Part of me wishes I knew about this a couple of weeks ago: it would be fun.
But the part of me that is not totally fucking insane (getting smaller and smaller) is glad that I didn’t.
I just heard about this via bloggingheads: a bunch of intellectually (and otherwise) ambitious young blogger-types have set out to read David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest between June 21 and September 22 — which clocks at around 75 pages per week, plus several hundred pages of endnotes.
The main action is at Infinite Summer (intro), with affiliated groups blogging at Infinite Zombies and A Supposedly Fun Blog, as well as a few lone wolves scattered around.
DFW has been a bit of a curiosity of mine since last September. I picked up Brief Interviews with Hideous Men back in the winter — by virtue of being the only one of his books that was immediately availability at the library — but I wasn’t exactly moved (certainly not enough to be excited about John Krasinski’s film adaptation).
I loved “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience,” which I read after the French Open, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is on my to-read list this weekend.
Maybe I’ll pencil-in Infinite Jest for the autumn. I have to read more Dyer first. In all honesty I’m pretty sure I’ll never read this — never finish it, at least.
In the mean time there are already some entertaining remarks coming from of the related blogs. I have to wonder if this will permanently affect the style and tone in some of the nerdier, wonkish corners of the blogosphere. For example
Chris Beam from Slate ponders:
… why I think talking about David Foster Wallace is so hard: reading him breeds the same kind of ironic distancing and manic overthinking that he excels at. Even friends of mine who love the book have a hard time saying why. (David Foster Wallace apparently had trouble talking about David Foster Wallace, too: Watch the Charlie Rose clip where he practically crawls inside himself.) That’s why I’m excited about this blog. This is a pretty clear-headed bunch, and I hope we can try and pierce through some of the mythology and figure out what makes the book tick. Even if we are tempted to drown it in the tub along the way.
Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles (a physics blog) suggests:
… as a warning to blog readers. I am ridiculously fond of Wallace’s writing, but it tends to have a deleterious effect on my own writing, both by increasing my tendency to use words like “deleterious” but also by enhancing my natural tendency to drop little asides into the middle of otherwise unremarkable sentences and paragraphs (the book-in-production has a whole bunch of footnotes, though none of them contain plot) and leading some of my sentences to spiral out of control like an astronomical body perturbed in its orbit by the passing of some giant attractor–a sort of free-roaming literary black hole, as it were.
Hmmm, seems like just the thing I need. My insane side is telling me to bump this up on my reading list.
They people reading it now say the Wallace-ifying effects of Infinite Jest will be temporary, but is anything so immersive ever merely temporary?…
