The Infinite Jest Challenge

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:

____________________

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!]

____________________

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.]

Five days, twenty tylenol, and fifty plus hours of sleep later, my flu has finally succumbed to the power of my immune system. My speedy recovery spares you all the cringe worthy posts I had planned to use to postpone any further discussion of the book, including: (1) a personal biblio-biography, (2) a personal timeline of things worshipped and things feared (à la Todd Levin), (3) my favorite online dictionaries.

I’m looking forward to the next 700+ pages, as you so helpfully pointed out. It feels like we started reading this book weeks ago, not just eleven days. Eleven days? Inconceivable! Is it possible that Infinite Jest is affecting my experience of the time-space continuum? How is my experience of reality different because of David Foster Wallace’s words? My life does seem to be made of many narrators all of a sudden.

In the interest of experiment, I want to reverse this newfound strangle hold DFW has me locked into and instead impose reality on Infinite Jest. A reverse neck breaker of literary proportions, if you will. This time, I, the reader, will take charge over the book. No longer will I sit complacently wondering how Infinite Jest may devastate my well conceived opinions and thoughts. I have branded ye, O DFW! You now exist in a universe containing only two choices!

But I’d like you to know that in all truth, I’m only for one thing this campaign season with no sign of flip flopping.

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?

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 1/30/0

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.