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infinite jest
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| a nice ij tie-in |
| posted by: publius |
12:02 5.8.10 |
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/sports/tennis/08tennis.html?ref=sports
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| third interim report |
| posted by: horsebeater |
22:45 4.28.10 |
Current Page: 748. I've never been 230 pages from the end of a book and felt "almost done." The book slowed for me from pages 475 or so to 575 and then picked back up again for me with the Lenz/FLQ stuff.
USA Freedom vs. Quebec Structure. A favorite theme of mine, the total freedom vs. structure theme has faded a little bit, wrapping up with the end of the Marathe/Steeply Arizona discussions. A great part on p. 472 that talk about how they studied the people that were signing up for the rat-like pleasure experiments and they were "fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal." While only some of us are alcoholics, and most of us would fall prey to the Entertainment, we are all addicted to pleasure, I guess. And the TV vs. TP snippet on p. 600 is interesting. But otherwise this theme seems to have run its course.
Other Likes: The descriptions of the tennis workouts (pp. 452-460); AA and the cake box analogy (p. 467-68) ("anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now was it?"); Roy Tony and Erdedy and hugging (pp. 504-506); how Lateral Alice's apartment is 2 m wide (p. 518); how Lenz can't stop over-analyzing his relationship with Green (pp. 553-555); Gately's Fight (pp. 601-619, particularly the stuff before the fight and how DFW just draw you into the world about moving cars from one side of the road and just makes you believe and care about it); powdered milk (p. 630, 637); how nice Stice and Hal are to one another during their tennis match in the 600's; the genuine-ness stuff (see below); jumping out of windows (p. 696); how AA is an addiction that replaces the alcohol (p. 706); DFW's rant on bad parenting (pp. 1050-51); the cult of the next train (fn 304, pp. 1055-1062)
Dislikes: James Incandeza and his father (pp. 491-503); other stuff that is just too weird: How can Lenz always walk north? Creepy stuff on Orin and sex (pp. 566-57)
Questions: Why the hell is Mario showing up everywhere? At the pond draining (p. 625)? At Ennet House? WTF?
What is this shit about stuff moving around at ETA? Stice's furniture? The ball moving when Hal and Stice are playing on p. 680? I'm lost.
Why does Hal play worse after he gets off the drugs?
The Genuineness Theme: Of course, what is emerging is a new big theme: that you should be genuine in life and not too ironic. DFW claimed, in interviews, that this is a big part of what the book is about. And DFW comes at us hard in at least 4 spots on this theme in the most recent 160 pages:
(1) Mario's likes of people that are "very real" and how, at Ennet House, "once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way" and how "It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way." "everyone at ETA 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." (pp. 590-592)
(2) Hal watching Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat (pp. 687-689) "[It] remains Mario's favorite of all their late father's entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness." and then Blood Sister (pp. 703-704) and how mocking a genre sometimes bleeds into being "seduced by the very commercial formulae you were trying to invert."
(3) Anhedonia! (pp. 692-697). Wow. DFW just starts preaching, really. "It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial USA treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool .... 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. Adn then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete ...[T]to be really human ... is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile."
(4 ) With Joelle: "The truth has a kind of irresistible unconscious attraction at meetings..." (p. 708) but really discussing James I's work as "the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication" and that whole section on p. 740. "Satires usually [are] the work of people with nothing new themselves to say." And especially p. 742 and the Vittoria' Berninistuff. That might be the best part of the book.
So about the genuineness theme. I love the concept and the idea and would have thought of myself as a proponent of this in the 1990's. Being genuine is good. I couldn't help trying to think of the movies out in 1993-1995 and I couldn't stop thinking about Reality Bites and how much I just fucking hated Ethan Hawke and even Winona Ryder (who you were supposed to relate to, with their snarky and angsty selves). And how I rooted for the Ben Stiller character. So I get DFW reacting to that at the time. And I think DFW is doing a good job separating irony/comedy from disingenuousness, in that you can be ironic or sarcastic or whatever, so long as it is out of a place of genuine emotion, where your only goal isn't to posture and seem cool. Obviously the book is ironic and comedic, and isn't against that, but it's not hateful or even Chelsea Handler/Gawker/bloggy style snarky.
