I am trying to put together a list of truly inspirational songs. As a writer, I occasionally get into funks of “poor me, can’t get an agent”. They don’t last long but I hate them! So I’m hoping having a prepared list of “listen to these and cheer up” songs will help.
If you have one that works for you, please go to my personal blog and add it to the comments, or feel free to add it here if that’s easier on you.
Thanks, and I’ll post the finished list here if there’s interest.
Heather
I started reading on the 21st, as per the rules (and I know I could have started earlier, but I liked the “we’re all beginning together” feel of the 21st.)
I can’t easily say how many pages I’ve read, since I’m reading on my Treo, but I’ve covered 199 screens and am past the first week spoiler line. (I’m a natural 1200 wpm speed reader, which should be a huge advantage with a book this size. 🙂
Frankly, I found the first ten screens or so to be difficult (too many people to keep track of) but then I relaxed and went with it, and I’m enjoying it. There are some absolutely gorgeous images in those pages, speaking as a writer… very early on (before the page 31 spoiler line on the mother ship’s forums for sure) he refers to “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.” So simple, such a perfect way to describe a wildly pounding heart.
I don’t want to get too far ahead (the first spoiler line was at screen 163 for me, so I’m not too far off where I should be), so I think I’m going to re-read the section I’ve already read and let it sink in some more.
But so far, I am enjoying it!
Usually what you hear about Infinite Jest is that it’s difficult and long and like climbing a mountain and dear sweet lord, those end notes and the esoteric information and the pages-long sentences and…
Of course, long-time fans of the work don’t gripe about these things, but it’s what you hear from people who’ve tried and failed to read it (or opted not to give it a shot at all based on similar comments).
So then to read things from new readers (and fellow zombie bloggers) like this from Anna:
So imagine my surprise, then, when I start reading and it’s not bad. It’s not so opaque as to be incomprehensible, only opaque enough to be, you know, interesting. It’s funny. Sure, I’ve highlighted some parts. Dictionary.com may become my home page. But it’s…wow. It’s good. It’s readable. Is it possible that I might even like it?
and this from James:
So far, I’m really enjoying the novel.  It’s challenging (even taxing) in places.  But, on the whole, it’s solidly entertaining.  DFW throws in enough humor and suggestion of things to come to keep me happily chewing through his prose.  It’s not, so far, the most difficult or challenging book I’ve been subjected to (or, in some cases, have subjected myself to).  And that’s a relief.  And there are rewards at every turn:  a novel turn of phrase here, a darkly comic situation there, a scrap of esoteric knowledge, nice little references to what’s gone on before, etc.
is really encouraging and exciting and even in a way validating. I’ve spent years being defensive about the book, even making pre-judgments about how well it would be received by some person or another and declining to recommend it from time to time on the basis of its difficulty. But reading my fellow bloggers’ comments and tracking #infsum on twitter is really invigorating for me, reminding me that, yes, there are parts of the book that are hard, and it’s a big investment to read the thing, but there’s so much reward too, so much humor and humanity and heart that even those doubtful about their chances of slogging all the way through it are finding it to be doable and maybe even likable.
Watching as people discover that reward in spite of (or because of) some of the difficulty helps me relive the wonderment of my own first reading (which wonderment I had sort of lost sight of). And in a weird way, it makes me proud. What exactly I’m proud of I can’t say. I suppose there’s a temptation, as an early appreciator, to feel like something of a pioneer, but that’s not the target (at least not the main one) of my pride. I can’t really be proud of the book, since it’s not something I had a hand in creating. And it’s presumptuous and a little silly to say that I’m proud of Wallace (though I guess I am). So I can’t put my finger on it. But every time I witness one of these little discoveries, I get a little catch in my chest, a little thrill, sometimes even a little shiver, and it makes me really glad to be playing along.
Here it is: I’m scared of this book.
I’ve heard it’s going to clobber me with its heft, it’s going to belittle what pitiful intelligence I thought I had with its towering erudition, it’s going to reduce my pathetic reading ability to the bitter taste of ash and failure by the ferocious power of its subtle complexity I could only pray to ever understand. I’m duly afraid, and I’m glad to read I’m not alone in feeling this way.
