The Infinite Jest Challenge

After much contemplation and internal debate, I am opting to make the Infinite Jest placemat. My reasoning? (1) Seeing as this was your mom’s idea and we have already entertained your sister’s request, I think we should go ahead and play to all the women in the Azzolini household; (2) No one in my family will want to play the Infinite Jest board game; and (3) I foresee many many sources of inspiration, including:

Note the self referential attitude of this mat. It invites the (r)eater to partake in its own creation.

I feel like this mat itself could be The Official Infinite Jest place mat if only IJ had something to do with cats. All sorts of complementary things going on here.

Not exactly sure if this is really a placemat (It traces back to the work of one Moenen Erbuer, which is one amazing name), but it would definitely distract me and make me uncomfortable while eating, which is exactly how IJ makes me feel while reading it.

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What influences are you drawing from for the board game? I’m really excited to play it by the way. If you could somehow get one of our three (or four) talanted fans to make it into an online game, I think the entire DFW blogosphere would thank you.

Things I’ve done on our day off from Infinite Jest: (1) went to the gym and ran four miles, quickly followed by (2) getting off the treadmill too quickly and wobbling into someone jumping rope leading to (3) tripping and falling into a very muscled man doing push-ups. There were other things that I did, but they mostly involve me scribbling things on a notepad and typing at a keyboard.

Is this how we’re going to feel once we get off David Foster Wallace’s proverbial treadmill, reading everything with the same sped-up lens of IJ? I half expect my reading of the next book to go something like this (to be read in the voice of Phil Hartman):

Well, well, two characters speaking to each other, this can’t be anything but an exercise in wordplay! Wait a minute, wait a minute, they’re having a conflict. My word, they’re actually responding to what’s been previously said! My ears ring with the sweet sounds of continuity! My eyeballs are flowing down this page at the rate of a water droplet down Victoria Falls! My god, the next chapter is already here and it features the same two characters! I’m already turning the page! Too fast! Too fast! AHHHHHHH! (falls off the table)

Oh, Phil Hartman, I miss you. My sister hated when I watched News Radio, and sure, it was a so-so show, but you were great in it. Come to think of it, you were in a lot of projects you were too good for: Jingle All The Way, So I Married An Axe Murderer. I was too little to see you on Saturday Night Live. R.I.P.

NEW CHALLENGE for us, Elizabeth: I challenge you to pick out five of the biggest, fattest, most obscure vocabulary words from the next reading. Then using those, I’ll make up my own sample sentences. I’ll be doing the same for you, of course.

P.S.  Congratulations, I’m pretty sure you beat my Panini post with your DFW Cookie recipe.  You being the one most resembling DFW of course, you are obliged to try out the recipe yourself and be the true judge.  Enjoy!

I promised a mutual friend of ours who shall remain nameless (though his name rhymes with Mawn O’Mullivan and he lives in Chicago in a community that rhymes with Moscoe Millage; he also goes by the alias of Matt Barney on this blog) to say this to myself:

I, Aaron Fai, created a blog about a book I am reading.

He asked me to let that sink in for a minute.

Yes! I am writing a blog about a book I’m reading. Yes! I am conscious that this is possibly the lowest common denominator of literary criticism not to mention of the blogosphere. Yes! This grants our friends permission to ridicule us for years to come and bring the subject up at dinner conversation despite any visible signs of mortification on our part.

I see that you’ve been ignoring all the topics that I brought up for discussion on my first post. You won’t get out of them that easily. I’ll be gracious and cut to the chase. We both know which topic we want to discuss: this novel’s culinary parallels.

After careful contemplation, I present my first nominee for a culinary counterpart to Infinite Jest:

THE PANINI

When the panini popped up a few years ago, at least in Los Angeles, everyone went crazy for them. Those dark score marks on thin Italian bread became a hallmark for cafes everywhere on the west side. They were the new thing and every waxy face in Hollywood had their preference to what to go in their precious panini. Avocado, artichoke, turkey – whatever. In the end, of course, they were subject to the natural trajectory of all celestial bodies in Los Angeles; they rose and then they fell (I should write for E! Entertainment, shouldn’t I?). You looked down at your $7.99 panini and you realized: dammit, this is a grilled cheese sandwich. It didn’t taste any worse, you just fell back to the ground a little.

Infinite Jest debuted in 1996 under similar aplomb and while we weren’t really of the literature reading age (I was too busy getting picked last in basketball in seventh grade), I’d like to think that every lit junkie in L.A. was buying it and flipping through it’s contents, professing how much they adored the self conscious ending but how disturbed they were by the lack of narrative conclusion and asking what this meant for their times. Truthfully, outside Adam I-Forget-His-Last-Name-But-He-Was-Short-And-Was-On-The-Rowing-Crew in the dorms in college reading it halfway (I think to impress his girlfriend), I’ve never seen anyone toting IJ around. But my point is, even though the book’s immediate celebrity has passed and everyone has long since realized that it’s just a damn sandwich, I mean book, the thing still has presence and evokes discussion. I’m glad to be reading DFW’s big book now rather than in 1996. Aren’t you?

Your turn.

P.S. Is it just me, or do you really miss the short health specialist updates where more and more people keep joining in to watch the cartridge?

Note: Due to some technical difficulties involving my computer’s complete rejection of the new Leopard OS, this entry was typed in the day’s postmortem.

I agree Liz, today’s reading was a nightmare. A full spectrum of the novel’s engagement with experimentation presented itself. The text diverged into more narrators than we collectively have limbs, DFW’s trademark footnotes (or as he likes to call them in his essays with the glee of a 14-year-old MMORPG player, FN’s) revealed an array of pharmaceutical and filmographical trivia, and the subsidized years which I once thought I had straight no longer make any kind of chronological sense. Most of these aspects still worked to varying degrees of success, except for one:

Courtesy of Google Images, not the private hoard of racist illustrations I keep on my hard drive 

After thinking about it the whole day, really trying to justify its means, I have come to the conclusion that I just hate the ebonics chapter with Wardine and Roy Tony. First off, it’s as if DFW took a chapter and processed it through Gizoogle. I understand the concepts of authorial fallacy and textual authority, but damn DFW if he didn’t challenge my notion of what a white middle class author is allowed to write. Judging from my little bookmark of chapter summaries, it doesn’t appear as if this narrator is returning either. This was a one off caricature and that pisses me off. The only other famous example of a white author taking on an African American dialect that I can think of is William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner. But I suppose Styron’s book is exactly the kind of realism that DFW stands stalwartly against. All attempts at a complete dissection of the English language aside, did we really need another depiction of black men and women hitting each other while they take haphazard care of their babies and go in and out of jail? Even a highschooler (Maya on Goodreads) can recognize this section as “cringeworthy.” C’mon, DFW!