That said, while the 3 passages above make this point explicitly, I can't really see how the book is ABOUT this. Fitting it into the story, you can see Hal and Orin as both overly-detached and suffering from it, but this theme seems to be newly appearing on the scene and not completely in sync with the rest of the book. I guess the UHID stuff feeds into this theme (see p. 535-38 particularly), but what else?
Arguably the big theme is "we are connecting with people less" and one reason is people aren't genuine and other reason is "Entertainment is Making us connect with people less" theme as well (see p. 620-621) and another reason is "We are working soo hard at trying to reach perfection (and that's kind of silly) and we have less time for others" theme (p. 635), but I feel like I'm pushing for a common thread.
In fact, if the book is supposed to be a plea for acting genuine and being real, and CT is the "openest man of all time" (see page 517) then why is CT such a schmuck? Why isn't he the hero of the book? And why is everyday life described like this: "The daily bullshit here is hip-deep and not so much annoying as soul-sucking" (p. 594). And why the compelling section about teaching the ETA kids to be wary of success (and really teaching them to mock -- and not really want -- their success before they even achieve it) on pages 680-682 then?
And, I have to say, here in 2010, I got plenty of really real with me in my day to day. My kids are not ironic, not even a little bit. My job contains almost no irony. Almost no one in 2010 thinks Ethan Hawke from Reality Bites is a role model, either. The message is good but it doesn't resonate like it would've 15 years ago.
Some quotes: "Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same?"The kind of religious overtones kicking in: playing tennis and occurring (p. 459); "He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness." (p. 520); "unending rows of crammed-together triple-decker houses with those tiny sad architectural differences that seem to highlight the essential sameness" (p.582) |
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| i did. |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
16:42 4.21.10 |
but it's one of those things were you spend 70% of your time being utterly confused about names, events, plot that i felt like i "missed" an awful, awful lot.
it's so obviously one of those books that you could just read cover to cover 4 or 5 times and constantly appreciate more. once doesn't seem nearly enough. |
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| simpli |
| posted by: horsebeater |
10:05 4.21.10 |
| didn't you read gravity's rainbow already? |
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| publius... |
| posted by: horsebeater |
10:05 4.21.10 |
... re V, by saying "less satisfying" I didn't mean to imply "lesser," I just meant that while i'm advised that it is very much pynchon-esqe, people also describe it as difficult and painful to read.
i've read crying of lot 49 and if there's another pynchon to read, i just assumed it would HAVE to be gravity's rainbow. |
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| i've read gravity's rainbow |
| posted by: publius |
09:50 4.21.10 |
but that was almost 15 (!!!) years ago. so i'm definitely up for reading it again.
whether i can jump right into it after a second pass through ij i'm not so sure though. i think after this i'll want to make a good dent in the shakespeare project.
but let's definitely put gravity's rainbow on the docket... |
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| publius nows me far to well. |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
09:39 4.21.10 |
i meant gravity's rainbow.
but i have blood merridian on the shelf, and it's be staring at me for (damn) nearly 15 years.
in any event, let me know the decision. |
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| chiming in for the worthwhileosity V... |
| posted by: publius |
09:34 4.21.10 |
though that's not really the right place to move after ij. the right place to go is gravity's rainbow (which i half think is what simplicissimus meant). without gravity's rainbow, no infinite jest (and there are outright dfw acknowledgments of this fact...you will stumble across a minor, footnoted character in ij named bodine, and pig bodine is one of the recurring and central characters in much pynchon).
and i disagree that V is one of his lesser books. everybody's darling, the crying of lot 49, is one of his lesser books. vineland is one of his lesser books. but v is quintessetnial pynchon.
and that is all i have to say about that. |
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| and blood meridian |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:54 4.20.10 |
that's one of the next 3-4 books i have in the queue.
if you think V is worth line-skipping, feel free to convince me.
