Comments | americnxidiot: so I finished Infinite Jest...

americnxidiot

so I finished Infinite Jest...

Jul 07, 2010 02:24

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

( warning: there be spoilers ahead )

infinite jest, holy shit

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americnxidiot July 7 2010, 19:39:03 UTC

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 (sic)
7. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
8. Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
9. Year of Glad

And I did occasionally google some acronyms when I forgot them, but it's definitely an interesting way to write things. I didn't know what O.N.A.N.T.A meant until about page 400 haha.

eta: hmmmm reading it chronologically. I will say, I went back and read chapter 1 which takes place with Hal in the Year of Glad after I finished the book.

kcerena July 7 2010, 19:51:18 UTC

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 July 7 2010, 20:01:12 UTC

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 July 7 2010, 20:01:57 UTC

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 July 7 2010, 20:18:24 UTC

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 July 7 2010, 20:27:30 UTC

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 July 7 2010, 20:37:33 UTC

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.

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