c/d: 'infinite jest'

I agree. And, I find his main characters exceptionally moving. Hal will always be one of my favorite fictional characters.

Aimless, I'd happily participate in an infinite number of Infinite Jest discussions!

Something amazing about it is reading ASFT after and realising how few of Wallace's obsessions actually made it into his first two books, like he was consciously holding off writing about them until he'd grown enough as a writer to do them justice...

orin's self-pity is just one aspect of his being a jerk, which i like, the way in which he has become a jerk and how it is handled.

big duh for missing out the first time that both steeplys were the same person: god i was dumb.

first google result for 'consider the lobster' = www.lobsterlib.com! i guess wallace (or someone) gave them permission to reprint the article, which is kinda cool. i'm looking forward to it, his essays are pretty remarkable things.

"allegedly funny" is good: i do honestly think there's lots of stuff that's meant to look as if it's meant to be funny mostly as a kind of distraction. i dunno, i think it ties in with his stance on irony - also i think it's the upshot of a thousand-page manuscript, not that i've ever written a thousand-page manuscript: i don't think "Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment" is going to seem all that funny to anyone, the ninetieth time they've written it ...

what the years thing does manage to do is obfuscate where everything you're reading about happens, chronologically, for the first half of the book or so. i dunno, the stuff with Incandenza's filmography is a better example of what i'm trying to get to.

like: 'Blood Sister: One Tough Nun'. okay, this is a pretty feeble gag. (although the better gag is that it's part of a whole genre of religious action heroes that exists in the postmillenial America DFW is writing, though this is only worth about a 4.5 out of 10, as a joke, to me.) the entire incandenza filmography (the longest footnote in the book, and the first one with any kind of substantial content) looks at first like it's just gags, and bad gags, but throughout the book his films get brought up in ways that require the reader* to re-evaluate it. Towards the end Hal is watching Blood Sister... and there's a lot on it, about why hal doesn't like it, about it's relation to his father's biography, making this silly gag serve the serious purpose of fleshing his father out as a character, about hal (and bridget boone's) reactions in a way that seemed (to me, last night, at least) really quite surprisingly poignant..

that said i don't think i've found anything actually funny in about 48 hours, so all of this might just be me.

*well, i hate saying that the author "requires" anything the reader: it sounds so bossy and formal and horrid.

Thing is, "essay"-wise, the guy is just a very good feature-writer, and judging by the new collection he's gotten better and better at it. Even his constant use of footnotes seems to have something to do with this -- reading the new collection it becomes clearer and clearer how he's writing magazine-style features and then more or less tucking all of the novelist's "thinkpiece" and "analysis" stuff at the bottom of the page. (I.e., it's almost more a genre thing than a stylistic one.) The lobster essay is both lousy and also bizarre -- he was sent by Gourmet to write about a lobster festival, and does so for approximately four pages before going off on lobster-pain and winding up going "I dunno, it's complicated, but I'm mostly just curious if Gourmet readers even think about that stuff at all?" Which is kind of fascinating and perverse but not exactly good writing.

But but. The Harper's grammar-and-usage essay is in there, and it's one of my favorites apart from that almighty television-and-fiction one. The Rolling Stone John McCain primary-season is in there in full, and reads even more terrifically than it did at the time. There's a piece called "Host" that I never saw on publication, I guess -- a profile of an average-seeming talk-radio host and the mechanics of his station -- and that was a great first-read, too; I'm a little wierded out sometimes by DFW-on-politics, because he has this kind of over-thoughtful moderation that can start to seem unimaginative (too much moral care and not enough moral vigor?), but like I said, he's a good feature-writer, part of which is knowing how to feature something other than your own thoughts.

(Ha: "good feature writer" = anyone even vaguely liberal who can spend weeks hanging around a shouty AM talk-radio station without picking fights / going nuts / killing self / becoming completely poisoned and uncharitable to the extent of not being able to "feature" the place at all?)

If there's any problem with collections like this, it's just the gap between what's a terrific piece in a magazine or newspaper and what seems worthy of single-writer collections, bought in hardcover or whatever. It's those big ones -- grammar, McCain, talk radio -- that can kinda sell this as a book. A lot of the others are great, but in a different way: there's a really sharp piece on a sports biography that would totally make your day if you caught it in a newspaper or alt-weekly or whatever, but I can imagine plenty of you growsing that a really well-written review requires something more than it's well-writtenness to seem worthy of going in a book?

is the harper's grammar one the one connected to the kerfuffle about his, uh, not overly wise comments to a black student?

nabisco I was talking about IJ! I am using ASFT as evidence of the obsessions, and saying how few of them made it into the first two fiction books.

I think possibly if I were rereading Brief Interviews, rather than Infinite Jest, I'd not want to ask this question.

*the magazine articles as well as the novels! there's something (proceeds to speak from hindquarters) 19th-century magazine reportage about them, about their not quite knowing what's expected of confronting this particular form -

leaving aside the narrative absurdities, which might be a little harder to categorise, i'm quite curious about wallace's 'style': in that there are lots of bits of writing in Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews where wallace is deliberately not writing his 'style', and lots of bits where he exacerbates particular bits of his 'style', or at least particular stylistic tics, either with some kind of result in mind or just to see what happens.

his regular prose style involves kind of fuzzying out of direct pronouncements of things in favour of either an academic(?) or a how-regular-people-talk circumlocutory way of putting them. there's a peculiar fondness for these dangling (modifiers? i dunno) post-comma, ending a sentence, like (at random):

"The whole thing started out looking like tit-on-a-tray, burglary-wise."

