IJ quote of the day 2

“These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something talll and sheer” (46).
Go read Infinite Jest.

So yo then man…

I’m having a seriously hard time returning to Infinite Jest.  I know I love the book,  for the same reason Dave Eggers urges us— in the 2006 edition— to read it:  “There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost [...]

IJ quote of the day

In honor of infinitesummer.org, I feel like posting the most awesomest Infinite Jest quotes as I come across them (all within the rules of Infinite Summer, for I will not post a quote before the online world reaches the week’s requisite pages.)
“Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of [...]

“The Unfinished”

It has taken several days for me to finish D.T. Max’s New Yorker article, biography of sorts, of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. The article is moving, and includes correspondence from Wallace to Franzen and DeLillo, and quite a bit from his wife, Karen Green, whose pain I cannot even fathom and [...]

Do not read that story.

I didn’t know what I was in for, reading that story, but I know that it is the single most tragic thing I’ve read, including Hemingway’s famous six word story, and that the final line is eight hundred thousand times more (just more—more everything—more compelling, more shocking, more evocative, more terrifying, more conclusive, more emotive, [...]

Maybe it shouldn’t matter this much, but it does.

I was trying to explain to Spouse, again, why my world is still upside down about David Foster Wallace’s death. Why I still read hours’ worth of blogs and comments and articles about him instead of doing the other work I’ve promised editors and conferences and myself.
And here’s what I came up with tonight.
It’s not [...]

Aaaah, bliss.

You know, sometimes it’s just good to be exhausted.
Now that Peanut has adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, a little government intervention I like to call The Fcuk with Parents Solstice, which was clearly invented and perpetuated by old men with no sense of empathy for the month that it takes to re-regulate a child’s sleep [...]

My third and final DFW post

[I just can't leave this post as I originally wrote it. But I can't delete it entirely because the comments from blueeyedsoul are lovely. Rather than leave this angry, name-calling post as is, I'll repost here my original reaction at DFW's death. I feel, first and foremost, for his parents and his wife at the [...]