CapitalistImperialistPig

The Great Gatsby is my latest read, and it's sort of interesting to contrast it to Infinite Jest . Of course everything about Gatsby is spare and understated, where IJ is vast and bloated. Both these guys can tell a story, but I have the feeling that in Gatsby, every bit of technique is subordinated to the story and almost invisible, whereas in IJ it's the opposite. Wallace wants you to see every bit of his wobbling lens and the heck with the scene. Just sayin'

??? Further review might follow someday.

I must be near the end, even though I'm only on page 957, since I am on the very last page of the endnotes (#382/388). It is by now pretty clear that this is going to be a shaggy dog story - there being not nearly enough time to wrap up the many plot lines. Oh well.

I think you probably need to blame the publisher for this one: (d/dx)x^n given as nx + x^(n-1) I suspect author really wanted the correct n times x^(n-1)

David Foster Wallace makes a big point of Dialog where two characters talk past each other. This is annoying in real life and really annoying in fiction. Does he have some point here? ‘Hey Hal?’ ‘Booboo, I dreamed I was losing my teeth. I dreamed that my teeth dry-rotted somehow into shale and splintered when I ate or spoke, and I was jettisoning fragments all over the place, and there was a long scene where I was pricing dentures.’ ‘All night last night people were coming up going where is Hal, have you seen Hal, what happened with CT and the urine doctor and Hal’s urine. Moms asked me where’s Hal, and I was surprised at that because of how she makes it a big point never to check up.’ ‘Then, without any sort of dream-segue, I’m sitting in a cold room, naked as a jaybird, in a flame-retardant chair, and I keep receiving bills in the mail for teeth. A mail carrier keeps knocking on the door and coming in without being invited and presenting me with various bills for teeth.’ ‘She w...

The first hint I can recognize of something like character analysis. The subject is the central character of the novel, already deceased, bizarrely so, at the time of all its action: James Incandenza, AKA Himself and The Mad Stork, scientist, engineer, filmmaker and founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy, the scene of much of the action. The analyst, Joelle van D., possibly recovering crack addict and formerly Prettiest Girl Of All Time. She might have known from the Work. The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d seen, when Orin had had his brother— the unretarded one— lend them some of The Mad Stork’s Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness— no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like ...

Page 666. Wallace is capable of writing a compelling tale, or at least a few short tales, but they are embedded in a vast matrix of horrific dreck. He likes to chop up his stories and feed them to you in little bits, interspersing them among each other. They are, we can see from here, converging. The overwhelming theme is deformity and depression: psychological, social, physical and societal. This is his best prose, actually. Not surprising from someone who committed suicide due to his own depression - psychotic depression, in his term. The book has lots of fans. I still have very little idea why. Much of it is like a parody of every vice of pompous literary pretension - an absurd vocabulary, most of which is not found in my Kindle's dictionary, warped and crooked run on sentences, and preposterous dialog. Character's are distinguishable almost entirely by their particular physical deformities or outrageous costumes. Nowhere is there much hint of ability to sketch and ...

The collision of art and the modern world has not been such a happy one. As progress in science exploded, artists became infected with progress envy, and that turned out to be a problem. Nobody could write better symphonies than Mozart and Beethoven, nobody could sculpt better than Michelangelo, and nobody could paint better than those old Dutch guys. This prompted a bunch of experiments challenging the old forms, some of which managed to be interesting, but most of which turned out to be trash. For my money, music and literature got the worst deals, with guys pounding a keyboard with dead fish and calling it music in the one case and postmodern literature in the other. Jay MacInery, reviewing Infinite Jest in the NYT, noted that at about page 480 one might get the urge to shoot the author, or oneself. OK, I'm at 527, and homicide is a little beside the point, since the author took care of that business himself, but this book really does seem to be sort of a nasty joke on the r...

Since I've been feeling bitter and dissing on David Foster Wallace lately, I ought to share a paragraph I really like, where one of our protagonists (Don Gately) visits another Boston AA group. The Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group seems to be over 50% bikers and biker-chicks, meaning your standard leather vests and 10-cm. boot heels, belt-buckles with little spade-shaped knives that come out of a slot in the side, tattoos that are more like murals, serious tits in cotton halters, big beards, Harleywear, wooden matches in mouth-corners and so forth. After the Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can’t even start to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It’s like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of real...

