Infinite Jest, post 1

Here I am three days and 54 pages into this weighty tome and guess what: I’m loving it!

Despite my recent inability to closely read anything more complex than a Regency — grad school does odd things to a person — I’m finding myself wallowing in DFW’s prose, reading slowly and with greater attention than I’ve given anything since The Faerie Queene in my very first English major course in college.

Reading in short bursts and with great attention will, I’m beginning to think, be my best strategy for staying on course and making it through with at least a modicum of an idea as to what has occurred.  First, because I definitely need time to let the back of my brain mull over all the recently-ingested characters, references, and random details between readings. Just as it’s best to take a little stroll between Thanksgiving dinner and desert, turning to mundane daily tasks insures that there will be room for more Infinite Jest when the time comes to partake again.

Second, because, well, I’m a glutton. I want to still be able to read other things this summer — though not anything so complex, certainly — without feeling the need to plow through this one in order to get to them. So IJ has become my lunch book. No matter what, I only get to read it one hour per day. This has the added benefit of ensuring that I actually take a lunch break; something at which I tend to be remiss.

So far, my favourite bit:

He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away… but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which has retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between two sounds, without a thought in his head. (p26-7)