Month: September 2009

All Over but the Crying

James Martin1 Comment

Infinite Summer has wrapped up, and I am still reading Infinite Jest. In fact, I’m only about halfway through (currently on page 550, by rough estimate [1]). But I’m still counting it as a victory, because Infinite Jest had been on my list for a long time, and I’m now too far in to back out. It’ll take a while to finish it up, but my first experiment with an internet-based reading project has been a very positive experience. I’ve met some cool people, learned a lot about DFW, and made my way half-way through a crazy, thought-provoking novel.

I’ll blog more observations about the novel as I make my way through it, though I’m more concerned, now, with simply reading it.

Meanwhile, Infinite Summer has launched a follow-up reading project focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Coincidentally, I have been reading that novel along with Infinite Jest. It is one of the novels that comes with Classics app, and I found myself reading when I didn’t have my copy of Infinite Jest around, both because I like vampire stories (in film, at least) and because I’d never read it before and felt a little guilty about it. So I could jump on that bandwagon, but I’ll probably just eschew the deadlines and continue to read them both at my own pace. Dracula is light fare compared to Infinite Jest, and can be a nice respite from it, at least when Stoker’s occasionally ham-fisted prose and tin ear for dialect doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Being as I’m still in the thick of it, I can’t offer a resounding pronouncement on the novel itself. All I can say is that I continue to enjoy it. And I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about it.

Notes:

1. I found lugging the book around was an impediment to my actually reading it, so I bought the Kindle version for my iPod touch. The Kindle app doesn’t give you page numbers, it gives you a “location” value which is, for reasons I still can’t determine, expressed as a range (I am, currently, at “Location 12515-12523”). Triangulating with the paper copy, I found that multiplying that first number by 0.044 makes for a pretty accurate estimate of the page number in my paperback copy.

[This post was dual-published at Infinite Zombies and at wheatblog.com.]

Disorientation

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Do you remember that opening piece in The Scarlet Letter during junior year of high school about the custom house and how you weren’t (or I wasn’t, at least) sure whether it was part of the book or whether it was an introduction that could be skipped? And then how what little bit of it you may have read was stilted and old and dessicated and more or less did not have a place in your sixteen-year-old head? Although I’ve long since learned to understand and even enjoy that sort of prose, it’s been a while since I’ve read a novel written more than 50 years ago, and reading the brief introductory note about the supposed provenance of the documents that make up Dracula reminded me of that earlier disorientation. While the prose of the opening chapter is hardly opaque, it does (understandably) read like something old, and this observation made one thing very clear: Reading Dracula is going to be a very different experience from reading Infinite Jest.

That difference is going to be driven by two sorts of cultural disorientation, the first grounded in real or immediate familiarity with things and the second grounded in simulated familiarity with things. For example, although the world Wallace wrote about was set in the future at the time of its writing, it depicted a landscape we could mostly identify with. People spoke more or less as we do and engaged with technology and in culture behaviors akin to those we engage with and in. While we may not have known intimately what life at a tennis academy was like, we’ve been to basketball or summer camp or watched others at such camps in plausibly realistic depictions on TV. While we may not have been to any AA meetings, they are enough a part of our recent culture that we have no trouble absorbing Wallace’s presentation of them almost as if we are ourselves sitting in a folding chair shrouded in cigarette smoke and trying really hard to Identify with whoever’s speaking.

But the opening of Dracula is very much unfamiliar territory. The speaker is in a place strange to him and stranger to us, having arrived there by train (and while there are trains today, how many of us take transcontinental rides on them, really? And how different must his late-19th-century train be from the ones we’ve ridden?). There’s strange food, strange people, strange geography, a horse-drawn coach mounted not as a matter of novelty but because it’s a real mode of practical transportation. I suppose we’ve seen enough of these sorts of things on the screen to feel as if they’re familiar, but that familiarity is manufactured and quite possibly mostly wrong.