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| as far as V goes, I've always heard that it's one of his less satisfying books |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:41 4.20.10 |
| give me a link to someone that loved the book that will convince me to read it. otherwise i think i'm headed toward reading Let the Great World Spin (which is supposed to be a great NYC book) or something by AS Byatt, whom I've never read. |
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| simpli: the short answer is this |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:39 4.20.10 |
if you have the book, flip open the book to page 19 or so (the part that talks about erdedy) and read the 8 or so pages of that section. you don't really need any background to understand that section. that part is a highlight of the book. if you like it and if having a section like that every 50 or 100 pages (with mostly good, but occasionally painful stuff in between) is enough for you to get through all 1078 pages, then i would say you should read it.
i would also note that if i had to describe a target audience for this book, it is:
intelligent, hipsterish/recovering hipster, sci-fi-enjoying, former high school tennis players that came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s and have familiarity with the joys of drugs.
so there's that as well. |
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| i'm staring at this beast right now... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
22:31 4.19.10 |
(well, it's catching the corner of my eye as i ponder just how much i despise joachim noah and love seeing him lose).
and i've got two questions:
1. Is it worth it?
2. If I read it along with you fuckers will we read pynchon's V next? |
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| no worries... |
| posted by: publius |
14:48 4.16.10 |
i'm not sure i totally agree with it either...but i just decided i want to give it a shot...we'll see how it works out...
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| note |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:25 4.16.10 |
publius: i realized that you said no back-and-forth until you're done (which I get on some level, but not sure I fully agree with).
in any event, I just wanted to get my questions down now, since when you were finished (2-3 months from now) I may no longer remember them. |
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| 3 thoughts for publius |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:46 4.16.10 |
First, although there are a lot of smaller scale literary elements in the book (including some of what you list),
I think we, at our group, were impressed quite a bit by the non-literary quality to the book, just the descriptive stuff that could have been in a non-fiction work. like how, on a basic level, how DFW got the feeling of high school tennis right (I wasn't a good player, but I played and it all rang incredibly true), the accuracy of smartish high school guys' banter (or Hal/Orin banter), how impressive and realistic the stuff on Joelle's suicide attempt and all the Gately / AA and alcoholism and depression felt, etc.
Some people liked the stuff on James Incandenza growing up, but I didn't. No one liked the Johnny Gentile stuff. But lots of
Regarding the more literary stuff, I think the 2 things we talked about most at our "first half" book discussion group were the following two topics. I'd appreciate any thoughts you had on this stuff.
One was the humor in Infinite Jest.
Obviously term papers could be written on the different kinds, and the contrasts of the stuff that's just funny (erdedy's thought processes waiting for pot) and the ridiculously over the top stuff (the Clipperton Brigade, UHID, Mario, Steeply dressing like a woman and seducing Orin)
Specifically, we were split on whether we found most of the second category funny/amusing or not, which was a tricky discussion, because if one person finds something hilarious and another person finds it not funny, it's difficult for the former not to be calling the other a tightass and the latter not to be calling the former a nerdy loser.
We tried to determine if the humor had a literary purpose or not, but none was evident at this point. The best we came up with was that I had noticed that the ridiculousness of the world that he had created had begun to seem normal after a while. If you had told me the asfscme (or whatever) fans were going to be turned off, I would have mostly un-ironically said "but what will blow the toxic gases back into the Concavity?" And then it struck me as odd how being bludgeoned with humor had made me numb to some extent
(someone pointed out that, from third party sources and other work, DFW has known to be very much anti-irony, and some people argue that this is the book's main theme, so the question is whether this plays into that or not, although it strikes me as a little bit forced, at least at this point in the book).
The other thing, and the thing I latched onto hard, was the Marathe/Steeply Choice Section and How That Idea Filters Through the Book. With Marathe positing the "Quebec" way, which is that you subjugate yourself to some higher good (the state, religion, freeing Quebec from ONAN, whatever) and that this gives you purpose and meaning in your life, vs. the "U.S." way, which is complete freedom for the individual. This is fun in a rudimentary philsophy kind of way, but it becomes more interesting to me how the various other sections of the book look through this lens.
Obviously Marathe and Steeply discuss the Entertainment explicitly and how the U.S. way of life ultimately can lead to meaningless hedonistic quests. DFW seems to want Marathe to win a little too much, in my opinion, in the section in the 400's, but makes the debate relatively even prior to that.
For example, AA would seem to be a good example of the "Quebec" way (you have to follow certain steps, but it leads you to a good result). But DFW cannot help, despite himself, letting Gately make fun of the steps to some extent, which leaves the issue a little bit open.
