Syntax of Things

The IJ Report--Done, Done, and Done

pref. [SI: the next quantifier below micro-; meaning *10^(-9)] Smaller than micro-, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one has nanotechnology (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `microtechnology'; and a few machine architectures have a `nanocode' level below `microcode'. Tom Duff at Bell Labs has also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury". See also quantifiers, pico-, nanoacre, nanobot, nanocomputer, nanofortnight. --Jargon File.

Like a lot of readers, I suspect, I made my way to the end of Infinite Jest with a growing ache of realization that the intricately detailed world that Wallace created in the novel would somehow continue to spin out of control long past the final punctuation mark. Maybe it's selfish of me to desire this resolution, to want to know the ultimate fate of some the characters I'd just spent nearly two weeks giving over my time and energy in coming to know. I don't demand a happy ending, or even an ending; I do enjoy resolution.

So is it there?

I let the last eighth of an inch of text sit for a half-day. To be honest, I've read a lot of essays and reviews about the ending. I've heard people complain, some with tears in their eyes, that "I'll never get that month of my life back." I even made it through 800 pages of the novel once and knew that there was no way that another 200 pages would resolve all of the plot lines without a full-scale cataclysmic act, perhaps a mass viewing of the Entertainment at the heart of the novel. For most of that final day of reading, I let the novel sit on the coffee table. I stared at the bookmark, winced at the thought of all of this work being for little more than the accomplishment of some esoteric goal. I went out for Vietnamese food, bought groceries, enjoyed an hour or so at a coffee shop reading the newspaper and checking the college football scores on the cell phone. All the while, I knew what had to be done.

I made some strong coffee.

The final pages slipped through my fingers. I read slowly, looking for those clues, waiting for the big final act that would bring on the "a-ha" I believed I needed. Hal Incandenza and Don Gately and the dozens of other characters both in the present and in the past, in the book and in my memory of what I'd read, the Entertainment and the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists, the endnotes and endnotes' footnotes, the drugs and the need for more drugs and AA and NA, all of it building into something...

Something.

Something was closing the book with a sigh. At first, I felt relief just to be finished and to be able to move on to some other book. Sitting on my front porch and staring at a line of ants moving toward a piece of dog food, I thought back on all of the possibilities that despite THE END still seemed to be there, but I wasn't disappointed. At least not in a major, throw the book over the porch's ledge sort of way. Despite all of its complexities and twists and often agonizing threads of maximalism, I closed the book with an admiration of a writer's craft and the ability to put so much into a work, so much that by the end of 1000 pages one could want--even need--more.

Just not at this moment. In an interview with Newsweek some years ago, Wallace asked the interviewer if he'd read the book. The interviewer said that he had not, but that Newsweek's reviewer had. To which Wallace replied:

My hat's off to him. Tell him Excedrin works best for eyestrain.

________________________

The final tally:
Day ten totals: 50 pages; 12 endnotes
Day eleven totals: 38 pages; 10 endnotes
Day twelve totals: 23 pages; 12 endnotes
Day thirteen totals: 75 pages; 23 endnotes<----THE END

Just for yucks:

A chart of my progress.

The IJ Report--Days Eight and Nine

This short post is brought to you by a high amount of stress and minimum amount of sleep. I promise two things. First, no mention of anything relating to the weather: no hurricanes, no heat, no dust devils. If I were to close my eyes right now, I'd see the accuweather radar permanently burned on my retina. I've been staring at it for far too long. In fact, the only way to get away from it has been reading Infinite Jest. Second, very little mention of the novel. The reading continues, but I'm drained.

To those of you directed to this report from TEV's post and hoping to find a running commentary on the novel, I apologize. It was never my intention to do some sort of extended book review. To do so would have surely sent me over the edge. The very act of picking this book up every day for the last nine has taken too much of my time and energy. I know it will ultimately be worth it. In fact, I'm enjoying the novel with every quarter of an inch of the book's width read. But as to why I'm doing this, good question.

With that said, here's what I managed on my first two days back to work after my week of vacation:

Day eight totals: 54 pages; 28 endnotes
Day nine totals: 59 pages; 26 endnotes

I see a light, getting brighter, and today I'll start the descent on page 795.

______________

Previous:
Note that I've created a category for the IJ Report.

The IJ Report--Days Six and Seven

Two hundred and thirty-five new emails greeted me this morning at work, my first day back from vacation. Between this e-pile and the shock of learning that the state of California has outlawed necrophilia, it's been a rather frantic day of response typing and body hiding. (In all seriousness, isn't it about time that California decided to pick on something other than smoking?) I'd planned on coming up with some lengthy explanation as to why, after nearly 700 pages, I still don't see where Infinite Jest is going, but I'm a bit fagged.