DFW is like the ultimate litmus test: have you heard of him? Have you read him? Have you channeled his inimitable writing style to demonstrate the power of post-post-modern American literature? All I knew about the book before I cracked the spine was that it was about tennis and drug addiction, and that Wallace was by all accounts a genius. “How is that going to propel me through ten pounds of pages?” I asked myself, quivering in apprehension. So when I came upon this group of reader/writers that is “part book club, part Fight Club” I was beyond excited. I wanted in! I wanted to take this obese book down to a dirty parking garage and beat it until it begged for mercy! I wanted to make soap out of its flesh, I wanted to leave it out on my dilapidated porch for a week in silence, just to show it who’s boss.
So imagine my surprise, then, when I start reading and it’s not bad. It’s not so opaque as to be incomprehensible, only opaque enough to be, you know, interesting. It’s funny. Sure, I’ve highlighted some parts. Dictionary.com may become my home page. But it’s…wow. It’s good. It’s readable. Is it possible that I might even like it?
I’m not even a tenth of the way finished yet, so I’m still a little scared. But I think now that if I do cry while reading, it won’t be because of my own literary incompetence. It will be because of – who would have guessed? – the power of Wallace’s prose. Even in my limited journey I have learned that all the elitist graduate students were right about one thing: Wallace was a genius, and there is no one else who can write quite like him.
We have to break some rules, though, if we’re all going to get through this without ending up like some Brad Pitt mind-trick: we have to talk about it. We have to talk about the Fight Club.
Last night after dinner and a couple of these I started reading from page 32, and it did not go well. The language of the book is dense and looping, and it’s going to require more quiet concentration than I typically devote to get through it.
My background is as a newspaper reporter and most of my writing now is legal, so I’m firmly of the subject-verb, just-the-facts persuasion. And I don’t read a lot of fiction. Easily two-thirds of my free-time reading over the course of a year will be from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Sunday New York Times, etc. Of the one-third that’s left, I read more non-fiction than fiction. I tend to like my literary fiction spare (Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club, Mark Haddon’s Curious-Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), or tight and lyrical (Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner).
That all adds up to Infinite Jest — a big, dense, complicated novel — being a big departure from my usual routine. I don’t want it to be homework, and I don’t think it will be, but I’m going to have to put more effort into reading it than I am accustomed to devoting to a novel. That strikes me as a pretty good reason to do it.
I’m struggling a little bit with my approach to blogging about Infinite Jest. The part of me that has read the book a few times is inclined to try to be something of a cheerleader and to drop wisdom (ugh) and helpful reminders and clues about things that wind up being important later, and so on. But another part of me thinks that’s ultimately self-indulgent and potentially obnoxiously didactic. So I’m sort of thinking now that it might be nice simply to point out things I like in the book, to be 100% cheerleader and advocate and 0% armchair critic or seasoned veteran reader of Wallace’s work. I’m also perpetually worried about the whole spoiler thing. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about things early in the book without pointing to events or themes hashed out later in the book. It’s like trying to walk backwards through a crowded room without bumping into people or knocking lamps off of tables. If my co-bloggers (or others who may be paying attention) have any suggestions for what might be a useful approach from the one of us who has read the book before, I’m all ears.
Well, today is the official start. Â And I am, for the moment at least, ahead of the game. Â I’m on page 83, but I stopped at 63 and made a lot of notes for this Friday’s blog posts (I’ve been using Evernote for that, tagging each note “infsum”). Â I didn’t see any other way that I wouldn’t inadvertently reveal something past the agreed upon spoiler marks. Â (I’ve already started a new note for Monday’s page goal.) Â But my notes at this point are too verbose for regular blog posts. Â I’ll have to compress them down, chopping out a lot of the summarizing that will be good for me–later, when I start to get confused about where I’ve been–but won’t be very enlightening here. Â I’ll have time to do that, I think. Â I’ve been a bit obsessed at the moment with reading ahead, as I’m sure to fall behind and really don’t want to play catch up for three months.