And, then, ETA is an example of the players subjugating themselves to a way of life within the academy in a Quebec-ish kind of way in order to acheive a goal, but DFW then notes how many know they won't make the Show and are going through the motions to some extent, and views people like LaMont Chu who are obsessed with getting to the Show negatively, and clearly wants us to love Pemulis' attitude toward having fun outside of the tennis courts. But you could argue that pursuit of individual excellence in tennis is a very U.S. style thing as well.
any thoughts would be appreciated. i am stalled around page 600, but plan to resume a strong push this weekend. |
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| publius clearly does not have children |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:23 4.16.10 |
| what, did you read the fucking thing in 5 weeks? |
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| done |
| posted by: publius |
10:38 4.15.10 |
with pass 1. finished on the subway into work this am, which is appropriate seeing as how that's where i read at least 1/2 of it.
i had a few minutes after finishing before my stop, so i turned back to the beginning of the book at random and started flipping through, and already all sorts of things have whole new layers of resonance.
i honestly think dfw meant the book to be read more than once. you need a grasp on the whole cosmology to really get it (especially the first half or so) because he pretty much drops you in the middle and then keeps jumping back and forth in time (which seems a bit harder to follow when you're dealing with (primarily) the year of the depends adult undergaments).
in any case, pass 2 will start this weekend and will be exhaustively annotated, chronicled and flight-of-fancied here on the tentfort...
i can just tell y'all can't wait... |
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| p 837 (of 981) |
| posted by: publius |
10:32 4.12.10 |
so here's what i've decided i'm going to do. i'm going to finish this thing (i made a big dent this past weekend...the end is in sight) and then i'm going right back to page 1 and starting over (how very finnegan's wake of me) so that i can both take real notes and give some kind of running play by play on tentfort as i go (sorry william shakespeare...you'll have to wait a little longer).
it takes about 500 pages of this book to really begin to see how it all comes together so a lot of what happens in the first part of the book was, not so much missed (though with a book like this you're always probably missing as much or more than you're picking up), as not given the attention it deserved because it hadn't started to accrete....
so just a few things which i will be a bit more front and center on round 2 (and this really is just a few out of what will be an enormously daunting list)...
the color blue!
annularity!
optics!
vermin (insects and rats)!
cartography!
etc. etc. etc.
i figure that reading it through the first time as and when i found time (before falling asleep, on the subway, random weekends) it took me a bit over a month to get through it (maybe longer - i'm not 100% sure when i started). the annotated pass will obviously take more time as far as note-taking and connection-making goes, but it will also be more of a concentrated effort - i'm looking at it more like something for a research paper as opposed to just enjoying dfw's virtuosity this time around. that means that i'll probably do most of my reading at a desk (which means i won't fall asleep with the book on my chest quite so often) with consciously blocked out period of time, so hopefully that will translate into some kind of rational time frame.
one other thing, just for the record, is that i'm avoiding all secondary sources, criticism, etc. until after the second reading. that of course means that i'll miss all sorts of things because i'm not familiar with dfw's references or i just flat out miss them. that's ok. this book is large, it contains multitudes. i'll take down what i can on my own and after that see what other people think (to that end, hb, it means that i'm going to take a pass on back and forth ij discussions on this thread until i'm done with the second pass and will wait to read your contributions until then as well).
i'm somewhat optimistically hoping to be through it by memorial day... |
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| we just had our first infinite jest book club meeting 10 days ago! |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:29 4.5.10 |
first-half of the book done.
publius will have to attend the second edition by teleconference. |
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| currently on p. 464 |
| posted by: publius |
10:27 4.2.10 |
progress is slow, despite the fact that i feel as if i spend most of my free time reading the thing. not slow in any unpleasant way. quite the opposite, actually. but i just feel like i should be on page 800 or so by now...
anyway, i will have a lot to say about this later on, but for now i wanted to capture my favorite little bit so far...
