Why this group?

I was dissatisfied with how disorganized all the DFW & IJ threads became over in the salon. With so many multiple (unrelated to DFW or IJ) threads active and growing concurrently over there, I think the IJ material might've gotten lost somewhat as a result. Too many distractions over there. At least for me. I think DFW and IJ are both big enough to give one's undivided attention to in a group devoted solely to them. And this book means too much to me personally to allow it to sink beneath the mire of some salon's threads.

I was also dissatisfied, looking back, how little I was able to contribute after the initial push into IJ, and so, w/out the pressure of a group read to keep up with (along w/life out there in the "real world") I'm hoping with this group to create a haven for other fellow "Infinite Jesters" who can talk IJ all day long.

I think we just skimmed the surface mostly in the salon. There's a lot more to discuss, I hope. And if there isn't, then I guess the infinite jest is on me.

Welcome!

Rique - thanks for the invite. Fire us up. I'm in a midst of (trying to write) a review at the moment, and still thinking about it, and wondering how much I missed. I'll definitely need to read it again some time.

Harold Bloom defines 'canonical' as books we need to read again given the constraints of time and eventual mortality. IJ is definitely canonical from that perspective. I also will read it again sometime, as I am sure there is a lot more I could get out of it. I'm also looking forward to reading more DFW, and I am slowly building up a collection of all his works.

2> anytime man. I've enjoyed reading what you've had to say on IJ over in the salon. Looking forward to your review. How does one review IJ anyway? katieinseattle asked that very question at the start of her review of IJ. I don't know. I loved tomcat's approach. I have three editions of IJ, so I've still got at least two more "reviews" in me. My first really wasn't a review, but more a piece of fan mail.

3> I missed sooooo much the first time (and yet it was still a rich rewarding read). So much to mined and figured out, to state the obvious. I'm hoping Sutpen and pyrocow will show up eventually and continue offering us their passionate insights into the book.

It's a book I can relate to and identify with personally on several levels, whether it's working and interacting with addicts, or getting lost in the minutia of academia, ad infinitum, or the sense of "being lost" in the universe, that DFW conveys so convincingly through a variety of characters culled from the wide socio-economic and cultural strata of ONAN...

I'm not positive where or how to begin, but I think I'll probably begin at the beginning (which as you attested to, Dan, on a thread very recently in the salon) is really the ending. So I guess I'll begin with ending, at some point.

I hope, though, that others will just jump in and start threads regarding whatever it is in IJ or DFW or his other works that they're presently passionate about and grappling with.

Listening to those as they tackled the text helped me comprehend what I'd read (and was re-reading) better.

I'd like to see this group become something of a collective user's guide over time.

an FAQ thread, quotations thread, interpreting hard passages thread, etc...Stuff like that...

I am insulted that no invitation was issued à moi. I am feeling a little persona non grata these days. No one even answers my PMs. And I have recently dead relatives, so I think someone should pity me. And should that cat who must not be named - the one who no longer loves me or responds to my PM messages - show up here, just tell him I barked.

DFW, I knew him not well, a man of , alas, finite jest. I will tagg along jest to be a nagg if noffin else. Though a nagg in a good way I hope.

#4 - Thanks. I'm not sure how to write a review, but I'm not really do that, just writing out some comments and a very personalized response.

Some things I'm dealing with that might be of interest:

Spoiler Warning - maybe just skip point 7 (maybe I just shouldn't post point 7)

1. This is a book of big themes with a plot dependent on tiny details and carefully reading between the lines. Trying to play detective and follow the plot from the end to the beginning, I begin to lose the experience, and the big themes. Is there a contradiction there - do the hidden details take away from the overall experience?

1b. I'm noticing the ambiguity of the plot forces us to ask a lot more questions then we might if the plot was clear-cut. There are different options and understandings and misunderstandings, and they lead to different directions of thought. Maybe DFW felt he needed to push us to think things through more. (...or does this just ruin the coherency of our thoughts?)

2. Working out the detective work of all the "hidden" plot details and their implications.

3. I see DFW as essentially reporting on a specific kind of truth - something that one obtains only after hitting the bottom. Is this a major theme, or am I taking it too far? How far can we take this?

4. What's in the film IJ that's so pleasurable?

5. I've missed some big stuff here. I know I have I just don't know what those are.

6. Optics, Incandenza, film, different ways of seeing,
- Schitt specifically has many unorthodox ways of seeing - the infinity of inifinities -contained (p 82), the myth of efficient (p 80-81), the spiel on not getting used to the environment, but instead staying within yourself
- but, really each character has there own very distinct ways of seeing
- there's some kind of continuous thought process there.
6b. Is this where the teeth fit in?

