
credulity, as in: despite the vast expanse of white space between the final sentence and the “981″, I
was like “I’m going to turn this page and find an epilogue or a coda or an Animal-House-closing-credits-
style litany of what happens to all the characters in the future (“Ann Kittenplan became a marketing
director for NoCoat Incorporated …”)

Eden M. Kennedy: Gately becomes a government actuary! Lenz gets eaten by bears!

MB: After that passed, my second reaction was a sort of amorphous, anxious “Oh great, now I’m going
to have to do a ‘Oprah/James Frey’ sort of deal where I haul the wraith of DFW onto this website and
publicly confront him about this colossal scam he pulled, to which I was an unwitting party”.

Then I slept for about nine hours.

Then I woke up and thought the ending was pretty good.

Kevin Guilfoile: I wouldn’t have had the guts to end it that way. As a reader I thought it was extremely
effective and moving and entirely consistent with the rest of the novel. But the author’s relationship with
the text is so different from the reader’s. He knows what he’s trying to do. He knows all the stuff he
thought about putting in there, but didn’t. It’s so difficult for a writer of even a fairly linear novel to
understand exactly how the reader will receive it, and to leave so much unsaid shows a startling
amount of confidence. He’s giving great credit to the reader, and for me it really paid off, although I also
understand the people who are frustrated with it. He asks the reader to do a tremendous amount of
work from the get go and when the novel’s over the work isn’t over.

MB: The “work isn’t over” aspect I like. By giving us the “shave and a haircut” and foregoing the “two
bits”, Wallace leaves us feeling like we’re perpetually in the middle of the novel, even after we’ve
ostensibly finished. The hidden meaning of the title is now clear: the jest is that the book is infinite, in
that it has no end.

Avery Edison: I was pretty unmoved by it, to be honest (well, except for being a little miffed at
yet another poor depiction of gender-variant people in the Asian “fags dressed up as girls”.) As the
novel drew to a close I became less concerned about it having a cracking ending — it’s such a
fractured and structureless book that expecting or anticipating something as conventional as an ending
that ties up loose ends seemed pointless, and my mental energy was better spent just enjoying the ride
as a whole.

I’m afraid I don’t share Greg Carlisle’s opinion that “the depth of the last sentence [is] unparalleled in
literature”. Oh, wait — unless we’re meant to be unsure if the “and when he came back to” refers to the
Fackelmann incident, or Gately’s coma. If that was the case then it would indeed be quite interesting.
Oh, now I’ve gone and confused myself.

I did appreciate the symmetry in the endnotes — we start with definitions of drugs, and we end with
definitions of drugs. Which mean that I could read all those last few endnotes at once and not have to
leave the main story as I plowed through the last pages.

EMK: I loved the ending. I thought it was incredibly emotionally satisfying. We already knew that Gately
had reached a turning point on that beach and that from that point forward he would begin to make
heroic efforts to change his life. So I loved exactly seeing how he got there, even though witnessing that
last binge was brutal. You know what the ending made me think of? That E-chord at the end of the
Beatles’ “A Day In the Life” — that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the
piano bench creak under John’s butt. That’s what reading Gately on the Beach felt like.

MB: Holy hell, I think you win “analogy of the summer” with that one, Eden. What a sublime
comparison.

EMK: Well, seriously, that’s exactly the sound that went through my mind as I imagined Gately lying
there. The other thing is, giving him the last word also made Gately seem like the hero of the whole
book, which was kind of unexpected. I thought we’d end with Hal watching the Entertainment, which
would explain why he had to be propped up during the interview at the beginning of the book. But my
powers of literary divination often let me down.

KG: One of the critical knocks against Wallace is that he has a disregard for the reader. I think the fact
that he pulls that ending off (at least to my mind) shows he is about as attuned to the reader as any
writer I know.