In the first post about Dracula at the Infinite Summer blog, scholar Elizabeth Miller warns against allowing preconceptions about the novel informed by pop culture to color our reading. This of course is another challenge of reading the book. When I first encountered words spoken (actually written) by Dracula, I couldn’t help but hear them spoken more or less as Sesame Street’s Count speaks. And though I never saw the fairly recent (ie, some time in the last 10 or 15 years) screen adaptation of Stoker’s book, I do have a mental image from the previews of a tall pale guy with a weird butt hairdo, and that image flashes across my mind’s movie screen while I’m reading, whether or not I will it not to. Working around this manufactured familiarity with the book’s namesake to get at what’s actually on the page is going to be one of the big challenges for me for this read, I think.

Wallace wrote, in e pluribus unam, about how inescapably young fiction writers were influenced by television and particulary the irony of its self-reference. This installment of Infinite Summer may prove an exercise in trying to escape the influence of electronic media from the reader’s perspective.

Infinite Vampires?

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Perhaps for the next installment of Infinite Summer, we should switch ghouls and rename this blog infinitevampires. Bah, instead of doing that, I’ve just mixed up the theme a bit, which I suppose will be kind of weird for any stragglers who come to old posts and see the Dracula theme. If it’s too hard on the eyes, I can switch back to something with less contrast, but for now, this gets me in the spirit (ahem). (Update: I got tired of the red and black theme, so I’m back to something a little easier on the eyes.)

As I think I mentioned in another post, I do plan to read Dracula, but I don’t imagine I’ll be quite so thorough in my reading or as prolific in my blogging as I was for Infinite Jest. So I’m inviting contributors who do plan to read it to blog the read here. If you’re game, either leave me a comment here (complete with valid email address) or email me at my first name at learnhouston.com. If you plan to blog it elsewhere, please also feel free to leave a comment, and maybe I’ll add you to the blogroll once you get going.

Interesting take on endnotes

Heather Wardell2 Comments

I’ve been roaming the Internet looking for the closure I didn’t get from IJ itself, and found Sarah’s Infinite Summer blog. Her post on endnotes has the interesting idea that the “will this one be interesting/relevant or won’t it?” feel of the endnotes is addicting because you don’t know whether you’ll get the payoff you’re looking for.

Given the addiction themes of the book, I think it’s possible that DFW set up the endnotes for exactly that reason: to make you see just how hard you might work for an entertainment and pleasure you’re not even sure you’ll find.

Neat idea, anyhow!

Finished this morning

Heather Wardell4 Comments

I hit the Sept 18th spoiler line on the 12th but have been unable to make myself read forward. I think I was afraid of how it would end.

I wasn’t expecting a Hollywood-style ending, of course, or even something that tied up all the threads in any meaningful way. Neither would have fit the book.

But I was surprised by the depths of the violence at the end. Sorkin’s men and that awful eye “surgery” and the pain of Pamela Hoffman-Jeep. Orin under a huge glass dome and the roaches pouring in. Even the slow degeneration of Barry Loach is a form of violence, as he goes from believing in people to doubting them and then to a near-wreck state.

The last good action in the book, the last kind and generous thing, is done by Mario. Mario might be the only truly good person in the book.

I don’t know how to sum up the experience of reading IJ. There were some beautiful moments and certainly some stunning writing. Some of the ugliest moments (Accomplice!, the horrible death of S. Johnson the dog) included some of the best writing. The concepts of sponsored time, of the UHID, of eschaton, are truly brilliant. And I will never hear the words “something smells delicious” again without thinking (with a shudder, no doubt) of IJ.

But then there were the meanderings that never seemed to link to anything else, the drug-detail footnotes (I didn’t mind the other footnotes, frankly, but reading drugs’ chemical composition? Why? I know he had a reason, but I can’t see it), and the parts that seemed deliberately designed to confuse.

I felt early on like I just wasn’t seeing “the point” of the book. I still feel like there’s an overall point that I’ve missed. But perhaps that IS the point: that there isn’t one. Ending a book called “Infinite Jest” with three apparently unrelated anecdotes that all include pain and ugliness is maybe intended to show the randomness of life and the depths of ugliness within most people.

I don’t know. But I know I’ll be thinking of IJ for a long time, and that’s the mark of something great.

Thanks

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

If I have had a more enriching reading experience in my life than Infinite Summer has been, it was the semester I spent studying Milton as an undergrad with a professor who can be described as brilliant and probably on speed. That semester was intense and focused. I don’t know really how to describe this summer briefly other than to say that it’s been fun.

