July 30th, 2011 / 12:43 pm
Snippets

One of the major reasons I love Infinite Jest is that it seems like it was written by an extremely intelligent alien; someone trying so intricately and direly to figure out humans and so utterly, utterly failing.

35 Comments

  1. Mike Meginnis

      I like that a lot.

  2. richard chiem

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  3. lorian long

      no.

  4. Mikael

      But in that effort, still succeeding.

  5. Blake Butler

       you think no i think yes and no and we’re both wrong

  6. Blake Butler

      of course. that central paradox is a small part of the whole point (which he, I’m afraid, and i believe he was afraid, was ultimately only partially in control of). it’s also why it’s more moving than even it meant to be.

  7. HR Shah

      david foster wallace’s last message to planet earth: fuck this place. it sucks. i’m leaving. 

  8. postitbreakup

      So, I’ve tried like 4 or 5 times, but especially 2 of those times, to read Infinite Jest, and I get stuck.  

      I love the pothead character, I’m intrigued by the diplomat watching the tape, and I am on the slightly positive side of neutral about Hal and the tennis academy stuff.  

      But I fucking can’t stand the cross dressing secret agent’s conversation and it feels like it keeps going on and on and on and on and on so I quit reading.

      Should I keep reading, does it get better, or is it just a book that I’ll have to accept is not for me despite (because of?) its brilliance?

  9. deadgod

      I think the writer communicates human failure pretty well

      why do you think it seems like the failure of the writer to figure out humans is utter

  10. JH

      It gets better. Way better.

      “The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the
      double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight
      against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept
      making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to
      get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.”

      Like that much better, only for 650 pages.

  11. Pie

      I think there was a conversation here once about books that are antagonistic towards their readers. Infinite Jest has always seemed like that sort of book to me. On my last (and, hopefully, final) attempt, I made it about 600 pages in. 

  12. Anonymous

      yea, hopefully.

  13. Ryan
  14. Ryan

      I don’t know why the quote was formatted that way. Sorry.

  15. nick

      more like dfw’s last message to dfw

  16. nick

      more like dfw’s last message to dfw

  17. nick

      i feel the opposite. seems like wallace is dishing out pleasure to his readers on every single page, if they’re properly attuned to receive it. but it also helps to take a breather (say a month or more) somewhere in the middle…

  18. nick

      failed!

  19. Justintylerchandler

      i read IJ in January and have been saying ever since I’m going to
      read it again. you just have to read it. now.

  20. Carr Ba

      That semi-colon should be a dash.

  21. Ryan

      NICK GIVE ME A BREAK ITS BEEN A LONG DAY

  22. bobby

      He was only half right. 

  23. bobby

      I think the struggle to physically deal w/ reading it — the heft, learning the double bookmark trick, tight font and big spreads, many false starts — there is a “learning to walk” aspect to it that leaves the reader, once finished, painfully accomplished. Finishing feels the way real-world important things feel, like learning how to stitch yourself up after performing a self-tracheotomy. 

  24. postitbreakup

  25. Omar De Col

      um, actually it’s called a hyphen you dumb butt

  26. Justin Taylor

      The very last part (utter failure) notwithstanding, this is a good description of what I find so compelling about “Shoplifting from American Apparel,” and to a certain degree about Tao Lin in general.

  27. craig ronald marchinkoski

      that’s a much better blurb than the sven birkerts quote back bay slaps on the book. the “think” quote. that quote has always bothered me. dfw could only have failed. but that failure reads so well. i too found the marathe/steeply thread slightly taxing the first time i tried to read the whole book. but there’s so much more to enjoy you learn to Roll with it, regardless. 

  28. Mikael

      Amen to that, Blakeman, but I do tend to think he knew how moving the book he was making was going to be. How could he not? Homeboy had a cardioid apparatus that equaled the size of his noggin.

      And the smart alien trying to understand humans thing, which I really Facebook like as an idea, and which I’ve never heard put that exact way, is actually a pretty standard literary trope, if I’m reading you right. Tolstoy called it disassociation, I think (I’m not bothering to be a smart alien and Google it right now), where you (the narrator) try to describe something in an overly literal way in order to make a very mundane and ordinary thing, event, emotion seem foreign, funny, etc. Classic example of trying to describe an opera to someone who’s
      never heard of one. “A woman is standing and screaming in front of
      a theater full of people, etc.”

      See also the “Ithaca” chapter of ULYSSES where Bloom, making tea for him and Stephen, busts a freestyle RE: water, where the excessive, gushing narration about scientific and hydrological facts acts as a stand-in for the excessive, gushing emotion the character is feeling and, we understand, suppressing. I put DFDub in this Joycean and Tolstoyian lineage, as our best contemporary remixer of dramatic, self-conscious disassociation. Of course, he took it to
      exalted, exuberant, culturally-relevant new heights.

      In a way, he was overdescribing early 21st-cent human beings not to show off to them how smart of an alien he was, as is often something you hear unfair human beings criticize him for. But he was doing it (overdescribing), I think, for our sakes. He was worried we wouldn’t understand (not condescendingly), because he wanted us to understand, the way Hal is so anxious to be clearly understood (with traumatic consequences) in that bravura first scene of IJ.

      That very DFDubian anxiety, to me, is (a) totally relevant, I think, to the way we interact in everday 2011 life, in blog comments, etc., (b) very consciously done by the author, and (c) I think, at the end of this 2011 day, whether you want to give him full or partial credit for his control of the effect or not (kind of a negligible point if you ask me) very deeply moving.

  29. postitbreakup
  30. anonymish
  31. deadgod

      Did it flow?

      From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received:  existence with existence he was with any as any with any:  from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.

      Did it flow?

      Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.

      Did it flow?

      A silent contemplation:  a tentative velation:  a gradual abasement:  a solicitous aversion:  a proximate erection.

      (Remix.)

      What creates the movement and intensity of the catechism of Ithaca is surely the nozzling intrinsic to it:  the channeling of amity then eros by care.

      Have a look (and forgive at least some of the misprints):  http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/17/ .

  32. Omar De Col

      time to get on the train and re read the dictionary pal cos i think ur getting confused.

      it’s technically called and ‘um dash’. as in, “um—i guess i’ll put a daaaash here—lol”

      like you know sometimes you’re writing and you stick a dash there but really there’s a gap in the sentence you can’t be bothered to fill cos you just got back from a 14 hour shift at cinnabon and it’s like, ‘i gotta get this done it’s nearly bed time’.

  33. Omar De Col

      time to get on the train and re read the dictionary pal cos i think ur getting confused.

      it’s technically called and ‘um dash’. as in, “um—i guess i’ll put a daaaash here—lol”

      like
      you know sometimes you’re writing and you stick a dash there but really
      there’s a gap in the sentence you can’t be bothered to fill cos you
      just got back from a 14 hour shift at cinnabon and it’s like, ‘i gotta
      get this done it’s nearly bed time!’

  34. marshall

      who iz most human

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