(in which we have a common-speech usage or two stuck together in a way on the page where they look pretty much like something someone would never say.) (actually i could do with giving about half a dozen more examples here but then this starts to look a bit much like work.)

one of the upshots of it is that his prose is very rarely limpid in that stereotypical literary prose way; combined with a tendency to decompress, to refuse to reduce a scene to the essentials, i think this is what a lot of people see as "cold" or "robotic" about the writing, maybe - ? anyway i recall being disappointed with 'oblivion' because I realised, reading it, that Wallace really did have a very particular style, almost a schtick. This effect being in part i) because 'oblivion' unlike the previous two books didn't have any particular "here-i-am-writing-in-a-non-david-foster-wallace-idiom" bits ii) because with the most immediately schticky aspect removed (the footnotes, duh) the almost-schtickiness rest of the writing showed up a little more.

rereading this again. forgot i'd done this, the first time

by which i mean, started a thread to ramble on about it.

i do honestly think there's lots of stuff that's meant to look as if it's meant to be funny mostly as a kind of distraction

this has been popping out at me more and more. i think dfw uses this mode of, like, parodic science fiction (not parodic of science fiction, it's one that shows up in like 50s SF itself) to do these sweeping broad versions of his theme without having to invest them with seriousness or probability, which i think is valuable. the bit about the rise of videophones leading to downfall in self-confidence about how one looks leading to the demise of videophones is maybe the most striking example i guess. closing sentence:

"Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern."

which i find it kind of interesting, actually, how this novel (conceived in what, the early 90s?), which is set in i think 2010, though it's hard to tell, doesn't get the internet entirely wrong ...

he gets the internet/mass entertainment totally right!

i kind of agree with you--the book takes a while to warm up. there's all this seemingly random stuff he throws at the reader. (the e-mail about the construction worker, the videophone stuff, filmography.) i think the book works better for me when he incorporates that sort of material into the story more--like, for example, Mario's movie about Interdependence Day.

this (third time) is the first time that i've read it and basically known where this stuff is going and how it's connected, like, reading stuff about Mildred Bonk and Ken Erdedy and remembering well enough to skip forward to the bit where the residents of Ennet House are enumerated; though ha i did just cheat and google to work out who 'yrstruly' is.

(also found someone on a blog complaining that his attempt at "Ebonics" in that section was so bad as to be offensive, which uh)

that Ebonics section is pretty bleh, tho

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

the narrator's white! and racist!

i'm reserving judgement on the actual ebonics bit, tho ("Wardine say her momma aint treat her right." etc.)

have this book taunting me from beside my bed for a while. its so fucking big and difficult to hold tho.

i wonder to what degree my tendency to enjoy this sort of overmassive encyclopedic stuff is biologically predicated by my ridiculously huge spider hands

oh duh i never linked mario's arachnodactyly with his father's fear of spiders before

"This is a thing I do know. They can't kick you out."

i cant imagine reading this book 3x

His drunken teenage years were indeed amusing and kind of melancholy. I enjoyed that part a lot, then got annoyed as it started to meander, only to be pulled back in by the story about cleaning up the grandmother's house, which was some of the most depressing and horrifying stuff I've read.

Yeah Knaus straddles the line between melancholy self effacing tragi-comedy and like, the actual crushing effect of the world on the innocent individual.

Innocent is the wrong word. He just really makes something great from the tragedy-comedy dialectic channelled through his personal experience, sublimating that dialectic to all personal experience

I know what you mean by innocent. It's the way we experience through his eyes in real time the unfolding realization of what's happened, it gets worse and worse with every second that passes and you are right there with him feeling the horror and sadness grow as he takes in just how bad everything became.

clicked on this thread because of bump and am pleasantly surprised to see most of it not really about infinite jest. no doubt part of it is that the thread revive article is paywalled, but if the result is that folks are instead talking about this apparently better book by this apparently better writer, i'm happy with that.

without having read it (i'm sure it's good and (1) i'm too cooked to read literature at this point (2) i'm not reading a book called "my struggle") it gives me the sort of vibe of something like louise weard's "castration movie", the kind of fucked up shit that's too hard to do as anything but autofiction (one of the other reasons i avoid writing - i have plenty of things to say, a lot of them pretty fucking funny, and saying them would cause me the same kind of personal problems that "my struggle" seems to have caused for knausgård).

that is the danger of this kind of... i don't know that it would be amiss to call infinite jest "trauma porn", after a fashion. dfw quit taking his psych meds because he felt like they were inhibiting his "creative process", and i look at the results of his decision and say _fuck_ my "creative process". there's no shortage of brilliant, talented writers who didn't make it to fifty. i got three months to go and my fingers crossed.

I haven’t read IJ since I was 18, when it made quite an impression on me. i remember scenes from it quite vividly.

my mother loved the Knausgaard books, and we don’t agree on much in contemporary lit, so I have sort of dismissed them. also i just don’t care about some straight dude’s epic life, how many times must we be subjected to this shit

I can understand that complaint with books 2-6, but his life was really not "epic" with book 1. Though fair enough if you also take issue with the cause of his "epicness" (book 1). The interplay between braggadocio, his present artistic success filtering through stories of absolute failure in parts 2-6 is really interesting: each element cancels the other out and there's this sort of substantial negativity of the person communicated through that.

Sorry to stan, not every book is for every person

3 was a real slog and I didn’t finish the series. He’s just not for me. I tried the new series and it was boring.

I loved A Time For Everything, though, his book right before My Struggle, much of it has stuck with me for years.

But yeah IJ was much funnier and more memorable

It's a shame the best books are 1 and 6

also i just don’t care about some straight dude’s epic life, how many times must we be subjected to this shit

There are actually not many of Epic Lives of Straight Dudes in literature. In Search of Lost Time is queer, those Tolstoy novels are epic but not "straight" in any contemporary sense. Maybe Bellow? The Adventures of Augie March?

I think the first two Knausgård volumes are morosely funny in ways I never found DFW but, like DFW, he bored me after a while too. What I like about Proust is when his narrator so obsesses over girls on the beach and the permutations of his own jealousy that he abandons realist conventions altogether.

I haven’t read 6 yet but my favorite is probably 4 and least favorite is 2.

Alfred, I don’t care, the point still stands. I have read enough about straight men and their lives.

I wasn't looking to change your mind. I'm whistling a tune, honey.

There are actually not many of Epic Lives of Straight Dudes in literature. In Search of Lost Time is queer, those Tolstoy novels are epic but not "straight" in any contemporary sense. Maybe Bellow? The Adventures of Augie March?

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 27, 2026 5:08 PM (one hour ago)

you know, you got me thinking about this. yeah it's true, the number of Epic Lives of Straight Dudes are _far_ outnumbered by queer epics. it just seems like the ones that get the attention benefit a lot from the _presumption_ of straight-dude-ness.

I don't think there's any book that evokes such strong opinions from people who have never read it (this is more based on Twitter than this thread ftr)

Well, there are a few other books answering that description but usually not literary fiction.

