nymith's blind walk with Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest arrived yesterday, a pristine block of ice fresh from the mailbox. It was larger than I had expected, somehow. I scanned the back cover but skipped Dave Eggers' introduction and plunged straight into the text. Read the Year of Glad segment.

The first pages were a struggle. I would have to describe it as very dry, almost bureaucratic in tone; heavy with the relentless prattling of Deans and relations. The underlying weirdness of what what going on motivated me to continue and I was rewarded later by Hal's complete failure to communicate. His rant and its aftermath really moved me and I read on contentedly until the segment was over.

Verdict: Clinically precise yet entirely vague and going from dull as dishwater to emotionally resonant with the turn of a page. I do not yet like the book but I am intrigued, which is a beginning.

almost bureaucratic in tone

Yes, that's it. I'd never thought of it like that but that nails that section.

I'd just like to suggest that the "dull-as-dishwaterness" is as purposeful and laden w/meaning in DFWs big scheme of things as the "emotionally resonant" stuff. You'll see a tension between the two going back-and-forth throughout the novel.

I slept through the first 17 pages. And then things got really interesting. I guess in California, this may be described as "wavy".

'Speaking of up-turns, Stephen J. Burn and Greg Carlisle just came in from the almighty Amazon. Yeah!!!!

On further reading, I found the pothead Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment section to be riveting. It could have functioned as a stand-alone story. Drug addiction is a subject I find of interest anyway and the overwrought style of capturing every tiny detail gave the story an edge at once humorous and disturbing. Very good. What it has to do with the story of Hal will be made apparent in the fullness of time, I suppose.

1 April - Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad returned the novel to baffling terrain. While I love the stylistic shifts from segment to segment I find that all the characters talk like oddly-programmed androids. This whole book is starting to give me the creeps, in fact. Looking forward to the next part.

Took a break from the book altogether in order to concentrate fully on Ben Franklin for a blogging project. Picked it up this afternoon recollecting that there should be Hamlet references in a book with such a title, so I flipped it open to my bookmark and read "Another way fathers impact sons..."

So continuing from there (I'm a slow reader, most of the time juggling several books at once, and only up to page 42 right now), I find I'm not picking up on any of the humour all the blurbs talk about. There is a satiric element when it focuses on entertainment addiction but the result is disturbing. Maybe the comedy comes later?

I'm still enjoying the blindfolded quality of the book and the further stylistic shifts. The Wardine section read like a letter to Miss Lonelyhearts while Mildred Bonk took a brief romantic turn before snapping back to darkness with a harelipped drug dealer and such. Onward....

I join you after some weeks in reading IJ. Stay going

The first act of Hamlet has multiple references to "unfolding" (ie, identifying yourself and telling your purpose or background). I don't really know if the first hundred pages or two of IJ, have done that yet. I'm still a bit lost.

telling your purpose or background

First time through I didn't really bother to try to piece IJ together. I saw it as more or less a collection of stand alone sections, some with characters I'd met before (or after). I was just glad/amazed to be able to read writing like the recount of Erdedy's pot struggles mentioned above.

Any sense of plot or unity was pretty much beyond me. Second time through I got more of a sense of narrative, but still not much.

Sounds like good advice, taking IJ as stand alone sections. That's pretty much how I've decided to take it at this point. Endless variations on themes of tension and despair - I just read the segment relating Orin's troubles with roaches and mornings, ending with that heartbreaking schizophrenic on TV. The segments are generally quite short but they all (well, almost all) have packed a solid emotional punch. If it keeps going like this, plot or no plot, I'm going to be in awe.

Just polished off the first big footnote, the James O. Incandenza filmography. It's the first portion of the book I found genuinely funny but by being set up as a genuine filmography it was kind of hard to read. Of course, if DFW hadn't included all the info on minutes, mm, actors and distributors it wouldn't have worked so well, so I'm torn. "Tiresome but extremely effective" seems to be the novel's modus operandi. Wish I had more time to devote to it.

I think that that is the only footnote I didn't read all the way through, although there are plenty of drug facts in the footnotes that need only passing attention.

Robert

10> Regarding J.O.I.'s filmography, don't know if you noticed it, but a while back I began a thread devoted to the filmography footnote right here. There've been a lot more homemade movies made based on Himself's films, but the majority, I've found, are not well done, to put it mildly. The ones linked in the thread were at least passable attempts at serious filmmaking, the best of the bunch so far available.