EMK: I think that he was attuned, or that in writing this novel he was trying to attune himself, to the
human heart, almost desperately sometimes. As I was reading this book I would occasionally wonder
about the title: Jest? Is this supposed to be funny? And now that I’m done I can look back and see that
it is, it’s a wonderfully funny book, if you use like the nineteenth dictionary definition of funny. Like:
“slows you down and lets you to pay attention to things you’d ordinarily zip by, that if you just took the
time to really see them they’d make you smile in this really deeply loving way.” (That’s
what my dictionary says, anyway.) The scene that sums up this thought entirely for me is when Stice’s
forehead is stuck to the window. He’s just stuck there for hours, thinking. And then Hal walks up and
they have this little chat. No rush. Well, maybe we should try to get you off this thing, what do you say?
Uh, okay.

And I still think Zac Ephron should play Mario.

SUMMER’S END ROUNDTABLE,

PART II
This is the second of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.
Infinite Summer: What do you think happened to Hal?

Avery Edison: I think it was the withdrawal from Bob Hope that did him in — all that mold stuff has to
be a red herring, since we never got a 14-page footnote on the history of mold or something. I must
confess that I’m actually quite happy for Hal. We left him as we was beginning to experience actual
human emotion, and I think that’s great progress for him.

Eden M. Kennedy: I want to think Hal viewed the Entertainment but got pried away from it before he’d
lost all sentience. If that’s the case, then I don’t exactly know what the point of trying to get him into
college would be, but I imagine CT would have some desperate ideas about rehabilitation.

Which also makes me wonder about that early scene where Himself thinks that Hal can’t speak, but Hal
insists later in a conversation with Mario, I believe, that he could and did speak to his father — that’s
still a dangler for me. Was JOI occasionally so immersed in himself that he’d lost all connection with
what was happening right in front of him? I think that’s definitely possible, but that scene could also just
stand for a father and son’s inability to connect on a basic level. Who knows.

Kevin Guilfoile: I’ve only read this book once, obviously, but I think we’re initially supposed to consider
a number of possibilities involving drugs and John Wayne and Gately and the search for the
entertainment. Maybe further readings might help you hone in on the answer, and struggling with what
happened between the last page and the first is part of the intended experience. I certainly enjoyed this
thorough attempt to explain it.

EMK: That link is amazing, Kevin. I have a lot of catching up to do with the bloggers who were posting
on their own sites all summer.

Matthew Baldwin: I’ve always been comfortable with non-resolutions; for instance, I loved the ending
of that television show with no ending. (I can’t mention it by name because then people who haven’t
seen the finale will know that there’s no ending, but people who have seen the non-ending-ending know
the show of which I speak.)

And so while I enjoy reading and pondering the theories, I am content to not know what happened to
Hal. In fact, were someone to make an ironclad argument for a specific hypothesis (and that article
Kevin linked to comes close), my reaction would likely be disappointment. It would be like opening the
box and finding the cat dead.

IS: Do you feel bad about Orin’s fate?

AE: Orin certainly isn’t the nicest character in the book but he’s far from the nastiest, either, and so I
think the jar of bugs was far too cruel a punishment for him. Especially given the knowledge that the
A.F.R aren’t the kind of people who just let a victim live.

KG: You have to be cruel to your darlings, man. That’s the literary biz.

EMK: I’m not sure the punishment fit the crime, no. But again, wheelchair assassins are creative and
they seem to have a lot of grudges, so you could see how a bunch of legless men might have issues
with a man with a really talented foot.

MB: I was just thrilled to make the “Do it to her!” / 1984 connection. It felt like a small mercy on the part
of Wallace. I can picture him sitting at his typewriter, six pages from the end of his three-ream
manuscript and thinking “ah what the hell, I’ll stick an easy literary allusion here in case some poor sap
missed the other 47,000.”

IS: What about the other unanswered questions. Was Joelle truly disfigured? Was the wraith
real?

AE: I’ve spoken way too much about how annoyed I was at the wraith’s appearance toward the end of
the book, but as much as it irritates me that DFW felt it necessary to put ghosts in his book, I do believe
that there’s no other likely way that Gately could have received those words and had those
conversations with himself. I hope that a second reading ofIJ will maybe illuminate some precedent for
the wraith that I didn’t see before, and maybe calm my temper about the whole thing.