...and none with so much focus on the intricate world of (checks notes) junior tennis.

I don't think there's any book that evokes such strong opinions from people who have never read it

• bible
• koran
• the communist manifesto
• harry potter

I don't think there's any book that evokes such strong opinions from people who have never read it (this is more based on Twitter than this thread ftr)

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

are we talking infinite jest, or "my struggle"? because, uh, with "my struggle", there's a book with the same title that i have some pretty strong opinions about

harry potter

― mookieproof, Tuesday, January 27, 2026 10:31 PM (yesterday)

and of course there is always the question of "separating the work from its creator".

idk if i've mentioned it in this thread, but yeah, i did read infinite jest, spent a year reading it while waiting for the bus to and from my job as a library page, 1998 or so, fell in love with that damn book. i am exhausted by hearing the opinions of certain straight men, particularly those who go out of their way to be gratuitously transphobic...

q: how is dfw the writer like dfw the airport?
a: both have weird and inappropriate fixations on my dick.

(and it _is_ relevant to the putative topic of infinite jest, renee richards is a pretty important and influential figure in women's tennis, culturally at least, and richards _wasn't_ unsupported in her day)

...but a lot of it is anxiety of influence. which used to mean "all my favorite writers killed themselves", and now has more to do with... trying to be a Clever White Boy made me miserable and damn near killed me and it's very important to me to be as little like a Clever White Boy as possible... "white", that's not going to change, "boy", that's clearly not true. trying to not be _clever_. that's the tough bit.

was genuinely astonished at the really humiliating depictions of trans people on my reread of infinite jest, like men trying to become women was the funniest and most grotesque thing in the world. (i know the world thought this and to some degree still does, still you expect better of fiction.) think dfw might've had something going on re: this fixation. i was sorta disappointed that the new yorker piece brought up the lack of prominent women who aren't staggeringly beautiful (and it's funny because, of the women in the novel, it's kate gompert's chapter that sticks with me the most) and failed to mention this as well

anyway i still love this book so completely, the reread was very instructive in this regard because i found a million things annoying and offensive about it but when i reached the end i was like "that was a masterpiece and i've never read anything like it but itself"

i see i recounted most of that reread upthread lol

i'm contemplating reading it again! idk! it's got a hold on me still

I haven't read the entire thing since like 1997, only memorable chunks here and there. I'd really like to, but when I think about how little daily reading time I get lately, I worry it'd be too fragmented and long-term a project to get enough out of it. But then I'd be 1000 times better as a reader than I was back when I could skip classes and lie in bed reading it all day long, so maybe it evens out? And I've revisited all my favorite and/or greatest-hits stretches enough times that I'm now more curious about all the additional detail I've completely forgotten, or all the Marathe/Steeply dialogues I almost certainly wasn't appreciating when young.

was genuinely astonished at the really humiliating depictions of trans people on my reread of infinite jest, like men trying to become women was the funniest and most grotesque thing in the world. (i know the world thought this and to some degree still does, still you expect better of fiction.) think dfw might've had something going on re: this fixation.

― ivy., Wednesday, January 28, 2026 8:28 AM (six hours ago)

i fully admit to having had thought along these lines in my problematic "estrogen could save her" period... i'm more in my "nobody needs to be 'saved'" period. the work of his that interests me most is "brief interviews with hideous men". dfw probably _thought_ of himself as a "hideous man", one who wanted desperately not to be hideous. i'd characterize him more as a man who did hideous things. re: prominent staggeringly beautiful women (i haven't read the new yorker article, and i haven't read the book in more than 25 years)... i think this tracks with the _exceptional_ transphobia dfw displays in the book. (yes, transphobia was normative at the time, but his writing goes above and beyond in that category. i absolutely had internalized transphobia, and i would never have described a trans person the way he does.)

the great fear that so many of us have, that i had for myself, was the spectre of being an _ugly woman_. the mtf transsexual is grotesque in his work because his worldview is one in which men are essentially hideous, and women are essentially gorgeous. i mean look i used to believe that shit myself, i understand, and my god was i fucking ignorant.

when i think of the idea of the "ugly woman" i think of william t. vollmann, who in 2003 published a seven-volume, 3300 page essay offering "some thoughts" on violence. vollmann is... well, his facial features do not correspond to normative ideas of physical attractiveness. i don't say that as a moral judgement. for one, i don't know what he looked like before that landmine blew up in his face. he'd just not, in the pictures of him i've seen, someone i'd call "handsome". and yet, when i look at the photos of his longstanding girlsona in "the book of dolores" (because of course her name is "dolores", what other name could a guy like vollmann have chosen), which i have on my coffee table, she isn't an ugly woman. sure, vollmann is wearing makeup as dolores. i don't think it's about the makeup. there are just some men who are made miserable by manhood. vollmann is one. hemingway, i'd say he was another. dolores is, true to her name, deeply, profoundly sad - but she's not ugly.

i'm really glad that nobody needs to be - that nobody _can_ be - "saved", because reading what dfw wrote about trans women in _infinite jest_, i don't believe he was _worth_ saving. well, that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me, of course. i'm willing to open myself up to the judgement of others in this case.

i don’t understand what you mean by “saving.”

This conversation also makes me want to re-read it! I mean, I was quite predictably / regrettably not likely to have a critical eye for depictions of trans characters 30 years ago, so now it's hard to recall and think about. Which one leaps out as the bigger problem — Poor Tony being presented as so abject, or the way Steeply just being "in disguise" prompts jokes about obvious masculinity and straight men's attraction and such? I'm guessing it's the latter, unless I'm totally misremembering how that worked. But quite possibly there's loads and loads of other stuff I just didn't notice or take on board.

those are the major examples i'm thinking of, and yeah they're kinda equally bad for different reasons

uss millicent kent is also traumatized by her dad being a transvestite

there are some real straight up awful parts, like the parts mentioned above, and the Raquel Welch bit and the AAVE section.

this is an excellent "review" of a section of The Pale King that got repackaged as a novella, but has a long section on IJ that I think is astute

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now

lockwood's LRB article is fantastic, a fantastic read. scattered (mainly irrelevant) thoughts:

I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I had once taken one of my brother’s Adderall and then gone to see Django Unchained. (Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)

adderall is of course a drug of abuse. i guess i'll be going back to it a bit, since my vyvanse is about to run out and the earliest the new psych could get me in is late next month. of course there are the drugs and my chronic underdosing, a desperate desire to convince myself that i had _control_, the addict's need to believe that she could stop at any time. was it in my nature? to some extent, sure. the "biosocial model", they call it. a predisposition, exacerbated by one of my earlier conversion experiences - age 20, prozac, suddenly realizing what people mean when they talk about being "happy", and then, like most conversions, the long, slow backslide. realizing what i've given up without knowing - first hard-ons, then, as the drugs piled on, basic cognitive autonomy. i have pictures of myself in 2003. i look dead. my oldest brother suffers with excruciating back pain daily, having had his own conversion experience upon seeing what the medical prescribed benzos did to me.

fifteen years after that. my psych, a gentle older white man, asks me if i've ever been diagnosed with ADHD. when i was a child, suggestions of perhaps "hyperactivity", until after my parents' divorce, after my dad had my psychiatrically evaluated to see if i was abused, all my problems were solved. i was a perfectly normal child. things change so much. the hours i spent staring out the window at school, not focused on whatever task was at hand, is now seen as symptomatic of something.

my oldest brother, irritable from back pain but _free_, asks me if i'm not just taking meds so i can be a better little worker drone for capitalism. "probably," i say. "but what the fuck am i supposed to do? i need to get paid!"

it is 2026. i'm not getting paid. fine, i'm medicating myself to cope with the trauma of capitalism. i genuinely don't understand how anybody manages to do anything right now. i'd love it if i could have the self-confidence to think i was capable of anything worthy of remuneration at all, much less a million bucks.

He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David Wallace, who also says: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’

this was the thing that struck me most when i read "the pale king": david foster wallace does not genuinely understand boredom. things which were once considered "irrelevant", like staring out a window for hours on end, are now seen as symptomatic. the "small, sensuously specific details" are widely understood as being, in fact, flashbacks. maybe it is possible to have sensorily vivid flashbacks that aren't trauma related. i'm not the person to ask.

clinicians, in fact, increasingly argue over whether "boredom" actually exists. if someone has the ability to do things, but lacks the volition or desire to do it, why is this? surely, surely in this time we all are capable, in our own ways, of the pursuit of happiness. yet, over and over again, we don't. we immiserate ourselves. we "doomscroll". is it boredom, or is the game subtly rigged, subtly designed to profit off our immiseration? do the drugs empower me, or do they make me more pliable, more servile? maybe, just maybe, i would benefit if i were to stop taking them...

of course i won't. "it may be", the old demotivational poster said, "that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others". i think the "only" in that sentence is a bridge too far, but is there not value in warnings? unless, well. unless one becomes paralyzed by fear, too afraid to move in any direction, too afraid to write, too afraid to _finish_. perhaps unable to finish - a side effect that was underemphasized, underreported. who, after all, would willingly take a drug that made their dick soft?

that reminds me, tomorrow is shot day.

probably boredom exists. i _think_ i've been bored. the way dfw describes boredom doesn't track with my experience. it corresponds more closely to what i would call an emotional spiral, racing thoughts, anxiety, panic, five things i can touch, four things i can see, three things i can hear...

When he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them.

for better or for worse, words have, for a long time, been... connective tissue. much as i've tried to get away from it, to be just one person, for a long time i've lived a "dual role" - the world in my head, the world around me. i never saw writing as an imitation of life so much as a struggle to exist. as the internet has collapsed in on itself more and more...

i am dispersed, i am disconnected. neither born nor left to die. still, my body is in the world, and his isn't.

I have​ a tender partiality for the work in progress, and have always been electrified by the unfinished novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ongoing.

one of the reasons i write the way i do is because writing is fundamentally for me conversation, communication. few things bore me more than myself. when something isn't finished, i find that its emergent qualities are foregrounded. a work like robert wyatt's _shleep_ - finished though it is - i have grown alongside it. my life experiences attach to this record, which i've known since i was 22, like barnacles. how much more can this be the case with an album with no set form? back in 2001 i made my own fan mix of "smile". the 2004 version, to me this is finished, is definitive. that fan mix, though, that attempt to turn something unfinished into a coherent work, has definitely shaped me. with wallace it's different. sometimes people grow closer together. sometimes people grow apart. i have the same relationship, i think, with creative work. sometimes i grow apart from people and those memories become painful and bitter. who i was at that time, how i treated them, how they treated me. i am embarrassed of having idolized dfw, and angry at his hostility towards the person i was afraid to be. if the pale king is anything, it's the memory of reading it and realizing that dfw wasn't ever who i thought he was.

Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also motionless. ‘Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf)

...the corporate internet...

and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did.

starting the practice of mindfulness meditation was hard for me. the idea of _letting go_ was hard for me. _letting go_, at that time, evoked the decades of dissociation i'd lived. i felt i ought to scorn the material world as illusion. with practice, i came to understand it differently. dissociation, for me, was the mind disconnected from the body. it was a retreat into abstraction. it wasn't _boredom_, but it felt like nothingness. it damn near killed me. mindfulness is the opposite. it's letting go of words. it's allowing myself to be, to feel, without judgement. i find what i am looking for, and want to never write again. i hate living in a world that judges us by what we _produce_, what we _put out_. i do experience bliss, in my entirety, always. i constantly bury it, for reasons both wise and foolish.

Experiment:​ use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.

it's not about _him_. it was never about him, for me. he's neil gaiman. he's tom disch. he's jonny greenwood. he's david bowie. he's every artist who has ever disappointed me, every idol i looked at as though it were a mirror.

Infinite Jest – man, I don’t know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been ‘and then this little kid had a claw.’ It’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty.

i know, ms. lockwood, that you do not mean these words in the way i read them. nevertheless: you _wound_ me, madam.

What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls.

i must protest again. there are a larger number and wider variety of people who willingly apply capsaicin to their genitals, for a wide number of reasons, than was generally acknowledged in the 2000s. i will spare y'all the details. i wouldn't mention it all if i didn't feel my honor and virtue as a woman were at stake here.

