Scammed Again

Except this time it was a long con...and it took me four and half days to catch on. 

For many years, I've been hearing from writers and readers whom I respect that Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is a must-read. A important book. A masterpiece. The New York Times used the word "Uproarious" in their review. I love to roar with laughter. And so, the ever-dutiful and reverent lover of words and literature that I am, I bought it -- in iBooks -- and ignored it for 2 years. Sunday, I was sitting in my office pondering what to read next and I figured this was as good a time as any. I had recently listened to a podcast with David Lipsky who spent five days with Wallace after Infinite Jest was published and the conversation was so compelling that I expected the book to be as well. 

Well, it wasn't. Or maybe it was. I definitely felt compelled, though, not necessarily to read the book. More often than not, I felt compelled to throw my iPad across the room. I kept a diary as I read -- which I do with all the books I read because sometimes my impressions are fodder for my writing. I have decided that rather than present you with a sanitized review of the first 8 chapters (which is all I could manage before realizing that my mental health was at stake if I continued), I'm just going to reprint the diary.

There is profanity...especially in yesterday's entry because I was approaching the boundary between sane and insane as I read a 3-page-long sentence. So if cursing really offends your sensibilities, consider yourself warned. But it's real, and I don't apologize for it. I will not go so far as to say that the book is bad because it's art -- an expression of Wallace's soul -- and art is subjective. Also, if another aim of art is to elicit emotion, well, he succeeded. Honestly, I would love to one day create something that stirred people the way this stirred me. But I'm simple and would prefer that the emotion be love or joy rather than rage.

Here it is: 

(4/5/2015): Started in earnest today. Immediate impression is that it is 1100 pages and that seems pretentious. I don’t know how you can be economic or efficient with 1100 words…but hey, I’ll spend 2 weeks on something that all the people I read and listen to rave about as an “extremely important work of fiction”. What I’ve actually decided is that I’ll give it a week and then if I can’t put it down I’ll keep reading. Right now I feel as though I’m being punked. It combines the readability of Chaucer with the stream-of-conscience-style clarity of a beagle on cocaine. I can’t really figure out if I’m reading the thoughts of the same person from chapter to chapter (which, by the way, have exceptionally odd titles). In the back of my mind, I am wondering if Wallace intentionally wrote this to be indecipherable – so indecipherable that no one would ever figure out what was going on – so that everyone in the literary world (writer, reader, and critic) would so fearful of being seen as stupid or shallow for not enjoying or understanding it, that they would just accept it and herald it as a masterpiece. We shall see.

(4/6/2015): Two weeks?! I'll be lucky to finish this in 2 years. More like infinite nausea…infinite number of characters I hate…infinite run-on sentences…infinite indecipherable voices…infinite wrong names for everyday objects (teleputer? Cartridge-viewer? WTF) I hate this. 

(4/7/2015): David Foster Wallace is going to make me hate words. He uses them wrong. He uses too many and then when he’s finished using too many in the body of the book, he uses more in the footnotes…which are not helpful…just more words. And he uses a ton of obscure words – I know this because I’m reading in iBooks and every time I attempt to get a definition, THERE ISN’T ONE – I have to search the internet and it’s always something antiquated. Bolection? Reglet? Dipsomania? Optative? Fuck you, David Foster Wallace.  I feel like this was written in Greek and then translated into English by someone who learned both languages yesterday. I do not like this. It makes me long for Melville. But I’m going to finish this chapter. And my strategy has completely changed. Even if I still hate this tomorrow, I will continue reading it until I finish because I’m not going let his dead ass beat me. I did have the thought earlier today that possibly hidden somewhere in the 14^th to last page of the book – or in one of the interminable footnotes -- is a revelation that fooling the literary world and a shit load of readers into publicly revering this tripe would, in fact, be THE ULTIMATE JEST…It’s an 1100-page joke written just to fuck with the world. Somewhere in these pages is hidden the phrase, “Haha…GOTCHA SUCKERS!” but it's probably an acronym. And why are these characters always sweating? Oh yeah…and too many acronyms and he doesn’t tell us what any of them stand for. And if you think I’m reading all that bullshit under footnote number 24 (which is 7 pages long), you are sadly mistaken.

(4/8/2016): Done.
It’s like he’s trying to use ALL of the words in the entire English language. I am so tired. The first sentence of this weird chapter with only a circle for a title (no it’s not a zero and it’s not the letter O) just made me quit. After a good night’s sleep, I have realized that there is no reason to read anything that makes me this angry, let alone something that will make me this angry for around 30 days. I could read 7-8 books that make me feel like a human being in that amount of time.
I’m going to have to let go of my FOMO (Fear of Missing Out – which, by the way David Foster Wallace would not have defined for you despite his obvious comfort with overusing ALL OF THE WORDS) and just quit this so that I don’t succumb to the same fate that he did...severe mental illness and substance abuse. Additionally, I will have to come to terms with the fact that there are lots of people out there who have not only finished the book, but reread it and poured through each page for keys which they seem to believe unlock the answers to man’s greatest mysteries.
I will be leaving those mysteries unlocked. I will give exactly zero fucks that the literary world and all of the Infinite Jest Nerdiverse will think I am shallow and spiritually corrupt for not having completed this “masterpiece.” They are like wine snobs and this art is not for me.

Now I’ll be returning to our regularly scheduled programming with a glass of BotaBox wine and my copy of Siddartha or a textbook on astrophysics which I could read faster and would likely enjoy more.