...from a paper I had to write for class, about my relationship to experimental or metaphysical fiction. It was really supposed to be more narcissistic than it turned out...but I've been wanting to write about my first reading of Infinite Jest for a while now. There's nothing in this piece, yet, about the visceral feelings, about the personal ( Read more... )

"Mario Incandenza's nineteenth birthday will be Wednesday 25 November, the day before Thanksgiving. His insomnia worsens as Madame Psychosis's hiatus enters its third week and WYYY tries bringing back poor Miss Diagnosis again, who's started in on a Pig-Latin reading of the Revelation of John that makes you so embarrassed for her it's uncomfortable ( Read more... )

Intrigued by what feel more and more like deliberate nods to Joseph Merrick, AKA "the Elephant Man," in descriptions of Mario Incandenza. The oversized head topped with sparse hair, for instance, and the sly repeat notes about the piles and piles of pillows the bradypnea-afflicted Mario must sleep upon.
( The connection is interesting in part because of Wallace's obsession with David Lynch... )

( This is my 5th time reading Infinite Jest straight through, and I still don't quite know what to do with Joelle van Dyne... )

So for like the twentieth time since starting this Romantic literature class, I've had to bite my lip to keep from blurting something out about Wallace in class (it just seems like a dick move to be chronically bringing up something apart from our communal syllabus). If you had asked me a few years back what Infinite Jest had to do with Romantic ( Read more... )

I'm sure most of the hardcore David Foster Wallace fans on my f-list already have the Howling Fantods blog bookmarked, so you've already heard the news...

But in case you haven't, the February Harper's will have a new DFW story in it that is, according to rumor, a part of Something Significantly Longer. Which was of course what he said about the ( Read more... )

I decided to dress up this year as Hal Incandenza. If he were a glasses-wearing female. Luckily my new pixie cut is not far off from a boy cut, so maybe Hal Incandenza as a gamine.

Let's just say this isn't the most labor-intensive costume I've ever worn (which was, incidentally, the Great Cabbage Head project of 1985, in which my mother got a ( Read more... )

There are two, maybe three of you tops who might care, but if anyone is into David Foster Wallace (or wants some insight into the nature of my psychotic bug-eyed obsession with said writer), Dave Eggers' introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest is available here (as reprinted in the LA Weekly). I initially scoffed at the idea ( Read more... )

Word on the street is that the 10th Anniversary edition of Infinite Jest is coming out pretty quick, which means I'll have to purchase yet a fourth doorstop. Perhaps I'll get rid of the British edition I purchased in order to make more space on the damn shelf. That leaves me my first edition copy, and my thesis copy (complete with embarrassing ( Read more... )