I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes that he somehow made famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already. At some point, you will find yourself in a state of pure nystagmus, moving your eyes back and forth across the page without conscious will.

i didn't have this experience with _infinite jest_, but i absolutely did with _gravity's rainbow_. i think this is one of the reasons i respect gravity's rainbow more. it is one thing to publish an unfinished book. it is quite another to publish a _finished_ book so beyond my comprehension as a reader that my visual cortex quietly turns itself off in self-defense. again and again i would look at the page number of _gravity's rainbow_ and realize that i had no idea of what had happened for at _least_ the previous six pages.

the other thing i respect about gravity's rainbow is that pynchon survived writing it and, indeed, eventually learned to become a good novelist. this did not happen with dfw.

_infinite jest_? i devoured it. i read every footnote, read every footnote to a footnote. i saw in it a license to give voice to my every incoherent whim. i wouldn't say i _regret_ having been as ignorant as i was, particularly since i wasn't ever as ignorant, or as hideous, as i thought i was. i can't, and wouldn't, unknow what i know now. infinite jest to me now is one of those many things that seemed, at its worst, irrelevant. now, i understand it as a Symptom, an early warning sign of a sea of miserable, resentful men who seem able to do nothing but castigate themselves for their wholly unnecessary shitty behavior, who look at women and imagine that we hate them the way they hate themselves. i do not. i want people to stop telling me they're hideous before, after, or during their performance of hideous acts.

What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in which it is not read. All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed.

i don't know if this is an intentional pun, but it is very funny.

But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.

this, on the other hand, strikes a sour note in an otherwise excellent essay.

No, it was the essayists who were left to cope with an almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own. If he made mutants of the next generation, it was largely to their benefit: they were a little bit taller, with bigger eyes and a voice that was piped in directly.

i didn't, of course, want to be taller, and i certainly have never wanted to speak with his voice, the kind of voice that expects to be respected, to be taken seriously, because of how _deep_ it was. as for my eyes, they were the size they are before i'd heard of the man. i will give him credit for my late lamented intellectual self-confidence. It didn't last past...

‘I Really Didn’t Want to Go’, Lauren Oyler’s recent essay for Harper’s, is a rollicking, even Obetrolling critique of this. Aboard Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise, she thinks through Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty.

exactly. us girls are supposed to _glisten_.

There was always something suspect about Wallace as a guru, the same thing that is suspect about anyone who applies for the position. It is hard to imagine William T. Vollmann, say, getting secondarily famous for a commencement speech

i appreciate the serendipitous validation!

He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment.

it is. if i had to assign a cause, i'd call it the realization that the more i know, the more miserable i am. the adderall only helps so much, and if i have to choose what to do with that precious executive function, i would much rather be a good lesbian housewife and do the dishes. i will accept, at this point, being reminded of my place, because it comes with it the implicit acknowledgement that i _have_ a place.

You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years.

i do now! this is the thing so many people, mostly men, never seemed to understand about #metoo. "not me", they would protest, and we _don't know that_. we _can't know that_. it could be any of them, at any time, and whatever they did, _we_ would be the ones held responsible. again: it was never about _him_. he was only one of the many, many men who proved unable to understand that. i don't, though, think that it was because he was a man. though i didn't do the hideous things he did, i didn't understand that it wasn't about me any more than he understood that it wasn't about him.

We had first thought of him in terms of his genius, and then in terms of his suffering – how to hold these things in the same hand as his threat?

not to be glib, but decades of therapy. choosing to stop dividing the world into Victims and Perps.

‘But that’s insane,’ my husband said simply, when I took him through it. ‘Who does something like that? What kind of person?’

he learned what he was taught. as did all of us. he had ample opportunity, or at least more opportunity than most of us, to learn better, truer things. he didn't.

He was a child, he was basically wearing a striped Ernie shirt. He was doing it, and it was also something happening to him. He was a fellow sufferer, I thought. He was. And then, get out before it happens to you.

yes....

I had a copy from early on that I never read past ‘The Depressed Person’. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a sick book – not in the puppy sense, but actually ill.

connective tissue. what purpose does this word have, "ill"? no shit he was "ill". he fucking killed himself. i'd call that a pretty clear sign of mental illness. _it's not about him_.

Jonathan Franzen is correct to emphasise his rhetorical gift; sometimes just when you’re hating it most, you are being won over. The answers that anchor the collection, delivered by hideous men in response to blank questions, take it in their turn to pursue, repulse, and finally persuade us: but to what? ... The truth about Brief Interviews is this: it only gets good when we’re about to be raped.

of course. yes, absolutely, of course. i will, here, cite avelo's recent video essay, "Why We Love Evil Men":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EabebOlDkUw

"Evil men are hot," she starts. you know what attracts me to men like him? the idea that maybe, just once, he might actually be _right_. that i might _deserve_ it. that i might actually _want_ it. god, i fucking wish i could want it the way evil men _think_ we want it. it would be such a relief, such a relief if i could just take what they had to give and be _happy_. why can't he be right? he's so smart. he's so fucking smart.

It can still be ours, is the thing. There is a great deal of handwringing about whether we can still enjoy the work of hideous men. The question is not typically how to root out influence. It is whether we can still enjoy, but we are reaching for another word beyond it. What we are asking is whether we can still experience it without becoming these men.

Of course we become them.

mmmm. my question was slightly different. _was_ i one of "these men"? _am_ i one of "these men"?

well, no. it took me a long time to get to that simple place, but no. not hideous, not a man. others may disagree. my answer does not change.

that answer, like any answer worth finding, leads me in turn to a new question:

is it _ok_ for me to want them? is it _ok_ for me to think they're hot?

that's not a question i'm interested in answering. it's interesting enough for me to ask, though.

Uncharacteristically for me, I can't find my copy. Did I hide it from myself, like an addict in a sudden fit of regret?

There are parts I might want to revist but whole huge plots I don't ever need to read again (some of which are duscussed above). And I hope I don't try. Maybe best to leave it lost, so that the book in my memory takes on a benevolent, forgiven quality. A loved but problematic uncle.

One vestige of the time I spent reading it: my ilx handle. The puffin is a fine animal and has an anagrammatic connection to my name, and needing a pseudonym in the 90s, I was influenced (perhaps subconsciously) by "The Mad Stork" and here we are.

