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Nigmaetcetera posted:No it isn’t and that doesn’t sound like genre fiction I would want to read! It’s about, uh, a college professor who finds, uh, an evil VHS tape? You see I can’t even get a clear synopsis from you literary types! I feel the same way, it's like they're allergic to saying anything concrete or elucidating. I listened to some of the audiobook, but I'm going to have to read it because the audiobook doesn't read out the endnotes. From what I've got through so far, there are some main characters, one of them being the tennis prodigy, but their scenes are sandwiched around various vignettes For example, there's a story that for all I know will never come up again, but I guess I'll spoiler tag it, about a judge or DA or something that goes way too hard on some kids, and they get revenge by breaking into his house and shoving his and his wife's toothbrushes up their butts, and sending them the video of it after they've used the toothbrushes for several weeks. Then the kids accidentally kill someone, like in a way that they and most people wouldn't expect someone could die, and the DA gets his revenge by getting the maximum sentence for that, I think. I don't remember exactly. Point is, there are random weird stories like that. 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. The VHS is introduced in a series of brief scenes peppered amid the "main" stuff, in a way that you might present a Patient Zero in a disaster movie. I won't spoiler tag this one because it's one of the main things I hear people say about the book. It becomes impossible to stop watching, and so the first person who found it (I don't know how) basically dies of starvation or dehydration, and her husband finds her and suffers the same fate. So it's like the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world, except I don't think the creator dies of it, but I wouldn't know. I'm told at some point a plotline involves the feds trying to track it down, either to contain it or use it as a weapon? That piqued my interest and got me to start the book. I wasn't sure whether I would give a poo poo about some high-pressure tennis academy, and some of that stuff definitely drags on. It takes way too long to explain how he goes to some maintenance tunnel to smoke weed. In that sense I would appreciate a trimmed-down version, because I really don't care about matching the style to the themes, or the reading experience with the experience of the character, in the way I might with a film, but it would probably be hard to make the right choices about what to cut. But ultimately I think the tennis guy is relatable enough, his disability an asymptote against which to compare my own disconnection between my inner and outer state. His woes remind me a little bit of some of Louis Sachar's characters, just a bit more grown up. I think the degree of plodding means that you can gloss over any overly boring sections and be sure that you're not missing information that is required for the rest of the story to make sense. Judging by his posthumous novel being about boredom, I can guess that DFW felt a lot of internalized pressure to make books into grueling work, and from the nature of his death I'd prefer not to follow in his shoes, instead cutting my own path through his jungle.
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Jul 13, 2023 06:19
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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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