Major Spoiler Warning - point 7
7. or - Optics - then a tennis academy - then a film obsession - JOI constantly changes careers. Is he bored, or is he failing and then trying something new (implying ETA is a failure), or is he seeing a new way to get what he wants? I'm wondering if ETA wasn't an attempt to reach Hal, and that it failed, so the next attempt was the film IJ, and then JOI's wraith tries something else - although I can't figure out what he finally tried and did to Hal and whether he knew Hal took the DMZ my accident as a kid, and whether it's that - the DMZ - that first of all led Hal to his strange strengths and weaknesses and second led JOI to constantly get wrong how to reach him - the DMZ being the one variable he (JOI) couldn't see and therefore failed to account for. And what is the benefit of the wraith-possessed Stice/Hal upcoming match-up?

7 isn't really coherent...

8. Hal - Does he really not feel in the beginning (chronologically), or does he just hide it so well?

ETA the missing touchstone Infinite Jest

I'm calling it preliminary, but it's a review. I just posted it on my thread here (post 7): http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#1961862

PS - I finally read Murr's review .... wow. See here: http://www.librarything.com/work/903/reviews/56562680

I'll do it! Although the main/only reason I've been avoiding IJ discussion on the salon is the spoilers. Not sure how a non-spoiler thread would work--foolish idea, tending inevitably to insipid generalities?

I've been obsessed with lesser things and will return to IJ with this boost. Thanks!

7.> "What's in the film IJ that's so pleasurable?"

On page 993, the footnote to Infinite Jest (V?) is listed and described. What's stated there is, I'm pretty sure, about all we'll ever glean from its contents, as quoted from two different sources of Cartridge Quarterly (which isn't much): "extraordinary...entertaining and compelling work...". It's in color, Madame Psychosis is in it. She was in U.H.I.D. right? (or formed the group?) What's so compelling about the hideously deformed? We do tend to stare at people who look different, don't we, until we catch ourselves doing it? What if we lost the ability due to some optical illusion in the cartridge to disengage from the hideous deformity? Speculation...

But check this out...

This footnote has three footnotes: d., e., and f.

d. lists the reference and e. the second cited in Cartridge Quarterly, including the articles page numbers.

Well, I was curious: What if those page numbers cited in the Infinite Jest footnote not only refer to the articles from Cartridge Quarterly but also, more importantly, direct us back to the page numbers in the book, Infinite Jest for more clues/information.

So, go ahead, my advice to you, check out those page numbers, and it's no coincidence, especially the first page numbers listed, in my mind, that DFW did this purposely, the little trickster.

Not that it ultimately answers your point 4, Dan, but hopefully it gets us closer....

Could it also be a subtle reference to Dostoevsky's underground man, and his toothache?

>10 MeditationesMartini:, 11 ditto
Although re spoilers, I've also wondered whether it's worth avoiding them so assiduously? I hate to have great reads spoiled, yet reading those threads would make for a much more informed read of IJ. Opinions, please: is IJ a book to be spoiled?

Anyway, I'm glad to have been pointed here from a couple of directions and hope not to be slackerish. I realized DFW had infiltrated me when I watched a rerun of the TV series "House," where House is detoxing in a psych facility and one of the other characters is referred to as "Hal" ... surely an homage to IJ.

14 > gotta be some Dostoy homage going on re. the teeth.

I highly recommend, tomcat, and everyone, (and especially in considering tomcat and Porius' recent dialogue in the salon NFU thread regarding Joseph Frank, that you check out DFWs essay "Joseph Franks's Dostoevsky" in Consider the Lobster. Here's a sampling of DFW on The Underground Man from that essay to whet your appetite:

"...Notes...is a powerful but extremely weird little novel, and both these qualities have to do with the fact that the book is at once universal and particular. Its protagonist's self-diagnosed "disease" -- a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a self-conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self-negating character -- makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves, the same kind of ageless literary archetype as Ajax or Hamlet. But at the same time, Notes from Underground and its Underground Man are impossible really to understand without some knowledge of the intellectual climate of Russia in the 1860s, particularly the frisson of utopian socialism and aesthetic utilitarianism then in vogue among the radical intelligentsia, an ideology that Dostoevksy loathed with the sort of passion that only Dostoevksy could loathe with..."

15> great question re. can IJ be "spoiled" w/spoilers. For me it couldn't. There was an article in the LA Times Book Review back in '01 when DFW had just arrived here in SoCal for his teaching stint at the Claremont Colleges, and while the interviewer/reviewer of Wallace talked a lot about IJ and its plot, once I was in the book shortly thereafter (inspired by the LA Times piece) there was so much going on in the book already (as you're aware) that what I'd read in the Times essay had absolutely no effect on my reading of the book. I think IJ is so layered and convoluted - a novel of philosophy and ideas as much as it is a novel with a plot - that spoilers (again, for me) don't/didn't really spoil the reading process for me. Curious how that's gone for others.