So far, I’m really enjoying the novel. Â It’s challenging (even taxing) in places. Â But, on the whole, it’s solidly entertaining. Â DFW throws in enough humor and suggestion of things to come to keep me happily chewing through his prose. Â It’s not, so far, the most difficult or challenging book I’ve been subjected to (or, in some cases, have subjected myself to). Â And that’s a relief. Â And there are rewards at every turn: Â a novel turn of phrase here, a darkly comic situation there, a scrap of esoteric knowledge, nice little references to what’s gone on before, etc.
I’m looking forward to comparing thoughts about IJ with all of you, and with the growing crowd of people joining the IS project. Â Onward!
I don’t believe I’ve ever finished reading a literary novel. (Unless Chuck Palahniuk counts. I read Choke and was disturbed for days after. What a messed up man. The character, I mean. I think I mean, anyhow.)
I read and write commercial women’s fiction. I look for strong characters with a clear goal and clear obstacles preventing them from reaching that goal. I want to know, when I’m done reading a book, what happened and why; I’m not a fan of “um, WHAT?” endings. Beautiful turns of phrase do impress me, but I read more for the story than for the writing itself. From what I know of literary fiction (which, admittedly, would fit into an eggcup while still leaving room for a smallish egg), story is secondary to language. This makes me nervous about my ability to finish Infinite Jest with at least some level of enjoyment.
But I will finish it, or else I will a) feel like a failure, b) get kicked out of this blog, c) have wasted the money and space it took to put the book on my Palm Treo where I do 95% of my reading these days, and d) always wonder what the book’s really about.
From the sounds of it, I might still not know what it’s about after I’ve read it, but I will deal with that when I get there.
Today is the first day of Infinite Summer. In the immortal words of Bender from Futurama, “Into the breach, meatbags!”
Do you read front matter in books? I do so compulsively. The standard disclaimer that appears with all the Library of Congress mumbo jumbo tends to read (as it does in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) something like this:
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Which of course is complete bullshit.
The front matter of his 1989 short-story collection Girl with Curious Hair spices the disclaimer up a bit:
These stories are 100 percent fiction. Some of them project the names of “real” public figures onto made-up characters in made-up circumstances. Where the names of corporate, media, or political figures are used here, those names are meant only to denote figures, images, the stuff of collective dreams; they do not denote, or pretend to private information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise.
Essay collections are a little different in that they typically don’t require disclaimers about fictionalizing real people, but that’s not to say that they can’t have entertaining front matter. In his essay collection entitled Consider the Lobster, Wallace gives us this:
The following pieces were originally published in edited, heavily edited, or (in at least one instance) bowdlerized form in the following books and periodicals. N.B.: In those cases where the fact that the author was writing for a particular organ is important to the essay itself — i.e., where the commissioning magazine’s name keeps popping up in ways that can’t now be changed without screwing up the whole piece — the entry is marked with an asterisk. A single case in which the essay was written to be delivered as a speech, plus another one where the original article appeared bipseudonymously and now for odd and hard-to-explain reasons doesn’t quite work if the “we” and “your correspondents” thing gets singularized, are further tagged with what I think are called daggers.
A list of publications follows, complete with the aforementioned asterisks and daggers. Infinite Jest goes as follows:
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any apparent similarity to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or the product of your own troubled imagination.
Where the names of real places, corporations, institutions, and public figures are projected onto made-up stuff, they are intended to denote only made-up stuff, not anything presently real.
Besides Closed Meetings for alcoholics only, Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston, Massachusetts also has Open Meetings, where pretty much anybody who’s interested can come and listen, take notes, pester people with questions, etc. A lot of people at these Open Meetings spoke with me and were extremely patient and garrulous and generous and helpful. The best way I can think of to show my appreciation to these men and women is to decline to thank them by name.
After riffing just a little bit on the standard disclaimer, he goes into that unguarded, earnest expression of gratitude complete with what is sort of a trademark serial-“and” clause that has a way, probably because it is sort of child-like, of conveying innocence and I think sincerity and honesty, which (honesty) is one of the things I most like about Wallace’s work.
So, front matter. It’s usually not worth a read but is occasionally funny, informative (in a “here, let me open up the back of the shop for you a little bit” sort of way), or even endearing.
