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Stinky_Pete posted:The years are named after brands, I guess, which is good for a gag when one of them is "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment," but the purpose seems to be to make the timeline unclear at first other than what was contemporaneous, but I also am not going to remember which year each event took place in without a ton of back-tracking, so it's not the best choice, but at least it's not picking a year that readers will eventually be in, chuckling that the author thought people would still be watching VHS tapes today. btw, it's probably important to put the author in context. I was not yet school-aged when Infinite Jest (1996) was published, but my understanding of the 90s is an era where technology, by way of mass media production and new materials for packaging and signage, allowed large brands to become otherwordly and omnipresent, as more recently explored in the vaporwave milieu. Sure we had The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, but print and television were still "grounded" in many ways back then. Computer graphics introduced an unprecedented level of sterile perfection, accessible only to highly scaled capital, acting as distant gods dropping visions of a utopia that human beings cannot truly exist in. Snow Crash was published a few years prior the Seattle WTO protests would come a few years later, and I think people like DFW had anxieties about the prospect of a completely manufactured reality and/or digital mind control of one form or another, and Brave New World was a great fiction novel to read but it seemed like it was becoming the reality we are currently living under more and more each day. This was peak "Kill your television," parodied on Mr. Show (1995-98) and referenced in songs like Flagpole Sitta (1997). In that vein, Infinite Jest has a lot in common with Black Mirror. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCumH8LRo1A&t=61s I think the tenor of David Foster Wallace's overall corpus, particularly the essays, has a lot of overlap with this description of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Dan Olson (Folding Ideas), The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall posted:...has an almost juvenile, Makes-U-Think shallowness to it, worn down by a generation of trite commentary on the relationship between art and commerce, in no small part directly influenced by The Wall[ace], that cheapens The Wall[ace] simply by association. The lack of a concise resolution, the lack of a clear point at the end, which functions for some viewers as a powerfully disquieting denial of closure, also leaves the door open for symbols to take on meaning counter to their intended or desired use.
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Jul 13, 2023 07:16
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Stinky_Pete posted:btw, it's probably important to put the author in context. I was not yet school-aged when Infinite Jest (1996) was published, but my understanding of the 90s is an era where technology, by way of mass media production and new materials for packaging and signage, allowed large brands to become otherwordly and omnipresent, as more recently explored in the vaporwave milieu. Sure we had The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, but print and television were still "grounded" in many ways back then. Computer graphics introduced an unprecedented level of sterile perfection, accessible only to highly scaled capital, acting as distant gods dropping visions of a utopia that human beings cannot truly exist in. Snow Crash was published a few years prior the Seattle WTO protests would come a few years later, and I think people like DFW had anxieties about the prospect of a completely manufactured reality and/or digital mind control of one form or another, and Brave New World was a great fiction novel to read but it seemed like it was becoming the reality we are currently living under more and more each day. This was peak "Kill your television," parodied on Mr. Show (1995-98) and referenced in songs like Flagpole Sitta (1997). In that vein, Infinite Jest has a lot in common with Black Mirror. In other words, IJ came out at about the same time as Ok Computer.
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Jul 13, 2023 11:48
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Stinky_Pete posted:For example, there's a story that for all I know will never come up again lmao @ saying this about maybe the second main character IJ is a real “it’s the journey, not the destination” book. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but it’s completely true.
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Jul 18, 2023 00:31
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I decided this summer I was going to back-to-back the two "long, pretentious, abstract-ish" books I've been meaning to read for like 15 years now: Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I'm about 700 pages into IJ and I generally dig it, but don't really get the extreme fawning it gets - maybe it's because I didn't read it in college at an impressionable time in my life, but I'm on the side of people who say that I wish this book was like 500 pages total. I saw someone in the thread talking about how the long meanderingness is part of the overall goal of the book and writing style and point, but at least having not finished it yet, my thought is "nope. Shoulda been halved". Having said that, the book DOES make me want to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. DFW seems like he would be a great short story writer: being able to show everyone "look how good I can write in a bunch of different styles!" while being contained to small chunks, rather than IJ where he seems to be having the same need and going "ooh, I didn't write 20 pages yet about how the tennis academy assigns chore duty to clear the way to get their inflatable court out of storage! gently caress yeah lemme do that!" There's some absolute poetry in this book (Joelle ritualistically smoking crack in the bathroom at the party was phenomenally written) sandwiched between a lot of "oh my god I don't CARE". Also, DFW sure does love writing about child sexual abuse in a lot of detail, hoo boy.
