The Infinite Jest Challenge

 Good night, sweet prince!

I similarly threw my copy of Infinite Jest onto the floor last night. Except that I have carpet so it made more of a “WHOMP.” Then I stood on top of it and did a little dance. Okay, maybe a big dance. Like a big whomping Russian version of Riverdance dance.

Then I had a moment after finishing my dance (sweaty and sleepy) when I contemplated calling you and getting you to agree to not ever posting a conclusion to the blog. That way everyone can also go through the experience of finishing this book: utterly unsatisfied and nearly sent back to the beginning. I guess we’ll spare the readers, but I just wanted you to know that I seriously thought about it.

I agree with all your recommendations for future readers of the book. This is a book that gets easier the longer you live with it. But now that it’s out of my everyday life, my immediate recommendation to DFW newbies is: I still prefer the essays. There, I said it. I think part of what kept me going personally through this book was understanding and appreciating the underpinnings of DFW’s life’s work explained elegantly and egocentrically in such essays as “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” and “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (by now are you really surprised by the title?). The second actually is a pretty nifty cipher from what I can remember for a lot of Infinite Jest itself, so a revisit to that might be in store for me. After a long break. Two weeks. At least.

I don’t think I’ll be organizing/participating in any more gargantuan novel reading events anytime soon, but let me know what you want to read together next, Liz. Thank you to everyone for all the support for the last month, readers! IJ would have been collecting dust on my bookshelf if not for you all. And thanks to Ballio for buying the book for me! My total costs for this project:

Book… $0.00
Web hosting… $0.00
Materials for Infinite Jest themed place mats I never made… $0.00
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Total… $0.00

First of all, can I just direct everyone joining us to the comments section of Day 25? I think you’ll agree with me that it was the only substantial discussion of the merits of Infinite Jest thus far in this blog. Thank you for doing our jobs for us, readers.

I admit that I have done little to no work on my place mat. But by the grace of President’s Day weekend, I will make some prototypes. What’s even more strange than making a first draft of an Infinite Jest themed board game is spending more than one week just planning an Infinite Jest themed place mat.

Things I love about the board game:

1. The fact that it is completely unclear how to play it. How do you move forward in the game? Are those page numbers directing me to the novel or to other squares? What does the penny have to do with anything? How many moves does heads represent? Tails?

2. The incongruity between the slapdash layout of the squares and the cute little pictures of bunnies, anthropomorphized joints, and bouncing tennis balls. Makes me want to tear my hair out!

3. The squares contain mostly sincere recapitulations of the novel, except for once in a while when they lapse into grudges against parts you obviously dislike – i.e. “You come across two unusual characters hiking in the Southwest. They seem suspicious but everything that they’re saying seems is really boring… p. 510″ LOVE that still visible cross-out.

4. The wood surface that it’s on top of. Is that your floor? I bet you and siblings could do / have done some serious sock sliding/skating (terms widely recognized by Google’s lexicon, but not yet sanctioned by urbandictionary.com) on that waxy surface. Can that be part of our Day 31 finale celebration? I think you can beat these kids in a 200 meter speed skate, especially The Republic of Make A Doo Doo:

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 have read this weekend besides Infinite Jest:

1. Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee. Each page of this novel is split into two or more narratives which continue side by side. The first section consists solely of the main character’s polemical observations of politics, literature, and culture. The second and third sections feature the voices of the writer and the woman who he hires to type the writings that make up the first section. They vaguely correspond to the first section in their underlying concerns. Unsurprisingly all this was much less confusing than Infinite Jest.

2. I finally caught up on my Facebook wall messages. There were messages from my birthday in November that I still hadn’t responded to. There were actually people I still hadn’t told I was back from Kyrgyzstan. Oops.

3. The really annoying scroll at the bottom of the Super Bowl. My sister put it best when she said that the only people who care about player stats already know all the numbers. We firmly belonged to a second category of Super Bowl viewership that consisted of people (a) who work in advertising for a living, (b) plan their 3rd grade lessons while watching TV, and (c) like to take naps in front of TV. On the bright side, I totally called the Giants win. Barring any personal investment, I choose the underdog at all costs.