"robert f./bob death asks gately if by any chance he's heard the one about the fish. glenn k. in his fucking robe overhears, and of course he's got to put his own oar in, and breaks in and asks them all if they've heard the one what did the blind man say as he passed by the quincy market fish-stall, and without waiting says he goes 'evening, ladies.' a couple male white flaggers fall about, and tamara n. slaps at the back of glenn k.'s head's pointy hood, but without real heat, as in like what you going to do with this sick fuck.
bob death smiles cooly (south shore bikers are required to be extremely cool in everything they do) and manipulates a wooden match with his lip and says no, not that fish one. he has to assume a kind of bar-shout to clear the noise of his idling hawg. he leans in more toward gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: this wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'morning boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'what the fuck is water?' and swim away. the young biker leans back and smiles at gately and gives an affable shrug and blatts away, a halter top's tits mashed against his back."
p. 445
genius, all the way through...
and one random pullout phrase that grabbed me:
"i don't foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture."
p. 404
much more later... |
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| I've always liked the non fiction better |
| posted by: isidorus |
09:29 3.9.10 |
| His fiction is a little post- for me. While I love the funny/sarcastic pieces in A Supposedly Fun Thing, the thing that I've been thinking about the most is the religion stuff, especially the piece in Consider the Lobster about what he was doing on 9-11 and the This is Water essay (despite its posthumous and shameless re-packaging). Given his writing and his interests and his humor, it kind of surprises me that he was a serious churchgoer, and while I'm not changing my Sunday plans any time soon, DFW's religiosity/belief/arguments have made me reconsider it. |
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| funny... |
| posted by: publius |
09:58 3.8.10 |
i've been on dfw binge lately. i went to the strand bookstore (18 miles of books!) the other day and bought "a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again" (done) "consider the lobster" (almost done) and infinite jest (not yet started, but i leave today for a week-ish long vacation in mexico so i may haul it down with me, though with current airline baggage and weight allowances that could mean that i need to forgo bringing other things like clothes).
i have quite a bit to say about what i've read to this point but don't have the time to adequately get into it right now.
with that said part of me is guilty for not making spending a chunk of this reading time on the poor neglected shakespeare project, but that will come too....
more details as (time and) events warrant. |
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| second interim repot (page 455) |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:15 3.8.10 |
[ed note: this is basically a diary for me so that in 5 years I think to myself "man, I read infinite jest and don't remember shit about it" I can go back to tentfort and remember stuff.]
[ain't it weird that I am just assuming that tentfort will be around in 5 years ... it's like a given]
The List of Years: Is on page 223! yay!
Body Parts in the Book: ETA is a "cartioid" (i.e. heart); it has The Lung (p. 49); close-by is the MIT student union from which Madame Psychosis broadcasts, shaped like a brain (p. 186). Tiny Ewell's Tattoo obsessions (p. 205). Obsessions with tiny hands (p. 256-257). What else am I missing?
Themes I'm having a hard time figuring out: The teeth obsessions of Hal (see pages 1016, 449) and Schact (p. 117). The role of DMZ (aka madame psychosis). And whether the teeth and DMZ things tie into the other body part stuff. The stuff about the Incandenza family tree and fathers' expectations (is it just what it is, or is there something thematic here?). The repetition in the book.
Responses to Tom's notes:
I like the back-and-forth thing, but I can't say I'm finding too many examples of it. ETA to Ennet House to ETA to Ennet House in the order of the prose, maybe.
There's a fair amount of shadow stuff in the Joelle party (see p. 233) and then in ETA drills (p. 453). I agree it appears quite a bit, but I'm not sure what it means/if it means anything.
But the stuff about people's faces: isn't that just how you write about people?
Math/Science BS in the Book: In addition to the shadow thing I noted last time, the odds on page 259 regarding the odds of a 54-54 tie are not 1 in 2 to the 27th power. It's actually about 6%.
I'm about 95% certain that the Eschaton math on page 328 and in footnote 123 is total bunk as well. Anyone care to confirm?
I am starting to try to compile a list of things "Infinite Jest" means. One of them is "DFW fucking with you (and jesting) by just flat out making up math and science all over the book."
In that vein, does anyone know if the lemon pledge husks work? If someone is willing to buy lemon pledge, I will volunteer to have my arm sprayed down whenever we are meeting.
Favorite Ideas / Prose / Quotes in 162 to 455:
"...staring into that special pocket of near-middle distance reserved for the serious listener..." (p. 189)
The Everything I Needed to Know I Learned at Ennet House Section on 200-205. Sure, some parts are trite, but some great prose (gems like "... the minor D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner...") and great ideas, like taking the cliche "That evil people never believe they are evil" and adding to it so that it is "That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil." And then "That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." "That most Substance-addicted peple are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking." "That 'acceptance' is usually a matter of fatigue than anything else."