When I answered a call to write for Infinite Zombies, I had this to say (among other things):

I guess I shouldn’t try to sell myself as one who’s terribly likely to be prolific or brilliantly insightful. I’d enjoy having an excuse to write about my reading this summer and was already thinking (cued by Matt Bucher’s post at infinitesummer.org about his first reading) about putting something together about how I first got a taste of Wallace’s work. If you’re up for occasional casual (and probably not terribly probing) observations about the book as I go along, I’m game. If not, no hard feelings.

So much for occasional and casual and a failure to be terribly prolific, huh? I really had intended just to read the darned book and write something about it every once in a while. But as I began to anticipate the read, I started writing these little preparatory posts because I was the veteran reader of Wallace (among the Zombies), and these posts got me pumped up to write about what I was reading, and before I knew it, I was churning out 2-4 posts a week. Having the structure of IS to push me along really helped keep me honest, and then people started actually reading the stuff and responding back to me in the comments, and there was just no slowing down (or wanting to).

What I discovered about the little bit of something like accountability that came with having a schedule and a small following was that it made me a more careful reader, which made the whole experience so much richer for me. And while I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with the forums or all the blogs, the ones I was able to read provided that much more insight and incentive for me, showing me things I hadn’t thought of and often providing depth where my own reading (and writing) had been shallow.

So thanks for that. Thanks for reading and thanks for writing (here and elsewhere). And special thanks to Matt Baldwin for thinking this whole thing up and ushering us through the summer and to Scott Porch for dreaming up this blog venue. It’s all meant a lot to me and been a great experience.

The End

Daryl L. L. Houston16 Comments

I’ve agonized a bit over what to write here at the end of the book. There’s a lot to say and nothing to say. I’ll start with a confession. I think I’ve probably never really understood the end of the book, and not just in the usual “what happened to everybody?” way. I think that 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. I remember that during my first read, the stuff about Gately’s stint as an enforcer and the attendant misadventures seemed almost irrelevant. Why was this whole new history being described for me here at the end of a book when there were so many other things I was eager to read more about? (Infinite Jest was the first thing I ever read that didn’t adhere more or less to standard literary conventions.) I guess I’ve just tended to write if off as a weird ending that was more than made up for by the rest of the book.

We know that the ending has made a huge impression on some. Take Greg Carlisle’s explanation from last week:

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.

Greg writes a bit more on the ending in a special section on Wallace in a recent double-issue of Sonora Review:

As the last section of Infinite Jest begins on p. 972, Gately is experiencing dangerous medical complications. Wallace leaves the crisis event undefined and has Gately retreat into a state of hallucination-dream-memory that builds to a horrific crisis event in early Y.W.: Gately’s loss of consciousness as a motley crew of a dozen nightmare characters prepares to kill Gene Fackelmann, who has been on an all-night narcotics binge with Gately. Thankfully, Wallace ends his novel with one of the saddest, most beautiful sentences in all of literature, letting us have a touch of solace in seeing Gately just on the other side of the crisis event.

I can sure agree that the sentence evokes a peaceful image. What’s not altogether clear to me is which crisis event this image is the other side of. What exactly is Gately coming to from? At first, you assume he’s waking up from the post-Fackelmann debauchery. But why would he be on the beach? Would C and the rest of the crew really have moved him? He surely wasn’t moving under his own power when last we saw him. And he was soaked in his own urine and so wasn’t really going to be much of a companion out on the town, so it doesn’t seem likely that he went out and about with C and crew after recovering a bit.

Did you notice this on page 974?:

Somebody overhead asked somebody else if they were ready, and somebody commented on the size of Gately’s head and gripped Gately’s head, and then he felt an upward movement deep inside that was so personal and horrible he woke up. Only one of his eyes would open because the floor’s impact had shut the other one up plump and tight as a sausage. His whole front side of him was cold from lying on the wet floor. Fackelmann around somewhere behind him was mumbling something that consisted totally of g‘s.

