let the infinite summer begin: week one · Jun 24, 01:28 PM by j.
While I never subscribed to the delusion that I had actually read Infinite Jest, I was still under the impression that I had owned a copy for many years. I could even remember where I once kept it: on a shelf beneath a glass-topped coffee table in the living room of my old Los Angeles apartment, where it conveniently impressed guests and gathered dust. But it’s been eight years since I lived out west, and while it’s possible that I lost it or gave it away in the midst of a move, it’s more likely that that novel belonged to my roommate, who – it’s starting to come back to me now – may have actually read the thing. At any rate, this all led me to the Brookline Booksmith on June 21st (Day One), where I proceeded to buy a brand-spanking-new copy of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, and in some weird way, the heft of its promise in my hands felt like the turning of a new leaf, or perhaps, excuse the pun, many leaves. (Like paper, get it?)
In short, I have decided to jump onto the bandwagon of this summer project – www.infinitesummer.org – which aims to encourage “enduring bibliophiles” throughout the nation to read this baby once and for all, start to finish, on a suggested schedule that I for one have nestled into my bookmarks bar. Beyond the nifty calendar, the site offers all kinds of cool stuff to pillow its readers through the process – guest bloggers, public forums, and tips that are both cute and useful. All in all, a neat idea, and slightly reminiscent of social reading experiments such as The Big Read and One City, One Book that have each shared success and disaster. (When the latter tried to launch in New York, the Times published an article titled NYC; One City, One Book, Zero Chance.) But as I said: new leaves.
And so as I write this, I’m on page 42, although it only took me 6 to get to the line ”[T]he air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer,” and then 7 more to reach “I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control,” both of which only deepened my confidence in the fact that I have undertaken a summer project well worth the attention. So far I’ve done most of this reading on the subway, but each time I am always at least half-transported to the back porch of my old apartment in Jamaica Plain, where six years ago a roommate’s girlfriend lent me a tattered copy of Broom of the System, which I then read each morning with coffee, wrapped up in the blanket we kept on the rocking chair for early autumnal weather. That was my first and last full foray into DFW, and now, several years later, I find myself immediately lost in that familiar atmosphere of cold mornings and french-pressed coffee, of stunning descriptions and systematic language, of poking holes through the useless but often blinding sheen of the everyday. Because that is what is essentially magical about Wallace’s work – the creation of a complete bubble for the reader to disappear into, and yet the simultaneous destruction of our ideas about society, which is, in a sense, the ultimate bubble.
the believers: another exercise in psuedo-feminism infinite grammar: week three