I have to admit that I’m hitting a plateau over my excitement with this book. I’m finally caught up with the schedule, but I’m still trudging through certain chapters. I think we now realize that everything is quite artfully placed in this novel and there is a meaning behind its organization; it’s just not within my capabilities during this first time through to grasp those hidden easter eggs. I find myself longing for a straightforward narrative and I even read through a few chapters of a Tobias Wolff I had sitting on my night stand (In Pharaoh’s Army, if you must know) just to remember what clarity sounded like.

Anyway, I was thinking about writing a letter in the voice of one of David Foster Wallace’s girlfriends or old classmates, but, like all my good ideas in life, it was already executed by The Onion in this article.

Please, please give me a reason to go on. You must give me a challenge.

P.S. Make Me A Supermodel is meaningless eye candy when compared to the brilliance of Project Runway. Set your TiVo accordingly.

Have you listened to the Bookworm interview with David Foster Wallace with Michael Silverblatt? First of all, Michael Silverblatt is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most annoying people on radio. He’s the complete opposite of a shock jock, but still has the same effect on me as one. I’m numb after I listen to Bookworm, stuck to my seat, quivering, wondering if I should ever return to attempt an original thought on literature ever again. I suspect he keeps under his pillow his plans on how to murder Harold Bloom.

vs.

Returning to my point, in the interview [transcript available here] Silverblatt presents his observation that Infinite Jest takes the structure of – oh, what the hey, let’s just look at the interview:

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MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I don’t know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I’m going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me [Sure, Silverblatt; using the carrot before the stick - he is so modest in revealing his brilliant discovery]. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that. [BAM! With the force of a train.]

MS: It occurred to me [oh, the way a butterfly lands on my French shutters and flies away] that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were — and I don’t know this kind of science, but it just [that I do] — I said to myself this must be fractals. [Must be.]

DFW: It’s — I’ve heard you were an acute reader [This must be a kind of holy grail for literary public radio personalities, I assume, to be praised by DFW who memorably chronicled the ups and downs of radio host John Ziegler in 2005's The Host]. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket [of course!], which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ‘94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’ [one can only imagine the size of a first draft of Infinite Jest], so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to kind of [kind of] come together.

MS: “Michael” is Michael Pietsche, the editor at Little, Brown [See? Who would know that?]. What is a Sierpinski Gasket?

DFW: It would be almost im- … I would almost have to show you. It’s kind of a design that a man named Sierpinski I believe developed — it was quite a bit before the introduction of fractals and before any of the kind of technologies that fractals are a really useful metaphor for. But it looks basically like a pyramid on acid — [but of course!]

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The thing I want to know is: do you actually buy this structural bullshit? I mean, if DFW said so, it’s gotta be in there, but how much actually remains of the Sierpinski Gasket? Is it simply lopsided as DFW claims or have the cuts undermined its foundation? A true evolution of an SG looks as follows:

Which would mean two things for the novel: (1) all the book’s narrative matter (I mean that broadly: characters, plots, motifs, pages, chapters, etc) must come in threes and (2) there must be left in the center of the book infinite lacunae in the shape of progressively smaller triangles.  (Maybe if the book came with a hole in the middle, it would be easier to read?  Baltika through the spine?)

Forget a Sierpinski Triangle, DFW might as well come out and say that it’s a Sierpinski Pyramid for all that we can understand from that! It’s an interesting shape to be sure due to its lack of a controlling center (which has its narrative and thematic purposes), but so does a donut! I can think of many three-sided relationships in the novel, but those same relationships could also be thought of as cyclical. Infinite Jest = Sierpinski Gasket or glazed corner shop donut? [just kidding, I like the SG structure; it's just amazing that the given structural cipher to the novel has to be something so beyond us earthlings. Does DFW realize that sometimes he's edging on self-parody? Yes, he probably does.]