Judging from those excerpts, it seems apparent that I would despise this article and its conclusions.

Say whatever you want about DFW— he was clearly a dick— but I teach this story on a regular basis and it never fails to absolutely flatten its readers, and puzzle them, too.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a500/incarnations-burned-children-david-foster-wallace-0900/

Tabes, I read it so you don't have to. You would not like it.

There is an audience for book reviews that have a lot of autobiography and meme-adjacent "its place in cultural history" content.

It's the sort of thing you would like if you like that sort of thing.

I don’t mind autobiographical elements in reviews— I was taught by New Narrative writers, after all, so the insertion of memoir into critical writing comes as second nature to me— but I find myself reading the excerpts from kate’s post and simply disagreeing with every position the author takes.

I dunno, I like reading stuff I disagree with sometimes. Not trying to be pushy. The article provided, for me, a lot of clarity re: DFW's best work which for me is The Pale King, and it talked brilliantly about why parts of IJ feel like such a letdown, despite the entire work being brilliant. She also states that IJ is basically the end of an era that started with Pynchon, which I agree with. This excerpt below really gets at why TPK and this essay work for me. I feel like she was giving him a break adding all the autobiography stuff in--there is somewhat of a cult around the dude, because of his writing, yes, but also because of how he came across in public. I think if we judged him strictly on the work itself we might feel let down. There are huge chunks of IJ that should be cut out. It's kind of like how some brillant albums have a crappy song or two. For me it's the Steeply/Maranthe stuff that doesn't work and is super boring, and some of the show offy elements like the filmography. And I used to love the filmography.

tl, dr: TPK is, in my opinion, his best book!

I was sceptical of Sarah McNally’s claim, in her brief and somewhat subdued introduction to Something to Do with Paying Attention, that it is ‘not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style’, but that’s exactly what I found it to be. It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person. It was not his childhood, perhaps, but it had some of the same surfaces, colours, engineered fabrics. Time to care about JFK again, or still. A kind of cinematic obsession with the sound of joints sucked in and breath held and the textural impact of gold-orange-green couches, invariably described in his work as ‘nubbly’. Posters and dropped needles and a vacancy in teenage faces, and finally he was far enough away.

there is somewhat of a cult around the dude, because of his writing, yes, but also because of how he came across in public

if we judged him strictly on the work itself we might feel let down

?!

There is another layer or two because if you depart from "strictly on the work itself" you also have to deal with less savory aspects of his behavior, maybe also contend with his treatment of people possibly including Mary Karr.

I mean ordinarily when we talk about separating the art from the artist we mean a rather different thing. See Gaiman, Neil / Allen, Woody etc.

If anything, Wallace has written some no-contest gems of prose that would rightfully shine forever, even if you had never seen a photograph of him in a bandana.

I kinda wish I could visit a timeline where I *didn't* know anything about him as a person.

I kinda wish I could visit a timeline where I *didn't* know anything about him as a person.

me too!

If anything, Wallace has written some no-contest gems of prose that would rightfully shine forever, even if you had never seen a photograph of him in a bandana.

100% agree. still doesn't take away from the fact he has some missteps. i still think he's one of the best!

I'd say that him as a person is, more than most artists, pretty difficult to disentangle from him on the page? I mean, a lot of what he accomplishes, both in fiction and non, is to make you sense a unique writerly consciousness communicating itself to you in weirdly enveloping ways. An awareness of his great failures as a person can surely make that kind of communion less attractive; that's happened to me with various artists, where if nothing else you're just distracted by thinking about unpleasant stuff in their lives and it spoils the work. But I do really reject that common attitude where somebody's problems or failures as a person somehow void possibly better things they're expressing in art. Most of us believe and express far nobler things than we live up to. That doesn't necessarily make the expression a cynical charade. Sometimes the expression is very pure and hard-earned via our own regrettable awfulness!

Not saying that's necessarily the case with Wallace. And I don't know how it looks for someone who came to him during the era where he was being pitched or celebrated specifically as a person / commencement-address sage / literary great, as opposed to just the unexpected person who'd produced this giant striking text.

uss millicent kent is also traumatized by her dad being a transvestite

This used to be such a weirdly common trope, like popping up in sitcoms just behind "visit from old man's-man army buddy who turns out to be a woman now," and I absolutely never understood why adult characters were meant to be so invested in their fathers' masculinity. Like I basically grasp that there are/were people whose sense of identity includes some key element of a rock-ribbed masculine dad who could beat up your dad, but I have trouble fully picturing how that works. (I'm guessing most people under age 60 share that?)

I should probably reread "Pale King" and revive that thread so we can discuss the late style Lockwood and McNally are talking about. This is obvious and has been said plenty, but Wallace was having so much more success, in terms of reaching the effects he wanted, than he probably felt he was toward the end. Maybe he wanted to stamp out or transcend even more of his usual habits — most writers will be more sick of themselves than their readers are — but you can look at some of the goals and challenges he'd been laying out since early essays and say, you know, that late material was in fact successfully working them out.

I don’t mind autobiographical elements in reviews— I was taught by New Narrative writers, after all, so the insertion of memoir into critical writing comes as second nature to me— but I find myself reading the excerpts from kate’s post and simply disagreeing with every position the author takes.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Friday, January 30, 2026 6:02 AM (one hour ago)

so i looked her up when she mentioned her husband in the article, because i had her confused with patricia cornwell, a mystery writer who i had thought was a lesbian. (she's at least sapphic and currently married to a woman, though cornwell was married to a man in the '80s. it was the '80s. i tried to be straight for a long time myself.)

when someone does autobiographical writing - like i do, like lockwood does - of course it's based on who we are. patricia lockwood is a white woman who, well, i'll just quote the "personal life" section of wikipedia:

"Lockwood is married to Jason Kendall, "a journalist, designer, and editor."[51] "She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her 'desk-bed'," according to a profile in The New York Times Magazine.[20]

"Lockwood and her husband have three cats named Miette, Fenriz, and Gilly.[52] Lockwood contracted COVID-19 in March 2020, and as of February 2021 was still living with long COVID symptoms.[53]"

i don't really know a lot of details about your life, but the impression i get is that, for systemic reasons, you haven't had the opportunities this lady has had, that you learned early on that for you, just being "smart" wasn't going to cut it. no, more than that - i get the impression that you've had more than a few experiences where you were genuinely informed and educated on a topic, what in the corporate world gets called a "subject matter expert", and for whatever reason the gatekeepers decided to instead listen to some "smart" cis white motherfucker who very, very obviously had no fucking clue what they were talking about.

me personally... whether or not it's true, i sort of admire this lady, even if her article is, on some level, a treatise on the agonies of being a smart white woman, and thus exhibits a certain degree of blinkered ignorance and _ressentiment_. she's grown up her entire life on the internet, somehow managed to parlay twitter shitposting into writing a book acclaimed by the Atlantic as a "Great American Novel".* dril couldn't do that. me, i never even fucking made a twitter account, cuz i'm such a snowflake i melt into a puddle any time somebody is mean to me. i have never experienced this world as a place with a surfeit of _kindness_.

