Happy Interdependence Day! - A Celebration of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Today is the fictional holiday of “Interdependence Day” in the 1996 novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I finished the novel in September for the first time, and just finished an immediate re-read of it via audiobook/podcast thanks to the wonderful hosts of the Infinite Cast Podcast. And but so today I am celebrating with a blog post!

This gargantuan book about drugs, tennis, and entertainment has taunted me from our bookshelf ever since my wife and I moved in together 8 years ago, with it (the Book) among her possessions, placed unassumingly on the shelf like the mysterious blank interlace cartridge at the center of the book. Judging by her notations, she stopped reading it less than 100 pages in, so I knew it was up to me to read it. The playful tennis ball yellow text on the deeply saturated blue sky background would always catch my eye and it beckoned a massive curiosity within me over the years as it gathered dust and cat scratch marks. Certain books tend to do this to me, make me wonder what could lie within the spine of its hundreds of sheets paper, the thousands of words that collectively weave a blanket of narrative looking at its spine day after day, year after year. And no other book did it the way this one did. I could have never guessed what was inside these pages. I’m still blown away by this books existence after two reads. I’m baffled at how a single person can create a world and narrative like this. Especially something that’s both digestible as a novel with a story full of compelling characters, fascinating plot, brilliant prose and vocabulary, and rich symbolism and meaning while also completely defying understanding in the creation of this surreal, dystopian world known as the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. The reader stands near the convergence of parallel stories with similar themes that portray subjects (drugs and tennis) that have only faint threads tying them together (the Entertainment). The real story lies outside of the book, “just to the right of the frame” as David Foster Wallace himself puts it, and this provoked in me an intense urge to mull it over immediately after reading, to re-read (I just couldn’t help myself) in an attempt to tighten the threads we can only assume, but not be absolutely certain DFW meant for us to tie together. Single sentences never directly referenced again add a strange background to the book. The resulting work is a puzzle of a novel you can try to solve even though it’s missing a large number of pieces, or you can simply enjoy the symbolism and commentary on modern American culture with the pieces that do exist. In either case, I feel this only highlights a modern audiences need to create more entertainment out of existing entertainment. To discuss in forums, breaking it apart and dissecting whatever it is, just to try to piece it all together. I was left with a deeply altered perspective of our cultures obsession with media in its many forms, how we consume it, and how we become addicted to it (and other substances in the process) in our human need to find external fulfillment in the ultimate pursuit of pleasure.

I can’t even begin to attempt to “solve” the book in my own words, especially since the late tech genius Aaron Swartz already did. Please read if you’re interested in what’s likely unsaid “to the right of the frame.”

I needed to write something about this absurd reading experience, but what is there to write that hasn’t already been said without it becoming an insufferable grad school-type critical analysis? And but so I’ve decided to just leave any potential readers of this blog with some of the notes I made while reading.

Happy Interdependence Day!

Early notes from my first read:

• 9 May - Year of Depend Adult Undergarment Short chapter, phone call in early morning for Hal. Introduced to brother Mario, Orin (also Hal’s brother?) was on the phone. Said something cryptic and hung up. Mario asked who it was and Hal said you don’t know him.

• Just read a 10pg footnote about wheelchair assassins and a train game where kids jump from track to track trying not to get hit by a train in an absurd game of chicken, inside a chapter that’s some clandestine meeting between some fat guy dressed grotesquely like a woman and a member of said wheelchair assassins who is actually a double/triple/quadruple operative? I can’t tell which side he’s on. (His own probably). During said footnote the tennis academy student ‘Struck’ is reading and plagiarizing from research material written by a man getting progressively drunker as he writes, about wheelchair assassins and the train game, and at one point reads a very convoluted iamverysmart-type passage and says to himself “this is gonna take awhile to figure out” and I feel like this whole book is a massive practical joke on the reader.

• Tennis players spraying themselves with lemon pledge as sunscreen - commentary about absurd sports rituals? People don’t do this, right?

• I feel like if you’ve ever done a hallucinogenic drug you’ll enjoy this book. Everything happening exists in a sort of reality, but you’ll remember some detail that then makes the scene you’re currently reading absolutely absurd, for instance a car horn blasting a steady tone over a whole town at sunset. As the book goes on it gets more absurd but also starts to make more sense to me?

