The Infinite Jest Challenge

I’m glad to hear that your second blog will be for the benefit of all readingkind instead of the mockery of the internet stylings of one poor adolescent girl. I’m sure David Foster Wallace (hereby known as DFW) and John C. Reilly (hereby known as JCR) are proud of you as well. Since you seem so anxious to get started on the activities, here is my first challenge to you: for each author photo of DFW, find the corresponding celebrity look alike. Here, I’ll go first:

Winter capped DFW and Secret Window Johnny Depp.

Sure, they’re not identical, but Johnny here captures all the essential points of this famous DFW profile. The tussled locks, the scholarly glasses, the throwaway facial hair, not to mention the eyes that basically communicate to any passerby, “Go away, I’m retreating into a very dense series of complete thoughts.” Plus the added bonus that Depp is playing a writer in an another otherwise ludicrous film. I think one could argue for parallels between each one’s celebrity status in their respective fields, but that’s stepping outside the scope of the photographs. All I know is that DFW is thinking about someone while walking so pensively in that snow drift, and there’s a slight possibility that that someone is his doppelgänger in La-la-land.

To make our agenda clear to any outside readers, our mission is to read the novel Infinite Jest by DFW in 31 days and carry on a completely tangential public blog to document the experience . You can find our reading schedule here and I’ll make it available on the side bar. I should probably write out an explanation of our modus operandi. This separate entry will be secretly backdated so it appears as if we had planned it all out beforehand. Ah, the magic of blog timestamping.

I had the following reactions to today’s reading, all of which I suspect to cycle through many more times during the course of 1000+ pages, in proportions slightly skewed to the later pair. All photos were taken in real time.

(first picture magically deleted by WordPress 1/30/08)

Amused (p. 30) / Impressed (p. 33)

Confused (p. 16) / Utterly Confused (p. 30, again)

Are you sure you’re expecting me to be the one making the scholarly remarks?

Well then, subjects I expect us to talk about in the future: (1) the best method to comfortably hold a 1000-page book in your lap, (2) the appropriate bookmark(s) needed to read this novel, (3) this book’s literary antecedents, and (4) this book’s culinary antecedents.

…though a lot of trees probably died to make this 1,079-page book.

A few months after I left for college, I discovered the blog of a friend who had joined a sorority (I only mention this because it seemed so out of character), took on the name moonlightgem and shared her subsequent adventures with the online world in a bizarre mall-rat/””urban””/barely decipherable dialect that I have never seen since. I was so fascinated by it that I started a parody blog in a similar style. Perhaps because I found imitating moonlightgem’s language so exhausting, or perhaps because it felt a little mean, that blog lasted all of one week. And no, I wouldn’t give you the link even if I could find it.

I haven’t had a blog since, mostly because I haven’t felt like I had anything novel to contribute to cyberspace and have a hard time sticking with these sorts of projects. Fortunately I did a little research this afternoon and think that I have uncovered the three most important keys to success this time around:

1. Something to write about. I have the book, detailed day-by-day reading schedule, and plenty of time to read.
2. A good profile picture. This was the bloggiest profile photo that I could come up with. It’s poorly framed! It’s narcissistic! But would it be even better in black and white? Sepia?
3. A co-blogger, *ahem! show yourself!*, who will hopefully carry not only his own weight, but mine as well, when it comes to insightful commentary and stimulating discussion. This is the only time I’ll say this, but I never even took an English class in college, so have mercy.

On the up-side, avoiding deep analysis should leave me free to make less literary, but still valuable, observations like this one “David Foster Wallace totally looks like John C. Reilly with long hair in the photo on the back cover!” (He does, but only there. I checked.) and generate some good activities (I’m very excited about this) for us to complete.

Anyway… I was a little intimidated when I first picked up the book. That intimidation fell away in the first few pages and returned on page 31, which marks the end of the “professional conversationalist” chapter. I can deal with this sort of thing if it eventually makes some sort of sense, but Eggers’ characterization of Infinite Jest as a UFO of novels in the Foreword does have me a little worried. I really did enjoy what I read today, though. Very funny.