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Infinite Jest; David Foster Wallace

Decided on Friday to join Infinite Summer for the next three months and re-read Infinite Jest. I had read it once before beginning in October 2002. This was in the middle of the three-year vow to get back to reading and read at least one book a month. I'll assume for many subsequent months, those books were read in parallel. I hessitated to join the, now large, online reading group for all the reasons others had: intimidated, afraid of commitment, etc. At 55 pages in, I have no regrets and am somewhat obsessed with the book. Much easier the second time through.

Some links of note:

• Daily discussion boards from Infinite Summer, no spoilers!
• Twitter search for #infsum
• While talking about The Pale King, DFW's unfinished novel to be published next year, Kottke links to two excerpts from The New Yorker: Good People from February 2007 and Wiggle Room from March 9th of this year. The Wikipedia entry for The Pale King links to a PDF, published by Harper's, of a section titled The Compliance Branch.

Misc.: Taking advice from someone's Twitpiced book to use two bookmarks: one for the story proper and one for the footnotes. Many west-coasters were having a difficult time finding a copy! There's some new edition out, but it's not so new that IS could be pegged as a (decidedly weird) publicity stunt. I have no idea where I got my copy in 2002; it's from a UK division of Little, Brown, and Co. called Abacus. Every blurb on the cover is from a different British publication.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; Burn, Stephen

A quick read (< 100 pages) with some notable insight into IJ. He points out mythological references, storyline intersections, and major themes. I would've liked to have seen a concise character outline to match the 11-page timeline of major events he provides in an appendix.

One problem with analyzing maximalist novel (Burn calls them encyclopedia novels) is that the abundance of detail offers itself up to the adoption of many different templates of intent. Still, some are stronger (and more intent-full) than others. A couple of Burn's ideas felt too fine-grained but most were a welcome insight, and he presented his reasoning with the transparent honesty of dead-ends and alternate possibilities.

It's been several years since I had read IJ, but this analysis helped bring back and organize the story as a whole.

Tim and Jim

Martin Freeman plays Tim in the British Office. John Krazinsky plays Jim in the American Office. Wikipedia has a list of all of the parallel universe characters.

Martin Freeman has a personal Web site where you can purchase his CD of Motown covers. Not really interested in Motown, but good for him. Three out of five from five customer reviews. I still haven't seen H2G2 or Love, Actually.

John Krazinsky is apparently not as tech-savvy but is certainly getting some literary cred. According to Lisa and TV Guide, he's working on a movie adaptation of David Foster Wallace's short story "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" due out in 2007. I had read Wallace's other collection of short stories, Oblivion, back in September of 2004. Even his short stories have an unbelievable density to them, so "Brief Interviews" should be worth looking for.

Clause trophy

A week or so ago, Sound & Fury returned to the music blogging scene (furiously) with an entry that contained amazingly long sentences on the verge of un-understandability (89 words). I loved it. I had written an entry on it. Then I deleted the entry because my praise and rambling was directionless, even though what drew me to it (although much draws me to the S&F blog, as it acts the counter-weight to the permissive newness and, as he likes to label it, postmodernism of modern aesthetics and those ideas that I both champion and challenge) was the artful and almost impenetrable overlong sentences. Who likes those run-on tight-rope walks of grammatical daring? I do. Almost as much as hyphens.

Anyway, one of my other favorite blogs-who-serve-to-take-me-to-school is of course Language Log. I had apparently missed their (singular "they") post on the sad demise of embedded clauses in our presidents' speeches only to catch up when Trent Reznor is referenced.

And I realize the appreciation, or at least my appreciation, may have come in part from that of David Foster Wallace's writing (ignoring whether I was drawn to it from appreciation or whether I'm drawn back from learned appreciation). Although who doesn't love a good discussion of semantic complexity?

So tired

This commencement speech by David Foster Wallace made a timely appearance today on Blogdex.

