Infitnite Jest: Interlude

Like the growth of the Giant Sequoia, reading Infinite Jest takes time ... though ideally not three thousand years.

The President Tree
Sequoia National Park, California
September 21, 2016

Infinite Jest: Pages 67-128: Kate Gompert suicide watch, surprised blue eyes, Steeply and Marathe, Gerhardt Schtitt and E.T.A.

We are moving slowly. This is hyperbolic understatement. "We" meaning the initial trio of readers, the three Jest-a-teers, each of us in Life's full embrace. 75 pages a week? More than a month has passed and even I, the docent, have only gotten to page 128 (though that does include thirteen pages of footnotes, wink) (but still).

I will say this. It's fucking awesome the second time.

This time around I'm savoring everything. Circling whole sentences with admiration and awe. Making notes in the margins. HFS. WTF. WOW.

Poor Kate Gompert.

There are dark halls and sad places

... the sour odor of medical waste awaiting collection ... (p69) Kate Gompert in the psych ward

... sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. (p71)

On a single page, we get circumorals, thigmotactic, dentate, and synclinal. (pg75)

The Enfield Tennis Academy (E.T.A.) and Gerhardt Schtitt, the Head Coach and Athletic Director who ... has the creepy wiriness of old men who still exercise vigorously. He has surprised blue eyes and a vivid white crewcut of the sort that looks virile and good on men who have lost a lot of hair anyway. (p80)

Surprised blue eyes.

We also get a hefty dose of the tennis student-players themselves, teenage boys mostly, but also some girl players, and we start to form a picture of the culture at E.T.A. (which, I should say, is an abbreviation I find jarring and unpleasant to behold; it makes me think of the Basque separatist group ETA).

Hmm, but maybe that's DFW's point, to subtly insert the acronym of a famous international separatist group so that the fictional Quebecois separatist group in IJ seems completely plausible.

Note (from Google):

ETA (Basque: [eta], Spanish: [ˈeta]), an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna(Basque pronunciation: [eus̺kaði ta as̺katas̺una]; "Basque Country and Freedom") is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Perfect entry for Marathe and Steeply (Marathe p87, Steeply p88) ... though not before the Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge strikes! (p87)

The first time I read this section, I had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was surreal and disconnected to anything that came before it. Who ARE these people and are we really talking about a guy in a wheelchair and a guy in drag way the fuck up on some cliff overlooking a city in Arizona?

Actually, yes. and - SPOILER ALERT - Marathe is a member of the A.F.R, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, the Wheelchair Assassins, ... pretty much Quebec's most dreaded and rapacious anti-O.N.A.N. terrorist cell; and  Steeply is an Unspecified Service's field operative. (We'll have to deal with what "O.N.A.N" is later on).

Marathe to Steeply (a LOL margin note), commenting on Steeply's woman's disguise:

And your tits, they have become cock-eyed, I will tell you, Services Without Specificity, they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently. (p92)

Steeply is described as some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat. Priceless.

Hal at E.T.A. The Halster. Halorama. Halation. (p97). I've written in the margin "Hal is the young, troubled, genius".

Hal Brushed

Hal is sleek, sort of radiantly dark, almost otterish, only slightly tall, eyes blue but darkly so, and unbearable even w/o sunscreen, his untanned feet the color of weak tea, his nose ever unpeeling but slightly shiny. (p101)

Hal is a stoner. This is DFW knowing what that means and describing Hal as if he, the author, were stoned and noticing Hal. There's a scene in the boys locker room, a bunch of kids are sitting around tired after a huge practice. In the margin I have written next to this "This is deep noticing!"

Hal's face's reflection just fits inside one of the wall-tiles opposite, and then if he moves his head slowly the face distends and comes back together with an optical tang in the next tile. (p104)

Are you fucking kidding me?

And then, 16 pages later, Mario, Hal's weirdly deformed (elephant head, claws for hands) younger brother, gets sexually molested by U.S.S. Millicent in the thicket on the perimeter of the grounds. I know. WTF.

Infinite Jest: Pages 49-66: Hal in the Lung Tunnels, Gately! Dr. James O. Incandenza, Filmmaker

It's like mining a hermetic text for clues to the Great Mystery, or like exploring the crevices and fissures of reality with an accomplished and garrulous guide. You need to read slowly, paragraph by paragraph, a notating implement in hand. I use a mechanical pencil.

