Thoughts on Infinite Jest

My friend, the redoubtable Massey, has asked me to share some of my erstwhile thoughts about Infinite Jest, the David Foster Wallace behemoth that I started last month.  I'm only halfway done right now, and I'm afraid I have nothing of real substance to contribute, but I am due for a blog post.  Anyway, it's always useful for my own mental processes to have to make explicit some of what I have burbling inside my head.  Hopefully, too, this will start a literary discussion to rival our recent political blow-out.

So, what about it?

Well, first off, I find the book, in general, pleasantly accessible.  I guess I had expected it would be more difficult--difficult in the way of Ulysses, I mean, where you almost can't read it, the first time through, without a guide.  Infinite Jest is actually quite readable; though a lot of the vocabulary is (needlessly) obscure, the story itself--such it is--is more or less right there in front of you.  I started reading it because a friend, a fellow-writer, suggested he found the book 'generative,' a useful source of inspiration and motivation toward writing.  I think he was right: I've been reading Infinite Jest in the morning every day before I start to work and it does seem to be useful in dislodging ideas from my often clogged and refractory mind.  For that alone, it's worth reading.  (Interesting topic for future post: generative fiction/art vs 'great' art.  Always the same?  Probably not.)

At this point, I'd say the novel does not succeed as a narrative.  It's not really a forward-moving story, so much as an interrelated series of riffs and tableaux.  He's interested in two major subjects--addiction (drug, alcohol, and, in a way, tennis) and America's relationship to pleasure (where that pleasure manifests itself in both drugs and popular entertainment--television in particular).  The latter subject especially is one I find engaging, and so I'm generally happy enough to read Wallace musing on the subject.  But musings is really a lot of what the book consists of--or rather, it's what the book, at its best consists of.  I don't have much interest in what happens to the characters (nor, do I think, did Wallace while writing it) and the book's complex relationship to time--the way it cuts constantly back and forth between many different time periods in the life of its characters--give the whole reading experience a static, motionless feel.  Time is not a thing that moves forward; we rather experience people frozen in various attitude at various moment in their life.  The snapshot moments are interesting enough, but the relationship between the characters' pasts and presents rarely feels significant.

The part I find least compelling, at least thus far, is the ersatz history of the United States, President Gently, and the Quebecois resistance.  (The sequences with Maranthe and Stately sitting on top of a butte in Arizona arguing about the nature of America are especially tedious.)  With any other writer, a book like this couldn't work, but Wallace is smart enough to be able to stitch together a series of riffs on whatever topic he feels drawn to and make it readable.  A book of great moments, but not, in its entirety a great book.  That's the verdict for now.

Two people I've thought about frequently while reading it--and to whom I've been intending to write emails recommending they read it--are 1) Seb and 2) "Subliminal Gary."  For entirely different reasons, each of you would respond to this in a big way (Seb maybe most of all?).

Also--this is a GREAT book to read on Kindle/Ipad.  It makes it easy to look up all the esoteric medical vocabuarly, and going back and forth between the endnotes and the main body of the novel takes only the touch of a screen.  Also, makes it easy to transport.  For whatever that's worth.

Random Prediction

So I woke up today convinced that in the next week or so, Norv Turner would be fired.  I'm setting this down in writing in a semi-public place in the event that it happens, so you can all marvel at my prescience.  If it doesn't happen, then, well it should.

My other football predictions are so far looking pretty good.  Maybe it's time to just start a sports blog?  There are so few of those around, right?

Not much else to report around here.  The Wife and I are going on a fall vacation to Boston starting on Thursday.  I bought a Kindle, thinking it would make it easier to read and travel (and because Infinite Jest, the current project, is a bit of a monster, luggage-wise.)  An unexpected benefit: reading on a Kindle allows you to instantly look up the meaning of any word you don't know (just hold your finger on the world in question--no need to both with getting up and going to the dictionary).  I generally think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but David Foster Wallace seems to take an obscure joy in using words that, well, I imagine few people would know.  So that has come in very useful.  Also nifty is the ability to read his footnotes instantly--you just touch the footnote number, and you are transported there.  When you're done, you touch the number again.  There's no need to flip back and forth.  It's really the perfect book for a Kindle.

All right.  As you were.

Crucial Status Update

At some point, recently, in the hearing of others, I believe that I suggested that Station to Station, and not Low, was, in fact, the greatest masterpiece produced by the great producer of masterpieces, the Thin White Chameleon, Mr David B, Esq. That, I now retract. Utterly and irrevocably. It's Low, my friends. Low upon Low upon Low. Set it down in the records, in the stony syllables of history, from now until the end of recorded time.