MB: By the way Avery, I am 100% behind you on the ghost-annoyance. I felt exactly the same way, that
the sudden injection of the supernatural was an abuse of my willingness to suspend disbelief. I didn’t
leap to your defense earlier because I thought that Wallace would leave open the possibility that it was
all in Gately’s head, but “bed on the ceiling” ended that hope.

EMK: I thought the wraith was real, yes. I loved that part not just because I’m not too prickly about the
supernatural, but because I trust that DFW wasn’t a kook, and he explored Gately’s existence in a
realm somewhere between life and death using a sort of quantum view (as I understand it, in that on
the subatomic level things behave in wonderfully inexplicable ways). A wraith also provides an
explanation for beds adhering to the ceiling and whatnot.

KG: Yeah, once again you have to go through a lot of machinations to try to come with a scenario in
which the wraith isn’t real. But we talked a little bit about the tonal imbalances that are almost inevitable
in a project of this size. I think that’s what throws some people–that the wraith clashes with the
incredibly realist sections of the book. Still it’s entirely consistent with the more absurdist parts.

AE: I’m torn on Joelle’s disfigurement. The description of the lead-up to the acid-throwing seemed very
lucid and convincing, but I love the idea of her being “deformed by beauty”. It’s tough to choose.

KG: I’m convinced of her actual disfigurement.

MB: As am I.

KG: I think it’s purposely a little bit vague–Wallace wants you to contemplate both possibilities–but in
the end it seems pretty clear where the balance of the evidence is. To Avery’s point, though, the idea of
Joelle’s being “deformed by beauty” does exist, even if she’s actually deformed. You don’t have to
choose. The possibility exists.

EMK: Kevin’s described my dilemma exactly: I was enthralled with the idea of physical perfection being
not a gift but instead a hideous deformity, and that Joelle had the self-awareness to want not only to
protect herself from the self-consciousness other people’s reaction to her face forced her into, but to
protect other people from having their minds blown by looking at her. Then you can see that her mother
throwing acid on her face just gave her a different deformity — not necessarily any better or worse, just
a deformity that her mother was more comfortable with. Gah.
SUMMER’S END ROUNDTABLE,
PART III
This is the third of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

Infinite Summer: Looking back, do parts of the novel that seemed superfluous at the time now
make sense?

Eden M Kennedy: Yes and no. The joke about “never try to pull more than your own weight” came
back a few times in different contexts, which were all appropriate, but I agree with Kevin’s
ambivalence toward it, and I’m not sure I get why it’s in there, given the story’s history. Also, looking
back on all the early Marathe/Steeply conversations, when I really had trouble giving a shit about what
they were talking about, I think their conversations would probably reveal a lot more to me on a second
reading. So no, they don’t make sense yet, but I have faith that they domake sense.

Avery Edison: I’m starting to understand that even if one section doesn’t give us any new information
or make sense as a part of the story, it’s still important because it builds IJ‘s tone. Infinite Jest seems to
be less about a series of events that show what happened to a bunch of people, and more about a
collection of vignettes that paint a picture of an entire world. Everything is necessary because even the
tiniest details inform this portrait of an entire alternate universe.

Kevin Guilfoile: If we were talking about a conventional novel, there’s clearly much here that could be
trimmed to make it “better.” But Wallace is aiming at something other than just storytelling, and the
experience of the novel wouldn’t be nearly as moving if he didn’t structure it the way he did. There are a
lot of scenes, frankly, that could have gone (given the ultimate context I probably would give DFW a
pass for borrowing the bricklayer story, except for the fact, as Eden points out, it’s almost entirely
gratuitous), but I also give Wallace a great benefit of the doubt given what he’s accomplished with this
novel. To go scene by scene would be nitpicking as far as I’m concerned.

Matthew Baldwin: Exactly. It would be akin to saying, “but does the Mona Lisa really need to have
those mountains in the background”? And the short answer is, “Yes. Because it’s the Mona Lisa.”

IS: Were the hours (days, weeks…) spent reading the book well spent? Do you regret reading
the book at all?

