Yet another infinite jest thread

I'm not going to come right out and say that I recommend you eat approximately two to four tabs of LSD or 2C compound and try to read infinite jest the way I like to read it, because I think it's about to be clear that I've done this enough for the both of us, mostly when I had like papers due.

First of all, if you're ever thinking of maybe reading the book backwards in order of sentence or possibly comma-separated clause, I'll recommend that you not, and definitely not tell people in real life you're trying to do this, while you do it, because you will worry them, and because it stops working after a couple dozen pages. Adderall is a hell of a drug.

So when Gately is in the hospital and can't talk, he tells Joelle that the way he managed to figure out he could get through horrific withdrawal, or shoulder-pain, or whatever, is that he could just build a wall around not only every day, A.A. 24-hours-at-a-time style, but around every second. Here is what I think this is a hint at, this aesthetic like project going on behind the scenes, the whole time.

Flip to any page and read from the top. Don't think about the plot of the book, which I can't be the only person who noticed there is no, literally no plot outside of one dead dog, one gunshot, and a whole lot of fucking tennis practice (and dead framing narrative canadians who are all very upset about Infinite Jest and how great it is). If you try to think of anything that actually present-tense happens in the book to someone who isn't Canadian (and hence fictional), none of it is very interesting to someone who isn't interested in what some kids at a tennis academy are having for lunch. Don't pretend you liked the parts about Hal's friends' eating habits, or . Because the plot is so empty and, when it isn't empty, excruciatingly slow, any given page functions fine for this. Page, say, 702, pictured. It's part of the empty tennis academy plot. Bear with me: at the end of every line, pause. Reread the line and fill in the blank at the end, instead of going on to the next. Sometimes you just need to add a period. They're not all good, so I've taken the liberty of cherry picking a few.

"always enters her mouth upside-down and her tongue gets to contact"

"All the girls are now in socks. Hal notes that girls always seem to slip out of"


"and sit down somewhere. Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself," which they do, if you think about it.

What is especially fun is reading the big paragraph on 703, starting with "what is up his butt?" and really picking up speed halfway through, after the crack about women getting pregnant. It gets very hot and heavy.

Other urls found in this thread:

101books.net/2011/04/22/the-david-foster-wallace-grammar-quiz/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Pages mentioned. I'm deadly serious.

Go on, I'm mildly interested.

p. 634: "Hal recalls his brother's late-in-college thing of seeing if he could take a girl out somewhere public and then meet and have covert sex with a whole different girl while still out with the first girl." He got better and better at doing this over his career.
Here's one of the two-page dictionary spreads from Both Flesh and Not, which are 1.) alphabetical 2.) all definitions I legitimately did not know, 3.) mostly nouns, none of which refer to any kind of living animal, except for a couple adjectives, all of which describe the definitions themselves, 4.) get increasingly energetic by the end of the page, with for instance here: a sleeveless undergarment followed by something to do with a bullet followed by some kind of IV device, followed by "canthus" which is about as close as a noun can get to being a body part without actually being a body part. Also notice how "capri pants," which who doesn't know what those are, is just an excuse to mention Mary Tyler Moore and use the words "Dick" and "Dyke."

( and 5.) published posthumously; explained as "a list of words he like and kept updated on his computer" )

you're a druggy and way too into infinite jest for hte wrong reasons. I like your affinity to quoting but relax mofo (for what it's worth i love the book)

:( What are the right reasons?

what are you saying, someone is fucking the person reading the book?

More like how he'd come up with the dryest, least interesting topics for nonfiction essays, and then put in interesting bits for anyone who's familiar with his work. The first girl being any given reader and the second being someone looking for neat autobio or aesthetic work. Maybe look at this this grammar quiz of his, which is not only difficult and instrucive, but takes you through a greeting, descriptions of his early rambling work, minor league alcoholism, then a full half of it is religious stuff, after he got sober and started writing about other people and their problems.

101books.net/2011/04/22/the-david-foster-wallace-grammar-quiz/

or maybe he's taking the reader to a place where he can fuck someone else and is laughing at you for being along for the ride

He'd never do that, me and he have a whole special thing, you wouldn't understand

you sound autistic but yo, keep going. i like this theory, dump some other shit - i'm listening.

Keep it up detective bro

>eat approximately two to four tabs of LSD or 2C compound

For future reference:
>you don't "eat" LSD, you take or "drop" it
>you don't "eat" 2C-x drugs, you take them (or snort them)
Can't attest to your analysis of the book since I haven't read it but your claims that you've done this "enough for the both of us" is an exaggeration, to say the least.

The line-by-line thing is only fun sometimes, but page-by-page is a lot more reliable. Sometimes he puts so much work into a page that you can see what like lenses he was trying to use, which the guy had a total fetish for chiaroscuro lighting.

Here's one of the best pages in the book: 488, the mathematical center (if you don't count for the footnotes), the only page-long sentence, which ends with the only present-tense human death in the whole book. There are only a couple lines on this page that you can pause at the end of, and none on the second half of the page. It draws you along. Halfway down the page the broom is pushed to half its length, at which point the page gets very pretty and you can start pausing and reading line by line, if you don't want to be cruel to poor Lucien. The lines don't end very nicely but they do start very prettily, now, until the unspeakably pure light on the river Ste-Anne gets interrupted by the broom, again, and Lucien is allowed to die.

I like saying "eat" LSD, it makes it sound like I don't take my drugs very seriously

(you CAN pause, I mean, if you're doing a line-by-line analysis, but it always totally breaks the flow, is what I mean)

this might just be how he wrote. maybe he wrote one page/day, so it all fits together in a special way. i still need a better way to avoid this

It makes you sound like you're full of shit

Hmm but he had the whole manuscript done before he ever sent it to Little, Brown, and it had way more pages then. A better way to avoid what?

):

to avoid having one day's writing be so 'complete' and so not necessarily as coherent or in the same voice as the next day's as it could be

Also you should definitely take psychedelics seriously. There's a lot you can get out of them if you just focus and don't take them lightly, especially DMT and LSD.

Ohhh. I don't write enough to really know what you mean but I can imagine. Maybe try reading through what you have just written before you pick back up with it the next day?

You saying maybe if I take a quarter sheet and stare at a wall I can learn to not sound like a pompous prick on the internet?

You don't sound pompous you just sound like you don't know what you're talking about. But yes, I used to be an egotistical little shit in high school, then I dropped a bunch of acid and became a much more understanding and sympathetic person in a matter of months. So I think you do stand to gain something from it, not saying you're egotistical just saying everyone has some flaws they can change.