Lou Dobbs is Fun to Deride

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"I have something to add..."

As someone who works regularly with high school students trying to improve their writing, I found this article in The Atlantic, about a Staten Island high school making massive strides in the quality of its student essays, useful and intriguing.

An excerpt, which I found inspirational and funny:

Classroom discussion became an opportunity to push Monica and her classmates to listen to each other, think more carefully, and speak more precisely, in ways they could then echo in persuasive writing. When speaking, they were required to use specific prompts outlined on a poster at the front of each class.

“I agree/disagree with ___ because …”

“I have a different opinion …”

“I have something to add …”

“Can you explain your answer?”

The structured speaking was a success during Monica’s fifth-period-English discussion of the opening scene of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “What is Willie Loman’s state of mind? Is he tired? If he is tired, why would he be so tired?” asked the teacher, Angelo Caterina. “Willie Loman seems tired because he is getting old,” ventured a curly-haired girl who usually sat in the front. “Can you explain your answer?,” Monica called out. The curly-haired girl bit her lip while her eyes searched the book in front of her. “The stage direction says he’s 63. That’s old!” Other hands shot up. Reading from the prompt poster made the students sound as if they’d spent the previous period in the House of Lords instead of the school cafeteria. “I agree that his age is listed in the stage direction,” said John Feliciano. “But I disagree with your conclusion. I think he is tired because his job is very hard and he has to travel a lot.”

He Does It His Way

I will have some responses to the more recent posts on the behemoth politics post in a day or so.  In the meantime, I challenge any of you to get through this video without laughing with glee.  It's not until the 1:10 mark that the joy begins.  You'll see.

Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan

On the DNC

"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in." 

That's one of the many great lines from Clinton's speech last night.   This Democratic Convention, I think, marks the death blow for the Romney campaign.  Assuming Obama makes no major gaffes between now and election, he's going to win.  That's not a bold prediction, I know, but I can't help that what seems obvious to me seems obvious to everyone else.  My hope is that an utter defeat this fall will help the Republican Party reform itself into a party of viable, responsible adults.

Can anyone who has watched both of the nominating conventions believe that the Republican Party, as currently constituted, deserves--or is prepared--to be in power?  Their entire strategy since Obama came into power has been to oppose his every attempt to do anything (including an attempt to balance a budget the substance of which they agreed with) in the hopes they could defeat him.  Or, as President Clinton put it last night:

President Obama...tried to work with congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn't work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.

This was Mitch McConnell, of course.  And this, at core, has been the motivating ethos of the Republicans--not we want to govern, but we want to WIN.

Another excerpt:

When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better. After all, nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes. Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.

I tend to value small government over large, and the private over the public sector.  I am fully persuaded that our most important challenge over the next ten years will be cutting entitlements and working out a sustainable model for balancing budgets.  I have many problems with several stalwarts of the Democratic base.  And yet for all that, I have never been so fully repulsed by the Republican Party as I am today.  I won't say they have no ideas--I think (hope?) they do.  They don't make arguments based on those ideas, however; they argue only that Obama is bad.  The entire Republican convention, last week, could be summed up in the phrase "Obama Is Bad."  It's lame dispiriting stuff.  What a contrast to what we've seen from the Democrats so far in Charlotte.

NFL Season 2012

If there's one thing I'm for which I'm known and respected--nay, even revered--among my friends it's my abilities as a football prognosticator.  Each year starting in August the pleas to hear my predictions about the upcoming NFL season grow and more fervent.  Phones ring.  Emails are sent.  "Please, ANCIANT," they say, "Please tell us what will happen this year in the NFL."

Be calmed, my friends.  Your pleas need sound no more.  The knowledge is coming....


1) The NY Jets will finish under .500.  Rex Ryan will not be the head coach at the start of 2013.

2) Brandon Weedon will disappoint as the Cleveland QB.

3) Ryan Fitzpatrick--who I like as a person--will play poorly.  Everyone will talk about the huge contract he got last year and how much the Bills overpayed for him.

4) Sam Bradford AND Blaine Gabbert will shake off their bad performances from last year; both will play well enough to justify being number one picks.

5) The Steelers will not make the playoffs.

6) Defenses will figure out how to contain Cam Newton; his numbers will decline significantly from last year.  He will look average.

7) In Philadelphia, Nick Foles will play well enough for Michael Vick (who will suffer the usual out-for-four-games-with-bruised-ribs injury in week 6) to generate a QB controversy.

Most of my picks so far are about QBs, I realize.  Is it because my natural athleticism and steely-eyed badassery makes me essentially a pro NFL quarterback myself?  Probably.