MB: Totally worth it, no regrets. That said, there were times during the reading (especially around page
700) when I wished I could take a break, just set the book aside for a week or two. But at the same time
I knew a break would turn into a hiatus would turn into a fuck I can’t believe I failed to finish this
book again.

I felt like the protagonist in that Jack London story To Build a Fire, forcing myself to keep moving,
desperately wanting to rest “for a moment” but aware that doing so would be end.

AE: A month ago, I would have said that I’d made a terrible decision in committing to reading the book,
but now that it’s over with I’m immensely glad I did it. Putting aside the sense of pride I get from the fact
that Iactually managed to read a 1,000 page book, I really did have fun, pretty much from the eschaton
game onwards. There are themes in the book that I’m sure are going to percolate in my brain for a
while, and I feel like a (slightly) emotionally deeper human being having read so much truly smart stuff
on depression and addiction.

EMK: I do not regret having read Infinite Jest one bit, even though at times it was very, very difficult to
motivate myself to stay with it, to find something remotely relevant to post about it, and to make my
family understand why I had to go hide in the bedroom all weekend to get caught up. (They’re REALLY
glad I’m done.)

KG: I don’t think I would have ever read Infinite Jest–I surely don’t think I would have finished it–without
Infinite Summer. And so I’m really grateful Matthew asked me to be a part of this. And not just for the
book, but for the community around it. The posts by the other guides and the commenters and the folks
in the forums (I really didn’t have much time to dive in there, though I will now) and the readers
following along on Twitter. The collective encouragement and wisdom of this group made it one of the
most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve ever had. I’m grateful to all of you, actually.

I’ve already read the next two books in the IS queue (Dracula and 2666) and so I won’t be reading
along, but I will be stopping by here regularly for the excitement of watching smart minds wrestle with
big ideas.

Apparently The Pale King has been delayed until the fall of 2010. Disappointed?

AE: I’m looking forward to reading it, certainly (especially after hearing a reading from it on this
episode of To The Best Of Our Knowledge), but I’m not desperate to read it, and the year between now
and then gives me more than enough time to tackle IJ again.

KG: I will definitely read The Pale King but I doubt I would have gotten to it before next year, anyway. I
just spent a summer reading one book. My book stack needs some serious thinning.

EMK: No, I’ve got all this other Wallace to catch up on. I didn’t think I’d want to read any more Wallace
at all after IJ, frankly, but his essay about going to a porn convention sucked me right back in. And now
that I’ve read more about his life and how all his personal head-work had led him up to writing The Pale
King, I’m really more sorry than ever that he couldn’t stick around to finish it. But I’m looking forward to
reading it very much, whatever shape it’s in.

MB: Had you asked me this yesterday, my answer would have been: not really. I felt like Wallace
poured all of himself into Jest, and I’m frankly a little skeptical that there could be more of him to read,
especially in another huge, sprawling novel.

But then, last night, I walked into a Barnes and Noble to pick up The New Annotated Dracula, and
inexplicably walked out with Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I stood for a moment in the parking lot,
looking down at it and thinking, “how the hell did that happen?” So apparently my thirst for Wallace
remains unslaked.

SUMMER’S END ROUNDTABLE,

PART IV
This is the last of a four-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

Infinite Summer: Did Infinite Jest change your life?

Avery Edison: It’s definitely got me reading books again, which is marvelous. I hadn’t realized how
much the internet had affected my ability to just sit down and read a book, and — looking back — the
first half of IJwas all that tougher because I was re-training my attention span in addition to trying to
process Wallace’s prose. I’ve read four or five books in the two weeks since I finished Infinite Jest (yep
— I finished early. Was very proud.) and I can’t even conceive of that kind of achievement pre-Infinite
Summer.

Aside from that, I’ve found myself with an interest in tennis for the first time in my life. I’m normally the
sort to avoid the sport if it ever shows up on my TV, but this past week I spent half an hour watching
volleys on YouTube, and reading DFW’s NYTimes article on Roger Federer.

