Archive for the 'Infinite' Category
Infinite Summer
Infinite Jest has been sitting in my mind since reading Federer As Religious Experience and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and sitting on my shelf since Nic gave it to me for my birthday in January. The 1,079-pager sits sandwiched between Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone (short stories, 305 pages) and John Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems (100 pages). And I’ve been too intimidated to take it down.
Until today. When I saw this:
So, it’s like the support from NaNoWriMo where participants write 1,600 words a day during November to come out at the end of the month with a novel. Except, this is Reading a Novel.
Summer Reading Support Group.
Complete with conversations, encouragement and commiseration. And no pressure to understand footnotes, allusions, mind meanderings. Just, enjoy. And, so I will start. Seventy-five pages per day all summer long. Woot! Starting… now! Who’s in?
This, from the project’s brainchild Jason Kottke:
But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.
And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.
And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.