I think I've mentioned before that I once spent an excruciating year working as a proofreader for an engineering firm that had won a contract with the Navy to convert their hardcopy technical manuals to SGML-coded CD-ROM manuals. My job was to word-for-word, or in many cases number-for-number, the electronic version against its progenitor, checking all of the hyperlinks and verifying that data was scanned over accurately. In the training for this job, we were told the importance of the work and urged to be slow and deliberate or else hear about our mistake on the nightly news in the form of a plane flying into the side of a mountain or a missile "accidentally" destroying an aspirin factory. The key, we were told, was to make sure that every number, every letter, every punctuation mark transferred exactly, else, well, we'd get a little more than a letter from the editor.

I'll never forget one two-week period. I spent every day of those two weeks proofing page after page--four columns per page--of specifications for the literal nuts and bolts of a particular part for a specific piece of hardware. All numbers. I prayed for a single word, something other than the "Table X" heading at the top of every page, but the columns of numbers would not end.

I guess I'm trying to draw some parallel to my reading of IJ. At first, I found myself paying particular and close attention to every word. I labored over the endnotes and followed their paths to other endnotes. Now after 700 pages, I feel the urge to skim, but something, maybe that proofreader's attention to detail or the fear of missing the gem hidden in the eye-high weeds, something prevents me from doing this.

This weekend's careful reading:

Day six totals: 88 pages; 28 endnotes
Day seven totals: 62 pages; 21 endnotes

This afternoon, my bookmark sits on page 682.

______________________

Previous:

Previous:
+ The Preparation
+ Day One
+ Day Two
+ Day Three
+ Days Four and Five

The IJ Report--Days Four and Five

Despite all of my best efforts to remain sedentary, I did have one item of business to attend to this week. My old clunker of a car has been long overdue for a smogging and a registering. According to the little sticker on the car, it's been expired since July. Just last week, the parking patrol, which rarely if ever hovers around these back neighborhoods, must have been extremely bored or headed in the direction of the coffee shop and spotted my little violation, leaving me a nice envelope stuffed with a twenty-five buck ticket. It was probably just the wake-up call that I needed.

So Thursday, I drove a few blocks to the smog-only-as-required-by-law shop. Let me back up and add that part of the reason for my procrastination was my fear that the car would not pass smog, especially considering the draconian anti-pollution standards in this state. So I sat and watched as the mechanic poked and prodded and did everything but ask the car to grab its ankles and cough. I watched for any sign of exhaust, biting fingernails while the computer analyzed my car's future.

"Looks good," the mechanic said. I wanted to hug him. I don't have money to spare on auto repairs right now and really feared a return to the number two bus was imminent. Spared another two years.

Passing the smog meant a trip to the DMV, sans appointment, to get the little sticker. Need I say more?

Friday was the peak of the neck pain. Ibuprofen on an empty stomach is not good for the system. Cures what ails you, but the waves get a little choppy.

So what does all of this have to do with Infinite Jest. Little of nothing other than to say that the vacation is coming to a close and with a weekend full of air conditioner returning, sunset viewing, a Chloë Sevigny blow job (heh!), and whatever else I can do to keep from reading the novel, I've come to the conclusion that I won't be finishing this book anytime soon. Not giving up yet, but...

Day four totals: 69 pages of text; 33 endnotes
Day five totals: 99 pages of text; 49 endnotes

At some point this weekend, I'll be opening the book to page 548.

To this point, my favorite parts of the book all center around life at the Ennet House, a drug and alcohol rehab center. In this passage, Don Gately, one of the central characters in the novel, a recovering hoodlum, alcoholic, and drug addict reflects on the process of recovery:

--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smiley-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that it's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around....

________________

Previous:
+ The Preparation
+ Day One
+ Day Two
+ Day Three

The IJ Report--Day Three

I'm sure this has happened to you before: you get so involved in a book that it seems to follow you around, whether you're reading it or not. Last night, I had a couple of strange dreams. One involved trying to decode a series of complicated puzzles using clues that were all acronyms which I had to figure out through other clues written on the back side of the paper containing all of the clues. Luckily, my aching neck woke me from this dream. The other dream made no sense but I do remember seeing the neighbor's cat--the one with the fucked-up eye--and noticing as it stared at me from the top of my Hyundai that the eye had been remarkably healed.

I'm quickly nearing the halfway point of Infinite Jest and I still find it a slow, excruciating read. There are moments of pure genius followed by three-page paragraphs that would be reason to make this book a permanent window-prop. But I'm a patient man (sometimes).

Day Three (or Day of the Haunting Dreams):

122 pages of text
62 endnotes ¹

I end day three at page 386. The heaviest part of the book remains.