The team's pace has slowed to a crawl, to a stop really. I have lost both ND and LL. The fabled 75 pages a week was a pipe dream; at current rate, we will finish (rather, I will finish) in approximately 15 months. Absurd!

Of course the question, from the docent's point of view, is - should I go on alone? Right now the answer is yes, albeit slowly. I am like a cat at a screen door sniffing airborne temptations wafting in from outside.

How can it be that every measly span of pages (less than 20 for this entry) delivers brilliance and amazement? The margins in my copy are well-scrawled-in, almost every page. How can a mere 20 pages of a 1000+ page novel deliver plot hints and directional foreshadowing? Maybe it takes a second reading to recognize how much is going on in every passage, in every sketch and interlude, in every endnote.

Hal with "his little brass one-hitter" getting stoned by himself in the Lung Room deep under the Enfield Tennis Academy, in the tunnels. Every preppy stoner past & present relates immediately to this chapter:

A one-hitter, sort of like a long FDR-type cigarette holder whose end is packed with a pinch of good dope, gets hot and is hard on the mouth - the brass ones especially - but one-hitters have the advantage of efficiency: every particle of ignited pot gets inhaled; there's none of the incidental secondhand-type smoke from a party bowl's big load, and Hal can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly pale and sick-sweet-smelling. (p49)

HFS, absolutely. He nailed it.

Endnote madness! Page 53, in one paragraph come endnotes 5 - 9, all drug-explications.

Gately's first appearance! (p55). Autumn - Year of Dairy Products From the American Heartland. An utterly horrifying vignette that introduces one of the central characters of the ensuing thousand pages and suggests future passages of cringe-inducing stories and imagery.

... ferocious jolliness... (p55)

The thing started out looking like tit on a tray, burglary-wise. (p56)

Then there's the passage (beginning on p63) on James O. Incandenza, Hal's father (deceased), founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy but, more importantly, the noted avant garde filmmaker and creator (one learns if one reads endnote #24) of the eponymous cartridge/entertainment, Infinite Jest.

Endnote 24 is staggering. The James O. Incandenza Filmography, nine pages long. There are footnotes within the endnote!

And there are crucial details and clues to the whole novel contained within the film descriptions. Each film listed in the filmography warrants a close read because the details and synopsis are so fucking rich and wacky and make you write in the endnote margin HFS. To wit:

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Animated w/ uncredited voices; 35 mm; 59 minutes; color; sound. God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa." PRIVATELY RELEASED ON CELLULOID AND MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS. (p988, endnote #24)

I mean, the whole filmography is a creative achievement in its own right. Hilarious, twisted, really Out There in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. Not to mention that the last entry cited in the filmography is Infinite Jest, the film. Essential to read this. Anyone skipping the endnotes is automatically disqualified from the club of Infinite Jest Totalists.

Sentence Alert! On page 64, the middle paragraph is comprised of two sentences, the first one a 145 word gem (the word count disputable depending on whether you treat hyphenated words as one or two words, i.e., hard-drinking or U.S.-spoused). Regardless, the paragraph is not to be missed.

Infinite Vocab

parget(ed) (p51) - plaster or any similar wall covering.

apocopes (p57) - the cutting off or dropping of the last sound or sounds of a word.

bolection (p62) - a molding that projects beyond the surface of a panel

reglets (p62) - (architecture) a flat, narrow molding, used to separate panels.

Infinite Jest: Pages 17-49: Erdedy, the Howling Fantods, and the Infinite Jest Entertainment Cartridge

A lot happening. Very little overt connection. Erdedy. Wardine. The Medical Attache. Mario. Orin. The professional conversationalist. The Appropriation Artist. Oh my.

The Erdedy chapter is priceless. Erdedy is someone completely alone with his anxieties. We can all (most of us anyway) relate, if not to the anxious waiting to score weed then to the very condition however it arises of being extraordinarily anxious about something.

It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else. (p22)

I have a new acronym to write in the margins when I encounter some phrase or passage that blows me away: HFS. It stands for Holy Fucking Shit!

The bottom half of page 22 earned an HFS, as did the sentence: The last woman had been sexy but not pretty, as the woman he now didn't want to see but was waiting anxiously for was pretty in a faded withered Cambridge way that made her seem pretty but not sexy. (p23)  HFS.

Endnote #3 earned a loud HFS.