• So many acronyms of everything, abbreviations, I’m super curious if they were made to shorten the book or if it’s a storytelling device?

• Holy fuckkkk Lyle the guy who licks peoples sweat wtffffff who thinks of this stuff…guy called him an institution!

• Jesus Christ the next passage was even crazier…whole section in Boston street vernacular of a story about a group of people copping some heroin and one guy shooting it up but it was drano and the first guy to shoot up died and they had to dump his body in a dumpster. Dark passage.

• Shirts with sayings like: CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THE SUPREME COURT JUST DESECRATED OUR FLAG

• ‘The Entertainment’ has only been mentioned a handful of times but the book itself begins to feel like a compelling force making me read it.

• I find the ETA sections dry & the Incandenzas one dimensional, although they are intriguing.

• The EHDARH sections are riveting and an absolute riot. They make me laugh and by the end of the same paragraph I’m crying.

• The whole book is both remarkably normal yet totally absurd.

• Marathe and Steeply talking about soup as an example for instant/delayed gratification and like libertarian ideals? Where does one persons pleasure begin and what happens when it begins to infringe on someone else. Etc.

• He dangles the Infinite Jest mystery like a carrot in the far distance but makes it compelling enough to keep reading.

• Pg 958 - Mikey story feels so real and so sad

Don Gately’s Dinner Menu

• Boiled hot dogs
• Dense damp Meatloaf with little pieces of American cheese & half a box of cornflakes on top
• Cream of chicken soup over spirochaete shaped noodles
• Ominously dark shake and bake chicken legs
• Underdone hamburgers with ketchup
• Hamburg sauce spaghetti with pasta boiled for an hour

Quotes I enjoyed:

Pg 22 - “He’d cure himself by excess.”

Pg 168 - “I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.” - Hal Incandenza

Pg 416 - “What matter whether your ‘choices’ are 4 or 104, or 504? Veals’s campaign argued. Because here you were — assuming of course you were even cable-ready or dish-equipped and able to afford monthly fees that applied no matter what you chose each month — here you were, sitting here accepting only what was pumped by distant A.C.D.C. fiat into your entertainment-ken. Here you were consoling yourself about your dependence and passivity with rapid-fire zapping and surfing that were starting to be suspected to cause certain rather nasty types of epilepsy over the longish term. The cable kabal’s promise of ‘empowerment,’ the campaign argued, was still just the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you’d sit there and open wide for. And so but what if, their campaign’s appeal basically ran, what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if — according to InterLace — what if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time? Choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, &c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production facilities and packaged and disseminated by InterLace TelEnt. in convenient fiber-optic pulses that fit directly on the new palm-sized 4.8-mb PC-diskettes InterLace was marketing as ‘cartridges’? Viewable right there on your trusty PC’s high-resolution monitor? Or, if you preferred and so chose, jackable into a good old pre-millennial wide-screen TV with at most a coaxial or two? Self-selected programming, chargeable on any major card or on a special low-finance-charge InterLace account available to any of the 76% of U.S. households possessed of PC, phone line, and verifiable credit? What if, Veals’s spokeswoman ruminated aloud, what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director; what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?”

Pg 592 - “It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy.” - Mario Incandenza

Pg 620 - “But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice.”

(Some) Vocab I Learned:

Amanuensis - One who is employed to take dictation or to copy manuscript

Apposite - Appropriate or relevant

Agnate - Related on or descended from the father’s or male side

Erumpet - Bursting through a surface or covering

Prandial - relating to meal, especially dinner

Fantods - nervous irritability

Sulcus - deep groove/fissure

Keening - wailing in grief for a dead person

Carie - tooth decay

Swinishness - unpleasant or contemptible, especially in regards to being coarse, greedy, or lazy

Propinquous- nearby/adjacent

Annulation- having to do with rings/circles

Anechoic - space without echoes

Novena - A recitation of prayers and devotions for a special purpose during nine consecutive days

Parturient - About to bring forth young; being in labor