...to see how bad bad writing can be...........Joe, in Sunset Boulevard. Or torture to read it. Infinite Jest has plenty of it. Man could this dude have used an editor.

I ask myself, why do I read, and continue to read, books that I don't really much care for? Books like Gravity's Rainbow, Atlas Shrugged , and Infinite Jest , for example. It's partly curiosity, I expect, rather like climbing up a difficult and brush obstructed trail to get to a mountain top or at least some sort of overlook. Maybe there will be something worthwhile at the end. Such questions are tied up with the question of why we read at all. Saying, "for entertainment" is too simple. We humans, or a lot of us anyway, want to understand our environment and especially other people. The more alien a point of view is, the more challenging the effort to understand it. Something like twenty million copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold, and a fair proportion of the readers have fallen under its spell. I had read a little of AR before I tackled AS, and enough about her to know I was extremely unlikely to be a fan. I did want to know what made the devotees t...

Actually page 314 of Infinite Jest , by David Foster Wallace. Many good novels might be over by page 314 - maybe even most of them. Plus some dozens of pages of end-notes. Wallace is quite capable of writing engagingly, and frequently will, but he's also very good at being annoying. Most of his characters seem to be freaks, suicidal, severely drug damaged or combinations thereof. The dialog he constructs is usually ridiculous, or at any rate very unlike anything I have ever encountered from actual human beings. He does suck one in though, but not in a "what an interesting world, I'd sure like to be there" way. More like an "exactly how did this gruesome car accident occur?" way. At any rate, I seem to be stuck here, so I suppose I need to see what, if anything, happens. My Kindle dictionary can't find most of the obscure words he is so passionately fond of.

"It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me," says Hal, "that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly." Report from page 183/1079 of Wallace's Infinite Jest I'm increasingly unsure that I want to dedicate much more of my life to this gigantic and grotesque novel.

Report from page 125 = 12%. OK, it's not terrible, in fact it's pretty engaging. It is weird, however. The prominent critic Harold Bloom hated it, and many seem to consider it a great work - even the great work, of recent American literature. It's sprawling, like the greater Los Angeles metropolis. The author is endlessly self-indulgent, so sometimes it seems like one is reading the words of the world's most obnoxious adolescent show off. He seems determined to put every obscure word he knows into the text, and with 484,000 plus words, he has room for a lot. There are a few so far poorly integrated themes: a tennis boarding school, drug addiction, mental illness, and a science fictiony plot involving post something or other Canada/Quebec vs. the US. There are also enough characters to populate all of Russian literature, and the author seems either unable or unwilling to sketch them in anything other than the tritest strokes - all seem to be either freakish carica...

Oh Dear! I have let myself get sucked into a Literary Novel. The literary novel was the invention, naturally, of literature professors. The literature professors, by the way, are mostly people who found out that they couldn't write an at age when it was to late to learn any economically or socially useful skills. It was jealousy that prompted the invention. Literature students are usually people who like to read stories, and reading stories is fundamentally pleasing, so the Lit profs found their students mostly wearing happy faces, except of course for those who had already figured out that they couldn't write and needed to prepare for a real job somewhere. When they looked around campus, though, they saw countless grim-faced students, worn down from sleepless nights and debilitating toil. "Who are those hapless losers, they asked." Physics students. Math students. Engineering majors, came the answers. "And why are they so miserable?" "Problem se...

Having devoted my last three novel reads to Africa (Conrad, Achebe, and Naipaul), I have rather recklessly embarked on David Foster Wallace's semi-infinite novel Infinite Jest . In my youth and middle age, I loved long novels - War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, The Alexandria Quartet, Moby Dick, Harry Potter and even other long books generally. Now that I'm old, and sadder if not wiser courtesy of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Atlas Shrugged I find them intimidating, like the sort of long walks in the mountains that I can no longer manage. Well Wallace is another kilo-pages plus, so we shall see.