At Random

Is Hal mute? Is the scene with the professional conversationalist (who turns out to be his own father) actually dialog that goes on in Hal's mind but that he doesn't actually say? Remember, the opening scenes of Hal's meltdown occurs when the administrators insist that Hal speak for himself - and he can't. Or doesn't. And freaks out.

What's with Wardine and the Black vernacular? (p37)

Hal, Orin, and Mario are brothers. Orin is an NFL punter. Hal a tennis prodigy. Mario the youngest, apparently disfigured or handicapped with an over-sized head.

The Medical Attache is succumbing to the Infinite Jest entertainment cartridge.

fantod (by Edward Gorey)

The howling fantods first referenced on page 45. Roaches gave him the howling fantods.

Hobbesian Sewers (p45)

Who starts a sentence like this?! And so but since the old CBC documentary's thesis ... "And so but since..." that is really ballsy. (p47)

Infinite Vocab

phylacteryish - a phylactery is a small leather box that contains Hebrew texts and that is worn by Jewish men at prayer as a reminder to keep the law. (p47)

Infinite Jest: Pages 3-17: Hal's Meltdown

Infinite Jest: Notes from Pages 3-17 

Hal's meltdown. Told in Hal's first person narrative.

Note that page 3 in the 20th anniversary paperback is actually the first page of the novel. The first phrase that grabbed my attention occurs on the first page.

"... the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material ..." (p3)

I love the idea of "uncooperative material," as if "material" had a will, as if inanimate objects have preferences or manifest purposeful resistance. And then there are these gems:

The familiar panic at feeling misrepresented ... (p8)

Jet contrail

... the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest ... (p9)

The blue sky is glassy and fat with heat ... (p15)

The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were being exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. (p16)

Infinite Vocab

IJ is a vast trove of quirky words and curious references. Keeping a dictionary handy helps the reading experience.

Kekulean Knot (p6) - a sideways reference to Friedrich August Kekule.

Brewster's Angle (p10)

presybyopic (p11) - a vision condition that develops around the age of 40 when people experience blurred near vision when reading, sewing, using the computer, etc.

creatus (p12)

enfilade (p13) - a volley of gunfire directed a long a line from one end to the other; or, architecturally, a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other.

hypophalangial (p16) - missing one or more phalanges from fingers or toes

Rereading Infinite Jest: The Beginning

In my last Lescaret post way back in February, referring to Infinite Jest, I wrote:

"There is so much in this book, so much extraordinary writing, so many vivid descriptive phrases, that reading it only a single time seems inadequate."

Today I set out to remedy the inadequacy of having read it only once.

Two close accomplices, ND and LL, and I have agreed to take on this enigmatic and confounding masterpiece, reading it concurrently and sharing thoughts & comments via email. We're reading the paperback 20th anniversary edition from Back Bay Books (February 2016). All pagination references pertain to this edition and the novel itself will be referred to subsequently as IJ.

Neither ND and nor LL have read IJ before but both are familiar with DFW and have read some of the non-fiction.

I read IJ more than four years ago (see Infinite Vocab 101 and 1,079 Pages, in Paperback). Fascinated with the enormity of the novel, I wanted to know more about its author. Some would argue for the separation of art from artist, that great art stands alone, irrespective of its creator, and should be approached that way. Less ideologically committed, I always want to know the memoiristic details of my author heroes and mentors. I want to understand the Artist in relation to her Art; therefore, I want to know both - the art and the artist.

So for more on DFW, I read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (2010, David Lipsky) and Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012, D.T. Max). And dipped into The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa, 2012, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou), and Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University of Mississippi, 2012, edited by Stephen J. Burn).

All are worth investigating, the first two in particular: The Lipsky book for its intimacy and its day-in-the-life-of qualities (in this case, week-in-the-life-of), and Max's biography for the DFW's years at Amherst College. As a note of personal connection once removed - the years DFW spent at Amherst (1980-1984) roughly coincided with my years at UMass-Amherst (1981-1985). It's not inconceivable that we passed each other more than once browsing the bookshelves of the then numerous independent bookshops in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Of course, whether you know the biographical details of David Foster Wallace or not when approaching Infinite Jest is irrelevant. In this instance, the art speaks for itself.

In the coming posts I'll visit our reading progress, list vocab words that sent me to the dictionary, cite sentences or passages of extraordinary composition, and offer general comments and insights that emerge from ND, LL, and myself as we go.