* deciding that one can just unilaterally declare a work to be a "Great American Novel", with the caps and everything, is the most Atlantic thing ever, btw

the way i look at my life is that people used to throw money at me for being smart, white, and pretending to be straight, and i always fucking hated when people did that. dfw got a "genius grant". william t. vollmann got a stipend of $50K a year, tax free, to write. he spent it by going to japan, starting to dress as a woman, and learning about "dolores". he's said of her: 'I’ve bought her a bunch of clothes, but she's not grateful. She would like to get rid of me if she could.' no shit he's afraid of her. people would be far less inclined to give _her_ money for being really, really smart.

i've no doubt that lockwood has worked the hell out of her privilege, and i haven't. i've been personally ashamed of it, which is stupid, because i'm well aware by this point that systemic privilege isn't a _personal_ thing. i still act like crippling myself will somehow _compensate_ for something that's always been outside of my personal control. it didn't keep people from paying me for being "smart" in the past, and for whatever reason (i don't think it's as simple as me being out as trans), nobody's offering me any money for being "smart" right now.

i'll admit that a lot of what impressed me with her article was that i thought it was written by an old lesbian mystery writer. now, i look at her and see that her dad is a priest and i think oh, she has lifelong internet brainrot _and_ lifelong catholic brainrot? and she's a shut-in? i can respect that shit. people are better in the "real world" than we are on the internet, these days, even though if the internet was a real place it would fucking be portland. so i don't feel quite like i live in the "real world". i'm not sure if there is such a thing as a "real world", these days.

(Aha, Patricia Highsmith is the old lesbian mystery writer!)

I would almost guarantee that however you're picturing Lockwood, socially, is gonna be a bit off, cuz her background's fairly odd, as captured in many profiles or her and a memoir and so on. But IIRC the short version might be, yeah, daughter of a convert married priest, eccentrically lower-middle-class midwestern upbringing and autodidactic streak, learns at the last minute that her family has no money to pay for college, falls for a guy she talks to on a poetry forum, he thinks she's brilliant enough that she should focus on writing while he works, they keep sending out poems until some traction develops. The later Twitter presence and one atypical viral poem surely helped her popular reach, but is definitely not an origin point she then parlayed into writing. It's interesting that she got to spend her 20s living a kind of "life of the mind" not for the usual ivory-tower or family-wealth reasons, but on that sort of old-fashioned early-marriage model where you scrape by while one partner tries to make the art happen. I'm hesitant to over-connect this with her having a unique voice — I suspect her voice would still feel unique even if she'd spent those years in the same graduate programs or urban centers as a thousand other poets — but it couldn't have hurt for her to develop a bit more in her own space.

uss millicent kent is also traumatized by her dad being a transvestite

This used to be such a weirdly common trope, like popping up in sitcoms just behind "visit from old man's-man army buddy who turns out to be a woman now," and I absolutely never understood why adult characters were meant to be so invested in their fathers' masculinity. Like I basically grasp that there are/were people whose sense of identity includes some key element of a rock-ribbed masculine dad who could beat up your dad, but I have trouble fully picturing how that works. (I'm guessing most people under age 60 share that?)

― ን (nabisco)

to be fair, there are aspects in which this can be quite traumatizing. the issue is not the gender non-conformity, but the constructed justification for that behavior, which, for the "transvestite", often historically revolved around a white patriarchal construction of womanhood. there are many such cases in which a transvestite, upon having their heterosexuality questioned, would respond with some variation of "i'm not gay, i love women", statements which were, in the 80s, seen as mutually exclusive. the "dual role" transvestite is the gender equivalent of the mullet - business up front, party in the rear - and when i was younger, i did see them as "cringe" in roughly the same way that the mullet is.

"cringe" isn't by itself traumatizing. for me, the trauma is that the gender non-confirming narrative of my youth was not just anti-queer but culturally conservative. transvestites and transsexuals alike were supposed to emulate the tradwife, were supposed to be _respectable_, in a way that was, in a practical sense, really only ever open to white people. this perspective is, i think, very well represented by Stephanie Burt in her 2014 new yorker review of vollmann's _book of dolores_, "mansplaining crossdressing". burt at the time identified both a crossdresser and as trans, and made clear that the former does not preclude the latter. she contrasted vollmann's approach to suzy izzard's approach to crossdressing. looking back on izzard's "executive crossdresser" material, it's pretty closely aligned with what sometimes is called "genderfuck".

while i can't speak for vollmann, i do think there is a lot of implicit hypocrisy in the "transvestite" narrative. the facacde of respectability, the facade of straightness, is just that - a facade, culturally coerced. a lot of people in the 20th century would join "transvestite" group, would claim to be "transvestites" because it was culturally expected, and as long as they said the right things, the groups would politely ignore it when they'd go on craigslist and look for guys "force feminize" them into "sissies". because, contrary to what the patriarchal narrative said, it is _normal_ for people of all genders to experience sexual desire. in the world of the "transvestite", though, this was sublimated into a form centered shame and humiliation, the idea that to be a woman was to be _abject_, to be lesser.

and so i hated and feared the world of the transvestite, as well as that any reading of transness that centered a "traditional" approach to femininity. every couple of years i would try to make sense out of my feelings, run across Susan's Place, and promptly run screaming in the opposite direction. it was bad and fucked up.

of late the "sissy" has been generationally superseded by the "femboy", a 4chan-derived approach to gender which is _still_ somehow less fucked up than "sissies" were, mostly by admitting people who are openly queer. there's still an overwhelming sense of self-hatred, an overwhelming internalized conviction on the part of many femboys that they couldn't possibly be "real women", an overwhelming focus on "passing" as a marker of identity. this school of gender non-conformity valorizes above all the "tradwife". growing up with someone like that for a dad? yeah, that's traumatizing.

tl;dr: a lot of "transvestites" back in the day thought that the ideal woman was a white tradwife. that's fucked up.