8) The Falcons will make the playoffs.  The Bears will not.

9) I am still not a believer in the 49ers and Alec Smith.  I should be, I guess.  But I wouldn't be surprised if they finish at 9-7.

10) The Dolphins fire Jeff Ireland as GM.  This is a wish more than a prediction, borne of me thinking he's not only a terrible GM but a really unlikable person.  But I'm putting it here anyway, in the hopes it will be true.

The Fawning PR Man

I've never felt, for any Presidential candidate, as strong a revulsion as the one I feel toward Mitt Romney.  If there's any interest from readers, I can try, in a later post, to adumbrate some of what I see as his many flaws.  In the meantime, this editorial in The Economist, while too mild in its condemnation of Romney's craven pandering for my tastes, is worth a read.  Its scolding, disappointed tone is, methinks, a bad sign for a candidate whose background and ideology (if an empty suit like Romney can be said to have ideology) would seem to make him a natural ally of the eminently pro-market, anti-regulation Economist.

Sample quote:

Competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected.

"I hate this so much"

My friend, ASWOBA, posted this on Facebook, but in case any of my eight readers didn't see it, I'm going to repost.  It's the account of two diners eating at a restaurant called "Dans Le Noir" in New York City.  The gimmick is that the dining room where you eat is kept completely dark.  As in, pitch black.  You eat your whole meal without seeing anything (or anyone).

And is it horrible?  Oh yes.  It is horrible.

Two samples from the article:

EaterGM: We talked about this several times during the hour and a half, but the only thing that got us through there was just blind faith that we weren't going to die.
EaterAK: I think it's funny that I was worried about making small talk with strangers before going in, because once we were in the dark room, all I could think of was getting out of there.
EaterGM: The only thing. So, the waitress comes over and explains that we'd have to pour water into glasses by sticking our fingers in the glasses.

* * * 

EaterAK: I should note that while we're eating we are sitting in this dark room, it's VERY loud and very stuffy.
EaterGM: Oh, extremely. Yes, like a subway car during rush hour.
EaterAK: And every ten minutes or so one of the waiters yells for everyone to be quiet, and then it revs up again. Our waitress explained that it's due to the fact that you don't know how close you are to people so you just yell. I noticed my throat hurt afterwards.
EaterGM: Ha yeah, we were screaming at each other the entire time. "WHAT DOES YOUR FOOD TASTE LIke?" "I HATE THIS AMANDA." "IT"S HORRIBLE." "I HATE THIS SO MUCH."

'I never thought you were.'

I excerpted the Our Mutual Friend passage in the last post not only to call attention to its own felicities but because I was struck, reading it, by an intriguing parallel between it and Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of The World.

Here's the relevant passage from O'Brian:

'Forgive me, sir,' said Jack, rising, 'but there is still the question of hands: I am short, very far short, of my complement.  And then of course there is the chaplain.' 

'Hands?' exclaimed the Admiral, as though this were the first he had ever heard of the matter.  'What do you expect me to do about them?  I can't bring me out of the ground, you know.  I am not a goddam Cadmus.' 

'Oh no, sir,' cried Jack with the utmost sincerity, 'I never thought you were.' 

'Well,' said the Admiral, somewhat mollified, 'come and see me tomorrow.'  

...Allen and his new captain walked out into the street.  'I shall see you tomorrow, then, Mr Allen?' said Jack, pausing on the pavement.  'Let it be early, if you please.'...

Now that they were out in the open, surrounded by quantites of people and talking about subjects of reat importance to them both, such as the ship's tendency to gripe and the probable effects of doubling her, Allen's constraint wore off, and as they walked along towards the ship he said, 'Sir, may I ask what a Cadmus might be?' 

'Why, as to that, Mr Allen,' said Jack, 'it might not be quite right for me to give you a definition in such a public place, with ladies about.  Perhaps you had better look into Buchan's Domestic Medicine.'

Cadmus, sowing dragon's teeth, creates an army

It's the same joke--someone's trying to cover up their ignorance by pretending to be unwilling to say something not fix for mixed company.  I don't necessarily assert that O'Brian intended to borrow this idea from Dickens; I doubt it was a conscious theft.  But O'Brian--as erudite and learned an author as any I know--had undoubtedly read Dickens.  That idea, that set-up for a joke--if you want to call it that--had stuck in his head.  The pleasure of finding that connection, of seeing an idea passed form one hand to the next, is one of the great joys that reading, and especially _rereading_ offers.  (Only because I've read all of the O'Brian books a dozen times was I able to associate the two moments, reading Our Mutual Friend.)