Infinite Winter

Infinite Jest turns twenty this year and, though the work emerged in the 1990s and though some of the 'advanced technology' of the time now seems old-fashioned, the novel remains relevant as well as fascinating, challenging, and ultimately rewarding to those who persevere and read the entire work.

Some folks are doing that right now. Infinitewinter.org just got underway with readers accepting the challenge of absorbing 75 pages a week (does that take into account end notes?) and sharing their thoughts and perceptions of the experience and the book.

There is so much in this book, so much extraordinary writing, so many vivid descriptive phrases that reading it only a single time seems inadequate. I underlined the following sentence in my copy when I read it, but how many sentences like it did I overlook?

"The river at dawn is a strip of foil's dull side." (pg 452 of the Little, Brown paperback).

Or this idea:

"The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that's chosen to hold itself still." (pg 798, ibid).

The writing in Infinite Jest is the kind that dazzles, amazes, makes you laugh out loud. It's the kind of writing that doesn't need a plot.

The Kraus Project

I'm no fan of Jonathan Franzen, at least not his fiction. I didn't care much for Freedom. But wait. That's the only fiction by Franzen that I've read, so it's unfair of me to say that I don't care for his fiction. All right, point taken - let's just say that, though I read the whole book, I did not like nor enjoy Freedom.

His essay "Farther Away" (it first appeared in The New Yorker and later was included in the eponymous volume, Farther Away) I found brave and engaging. That he would dare convey personal negative thoughts about David Foster Wallace in print was scandalous (to some). I found it refreshing, and interesting. Other essays in the same book are appealing as well. Franzen writes clean prose and his thinking is not trite nor his observations banal. He is a writer worth reading.

Yet he seems to be a lightening rod for animosity. Critics, offended women writers, amateur literary commentators and bloggers, all loathe him. In particular, the techies despise him and heap scorn upon him for criticizing the internet, social media, the fetishization of gadgets and technology. Oh, and heavens, he's a birdwatcher too. Scorn! Caustic flame attack! Ridicule!

His latest publication, The Kraus Project, hadn't been out a week before its contents had raised a firestorm of invective and condemnation. Shame on Franzen! He criticized Rushdie for using Twitter. He dared suggest that the internet and social media were NOT the greatest cultural advances since the printing press. He took Amazon to task for its destructive impact on independent bookstores. Heresy!

Yet lost in all the derision was any discussion (that I read, anyway) of what seems to me the most interesting thing about The Kraus Project, namely the concept of the work itself, and the form it takes. Basically, he presents two essays by the Viennese curmudgeon, writer, critic Karl Kraus (think fin de siecle Vienna) that he, Franzen, translated from the German. Okay, if you're a Karl Kraus fan (and there surely are some out there) or if you're a German lit major or a translator, you might come at this volume from your singular perspective. But if you're like me, who'd never heard of Karl Kraus, who doesn't care about the adequacy (or inadequacy) of Franzen's translation (it turns out that Kraus wrote deliberately opaque & difficult prose), then you'll come at this book from another angle. Or not pick it up at all.

I'm enthralled with it. I can barely read two pages at a time. I don't understand most of the Kraus stuff. And I'm only 40 pages into it. But you know what? It's fascinating! Why? Because the form is very different, very innovative. (Okay, sure, someone has to have done something like this before - who can possibly do anything completely "original" anymore?). Well, this work seems very new and fresh to me.

As I see it, the translations are simply a platform from which to jump off into a wide array of other topics; memoir-ish recollections, social criticism (the aforementioned condemnation of our gadget & internet-obsessed cultural moment), literary history, historical anecdotes, etc. It's collage-like and divergent, informed and curious. It meanders. It rants. It elucidates. It praises.

These days it's as if people who write about books, who review books,  people who read & discuss books, all seem hell bent on either smarmy, wise-ass put-downs, or hyper-critical analysis, all very serious and edgy and pointed. After a point, I get sick of it all and have to throw up my hands with an expectorated "WTF?!" At least when it comes to Franzen, everyone tries to one up the next person in their ability to lay waste to the man's work (or reputation, or hobbies, or choice in glasses or whatever).

Be that as it may .... I recommend this odd book. Even if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and don't care a thing about essays in translations. Actually, it might even be more interesting if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and could care less about the accuracy of the translation from German into English. It's a quirky original dalliance, the best of eccentric intellectual sketching.

