Infinite Summer - Thread #1

Hal himself is also part head (well-read) part body (tennis champion)
though I'm not sure if that would be reading too much into it now.

is the first chapter in the electronic version from pages 2 to 22 or 23?
it seems to be the case for me, it's not a bother though

Shit, that's right. Never thought about how this dualism goes deeper than apparent. You know, if we're willing to keep going, I think a similar point could be made for Eschaton (it being a supremely intellectual game that, though, has to be balanced by physical precision and prowess), Steeply/Marathe schtick (they're both minds/souls devoted to their purpose, while their bodies are naturally (apparently) inimical to it) and drugs could be thought of as the great Rejoinder, putting these two parts of being back together through their effect. And well, let's not forget Madame Psychosis, which is an egregious example of this separation. Or Orin. Or Found Drama.

...fucking hell.

SCENE BY SCENE GUIDE:
>faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm

OP is your friend

its from 9 to 30

ok so i suppose its just moved forward 7 pages compared to your version, mines got the dave eggers introduction.

Lessons learned so far:
Eating mold is bad for you.

I might have to join in just because my copy is sitting there collecting dust and it's a good opportunity to tackle it, but I'm also in the middle of reading Gravity's Rainbow so it might be difficult.

Well 15 pages daily is not much honestly, I read 40 or 60 per day last summer and had plenty of time to spare. Also did with English not being my firat language, so I'm willing to say you can probably do it.

Just read the first chapter, it was more entertaining than I thought it would be.

Thanks for the link, I should have read OP more carefully.

OK lads, let's get meme'd.

Sounds like it could be a lot of fun, was going to read Infinite Jest when Wimbledon was on to make it more fitting but reading together with Veeky Forums could be great.

I actually quite like our cover over the US edition, I just don't think the blue sky and clouds is all that fitting but ours really sells it.

I-i don't own it.

;_;

Then download a pdf

I am a southamerican boy and i dont have money to buy the book neither i can get it in my country i am reading the pale king can someone send it to me? I would be glad.

sent :)

How am I supposed to send it to you if there is no way to contact you?

You'd just be "glad"? Not even depend adult undergarment?

>creative writing students pretend they're not creative writing students

I'm about to marathon these 15 pages. What should I expect?

Something about chairman mao and high on xanax while ruling communist china.

Wow, it just came in the mail today, what perfect timing. Infi/lit/ summer

i'm not sure i follow exactly what is wrong with Hal's transcript

it has been dickied? is it that his grades have dropped recently but he submitted fake papers with fake grades to the university?

>eBook is 12.99 T_T

Guess we'll have to hit up our libraries, user.

Just download it off some torrent site and put it on your ereader

His standardized test scores are really bad, considering his great grades and his highly academic sample essays.

It's not a synecdoche

literally google 'Infinite Jest PDF' or go to bookzz

I always thought he just meant it literally, Hal being exact with language, the body plus head being the visible parts above the table.

the dmz did it

this, but to be more specific, his standardized test scores are bad and those are the only actually verifiable scores of his' i.e. they weren't obtained in the school ran by his mother and uncle (ETA). and the papers could also have, as deans argue, easily been falsified.

The real reason why Hal's standardized test scores are bad are, of course, because they are the most recently done, the implication being that he was already starting to lose his mind when he was to do them.

The papers are legit Hal's work if I understand correctly.

>lose his mind

why do people say this? it's clearly loss of motor control

Right, but I'm trying to avoid any hint of spoilers or prescience for the presently-being-initiated.

Naturally, the poorness of both his most recent grades and his scores is not coincidental.

The papers are from before the "decline", which I think Hal's narration explicitly states (albeit not in terms of a decline, but before the present year of bad grades or some such).

That's definitely the better term for it, I just didn't think of it tbph

Yeah, he admits in his rant at the deans that some of his grades in the last year "might have dickied a bit", but that that was "to get him over a rough spot".

That's definitely the better term for it, I just didn't think of it tbph

Yeah, he admits in his rant at the deans that some of his grades in the last year "might have dickied a bit", but that that was "to get him over a rough spot".