I just wrote "wow" after getting through that. And then the book kind of went on a great stretch from 200 to about page 374 for me (after which I've been less impressed). I've really liked:
Lead up to Joelle's suicide attempt (pp. 233-240) and "Too Much"
Hal lying about nail clipping (p. 242 and then 248)
Schact's drug taking description (p. 267-68)
Gately and Day's complaints and AA: the role of cliches in recovery (p. 273); "I found myself sitting tonight in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings." (p. 1001); Surrendering to AA (pp. 348-353); the role of exhaustion in getting over addiction/depression: "part of finally getting comfortable in Boston AA is just finally running out of steam in terms of trying to figure stuff like this out." (p. 368); the God of AA (pp. 443-444)
Marathe/Steeply on pleasure and freedom and choosing what you love (p. 317-321): Is this the key passage of the book? (the marathe/steeply section on 418-430 is kinda disappointing, however, in how it tilts too far pro-Marathe, I think, and resolves what's an interesting debate until then)
(And I like how the marathe/steeply "choice" stuff dovetails with the AA stuff; and then later the "choice" stuff in TV programming on page 416 and thereabouts)
Eschaton (p. 321-342) is pretty funny, although the "Lord" dying at the end is a little much.
Annoying things: The hideously and improbably deformed (UHID) stuff. The siamese twin tennis players. Nunhagen aspirin (pp 412-413)
This is another thing Infinite Jest can mean: "DFW making 'jokes' that aren't funny in the least they are soooo over the top ("infinitely" over the top, you might say)"
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| first interim report; page 162 |
| posted by: horsebeater |
17:54 1.18.10 |
OK... thought I would check in on this with a few early thoughts.
Status: Page 162
Footnotes Skipped: Only 2 or 3 so far, accidentally, although I am seriously considering skipping more.
Favorite Parts So Far: Erdedy wating for the pot (pp. 17-27); Hal and drugs in the tunnels underneath the school, but particularly "shorting out the whole motherboard" via drugs and the paragraphs thereafter (pp. 53-54); Kate Gompert in the psych ward (pp.68-78); the need for being a team player in modern society (p. 83); Marathe and Steeply and whether you choose what to love or not and what that says about you and what it all means (pp. 107-108); videophone discussion (some great ideas, some uneven) (pp. 145-151)
Favorite Quotes So Far: "Why not not, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?" (p. 16); "at the height of which he could think only, despite the pain and panic, of what a truly dumb and silly way this way, after all this time, to die..." (p. 59)
Least Favorite Part: Anything written in ebonics (online, I've discovered that "this is where many people quit reading"); stuff that appears to be making fun of Mario Incandenza in a cruel way; the Cardinals entrance.
Realization about the timing of this: It took me about 50 pages to remember that DFW wrote this in the pre-internet age. Back then, this would've taken some serious afternoons in the library. Lots of the footnotes now could be generated with 15 minutes of googling. It's kind of a shame that I didn't read this book at a time when I would've been impressed. Technology has dampened DFW.
Scary Realization: At about 12-15 text pages an hour, this book will take me about 70 hours to read. There are 60 1-hour episodes of THE WIRE (which I have never watched). So it will take me longer to read Infinite Jest than to read all of the episodes of what many say is the greatest TV show ever. Not to put any pressure on you, or anything, DFW.
Shadows in the AZ Desert: I thought the stuff about the shadows with Marathe and Steeply was really cool (pp. 88-91), but the more I think about it, I'm calling bullshit. I don't think that shadows really act like this. Anyone?
At this point, I began to wonder whether DFW is (a) making shit up and seeing what he can get away with, (b) having 18 different story lines that might cross paths vaguely plot-wise, but not really thematically. Does "Infinite Jest" mean "I'm going to mess with the reader endlessly, letting them think it is coming together when it is not (or if not "endlessly" then at least for 1,000 pages") ?
Back Cover Claim: The claim on the back cover is that the book "explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to domniate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are." Thus far, I do not think the book is about this at all (really, the only way it is about this them is if you swap the word "entertainment" for "drugs"). |
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