Oh, and the footnotes. What I don't mention above is that the Kraus essays seem like just material that Franzen can hang his footnotes on. This is not a bad thing. This is the oddity of the work, the weirdness that makes it so intriguing. The heart of the book are the footnotes. In the footnotes, we get the memoir stuff, the human connection stuff, the divergent interesting literary aside stuff. In short, we get the stuff that transcends the stuffy huffing and puffing of Karl Kraus on, per the first essay, Heinrich Heine.

But what did Franzen think when he decided to go all in with the footnote set-up? Surely he must have been aware that people would call him out on their use and infer that he was aping David Foster Wallace. Oddly, I have not seen that particular complaint leveled at him (though I stopped reading the carping reviews after a few). For what it's worth, I love footnotes. And David Foster Wallace, for all the fame (or infamy) his extensive use of them engendered (technically-speaking, in Infinite Jest, they are endnotes, not footnotes, but they function the same), he did not invent the footnote. He used them to great effect, and Wallace's are brilliant, engaging and, I would argue, essential to the character of the works in which he employs them. But they are not solely Wallace's domain.

So I'll give Franzen credit for crafting his own book around them, it's a courageous undertaking, one that, in my opinion, earns The Kraus Project enthusiastic accolades.

Infinite Vocab 101

There are a lot of amazing and interesting words in Infinite Jest. I wrote down a bunch of the ones I didn't know. Not every one, of course. I skipped all of the anatomical & pharmaceutical terms and there were times when I just didn't bother. IJ is big enough for that: for weeks you can read through thickets of pages and not write a word down, and then more weeks come and more huge chunks of pages and you find yourself jotting down every wild word you've never before seen and underlining sentences and whole chunks of prose that surge like tides and resonate and enthrall like 4th of July sparklers and meat on a grill.

enfilade – 13                   fitviavi - footnote 56, 996     

magisculed – 24                 ephebic - 170                  

anfractuous – 39                fricatives - 174

phylacteryish – 47              formication - 177

pargeted – 51                   sephenoid - 182

nystagmus – footnote 5A, 983    callosum - 182      

apocopes – 57                   laryngeally - 182

synclinal – 75                  treillage - 185

leptosomatic – 79               rostral - 185

calliopsis – 80                 lamina - 185

quincunx – 80                   piameter - 186

aleatory – 82                   sulci - 186

candidiatic – 87                chiasmae - 186

pedentive – 91                  oblongata - 186

pedalferrous – 93               meatus - 186

gibbous – 109                   triviumoid - 188

guilloche – 120                 papuled - 190

apercu – 121                    aminating - 195

osseously – 122                 gonfalonish - 208

eidetic – 127                   mucronate - 208

amines – 142                    tumbrel - 225

putative – 142                  wopsed-up - 234

erumpent – 155                  afflated - 235

parping – 159                   squunches - 236

rutilant – 159                  strettoing - 240

narcelle – 170                  acclivated – 241
apotropiac – 243                     ascapartic – footnote 110, 1016