(Aha, Patricia Highsmith is the old lesbian mystery writer!)

― Come On, (Eazy), Friday, January 30, 2026 8:55 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago)

lol there's more than one, e, patricia cornwell is in fact the particular old lesbian mystery writer i was thinking of patricia highsmith died in 1995, and therefore is unlikely to have an opinion on _infinite jest_ :)

I would almost guarantee that however you're picturing Lockwood, socially, is gonna be a bit off, cuz her background's fairly odd, as captured in many profiles or her and a memoir and so on. But IIRC the short version might be, yeah, daughter of a convert married priest, eccentrically lower-middle-class midwestern upbringing and autodidactic streak, learns at the last minute that her family has no money to pay for college

― ን (nabisco), Friday, January 30, 2026 9:16 AM (seven minutes ago)

up until this point my background and lockwood's are, uh, _similarly unusual_, not in detail, but in overall shape. i do, as a result, have a unique voice (which i hate and have tried often, unsuccessfully, to suppress). the divergence point is that she met this guy and got into a relationship and for whatever reason, under whatever pressures, decided to pursue writing as a career. i chose instead to cultivate my own obscurity, which i have done fairly successfully. "you're a good writer, you should write" hits me in about the same way as "you're funny, you should do stand-up comedy", or "you're good at sucking cock, you should do sex work".

my great literary influence is stephen king's "danse macabre", in which - as i recall - he advised prospective writers to not possibly write professionally if they can possibly avoid it. from that, i took the message that becoming a professional writer was a fate worse than death, and strove mightily to avoid such a fate. it's not the only instance in which i've gotten some reasonable and well-intentioned advice completely backwards. for instance, i also noted, early on, that all of my favorite writers tried very hard to kill themselves, and concluded that if i didn't write, i'd quit wanting to kill myself. i have, for the record, since quit wanting to kill myself, for the most part. i didn't get to that point by not writing.

i do, though, fucking hate writing. i find it a useless waste of time, time that could be better spent doing the dishes or compulsively masturbating, and i continue to try to will myself to stop writing in about the same manner, and with about the same success, as i used to will myself into being a man.

https://bsky.app/profile/meo.bsky.social/post/3megwekrll22r

Ok I lolled

FWIW, I thought I would c&p my series of comments from I Love Books, as I read Infinite Jest back in 2009:

I started reading Infinite Jest last night. It appears to fall into the Walt Whitman / Thomas Wolfe / Henry Miller School of All-Embracing Word-Drunk Authorship. A fine old American tradition, but it remains to be seen if I can preserve enough momentum to ski past the uphill stretches.
---
I'm approx 200pp into Infinite Jest. DFW obv has the narrative-voice-thing going for him in spades, even if his narrators are all ventriloquist dummies for the language-obsessed voice in DFW's head and his characters exist mainly to give the narrator something to describe at greatly extended length.

With roughly another 800pp to go, it is increasingly obvious to me that, if DFW had any point to make about anything at all, he has already made his point, and if he has any story to tell, he is not very insistent upon telling it and not very interested in stories per se. So, it is either let myself be pulled along by his voice, or bag the whole business.

At this juncture, I plan to let myself be pulled along by his voice for a while yet.
---
thomp, I have only read some of DFW's essays. No short stories.

As for anyone's "radical distrust of narrative", although I am quite interested in reading and writing, I have never found much personal interest in critical theory. To give you the basic idea, I appreciate Duchamp and Dada at the level of "nudge-nudge, haha, it's just a joke, d'y'see?" So, whatever critical comments I make about a work, your view on my comments should be informed by this knowledge. If it is a gift to be simple, I am among the blessed.

As a reader, I care only if the author has given me an a cogent reason to continue reading. The pleasure of a developing narrative is only one possible form this reason might take.

Just to be catty, I do notice that DFW has taken the trouble to embed a narrative into his novel, so perhaps he somewhat distrusted his radical distrust. It is just that the narrative elements have been reduced to tiny particles and dispersed into the prose in the way poppyseeds are mixed into the batter of a poppyseed cake. In which case, the main pleasure must be taken in the sweet, cakey medium of the prose. He does this pretty well, so I am still reading.
---
I am about 500pp into Infinite Jest now. My main impressions are only becoming more confirmed as I wade in further.

The book can fairly be described as a comedy, but it is not especially funny so much as it is witty. And, like most wit, it provokes admiration more often than laughter. The only characters resembling humans are the AA drunks and other drug addicts. These he treats with care and affection. His other characters are more like placeholders, which, of course, is quite permissible in social satire.

I only wish I appreciated his wit more than I have so far. It is peculiar and personal and seems to tied to a milieu at the margins of my own experience. As it ages, I expect it will join such period pieces as Restoration Comedies and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as "good in its kind and very popular in its day".

I read IJ back in the late 90s. I remember thinking that the parts that were supposed to be funny were not really that funny. I have no idea what I would think of it now, but not sure I want to commit to a re-read.

I think younger aimless's distinction between funny and witty is important.

The wordplay and the pop culture melange and the silly voices and names are going for a knowing eyebrow-raise rather than a hearty laugh.

One shouldn't fault the author for failing to do something that he wasn't trying to do.

It took me a year to read it back in 2008 - I remember it being like a companion, by turns witty, dull, beautiful, thought provoking etc. In the end when it penetrated my thick skull that it was a novel about addiction I realised it had been like living with an addiction itself. I remember finding the ending lyrical and emotionally weighty despite its slightness, almost like the book had softened me up for the blow.

it had been like living with an addiction itself

Lol I just got my 5-year chip from Jestaholics Anonymous. I used to stay up all night flipping between chapters and the back, then feeling awful in the morning. I thought I could quit any time, it was just for relaxation, but no.

Now I'm not even tempted to read even a single footnote.