And I did not know that about "House"! I've gotta believe that the writers of a show as cynical and existential as "House" are indeed familiar w/Infinite Jest. Seems self evident. I hope it's true. Cool story, detail. I've missed that episode.

I'm going to start a "Humor in IJ" thread later, because I've read some criticism hereabouts from several readers that DFW is too serious or takes himself too seriously or is pretensious blah blah blah (and what writer of literary fiction hasn't taken themselves or their work too seriously at times? -- isn't that their job to create "serious fiction" anyway? and why we love them so?) so I want to spotlight the hysterical LOL funny side of IJ and DFW too. Infinite Jest can be just as funny in spots as his funniest essay, imo.

>15 detailmuse: that is a fantastic way to think about it. You have given me a great gift here today. And if a narrative as traditional as, say, Anna Karenina isn't spoiled by knowing what happens to her at the end, then surely I fret too much. It's more of an accolade to Foster Wallace than anything, really.

Which means I don't feel too bad being critical: do any of you get this sense sometime that a young(ish) prodigy is taking on a project of bewildering proportions with the easy confidence with which he has so far sailed through life, and sometimes coming up against his limits, coming off glib, like someone who tries too hard to know everything about everything, somebody who knows how to imply that he knows (even)more than he does? It's a problem in any magisterial work, but especially one in which such infinite care has been taken as with Infinite Jest--I think specifically of the treatment of French and German words, the writing of Front with a final e and accent aigu, making it "frontay" to rhyme with "fronsay"; the confusion of de las and dus; the spelling "Schtitt", which surely should be Stitt,or if anglicized, Shtitt. I think of somebody's "clipped Alberta accent", in which "Alberta" is clearly standing in for "Canada", meaning "Ontario", meaning "the stereotypical Canadian accent as presented in US media." Alberta may have a few people who talk like that, and a few who talk like Sarah Palin, but mostly with the exception of their Canadian Raising ("aboot") they'll be indistinguishable from, say, Californians. And I don't expect Wallace to know all this, but it makes me wonder what kind of problems specialists in other fields would find with his treatment of pharmaceuticals, say. It may seem churlish to quibble with a magisterial performance like this, but as well as sort of implicitly asking for credit for the infinite care as alluded to above, it seems to me like Foster Wallace is also trying to imply a sort of infinite knowledgeability. If this book is analogous to the Entertainment in all the apparent (and interesting) ways, I feel inclined to cut it less slack--for trying to be infinite--than if it had tried to be merely really, really good.

Do any of you feel like this? Like Wallace is trying to inhabit the Master position, control the high ground in an almost Machiavellian way? (One that also bears comparison with Hal Incandenza.)

Glad people still want to talk about the book. Some nice contributions so far, but right now I'm just going to respond to a couple of recent posts:

16:
Sheesh, people think IJ is too serious? I've always heard just the opposite. People tend to praise the humor in the book and miss the "point." I'm not saying you've imagined the criticism coming from the other side, but that struck me as something I haven't seen much of, myself. Aside from the "pretentious" epithet, but that tends to come from people who are skeptical of hard fiction anyway.

17:
The Anna Karenina parallel is a good one vis a vis spoilability.

"prodigy is taking on a project of bewildering proportions with the easy confidence with which he has so far sailed through life"
Erm...allow me to just interject that by the time Wallace published Infinite Jest, he had been through at least two nervous breakdowns, at least one suicide attempt, along with stays in mental wards (including a course of ECT) and a halfway house to recover from various addictions. Now, he was pretty much a middle-class guy for his whole life, so it's not as if he was ever out on the street (for long, anyway), but I've read a lot about the guy and I just don't think he ever sailed through life. I think it was always fairly tough for him. Now, all that's not to say that the book couldn't still give you the "impression" of some carefree prodigy taking on too much, but I just wanted to point out that the hypothetical prodigy of that impression isn't much like Wallace was.

"who knows how to imply that he knows (even)more than he does"
This is undoubtedly true. Wallace explicitly says as much in David Lipsky's new book, which is a long interview with Wallace that he never published. I don't think that's just Wallace, though. I think a lot of fiction writers try to create a narrative persona whose knowledge seems all-encompassing. To me, this doesn't mean that Wallace wanted his readers to think that David Wallace knows everything there is to know about pharmaceuticals. It's a narrative persona, and I don't see why it's a "problem."

Some of your quibbles don't bother me as much as they bother you: for instance "Schtitt" is fine, I think. The character's supposed to be sort of cartoony, and that spelling looks like a cartoony German name. "Alberta accent" doesn't rankle, either. Just a matter of individual taste, I guess.