I’ve also managed to quit drinking caffeine (well, Coca-Cola) after coming to the realization that I was
utterly addicted to the stuff (“when it gets to the stage when you need it…”) I’ve tried to quit a few times
before, on an almost annual basis, and never managed it. But as I’ve lowered my levels every day and
still gone through withdrawal I’ve found myself thinking “one day at a time” and pushing through.

Eden M. Kennedy: I agree with Avery on the first and last counts; it had been forever since I’d tackled
a Big Book and it took an almost physical act of will to get my mind working at a speed that surpassed
what it takes to skim Esquire magazine. (I am now halfway through DFW’s Consider the Lobster, which
is blessedly smooth terrain after IJ.) And my respect and appreciation for my friends in AA has
increased a thousandfold. I’m still an indifferent tennis spectator, despite my son’s newfound love of
rallying from the service line, but I really loved watching Oudin in this year’s U.S. Open.

The book itself changed my life in the way that any great book does. I’ll certainly never forget it, and I’m
certain little connections between the book and my life will continue to click together over time. For
example, last week I found out my dental hygienist is three years sober; I wouldn’t have dreamed of
asking her about her experience in AA if I hadn’t read IJ.

Kevin Guilfoile: I finished IJ on a Friday (After how many months? I don’t even remember.) and on
Saturday I read an entire other novel in an afternoon.

Did it change my life? When you first say that it sounds hyperbolic, but of course great books have
changed my life again and again. I became a novelist because there were great novels I read and
admired. To Kill a Mockingbird changed my life. So did The Martian Chronicles. A Confederacy of
Dunces. The Brothers Karamazov. Doctor No. The Moviegoer. The Stars My Destination. Lonesome
Dove. Rosemary’s Baby. Frankenstein. In Cold Blood. London Fields. The Shining. L.A. Confidential.
Too many others to list. I said before that it’s impossible for me to casually rattle off my favorite books
because the list changes depending on when you ask me and what I’m working on and thinking about
and currently inspired by. But I’m sure Infinite Jest will always be in the rotation now when I attempt an
answer. Just being in that company means, yeah, it affected me profoundly.

Matthew Baldwin: Funny story. Back in April I was in a bar, sharing beers with a buddy of mine, and I
mentioned this crazy idea I had of an Internet-wide reading of Infinite Jest. My friend got very quiet for a
moment, like he was debating whether to confess something. And when he finally spoke, he did so
hesitantly. “That book,” he said. “I mean,Infinite Jest? That book, it kind of changed my life man.”

I didn’t roll my eyes, or laugh in a way that wasn’t happy. But only because I suppressed the urge. I
mean, come on. It’s a book.

And now, thinking back on that moment a half a year later, I inwardly cringe at my reaction to his
sincerity. I think I owe that guy a beer. Honestly, I think I owe the entire Internet a beer.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Back in April, when I set out to recruit three more Guides, I decided to start with the folks I thought
would be best suited for the role and then move down the list as I accumulated rejections (of which I
expected plenty). Instead, to my great fortune, the first three people I asked accepted. I’m a little
unclear on how that happened, but I could not be more appreciative.
The Guides agreed to do all they did this summer on a volunteer basis. If you believe that awesome
and generous people deserve reward, please support them in their current and future endeavors.

Eden M. Kennedy’s most recent project is Let’s Panic About Babies(co-authored by Alice Bradley),
and was called “a hilarious Onion-style website about parenting” by Redbook magazine. Eden also
writesyogabeans! (where her son’s action figures demonstrate the intricacies of ashtanga yoga)
and Fussy (where she writes angry open letters to Justin Timberlake and chronicles her daily life).

Kevin Guilfoile’s bestselling debut novel Cast of Shadows–called “gripping” by the New York
Times and one of the Best Books of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and Kansas City Star–has been
translated into more than 15 languages. He was the co-author (with John Warner) and illustrator of the
#1 bestseller My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook by George W. Bush. Kevin is a co-founder and
commissioner of The Morning News Tournament of Books, and his essays have appeared in The
New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Salon, and McSweeney’s. His second novel, The
Thousand, will be published next year by Alfred A. Knopf.