Right there in the middle of the paragraph, the scene shifts seamlessly from the hospital to the apartment in which Fackelman and Gately are having Too Much Fun. So what I find myself wondering is whether the book’s last sentence isn’t also a shift. Is Gately perhaps waking up back at the hospital? Well the hospital’s no beach, and it has a ceiling rather than a raining sky, so maybe not. But then, Gately has had sky hallucinations before, when high:

Then after five or so seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the sky stopped breathing and turned blue. (915)

And:

moving like men deep under water, heads wobbling on strengthless necks, the empty room’s ceiling sky-blue and bulging (934-5)

Somewhere in the last few dozen pages, Gately more or less surrenders to the fact that if he’s offered Demerol again, he’ll take it. Then on page 974, Gately feels that horrible upward movement as his infection has reached a crisis point and he’s being worked on. So I find myself considering the possibility that during those medical ministrations, Gately was offered and accepted Demerol complete with the little self-dosing button he fantasized about while trying to rationalize surrendering and the further possibility that the final sentence represents not his emergence from the Fackelmann high after which he ultimately began to set his life straight but rather his stepping into a high that signals at least a step backward and at worst a total relapse.

If we grant that Hal and Gately do actually meet and try to dig up Himself’s head (maybe not actually possible — consider Joelle’s revelation of the fact that JOI’s burial place is itself buried in a toxic wasteland), then I guess we can say that at least Gately doesn’t have a total relapse into the life of a thug.

Still, I wonder whether the last sentence is a touch of solace, as Greg suggests, or whether it is a further plunge into a deeper sadness, which is, after all, what Wallace said he wanted to write about in Infinite Jest. What do you think?

Accomplice

Daryl L. L. Houston9 Comments

One of the most vivid scenes in Infinite Jest for me has always been the description of JOI’s film, Accomplice!, that depicts a sagging old man sodomizing a male prostitute. The prostitute insists that the man wear a condom, and the man takes this as a personal affront. The prostitute happens to be inarticulate. The john vindictively slices both the condom and his penis mid-intercourse, but when he finishes and the boy realizes with horror what he’s done, we learn that the boy was trying to protect the john from contracting HIV, not the other way around.

This has always had the feel to me of something like a double-bind, though that’s not quite what it is. It’s not quite cutting off your nose to spite your face, either. I’m struggling to articulate it, but I think maybe it has something to do with irony. The man undercuts his appearance of complying with the prostitute’s wish — irony being the presentation of something contrary to fact or actual meaning — and it winds up being his undoing. The pathos in this scene always gets me, something about the combination of grit and, in a way, tenderness (on the boy’s part). And it supports what we’ve been told in many of the bits about AA and in one kind of touching description of Mario: that irony is toxic.

Beyond its statement about irony, the film has something to say about art as well. Here’s Hal’s assessment of the film:

As I see it, even though the cartridge’s end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!‘s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself…. Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’ for some reason, i.e. is the puzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff? (946)

How many people have said similar things about Wallace’s fiction? Those goddamn end notes! Those long sentences! All those words most dictionaries haven’t even heard of! All those words, period! How many critics have said that Wallace needed a more bloodthirsty editor? Are Wallace and JOI guilty of bad editing and self-indulgence, or is there in fact an emotional payload behind the self-consciousness of their work? (Accomplice!, by the way, has a footnote onscreen at some point about the fact that it’s following a particular gay-porn convention.) I don’t really have a pat answer. I’m suddenly reminded of the scene in Blue Velvet in which the female character sings a rendition of Crying that, if memory serves me correctly, is simultaneously very emotional but also self-consciously stilted. [Note: ray gunn kindly reminds me in the comments that this scene in fact appears in Mulholland Drive and not Blue Velvet and that it’s not a main character doing the singing.]

What I can say is that for all that I found myself thinking about the book as much as its characters, by the last 150 pages, I was on a downhill slide. I took fewer notes and had trouble stopping my reading. Even though I had read it a few times before (having forgotten most of the end, conveniently), I was just gripped and wanted to see what exactly was going to become of Gately, Joelle, Hal. It became about the story more than about deciphering the structure and way of meaning of the book, and it happened for me unintentionally. I was just pulled in. Maybe it was just a sort of gravity. Or did something change in the pacing or self-consciousness of the end of the book?