When he said that percentage (62.5%) I took off in my head for a minute and calculated in my head how many people have to be there and how many of them are looking at him (I'm a physicist by trade, so I guess that's why)

62.5%
62.5 / 100
(60+2.5) / 100
2 * (60+2.5) / (2 * 100)
(120+5) / 200
(12*10+5) / 200
(12*2*5+5) / 200
(24*5+5) / 200
(24+1) * 5 / 200
(24+1) / 40
25 / 40
5*5 / (4*10)
5*5 / (4*2*5)
5 / (2*4)
5 / 8

so 8 people and 5 looking at him.

OP (Peemster?) could you make a link to the new thread that one can search here tomorrow?
This way I don't have to search the categlog but only Strg+F your name (better yet, add "new thread" to the name)

surely there was an easier way to calculate that, mr "satan trips + 100 + 11 + 2 - 9 -4 + 11 + log100 - log100"

So I read it about 3 years ago during the summer and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to reread it but never did.

But, right now, its being used to lift the clock on top of the bookshelf in my living room (that isn't even used for books) so that the clock can be completely seen. Its covered in dust. Maybe next year.

Please stop

Go away, faggot

Go write your "masterpiece"

lmao

Should I finish these Solzhenitsyn short stories first, or should I should I just dive into The Jest?

finish Solzhenitsyn... jest might take you about a month of exclusive reading, so no point in wasting any time you put into the short storites... unless u absolutely hate them

Additionaly my translation is 442 pages longer, and I'm very busy at the moment which means that I will lack behind if I even attempt to finish Solzhenitsyn first

Gently chuckled

In just the first few pages we get a profile of a very perceptive boy, named Hal. From the very first line of the book we get a conceptual and rather unnecessarily detailed look at three admissions officers who, for several pages, discuss Hal in the abstract while barely acknowledging his presence. This separation is the beginning of a long-running motif of broken-down communication. It is also extraordinarily postmodern. Every sentence, even down to the reluctance of the Deans to admit someone in so obviously faked their grades for both the material gain of the institution and even how Hal presents himself alludes to Hal being a mere result of others' work. He claims that other people would pull him through the experience, the deans have their own agenda, and for the most part he remains entirely silent. This goes back to a model we have in literature, where the debate is either society makes the person or the person is already their own person (nature vs nurture, basically), and very clearly Hal is being built up by everyone in his life. Hal is being nurtured. He is not even in control of his own future and when he attempts to argue his body fails him. Not his brain. This first chapter is about weakness and strength, but it is pointedly physical.
Then we have the abstraction of what a person *is*, what with the "jacket's biceps" (9), the "smile's teeth" (5), which at first glance is synechdoche but is more likely just an abstraction, a sort of conciousness that the author is creating where actions and objects are personified rather than the people.

And that's a very interesting idea indeed, how the characters seem to be less human than their actions.

also the Metamorphosis connection

>I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."

Are you fucking kidding me?

what, you've never done that?

>translation
Casual.

>not reading IJ from September - December

The prose in this book feels pretty choppy. I don't know if I like it or not desu senpai.

you do

>Year of Depend Adult Undergarment

fuck me this is exactly how I am/was whenever I had weed. Not the excessive amounts but the paranoia and social isolation. Am I in for a ride of feels Veeky Forums?

I'd've just applied 62.5% to numbers starting with 7 until it hits something natural, but I'm an engineer by trade.

I think he described the addiction process very precisely. Only for me it wasn't weed but porn, it still hit too close to home.

no

strap in m8, it gets worse

I cringed pretty hard when Hal started talking, that whole paragraph or two made me want to hold DFW's hand and tell him to stop trying to nonchalantly sound witty

what did he mean

>The yellow administrator's usage is on the whole undistinguished

page 4
>sitting in the chair to what i hope is my immediate right

page 3

i thought that the point was for you to cringe
maybe im projecting but i felt like the reason Hal had the seizure (or whatever happened) was because he was cringing at what he was saying so hard

both are in 4th paragraph of respective pages

what did he mean by his "usage"

Suburban, white people "problems"

What a joke. A jest, even.

no less real for us that 3rd worlders problems are for them

>addiction
>weed
Did Wallace buy into the Reefer Madness type PSAs that hard, or did he smoke and genuinely use it as an excuse to be a lifeless waste of space?

Another Veeky Forums book of the month? What happened to those Greek ones we were supposed to read?