I woke up slightlly hung-over this morning after a fancified dinner out with friends and had the worn-out, world-weariness that often accompanies a draining evening of manic mood. Sometimes I'm tired of feeling as if I'm constantly running. And tired of always trying to shoot a few meters in front of my current position. It's not as if I work too much or achieve too much or even that I'm constantly busy. It's just that every nowandthen the number of spinning plates manifests itself and I think about how many I've broken already and am waiting for the whatever. The inevitable. I suspect that it's a not uncommon feeling that hits everybody when they're at their weakest.

And I thought about what it is like for someone to have their beliefs crushed or at least abandoned. Any beliefs. And those beliefs could be Completely True or Completely False and Ugly, but there's a type of experience where the abandonment doesn't mark a growth but instead a chopping off and the person is never the same. In mourning. Not that I've had my "beliefs crushed," mind you, but it's an interesting psychology and sortof goes hand-in-hand with the spinning plates. As you struggle to achieve whatever it is you're trying to achieve, and trying to achieve it because it's part of your belief system or whatever, you could eventually at some point invalidate that belief system. (Coincidentally, I had to re-write a small section of code today after realizing that: it sucked. This was, however, a "growth" type of thing and not one of those "chopping off" types of things.)

Anyway, DFW speaks a little on these subjects and others.

Then, near the end, We raise the key from A to B

So much new music and so many new ideas:

Maximalism

Maximalism [Wikipedia]. A term I've heard frequently but have only now looked it up. Art with a rich density of style and content.

Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich. ... Maximalism is used to describe the very extended post-modern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference and elaboration of detail occupy a greater and greater fraction of the text.

I finally understand the label and then Salon says it's dead!

Genius idea #2

This is an idea I had a while back, but a Web site just reminded me how useful it would be--that's always a good sign for an idea if you keep thinking about it.

There needs to be a Web utility that retrieves and organizes all streaming schedules so that they can be searched. Many radio stations, generally classical, broadcast their playlist or at least a description of thier specialty shows. All of this information could be scraped and imported into a database so that people could search for "Shostakovich" or "Red Hot Chili Peppers" or "symphony" or even "David Foster Wallace interview." Once a reliable schedule database is set up, you could schedule songs or shows to be recorded.

I think of it as Radio TiVo.

Ghost World, page 25

Ghost World, page 25. Enid mocks an ex-punk who's gone corporate and tries to defend her new look.

Gone vacationin'

Flight's at 2 today to Greece, so there'll be a noticeable lull in the postings. I'll probably get hit by the comment spammers while I'm gone, but maybe there'll be some gems of wisdom ("they have online casinos now!?!"). γεια σου.

Reading Oblivion, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2, and Top 10, Book 1. Listening to ... shit, gotta get my iRiver loaded with music! Bye.

Oblivion; Wallace, David Foster

Year of Glad

David Foster Wallace would be proud. Or scared.

Blogs, part 2

Kristin had made many statements and raised many questions. I want to break out of the comment and look a little deeper at the content and intent of blogs. Jeez, this subject probably has been written and overwritten, but let's go for it anyway.

David Foster Wallace interview

Tonight at 7:00, WABE is broadcasting a David Foster Wallace interview recorded at City Arts & Lectures. The City Arts & Lectures shows are recorded at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Van Ness.

Arte Bagge

Peter Bagge (of independent comics fame) has the most irrational screed against the fine arts, art museums, modern art, and experimentation I've ever seen. Ever. He's like a caricature of ignorance: angry at the apparent arrogance of people who create something he doesn't understand. As if any expression more difficult than a representational landscape is flawed over-intellectualizing. I need to walk through this line by line (begin angry rant now):

Book order

More books!

The IJ reader's guide should be fun--it'll be nice to get a "hard" analysis that I was incapable of while reading. This site is a good resource for references and analysis too.

Grammar

I was just reading a short comment rant over at the sometimes interesting dive into mark that touches on the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate. The more you understand about linguistics the tougher it is to be a language snob.

Review: Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson (4/5)

I (finally) finished Quicksilver last week. Here's a review, and some additional links for reference:

• Metaweb (Wiki on Quicksilver)
• Quicksilver at Amazon
• Neal Stephenson's Web Page