lacuna – 245                    falcate - footnote 110, 1019

coccyges – 257                  bradyauxetic - 313

egregulous – 272                     ablated - 316

mokus – 273                     venulated - 362

Spont-Dissem – 274              cunctations - 368

nystagmic – 281                 arachnodactylic - 376

deafflatusized – 284            mucronate - 376

lordotic – footnote 98, 1003       chyme - 379

felo de se – 286                     aigrette - 380

strabismic – 289                     agnation - 382

ascapartic – 290                     adipose - 383

elisions – 290                  fulgurant - 387

apical – 290                    glabrous - 388

attar – 290                     carie - 410

auracopia – 298                 mafficking - 429

habiliments – 301               cuirass - 431

formicating – 304               dewimpled - 437

bilirubin – 304                 cognomen - 448

candent – 306                   nacreous - 455

quadrivial – 306                misprision - 465

wimples – 310                   ablative - 470

convolved – 310                 mysticetously - 476

xerophagy – footnote 110, 1006  propinquous – 479

anechoic – 503                  phocomelic – 901

coprolaliac – 621               achondroplastic - 901

mobiusizing – 622               entr’actes - 933

saltire – 632                   sinciput - 950

anaclitic – footnote 269, 1048       finial - 950

furcated - footnote 269, 1051        guilloche - 952

deuteragonist – 688                  kyphotic - 953

restenotic – 752                     ciquatoxic - 967

gonions - footnote 324, 1067         fuliginous - 971

colposcope - footnote 324, 1070      

lalating – 788

malcathected – 791

Hal Brushed

actaeonizing – 793

nictitater - footnote 332, 1074

shunpike – 796

quoins – 797

diglobular – 801

inguinal – 803

strigil – 832

anhedonia – 839

skirling – 866

parotitic – 871

ebubblient – 893

1,079 Pages, in Paperback

Let's get the adjectives out of the way first: sweeping, confounding, maddening, enormous, sad, absurd, unparalleled, astonishing, preposterous, cringe-inducing, inspiring, awesome, phat, brilliant, mind-boggling, unique, over-the-top, fucking amazing.

Infinite Jest, at 1,079 pages in the Little Brown paperback edition, the one with the inexplicable blue sky cover (overall a rather insipid cover that in no way grabs your attention or does justice to the novel it embraces) is the longest novel I've ever read. Reading it spanned summer 2011 and went deep into the fall, from early June to late November.

I read the endnotes. Everyone who cares pretty much already knows there are a lot of
endnotes. 388 over ninety-six pages. There will always be debates about DFW's endnotes and footnotes. How many graduate school dissertations will be written on David Foster Wallace's use of footnotes? Scores. But there's no debate here. The endnotes for Infinite Jest should not be skipped. Read every one.

Confession: it took me a long time to really get into it, I had to struggle through at least two hundred pages. I couldn't keep track of the characters. The narrative thread was a jumpy melange of absurdity and surreal realism that was often confusing and sometimes confounding. The completely weird  and disparate parallel 'stories' - the elite tennis academy with its twisted creepy family founders, the desperate interns of Ennet House (note: not "the Ennet House"), and the downright bizarre Quebecois wheelchair terrorists - were all off-putting in various ways. But I persevered.

The momentum really shifted when I got to the Eschaton part (page 319). Nearly synchronous with reaching the section that introduced Eschaton, I read in the New York Times that a band named the Decemberists had re-created the Eschaton scene for their "Calamity Song" video. I'd never heard of the group before but I found the song compelling, and the visual depiction of the teenage tennis players in their mundane tennis court environment somehow helped bring Infinite Jest into focus, made it suddenly tangible and truthful in a way I hadn't grasped before.

From that point on, I read it in great chunks, awed and completely taken with it. Not quite lethally, of course, (heh heh heh), but absorbed and convinced of its genius. The rhythm became more apparent, the characters became familiar, the weird tics and quirks and opaqueness were no longer bothersome but became endearing. And the writing was just plain extraordinary. Not that a single quote or passage from the 1,079 pages might possibly be representative or somehow indicative of the prose in any adequate way, BUT - how about this description of the Charles River?

"The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker-type blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites." pg 237

What about the professional building "... the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island dressing"? (pg 252) Or "...a sky the color of dirty glass."? (pg 621)  Or "...the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby."? (pg 925)

Like The Pale King, wherein is an abundance of stupefyingly good sentences and paragraphs, the prose of Infinite Jest at times soars and roars and stuns.

And then there's the vocabulary (list of words I didn't know the meaning of coming soon).

David Foster Wallace, Interview

Check out a previously unpublished interview ('A frightening time in America...') with David Foster Wallace at The New York Review of Books blog.

Interestingly, despite the basic absence of references to food in DFW's fiction and despite the fact he seemed to indulge in fast food with little remorse (see David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), in this interview at least he seems pretty cognizant of the problems of modern meat-focused agriculture, proposing that the method employed in the US in raising livestock is "one of the great unspoken horrors of modern capitalism." Among other things.

It's a wide-ranging and intelligent interview.