Except that suburbanites are better privileged to cope with their struggles, having better access to shelter, wealth, knowledge, groups, and institutions, to support them. But they often achieve fuck all with those. Consequentially in third worlder's eyes, they don't deserve their privelege, which is completely reasonable.

This is one of the factors why critics don't take DFW seriously. I'm calling Cancer on IJ. Get cucked, fags.

>This is one of the factors why critics don't take DFW seriously.
source?

So give us an example of good nonchalantly sounding witty then. Any example of trying to sound witty, when approached with that attitude, will be cringe.

Ok, I give up. This feels like something some liberal arts creative writing major would write. It could get better, but I'm just not feeling it.

...

The prose in this is terrible. He knows a lot of big words but not how to place them.

You're probably right

Well, by nature, trying to sound witty is cringe, right?
Trying to sound intellectual or clever or anything of the sort is unbecoming

My local library only has Oblivion: Stories in it's stacks. I have not read any Wallace before. Should I read Oblivion first, or order another book (Infinite Jest) first?

Someone that tries to sound nonchalantly witty, is what the character is consciously supposed to be though.

That's perfectly valid. I was responding to the phrase someone used: "trying to write witty", as if there were good witty characters that didn't sound cringe and dfw's hal wasn't one of them. I thought about it a second and realized that if you go in with that attitude of oh this is going to be so pretentious and college creative writing then literally any so called witty character ever is going to look cringe. So maybe the issue is in that attitude rather than with hal.

I read Infinite Jest first and it was fine. I don't think it makes a big difference if you've read his other stuff.

To be fair, the narrative voice changes a lot, and Hal who the novel starts on is very near autistic.

But then DFW just isn't a very good prose stylist anyways. Not sure what you were expecting. Nobody reads Infinite Jest for the prose.

Yeah, you've got a point there, user. I'll do my best to keep an open mind

Hal isn't supposed to be cool ...

just for future reference YDAU is kind of the novel's narrative present
im guessing you're referring to the erdedy chapter but most chapters in this book are year of depend adult undergarment

Great. I'm in. Last summer it was a good read.

This is no way original analysis, but since we're discussing the start of the book may as well mention there's a bit to unpack in the first few words:

"Who's there?" - first two spoken words of the play Hamlet

"I am" - first two words of IJ.

There are tons of references to Hamlet through IJ, so to start off with an exceptionally cheeky one is appropriate.

The first phrase ("I am in here") should also be unpacked separate from its literal meaning. As would only be clear in retrospect, Hal suffers from, let's say, a severe existential crisis of self. Others in this thread have already pointed out how these early pages are laying out how the novel will be about what is there really to a person? Is there an "I" in there? Hal's first words to us, the reader, are that indeed there is someone in here...

It's crazy how much the book's early pages blatantly address its conclusion. Feels very smug as if DFW is saying "this book is so long and confusing I can spoil it now and noone will remember" - and he'd be right.

Some big reveals in the first 20 pages, and by page 200 pretty much all the cards are in place.

This is so tenuous it seems like a joke.

Points for creativity, I guess, but grunts and strains so hard to reach.

THEORY: michael pemulis uses a fake name and is the younger brother of Lenore Beadsman - after being expelled from ETA rather than going home he goes to Amherst MA, and attends Amherst College where he sells drugs under the alias Antichrist

my proofs: they are the same character and dfw is a hack who reused antichrist in infinite jest and just changed his name

>mfw last year I was on IS but got lost somewhere around page 200, let everyone go and finish
>still trying to tackle it, by page 400
Should I restart with you nguys, or just stick around until this year IS catches up with me?

DUDE WEED LMAO GO AWAY DAD GO BACK TO SLEEP MARIO

what a fucking bad parent Himself seems to have been though, holy shit

also, is this tripfagging a joke or does the guy really think we give a shit about his tripfag rapport

I gave it a go lads, read the first two chapters.
Didn't think they were necessarily bad just nothing special to warrent the commitment.
Anyone want to try convince me to stick it out a bit longer?

Would it be redundant to tell you "it picks up"?

Judging a book by .02% of its length is kind of absurd, but if the subject matter doesn't interest you and you're not digging the writing style I suppose it's not worth the time.