I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

--David Foster Wallace

infamous

The question of just how many of us subscribe to this idea of significance, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it, has only gotten more urgent in those seven years. To remind readers of watershed events such as the White House State Dinner Crashers, the Boy Trapped in Weather Balloon, the antics of Sheen/Lohan/Palin/Cruise/Kanye/Kardashian/O.J./Trump, or any number of other displays of insatiable hunger would be, as they say, like shooting fish in a barrel. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that there are, at any given time, certain people “out there” who will sacrifice themselves on the altar of public ridicule for the higher purpose of remaining in the public eye—indeed, there seems to be an agreed-upon communal need for such people, and as soon as one atrocity begins to fade another is always ready to replace it.

Back to the paradox. So we privilege authenticity above all, but in our authentic state nearly all of us are insignificant; and we desperately crave significance, but achieving it nearly always requires a departure from authenticity. Here’s where reality television is so fascinating: It solves the paradox by dissolving, or deconstructing, the idea of authenticity until authenticity itself no longer signifies, like when you say a familiar word over and over and over again until it sounds like something in an alien language. I used to have this argument with my wife about The Hills, the painful MTV show that generously gave us Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, surely two of the most repulsive specimens ever to crawl out of the gene pool. To boil down the argument: I would say there was no way they were authentically that repulsive, and that this alone was enough to invalidate the show’s claim on reality; and my wife would say but they’re real people, as in they exist, and if they’re willing to be seen as so repulsive just to stay on the show, if they’re willing to sacrifice all dignity and self- and other-respect and distort their already-to-be-sure-unsavory personalities in whatever outlandish direction the producers deem necessary to keep the ratings up and the advertising revenue flowing, if they’re in essence willing to annihilate their “real” selves and replace them with these manufactured doppelgangers if that’s what it takes... well, then there’s something frighteningly and shamefully real about that. And she was right.

From this great, long, article

The Entertainment

Although I’m guessing David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest as early as 1993 or 1994, the year of publication was 1996, at which time I had reached 15 years of age. Muddled memories include Driver’s Ed class; going to every boys’ basketball game because the senior class of 96-97 was super-attractive; emailing friends rarely, mostly to gossip (and email being dial-up and separate from the internet, i.e. Juno); talking on the phone a lot, maybe instant messaging; working full time at Subway during the summer; going downtown to the bay to swim and to watch skaters doing ollies off railings; etc.

Older techno-geeks can inform me if any of the following was in even pre-existent creation in 1996 B.S. (Before Subsidization)¹ : The videophone (okay I do remember this being around) – but videophone leading to a panagoraphobia which opened “huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery”; cell phones, like very small and quite interactive; DVDs /HDTV which he calls “cartridges” but are like High-Definition CD-ROMs and the HDTV is also your computer(!); laptop TPs (teleputers); DVR, nixing the commercials and everything; “Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!” –Netflix-type instant-watch; “Aapps, Inc” controls the TV choices; interfacing like Skype programs and webcams (which are really videophones re-imagined); and finally, “Twitter”. I’m kidding about that last one, but in the first chapter of the book, Wallace really does use ‘twittering’ as a verb like ‘chatter’ at least ten times. How could such a visionary-type genius have left us in a world devoid of his revolutionary ideas?

Sadly, I found out about this greatly troubled man only after his death last year. That was when the ‘Infinite Summer’ group started, of people across the world pledging to read his 1100+ page book together throughout the summer. There was a scheduled online book club set up and I was on track with the articles and discussion. Then I slowly dropped behind the page I was supposed to be on, mainly due to the fact that each word, and page, and section of each chapter is dense reading, along with lengthy footnotes comprising the last 100-page section of the book. I stopped around page 240 and the book’s been gathering dust until this most recent month of May (2010 B.S.) when I picked it up again and decided it must be finished.

The main interlaced storylines consist of:

Enfield Tennis Academy – containing prodigies like Hal Incandenza² or Michael Pemulis, elaborate descriptions of the hierarchies of instruction and drills and other sports elaborations that surprisingly don’t bore me. Includes the live-action Risk-like game of Eschaton, which I now wish to play.

Ennet House – halfway house nearby the academy for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Mainly starring Don Gately, deals heavily with the background of addictive personalities. Especially intriguing to me is the constant debate (excerpted below) regarding its mind-numbing platitudes:
“By AA’s own logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting fellowship of AA even more than someone who admits his problem.”
Gately: “The slogan I've heard that might work here is Analysis-Paralysis. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing.”
“AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.”

O.N.A.N. – political backdrop wherein through the Great Concavity agreement, the U.S. has a treaty with Canada to give them various parts of New England and consequently catapult all of our trash (Toxic Waste Management) into said areas, through the use of fairly magical dumpsters. This literally makes our streets and country clean, a treaty proposed by germaphobic President Johnny Gentle, a former actor who sounds a lot like Schwarzenegger.

“Himself” – James Incandenza, Hal’s father, a filmmaker (see footnote 24, well over 10 pages of his film titles and descriptions, mainly documentaries, such as interviewing over 200 people in the U.S. named John Wayne) – married to a Canadian and highly involved in the title of this book.

One of the premises argued throughout the political chapters is that of ‘delayed gratification’ – that is, how everyone in America is guaranteed the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in hopes that if we’re all moving toward this goal, everyone will be simultaneously happy, but if we’re all like kids who don’t know when to stop eating candy, we’re all getting sick and making others sick with our American dreams. Consequently, we have thousands of choices, we have ‘freedom’ but no one has taught us how to make good choices, in other words stopping at the limit of the candy/sickness level. Or to use the technology example, when the cable kabal of 504 channels is available, we have 504 choices, but when Netflix-instant-watch is available, we supposedly have the ‘freedom’ to choose anything we want, but we don’t necessarily possess the wisdom or direction to make quality choices. In modern terms, it’s doubtful Wallace would’ve been a fan of the Real Housewives in the Year of The KFC Double Down, Subsidized Time. But he’s probably also referring to my ability to turn on the Weather Channel at 7:20am every morning and select Local Weather and immediately obtain a 30-second long 5-day forecast, which I rather like. All of this I’ve written at having only reached page 470. Full speed ahead…

___________________________________________
1. My favorite is the Year of The Trial-Sized Dove Bar
2. Hal frequently suffers from The Howling Fantods, which would be an excellent name for a rock band.

postscript: Colin Meloy weighed in with similar summarizing thoughts last summer, with or without Pemulis’ yachting cap.

Need to DEAR (drop everything and read) to finish this beastly wonder

“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”
DFW in an interview about Infinite Jest (1996).


Brought to my attention by Bailey, I'm now wondering if David Wallace in The Office is named after DFW.

I concur.

Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.

(from infinite summer community)

in other news, bringing this beast of a book with me to the airport. with notebook. pens. highlighters. bookmarks. (one for footnotes). this man was a genius. why didn't any of my writing profs make me read this masterpiece?

D.F.W.

May 21, 2005, commencement speech. David Foster Wallace.

So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.


come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)