Infinite Jest Diary #3

Progress: currently on page 216

I was going to do an all-vocabulary entry, since I have somewhat limited time and brain power. I am, however, rapidly approaching page 223; I will probably read it tomorrow morning. This is the page touted by Matt Bucher in Infinite Summer as a landmark page, a key to the novel, with content that will make me think differently about what I've read before. So I'll dispatch some thoughts.

I just read a review in the New York Times Book Review of David Lipsky's memoir of DFW, Although of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself (which Brother K mentioned in my last entry's comments). In his review, Ken Kalfus writes succinctly of Infinite Jest:
"Set in a near-future America fixated by its tools for chemical and electronic self-gratification, the novel seems more prescient with the rollout of every new compulsively entertaining digital device."

As I read this book, written in 1996, I keep noticing things about DFW's "near future" that have come true, in spirit if not in letter, or at least pretty damn close. Cf....

• "the Kemp and Limbaugh administration" (p. 177) might as well have been....
• "[I]t takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds." (p. 202) Pretty much captures the spirit of the age.
• "Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against all those little clocks they keep hitting" (p. 212) - Okay, this is just currently still true.
• "'Yes, but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real medical library?' Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc." (p. 213). Hal's approach is one after my own heart - trusting self-selected over machine-selected information, but it runs counter to those of his peers (and, I think, most 17-year-olds today).

And the whole theme of entertainment and addiction and how they relate to each other is just very prescient. The next entry I write will be just quotes and vocabulary words, and some of the quotes I put in there will be on that theme. I do just want to point out one more thing. I was talking about influences last time, and there is a passage in the book that reminds me of a similar passage in Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Maybe it's just a common approach to list things like this; maybe not. In Infinite Jest, it's a list of "many exotic new facts" acquired in a halfway house. In Robbins' book, it's a more nonsensical, meta-ish series of sentences that all start out "This sentence." The one I can remember offhand is something like "Like many italic sentences, this sentence has Mafia connections."

All right, that's all for now. Next time (whenever that may be) - quotes and vocabulary.