so I finished Infinite Jest...

[americnxidiot]

And I'm a little baffled.
And stunned.
And impressed.
And I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time.

Comments

[kcerena]

Congrats on finishing!! Sorry I can't chat with you about the end yet :-p Definitely been taking the savor approach to this book-- I remember my favorite English prof telling us how he thought Proust was meant to be read for about five pages a sitting, and I decided to experiment with something close to that for IJ. Can't bring myself to stop after just five pages (lol), but it's been helping me a lot to take breaks and reread earlier chaps sometimes. Maybe I'm feeling the novelty of not being in college and forced to finish books super-fast anymore, so we'll see how many post-grad years it takes for that to wear off

[americnxidiot]

I won't spoil for you. I was kind of forced to read this pretty quickly (hah @ a month and four days being quickly) since I started summer classes. It was really hard to make myself read other texts for class when I had this to read. I haven't read much of Wallace besides this and one essay on going home to Illinois, but I'd really like to, especially now.

I will say I definitely need to read this again, because there was a lot of foreshadowing. And hell, I'm pretty convinced he used foreshadowing for about 3 different possible scenarios more than once, so I'm still not entirely sure what I think about some things.

I think I remember reading that part when Joelle tries to demap herself as just an explosively descriptive drug overdose. I'll have to read it again, cause yea, I missed so much.

[kcerena]

I think it would be interesting-- if really sacreligious-- to go back and read the chapters in chronological order. The story would be seem good in a different way, and maybe even read pretty accessibly, especially since so much of the 'foreshadowing' is just retrospective for stuff you don't get to read until later. I wonder how easy it would be to figure out why he ordered things the way he did. What do you think of the language decisions he makes, BTW? I feel like he might use all those acronyms and colloquialisms to counteract the way that the idea density makes the sentences hard to read. It inspired me to start using more e.g.'s, slang, etc. in my scientific writing (I keep waiting for my advisor to smack me for it, and he hasn't yet!)

[americnxidiot]

I think it's particularly interesting in chapters that are 3rd person limited with Don Gately. He's not very smart so he mishears stuff all the time (i.e. he thinks toxemia = noxema), and you have to adjust to someone basically mishearing things.

I did bookmark pg. 222 which listed all of the subsidized years in chronological order:

1. Year of the Whopper
2. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
3. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
4. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
5. Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
6. Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic7. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland

[kcerena]

The ONANTA chapters are probably my least favorite ones. I always seem to take a break when I get to one, haha. It should have been so cathartic when he finally explained what the acronym meant, but I think I just took it for granted that it was some boring gov bureaucracy term and wasn't as curious as I should have been.

I like the Gately mishearings too-- it reminds me of how I feel like Nessie should be written in Twific. Only with her, the problem is not having experienced stuff instead of not being smart. It's so hard to pull off though, since you can't get away with being as cryptic as DFW can.

[americnxidiot]

Also every so often he'll write something in Bostonian phonetics, like... "Gately pushed the cat through the aisle" instead of cart, and that always tripped me up... except he was much more sophisticated about it lolll

The problem is that when people do kids in Twific... well sometimes it's best just not to do kids POV.

[americnxidiot]

And it's weird. I loved the Marathe/Steeply ones, but I had a little more time staying focused when it was about President Gentle or Rodney Tine.

[kcerena]

Yeah, the Gentle stuff is what drags for me. Though I like it when it's more about J.O.Inc.'s filmmaking than about him. Marathe and Steeply are awesome-- do you remember if they mentioned the legless wheelchair guys before the Lucien chapter? If so, that'll be next on my reread list; I felt like maybe I was supposed to recognize them at the time, but that it might also have just been a dramatic first entrance.

I totally didn't notice the 'cat' thing, or maybe I wrote it off as a typo. Silly me; the book's way too compulsive for typos.

Haven't actually read any attempted kids' POVs, though a lot of the ff kids' dialogue I've seen has rubbed me as weeeird. I just feel like seven-year-old Nessie should have kid in her still, mostly coming through in little slip-ups in understanding.

[americnxidiot]

Oh they definitely mentioned Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants before the Lucien chapter... in fact, I think it was pretty early on in Marathe and Steeply's chapters. Looking in the endnotes, the AFR seems to be mentioned for the first time in note 39, which is on page 89. I don't know if they mention that most of them are legless, though. You don't find out why that is until around the 700s.

They also made some mention (but maybe in the Lucien chapter?) that "hear the squeak" is synonym for the moment before a horrible death.

[kcerena]

Yeah, the 'hear the squeak' comment was definitely a footnote in the Lucien chapter. I loved how he put a bunch of Canadian language comments before that one so it didn't seem too heavy handed on the foreshadowing. Those language comments got ominous so gradually, just like the wheelchair guys closing in. I thought it was so sad when Lucien knew not to say the 'putain' thing at the end... Not sure why that stuck out to me as sad, given everything else going on.

[americnxidiot]

ah this is months later, but i just read consider the lobster. i saw so much of avril in the little bit he described of his mom haha.