Whatever the case, the facts seem to be that for those readers with whom Wallace’s work resonates, it does so powerfully and emotionally. This is in spite of any distancing effect of all the narrative and lexical gymnastics. And it may even be partially because of that effect. In certain of his short stories, Wallace kind of pulls back the curtain to show the back of the shop, what’s going on in the mind of the author, what insecurities there are, what framework he’s draping his story across. And the effect for me is one of honesty and sincerity: “Yes, I’m manipulating you with an eye toward provoking a particular response, but so that you’re ok with it, I’ll tell you exactly how I’m going to do it, so that it can be an honest transaction.” And because it becomes a self-aware, two-way transaction, you become an accomplice to the outcome. Of course, that sort of exposure or sincerity can have a distancing effect by yanking you out of the very story that is supposed to make you emote. But for some of us, it’s the transaction as much as the payload that has meaning. Is that maybe the answer to Hal’s question? Am I making any sense?

Of Swine

Daryl L. L. Houston14 Comments

I don’t know what I have, but I can only assume it’s swine flu. (Right? Because that’s going around?) I’m simply not up for writing right now. I owe a few kind commenters (and other bloggers) comments that I may not get around to posting. I hope I can build up enough steam to write something later in the week, as I sure don’t want to fizzle out right here at the end, having come all this way.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten about halfway through Suttree (which I had picked up a few weeks before Infinite Summer started) and so got a neat little thrill to read Eden’s post today linking Infinite Jest and McCarthy.

In other Infinite Summer news, my copy of Dracula arrived today. I don’t have it in me to read or write about that one as obsessively as I did about Infinite Jest, but I look forward to reading this classic I’ve always managed to overlook. And I may write a word or two about it from time to time as well, whether here or elsewhere TBD. Anybody else coming along for that ride?

Anniversary (Nothing Morbid, Merely a Weird Coincidence)

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

The September issue of Poetry magazine includes a poem by one Dan Beachy-Quick entitled “Anniversary.” It’s a thick issue, and, beyond flipping to the poems by Atsuro Riley, whose work I always crave, I had given it only a cursory glance. Today I skimmed Beachy-Quick’s poem and sort of wrote it off as something sentimental I wasn’t much interested in investing much of myself in. But I gave it another chance, and though I’m not sure I’ve given it enough of a chance yet, a few weird things started to jump out at me. I’ll quote the poem in full, hoping that qualifies as fair use:

Anniversary

You are for me as you cannot be
For yourself, chaos without demand
To speak, the amethyst nothing
Hidden inside the trinket shop’s stone,
Dark eyes dark asterisks where light
Footnotes a margin left blank. You
Don’t look up to look up at the sky.
Your ears parenthesize nothing
That occurs, that I keep from occurring,
In the poem, on the page, as you are
For me, not a shadow, but a shade
Whose darkness drops from no object
But is itself yourself, a form of time
Spanning nothing, never is your name.

Let me first qualify what follows by saying that I don’t present it as any sort of theory or close reading. It’s just a set of associations that I couldn’t help noticing. Of course, what you take from a thing you read is largely a product of what you bring to it, and I’ve got Wallace and Infinite Jest very much on the brain these days.

So the title. Anniversary. September 12 marks the anniversary of Wallace’s death, and this is the September issue of Poetry. Of course, it often takes months for submissions to be accepted or rejected, much less published, so synchronicity here is either lucky or orchestrated (probably lucky).

Chaos without demand to speak calls to mind Hal’s aphonia.

Wallace was born in February, and the amethyst is the birth stone for February.

The trinket shop makes me think of the Antitoi brothers’ shop.

Asterisks and footnotes: ’nuff said.

There’s lots of sky imagery in Infinite Jest (though to be fair, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a book that didn’t have lots of sky imagery).

The notion of occurring makes me think of a certain rant of Schtitt’s.

The mention of darkness makes me think of The Darkness. The association of that darkness with objects makes me think of The Darkness’s relationship with objects.

I could probably tease out more, but this is a quick brain dump. For the moment, I’m resisting the temptation to look for some kind of annagrammatic acrostic in the poem’s first lines’ first letters (the initials DFW do appear, but not in uninterrupted sequence). I don’t fully grok even the basic thing the poem is saying and need to do a different sort of reading of it than I’ve done so far. Just thought I’d put this free-association out there in the mean time.

Update: I wrote the poem’s author, and he kindly wrote me back and said that he hadn’t read Wallace, so the things that jumped out at me are in fact weird coincidences and/or the product of my overactive imagination.