Infinite Jest

24 Jan 2010, 22:03

Before David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, I didn’t even know his name.  After his death, though, wails of mourning went up amongst several people that I read and admire on the internets.  So, I started poking around the edges, reading some of his essays, many from this great “in memoriam” page that Harper’s Magazine put up.  I started discussing DFW and some of his essays with a friend, who had read Infinite Jest the previous Spring.  He pressured me to read the novel, but I demurred.  I don’t read much fiction these days, although I’ve been doing better the last couple of years, and Infinite Jest seemed like such an undertaking.

But when the Infinite Summer project came along, I could no longer deny the attraction, and I signed up.  As designed, the Infinite Summer project was to take its adherents through the novel before the end of Summer 2009, but being on an academic schedule, I accelerated my reading schedule to finish before the start of the Fall semester. Infinite Jest is a long novel, and I won’t deny that at times it was a real grind to force myself through the day’s pages.  But I made it.

When I finished, though, I said little about it, because my reaction was largely one of bewilderment.  I had certainly enjoyed many aspects of the novel.  It had taken me through broad ranges of emotion:  The novel is by turns hilariously, side-splittingly funny and deeply, gut wrenchingly sad.   But I was also somehow disappointed.  I’m a traditionalist in a postmodern world; I like my stories tied up in neat bows.  Of course, I had known from the beginning that a neo-postmodern novel could never offer that kind of closure.  And yet, I was disappointed.

In the months since I finished reading Infinite Jest, though, it has remained on my mind. My fixation is to the point that I’m tempted to go back and read it again, just to re-immerse myself in DFW’s bizarro-realistic world. I don’t think I will actually reread it soon, but it’s all but certain that I’ll reread it at some point.  Three things about the novel stand out in my mind as particularly noteworthy:

• A major theme of Infinite Jest is addiction.  And the addiction that DFW describes, I’ve found, is a powerful lens through which to view our culture.  Television, fast food, and RSS readers are, in many ways, just as powerful as the addictions to alcohol and drugs that DFW’s characters confront.  We are a society in desperate search of The Entertainment that will satisfy our wants and soothe our souls, but this very longing has the capability, the tendency, even, to enslave us and to separate us from one another and from our humanness.

• DFW’s compassion for his characters is astounding.  Many of the characters are brutal, addicted, vain, and unlovable. And yet, DFW draws them in a way that allows us to see their essential humanity through compassionate eyes. Given that I believe that seeing people with such “compassionate eyes” is a key part of the Christian calling, I found DFW’s compassion for his characters noteworthy and admirable.  It relates well to the message that DFW conveyed in his now well known commencement speech: Selfishness is the default mode of human beings; we have the opportunity to choose a different mode.

• Finally, DFW’s love for the English language comes through on every page, with masterfully crafted sentences.  The example I’ll cite isn’t from Infinite Jest at all.  Rather, it is a sentence from DFW’s essay about taking a cruise [PDF], subsequently retitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” for the collection of the same name.  It is a sentence about people skeet shooting from the deck of the cruise ship.  Thus, it is a sentence about an activity that I don’t care about in an essay that mocks the very notion of a modern cruise as a worthwhile activity.  DFW writes:

  “Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like — i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left — and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”

  I picked this sentence because it was chosen for the dedication page on a recently released collection of DFW tributes [PDF].  I have read the essay from which it was taken at least three times, and this sentence never particularly stood out —because there are such gems on nearly every page of DFW’s work.

Anyway, if you’re up for a literary challenge that might change the way you look at the world, then go forth and read.

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Housekeeping…

29 Dec 2009, 18:31

I made some behind-the-scenes changes to the way this site is run. Please let me know if you see anything broken.

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Thankfulness…

26 Nov 2009, 20:49

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. It’s often filled with heaping doses of good things like friends, family, and food. It’s the least commercialized of the major American holidays. And the theme, thankfulness, is one worth spending more than one day a year on.

(The lamest thing that I saw on the internet all day was someone who said that T’giving didn’t mean much to him because he lived every day in a spirit of thankfulness.  Give me a break.  We could all use an extra helping of gratitude.)

I’m thankful for my family.  For two kids that are wonderous in so many ways: healthy, clever, generous, loving, kind, and beautiful.  For their love for each other — more than I ever would have thought possible between a three year old and an eighteen month old.  For a wife who takes good care of them and of me and keeps us all on track.

So many other things to be thankful for, too: A job that provides both autonomy and security.  Friends across the miles and years.  A church family that nurtures and supports us.

I asked Charlie what he was thankful for today.  (They talked about it at preschool this week.)  He said, “My house, my toys, and the playground.  And books.”

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On a Parent’s Love

25 Nov 2009, 20:50

I encountered this quote in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic.  The quote was almost a throw away line starting mid-sentence in a (rather strange, not entirely agreeable) essay by Caitlin Flanagan titled “Sex and the Married Man.”

“[U]ntil you’ve [had a child of your own] you’re just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.”

Now, let me immediately backpedal from what Flanagan herself is saying here and not presume to tell childless people what they have or have not felt.  But this quote captures, better than almost anything else I’ve read, my experience of love as a father.

When we were expecting our first child, dozens of people, many that I barely knew, told me that it was going to “change my life.”  I found this extremely annoying, almost enraging, because none of them were at all specific about what they meant. What changed, for me, is what Flanagan describes.  The love that I felt for my children from the first moments of their lives was incomparable to anything that I had felt before.

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Bruce Schneier is Not Afraid

23 Nov 2009, 21:34

Really enjoying John Gruber’s new Tumblr, Fraidy Cats, logging the (mostly stupid) things that many of our so-called leaders are saying about terrorists and terrorism.  And he mixes in some quotes from those who are not afraid.  Like this great quote from security expert Bruce Schneier.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

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New Orleans

15 Nov 2009, 20:56

I thought this was a really interesting description of New Orleans, in “Houses of the Future” by Wayne Curtis, an article in the November 2009 issue of The Atlantic. I will further note that this quote is in service of an argument with which I don’t really agree, but it’s an accurate description of the city of my recollection, anyway.

“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty.  And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all of those things.  Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba.  Weird!  And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city.  Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean.  New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.” – Andres Duany, quoted by Wayne Curtis

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