It must have been Christmas of 1998 that I got my hands on Infinite Jest. It was late in my college career, and I had been steeped for a few years in reading dead old white guys. By this time, I suppose I had more or less committed to studying Milton and the dramatists of the 17th century. When I opened my Christmas gift from my sister, I saw a big big book with blue sky and clouds on the cover and a picture of a scruffy, sort of pursed-lipped, bandanaed guy on the back. My sister told me that she figured I had read plenty of dead guys and it was time I read some guys who were still living (now, just a few months shy of the anniversary of Wallace’s death, boy does that sting). She later confessed to me that she had bought it for herself but couldn’t get into it and figured it might be up my alley. After all, it seemed to be about tennis, and I had been an avid if mostly ungifted tennis player in high school.
I read the book in ten days over Christmas break, growing bedsore as I turned page after page after page. It was just that compelling, a fact that becomes significant as you wind your way deeper and deeper into the book and its central theme of addiction (the back cover of the book mentions addiction, so let’s don’t count that as a spoiler). For the decade-plus that I’ve lived with this book, I’ve continued to be hit by how the cycles and rationalizations of addiction and need described in Infinite Jest bear on my own life. Certain early sections capital-R Resonate with me — even though I don’t feel sufficiently entitled or tried-by-fire enough to feel such resonance — as has much of Wallace’s work since Infinite Jest. It’s been long enough since I’ve read all the way through to the end that I wonder if there might not be later sections that strike more of a chord with me now than when I was younger.
When I read Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I thought there was just a real earnestness about the work. Much of it I’m sure I didn’t get. Good lord, I can’t say that I identified with all of the hideous men. Yet in many of them, there’s a kernel of unvarnished, private truth, things one thinks and hates himself for thinking and doesn’t necessarily say aloud (even within what counts as “aloud” in his own head). I could recognize little bits of myself in little bits of plenty of Wallace’s writing, and I figured he was really honest at his best. And that was something I appreciated.
I got drunk once after reading BIWHM and wrote Wallace a very short note thanking him for being honest. I didn’t expect a reply, but I sort of wanted one. I hoped that by being direct and brief and by not fawning, I would entice him to open up a to-be-canonized correspondence with me wherein he gave me insight into what scraps of fiction I would one day send his way for critique, and of course it would all be memorialized not only because of his benevolence in mentoring me but because of my own meteoric rise to acclaim in literary fiction and my own earnestness and erudition and sort of rebellious approach to letters. Of course I didn’t really really expect a reply. And I didn’t get one at first. But six months later, he wrote me a post-card. He didn’t invite me to lay my head in the lap of his excellence, but by golly it was a connection, and one he really didn’t have to bother to make. His bothering to write me back made me a fan not just of the work or the author as author but of the man as a person, however little evidence of his goodness as a person I had. To learn after his death that he responded in similar fashion to many many people only made me admire him more.
So, this is the perspective from which I write. I’m a big fan of Wallace’s work. I’m not a scholar by any means, and much (most) of what may pass for scholarship (if anything does) in the posts I’ll write owes a big debt to my experiences on the wallace-l email discussion list, of which I’ve been a mostly quiet member for six or seven years now. I still mourn Wallace’s recent death with real sadness approaching the sort that one typically reserves for close friends or family. I find it easy to forgive whatever’s bad or inexplicably difficult within his work because of how good the really good is. This is not to say that I’m a lock-stepping flag-waver for Wallace’s work. A lot of it seems almost impenetrable or just weird or even boring. But when he’s good, I think he’s just about beyond compare.
I started rereading Infinite Jest a month or two after Wallace’s death but stopped less than 100 pages in, maybe because something else came up, maybe because it was just a little too soon yet (I’m not sure which; I’m not trying to be dramatic). Now I’m feeling really up for it again. I lose track of how many times I’ve started reading the book. It’s a half dozen easily. I’ve finished it either two or three times, making this either my third or fourth full reading. I can hardly wait to dive in. Aw, heck: I’m 70 pages in already; I can hardly wait to keep going.
Infinite Zombies 