I've wondered just what the writing process was like for Wallace. Did he struggle with IJ much in the same way that many of us have? Here's something of an answer:

The IJ Report--Day Two

I woke up with a nasty ache in my neck, not unusual thanks to a deteriorating disk in the upper region of my spine, a condition I blame on an innocent yet bad decision to play high school quarterback my senior year. This pain comes and goes at unpredictable times, usually more common in times of stress. This time, thanks to my week of not-doing-anything vacation, the only stress is reading Infinite Jest.

By mid-morning and after a few neck-stretching exercises prescribed by a doctor with a heavy German accent who I visited a few years ago (and who also put me on Zyban in the hopes that I would quit smoking, but I only ended up breaking out in the worst case of hives in recorded SoT history), the neck started feeling a bit better; still stiff with the point of pain only occurring only with my head in an up-and-to-the-right direction.

As you can imagine, a literal pain in the neck is a decided disadvantage when attempting to fulfill this week's goal of finishing IJ. Already through the first 100 pages, I found the old repulsion to returning. I know this is something that has to be fought, but I'm weak, especially when I have a deteriorating disk screaming for attention.

Nonetheless, I soldiered on, never really finding a comfortable position or a preferred method of cross-referencing endnotes. The results for Day 2 (or the Day of the Deteriorating Disk's Pain in My Neck):

149 pages of text
38 endnotes

Leaving me with a grand total of 258 pages and 84 footnotes finished.

No passage to quote today.

Previous:
+ The Preparation
+ Day One

The IJ Report--Day One

Today marks the first day of the actual vacation, a week-long celebration of my slothfulness. It's the first vacation in many years that won't involve some sort of travel, so I'm free to enjoy the concavity of my couch. As I mentioned last week, the only work that will be done this week--besides the occasional blog post--will be my attempt to make it all the way through Infinite Jest. Eager to get this underway, I've put Oblivion aside for now and have hefted the tome.

Day one resulted in 109 pages and 46 endnotes read.

While there is plenty in this first part of the novel to write about and discuss, including the feral hamsters passage that had me doubled over yet again, my nod to a favorite goes to the description of Orin's hatred of roaches:

Roaches gave him the howling fantoids. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus--the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant--and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer...

Interestingly enough, when I'm asked what New Orleans is like, a description of the flying roaches the size of my Hyundai usually falls somewhere between mosquitoes that could possibly carry one to Baton Rouge for a small fare of blood and the smell of the French Quarter at around midnight after a humid summer day and night of conventioneers and assorted tourists figuring out just how many hurricanes it takes to feel blown away.

Oh, but I do love that city.

More Infinite Jest-ness to follow.

Year of the Broken Record

Today at 3pm, a week of much needed and somewhat overdue vacation will begin. I haven't a single plan other than smogging and registering the car so that I don't get another parking ticket. However, there's one thing that I've put on the vacation to-do list. Just putting it there and writing about it here means that I'm committing myself to doing it. It's the only New Year's resolution that I made and with four months left in '04, I'm giving myself enough wiggle room to make sure I finish it.

It being Infinite Jest. 981 pages of text and 388 footnotes of David Foster Wallace weighing down my bookshelf, collecting the dust of two apartments, possible ash from last Fall's wildfires smudging the jacket. The spider webs have been holding it in place too long.

I've made three failed attempts at finishing this novel. For various reasons, none of them due to the quality of the novel but more with the quantity of my patience, I've made it only so far before returning it to the shelf where it stares at me, mocking my failure. It's hard to walk through the room and not see the four inches of blue spine with its cloudy lettering. I want to stick a fork in it. I want this mountain climbed.

After pulling the book off of the shelf, I noticed three makeshift bookmarks at the previous stopping points. I'm not sure of the order, but passages from each may be telling (or not).

One attempt ended on page 281:

"Peace on earth good will toward men," says Gately, back on his back, smiling at the dun cracked ceiling. He's the one who'd farted.

I also hit the wall on page 508:

It was not that the sky was lightening so much as that the stars' light had paled. There became a sullenness about their light. Now, also, strange-looking U.S.A. insects whirred actively past from time to time, moving jaggedly and making Marathe think of many windblown sparks.

My most successful attempt ended on page 838 after finishing an incredibly long, but typical David Foster Wallace paragraph:

The wraith says almost bitterly that when he'd stand up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they'd thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey-intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time.

So one more time, beginning again.

Much needed resources:

+ Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany
+ Steve's Infinte Jest Utilities Page
+ Howling Fantoid's Infinite Jest Page
+ IJ Scene-by-scene Guide
+ Tylenol & coffee