Avery Edison is a student of Comedy Writing at a university in England. She writes a few web-
comics, maintains a a tumblog, and has one of the most hilarious Twitter streams on the series of
tubes.

While not official Guides, Matt Bucher (of the wallace-l listserv) and Nick Maniatis (of The Howling
Fantods) were tireless in their promotion and encouragement. And John Hodgman’s perfect
summation of the event–”a noble and crazy enterprise”–is responsible for no small share of the
attention and participants we received.

Many people volunteered their time and talent to write essays and commentary for us. Infinite Summer
wouldn’t have been half as successful without the contributions of our guests.

•Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.

•Brittney Gilbert blogs for San Francisco’s CBS 5, and on her own site, Sparkwood & 21.
•Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most
recent album is The Hazards of Love.

•Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University.

•infinitedetox has been drug-free for close to 90 days and counting, thanks in part to David
Foster Wallace.

•Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. His archive of his
Infinite Jest commentary can be foundhere.

•John Green is the Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of Paper Towns (which was just
released in paperback) , Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. He is also
the co-creator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular vlogbrothers channel on youtube, which
spawned the nerdfighter community, a tight-knit group of a hundred thousand nerds who use
the internet to celebrate intellectualism and nerd culture.

•John Moe is a writer and public radio host now living in St Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of
the book Conservatize Me and his short humor pieces appear in several anthologies as well as
onMcSweeneys.net

•John Warner is the author of the leading volume of fake writing advice, Fondling Your Muse:
Infallible Advice From a Published Author to the Writerly Aspirant. He teaches at Clemson
University.

•Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College;
she’s the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of
Television, and co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons. She blogs there and at Planned
Obsolescence.

•Marcus Sakey is the bestselling author of four novels. His latest,The Amateurs, was called
“genius” by the Chicago Tribune, and his three previous books are currently in development as
feature films. He has ridden with gang cops, gone shooting with Special Forces, toured the
morgue, and learned to pick a deadbolt. He claims it was all for research.

•Maria Bustillos is the author of the newly released Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a
Woman, as well as Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork (in which Wallace fans may read the
author’s favorite chapter, “David Foster Wallace: the Dork Lord of American Letters.” You can
find her on Twitter at @mariabustillos.

•Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher
of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and
can be found at mattbucher.com.

•Matt Earp lives in San Francisco and creates electronic music under the name Kid Kameleon.
•Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher ofLittle, Brown and
Company and was David Foster Wallace’s editor.

•Michael Wendling is a writer and producer. He is currently producing From Our Own
Correspondent for the BBC World Service, and is working on a novel.
 •Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less. In 2006, he
was the founding editor ofValleywag.com.

•Mimi Smartypants is a Chicago writer and editor, as well as the eponymous author of a long-
running weblog. A portion of her early online writing is collected in The World According to
Mimi Smartypants.

•Nick Maniatis is the owner/maintainer of the David Foster Wallace web resource The Howling
Fantods as well as a high school English and Media teacher.

And rounding out the trifecta was the amazing community that flourished around us. Among those who
chronicled their reading of the novel was our blogroll:

•Infinite Zombies
•Infinite Detox
•A Supposed Fun Blog
•Infinite Tasks
•Gerry Canavan
•I Just Read About That
•Love, Your Copyeditor
•Sarah's Books
•The Feminist Texican
•Conversational Reading
•Journeyman
•Repat Blues
•Chris Forster
•Brain Hammer
•Naptime Writing
•Infinite Jestation
You can find many more posts and commentary in the weekly roundup archives.

There was also the Infinite Summer Facebook Page, the Infinite Summer goodreads page,
the Infinite Summer LiveJournal Community, the Infinite Summer Shelfari group, and Ravelry.

And I am enormously grateful to everyone who visited the site, participated in the forums, merrily
tweeted along on Twitter #infsum channel, and otherwise worked to make this the incredible event it
became

Finally, a shout-out to David Foster Wallace. We owe you way more than thanks.
INFINITE INDEX
Here is a calendar and index of IS posts, for those who wish to tackle the novel in the summers to
come.