Vocabulary from The Pale King*

The Pale King is a labyrinth, a meandering path with no promise of destination or purpose, a journey of farce and ennui. Not to mention interesting words. Such as the following list of vocabulary words I didn't know the meaning of that I jotted on the blank rear fly leaf of the 1st edition hardcover (April 2011) from Little, Brown. I started writing them down after reading a couple hundred pages so this in no way represents all the words in the book that I didn't know.

word - page #

banausic - 229
perdurance - 231
peplum - 234
guilloche - 255
swivet - 258  (footnote) (later on pages 411 & 41(footnote))
logorrheic - 259
impetigo - 263
tonsured - 275
baize - 274
costive - 277
anodyne - 280
celadon - 282
blebular - 286
diffraction - 292
preterite - 292
pemphigold - 300
amortized - 303 (footnote)
nancing - 314
empaled - 320
otiose - 336
recondite - 338
muumuus - 357
caliumoid - 362
obtundated - 365
caul - 368
eremia - 383
dextrorotated - 395
dyspnea - 395
inedia - 402
ephebe - 412
neotenous - 412
appositive - 414 (footnote)
defilade - 422
cathexes - 427
intubatory - 444
semion - 445
monopsony - 481
hypoxic - 515
clonic - 516

* This blog entry created while listening to Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" from the Captain Fantastic album (1975). 'Irrelevent' Chris Fogle** would certainly know the song well, though whether he would have liked it or not, I'm not sure. Probably not. He probably would have dismissed it at the time because of its ceaseless airplay and popularity. But twenty years later after it had largely been forgotten or was simply ignored when considering, for example, Elton John's greatest singles from the 1970s, he would probably have recollected the song with a sentimental pang and a warm spot in his heart, bringing back, as it did for me, memories of 8th grade dances, shy love, birthday parties that evolved into awkward and hesitant make-out sessions in darkened living rooms with brown shag carpeting and vinyl bean bag chairs. "Butterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye bye"

** "I remember feeling the actual physical feeling of hatred of most commercial rock -  such as for disco, which if you were cool you pretty much had to hate, and all rock groups with one-word  place names. Boston, Kansas, Chicago, America - I can still feel an almost bodily hatred. And believing that I and maybe one or two friends were among the very, very few people who truly understood what Pink Floyd was trying to say."

~ pg 162

Infinite Study

David Foster Wallace's unfinished, posthumous novel The Pale King has just been published. The web is awash in articles about the new book, about Wallace himself, and about the legacy of the writer who, since taking his own life in 2008, has been almost universally acclaimed as one of the most important American writers of the last two generations.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired DFW's archives, including manuscripts, notebooks, and many books from his personal library, all of which is available to scholars and enthusiasts. Coinciding with the release of The Pale King, the Ransom Center presents material associated with the writing of the book, accessed here.

One of the plethora of articles that have emerged since Wallace's death  is "Inside David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Library" by Maria Bustillos. When I came upon this piece, my first reaction was 'Gad, this whole DFW scholarship thing sure got excessive and pointless in a hurry.' And then I read the article. It's fascinating and anything but trite or pointless and offers what the best of these sorts of articles can, a unique and considered insight into the life and thinking of an artist hailed, admired, and read by many, many people, any number of whom themselves are serious working artists. The Bustillos article is first rate literary journalism.

David Foster Wallace, Book Reviews, and the Need to Believe in One's Work

The review by Wyatt Mason of David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace in the July 5, 2010 (vol LVII, num. 12) issue of the New York Review of Books is interesting on many levels. What struck me, however, is Mason's discussion of some of the earlier reviews of Wallaces's books, reviews that disparaged Wallaces work as "not edited," "excessive," "self-indulgent," "gibberish," "nonsense," etc.

Though Mason generously accounts for how some of those reviewers might have come by their opinions (deadlines that required hurried reading, for example), what stands out, in light of how we're beginning to understand Wallace today, is how un-generous and shortsighted those reviews were. Could it have been otherwise? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps only in time do we come to fully appreciate, or re-evaluate, a writer's work. Perhaps something truly new, truly innovative, must inevitably endure ridicule and misunderstanding before the prevailing culture catches up with its genius. The Beats, Kerouac in particular, come to mind.

Of course, the object lesson here for aspiring writers, writers willing to chart new territory, to experiment with form, to break with tradition, is to believe in oneself and to disregard the tenor and substance of negative reviews. It's a daunting task to be sure, one that, in Kerouac's case, could not be achieved. It seems clear that, despite Wallace's suicide, his belief in his work never wavered. Though in interviews Wallace admitted to  doubts he had about his fiction, the work itself belies those admissions. The force of certainty pervades his novels, stories, and essays and while every writer is to be afforded his or her apprehension about their work, ultimately the work stands on its own.

In the case of the reviews that Mason cites, what comes through clearly are the peevish, harried, pedestrian minds of the reviewers. Genius comes to light slowly while banality is always plain to see.