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Aug 28, 2023 12:00
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Brief Interviews is great and check out Oblivion too. It's a challenging and dreary collection, but it's kind of like he mentally tired himself out with his earlier stuff and then got meditative and more deliberate. It was a good turn for his work as he got older and I wish we got more 
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Aug 28, 2023 19:15
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Ok I finished it and then looked up a “what happened with the ending?” Analysis and I picked up on NONE of the poo poo it describes
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Sep 1, 2023 03:53
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The biggest question I had in reading the novel was whether Avril was Luria? On one hand the name is an anagram if you take the V in it's classical form, and we know she is canadienne with ties to revolutionary ideologies. On the other hand it's a bit of a stretch.
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Sep 1, 2023 04:28
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Finished Infinite Cast. Really good podcast! Molly and Chris rule. But I’m here because in the last episode they mentioned this recent Patricia Lockwood essay on DFW and it kicks rear end: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now
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Sep 7, 2023 17:41
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Gaius Marius posted:The biggest question I had in reading the novel was whether Avril was Luria? On one hand the name is an anagram if you take the V in it's classical form, and we know she is canadienne with ties to revolutionary ideologies. On the other hand it's a bit of a stretch. I think it's a red herring? I think Luria P is meant to be the "Swiss hand model" who fucks Orin. Which means that mixing her up with Avril is probably an intended read, and very blackly funny.
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Sep 9, 2023 10:54
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Kazzah posted:I think Luria P is meant to be the "Swiss hand model" who fucks Orin. This is correct. Luria Pérec, we see her first as the stenographer for Rod "the God" Tine.
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Sep 12, 2023 15:49
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Experienced this book via Infinite Cast as well, and while I'm disappointed at the lack of resolution (DFW does a great job of building tension towards the AFR "invading" the ETA but never loving pays it off) but having finished the podcast now I just want to read more analysis and discussion about it which for my money makes it a good book.Kazzah posted:I think it's a red herring? I think Luria P is meant to be the "Swiss hand model" who fucks Orin. Which means that mixing her up with Avril is probably an intended read, and very blackly funny. Orin wants to gently caress women who remind him of his mother so his final subject being that similar to his mother is another layer to the joke
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Oct 10, 2023 04:44
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He likely did have sex with his mom previously. And given how completely oblivious he is to the actual character of the women he sleeps with I think it wouldn't be beyond belief that he would gently caress his mom without realizing it was his mom. It just doesn't really work out with the timeline or logically for Avril to be helping out the AFR in that way.
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Oct 10, 2023 04:49
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No, Avril's political activism is definitely anti-Gently-administration and we're reminded many times of her Canadian heritage but I don't think she'd be radical enough to ally herself with the AFR. The fact that her possible (probable) incestuous relationship with Orin is mentioned offhand and barely remarked on by Hal was pretty jarring. Hal seems totally agnostic towards sexuality, and iirc is described as a self-imposed celibate, but his relative indifference to Orin/Avril is pretty grim. Also I just finished this last week so now I'm devouring things about it so I'm glad this thread exists even if the OP has moved on.
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Oct 30, 2023 22:35
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I think Hal is at best an unreliable narrator/protagonist as both before and after taking the LSD we can't be sure if what he says is happening is true (see the incident in chapter 1 and when he had a conversation with the "conversation expert" - both times he described himself as being outgoing and erudite but others didn't think so)
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Nov 7, 2023 07:20
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The conversation expert is his dad
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Nov 7, 2023 09:21
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Gaius Marius posted:The conversation expert is his dad Yeah I know, and he thinks he talks to his Dad normally but his Dad thinks he doesn't talk at all
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Nov 7, 2023 12:12
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I don't think Hal is an unreliable narrator in the way you mean the phrase. The opening chapter takes place well after the rest of the novel's timeline; John Wayne is already gone, Hal is locked-inside but is accurately describing other characters reacting to his new demeanor, etc. In the conversation-expert scene, he's already been dosed by eating the mold as a child (Avril running tight squares) but hasn't yet had his toothbrush dosed by Pemulis ("call it something I ate" refers to the mold, not the DMT). It doesn't make sense for him to already be locked-inside at that point in the timeline. Jim is clearly insane as hell. He makes the Entertainment purely to break his son out of his shell, but we know it actually has the exact opposite effect. The fact that Hal winds up as a figurant, unable to communicate, is thematically important but not linked causatively to anything Jim did -- after all, Hal didn't view the Entertainment. I think of Jim as a prophet-type figure in the sense that he already was experiencing Hal's future, which is why I think his wraith is hanging around.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:36
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mdemone posted:I think of Jim as a prophet-type figure in the sense that he already was experiencing Hal's future, which is why I think his wraith is hanging around. Oooh, that's a cool way of thinking about it and explains why he thought Hal was not communicative too
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Nov 10, 2023 02:07
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