Finally: "If this book is analogous to the Entertainment in all the apparent (and interesting) ways, I feel inclined to cut it less slack--for trying to be infinite--than if it had tried to be merely really, really good."
Whoa, whoa, what? What kinds of parallels to the Entertainment do you see in the novel IJ? I don't understand what you could mean by that. Nor do I really understand what you mean by saying the book is "trying to be infinite."

>18 Sutpen: thanks for the thoughts. Yeah, I'm using "Wallace" as shorthand for "the position or concatenation of affects that doesn't ever quite achieve the critical mass to be called a 'narrator', but gives me this feeling of prodigality and prodigiousness nevertheless". No comment on the actual man and his evidently hard life intended. It does appear, though, that he may have been a man with a reasonably accurate sense of his considerable intellectual gifts, which observation I don't thing detracts from the realness of his existential pain in any way.

I guess I find the narrative persona problematic because it sometimes doesn't quite get over the fence--for me. It makes things seem a bit spurious or like we're being faked out a little sometimes, which I just find to be a bit of a shame because the book is so good and the knowledge on display so immense. That's the sense in which things like "Schtitt" bother me, and certainly it's an individual-taste thing.

And I didn't mean to make too explicit a connection between the book and the Entertainment or suggest they are the same. I only meant they are both recursive,both overwhelming, and that the compendiousness of one is analogous to the "infiniteness" (the way you never reach the end, the way it breaks your mind and sends you spinning into infinity) of the other. "Compendious" would have been a better word for what it's trying to be. Really a personal response to the times I've crawled into bed to read a short chapter before lightsout and found myself still bogged down in an endnote (e.g. the Incandenza filmography) half an hour later.

Just sharing observations rather than trying to construct a unified argument. It's very possible some of them are foolish, as I'm less than 200 pages in.

19:
Gotcha. I hope my comments didn't seem too harsh/confrontational/etc. I don't mean to come off that way, but re-reading #18, they seemed a little more pointed than I intended. I like the book a lot, and I have strong opinions, but I'm very much interested in impressions that differ from mine. Just for the record.

It's definitely true that the "compendiousness" of the novel coordinates with the word "infinite." I'm sure that was at least partly intentional, as a matter of fact (though the title Wallace initially chose was A Failed Entertainment). But the sense of the word "infinite" in the title of the novel is different from the sense of that word in the title of the film, in my mind. "Infinite Jest" in the film's title refers to the way in which the enjoyment provided is pretty much literally without limit. In the book's title, though, the phrase is a reference to the kind of 'end point' that the film is meant to suggest. In other words, the title of the novel isn't meant to point toward the ideal status of the book, but to the place Wallace is afraid Western culture is inching toward (which is dramatized by the eponymous film).

Shit, I'm so behind...

About knowing the plot, we know the plot of Sophocles's Oedipus, but does that ruin our sense of awe at the renewed telling of the tragedy?

>19 MeditationesMartini: I like that li'l semantic split there and am going to adopt it.

>20 Sutpen: well, as mentioned, I don't know that it's "Wallace" necessarily or that it's an intentional thing--just that that's the effect the (perceived) faltering-around-the-edges of the, like . . . sensory-immersion envelope, the tiny touches that weren't quite right, had on me.

>21 pyrocow: Nope! But it would please me to be able to experience it again without prior knowledge, if I could.

God is Dead.^1

You^2 are beating^3 a Dead^4 Horse.^5

There, fore, DFW is a Horse.^1

^1 Originally attributed to an obscure allegedly proto-Nazi philosopher, these words actually appear to have been induced by an oral reading of the proceedings of the Council of Trent while in a syphallitic haze, and are thus better attributed to the co-authorship of Luther and the Pope rather than the much worshipped Syphallitc.^6

^2 The lack of the familiar for addressing a collective is strongly felt in the English language, and no where more so than in internet postings.

^3 This is an interesting case where the metaphor is the reality, since the beating is sufficiently vicious to be felt even if delivered verbally. This point requires further thought, as it likely has some interesting epistomological implications. Does anyone know a good epistomological detective?

^4 Cf. Jerry Garcia et al. Note that no period should follow et.

^5 The Vedic horse sacrifice may well be the earliest ritual associating the divine and the equine.

^6 I do not wish to deny the syphallitic deification, though no evidence^7 exists suggesting deification to be appropriate at this time. Perhaps sainthood would be an appropriate middle ground.

^7 Evidence, of course, was not a favorite of the Council of Trent, which, to the best of our knowledge, was not directly influenced by a syphalitic haze, though the Faustian reference here should be highlighted if the reader is to be properly impressed. Just as evidence was not a favorite of the great Council, so logic and reason were but servants of faith, suggesting that the standard syllogism requires extrinsic elements for validation, which have here been provided.