I'm something like 100 pages ahead of the Infinite Summer spoiler line (page 283 as of last night), meaning that a lot of the stuff I'd like to discuss or see discussed isn't fair game yet. I'm still greatly enjoying the re-read of Infinite Jest, though.
As I've said before, this is a dangerous book for me, in that Wallace's style has a tendency to leak over into my own writing when I read too much of his stuff(*). It's also a dangerous book in that a large number of the sections are written in a headlong style with very few breaks, and thus no place to stop until you get to the end of the section. Which has pushed my bedtime back on more than a few nights, and also led to an absolutely vicious sunburn back in the summer of 1997 or so, when I spent most of an afternoon reading it outside at NIST (it was a weekend, and I had gone in to check email and do a few other things in the lab, and the grounds there were more pleasant than the house where I was renting a room).
One of the fun things about re-reading this at a somewhat slower pace than that first time ten-plus years ago is all the little recurrences of themes and images that show up. Many of these I noticed back in the day, but didn't appreciate quite as much in the headlong what's-going-to-happen-next rush of the first reading. Things like the way the brilliant infodump about videophones (page 144(**)) has echoes a hundred pages later, or the way some of the minor characters keep drifting through the background of the main storyline (one of them turns up in the previously mentioned Note 304, though you don't realize it until much later), and so on. And there are also all the little background indicators of the global-scale plot that show up in the background of the daily personal dramas of the main storyline.
I'm going to end up letting the main group catch up quite a bit in the near future, though. I'm just about 20 pages from the start of the really epic Interdependence segment, which goes on for about a hundred pages with no good break point and was responsible for the aforementioned vicious sunburn, back in the day. That's going to demand a longer block of reading time than I have available just before bed, and there's no way I'm hauling this brick on the plane to Chicago this weekend.
(*)- I wonder if the present-tense narration of Infinite Jest isn't maybe the indirect cause of the fact that all the dog-dialogue sections in my book (and here on the blog) are written in the present tense? I've never had a conscious reason for writing them that way-- it just felt like the right way to do it-- but it could be unconscious Wallace-imitation. Or it could be something else entirely. Who knows.
(**)- Which, by the way, ought to be required reading for aspiring SF writers, who too often fail to take any sort of human psychology into account when projecting future technologies.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
There's some kind of known grammatical/rhetorical thing where people use the present tense when retelling an episode out loud.
(How's that for vague?)
Posted by: Kate Nepveu | July 8, 2009 11:09 AM
Was that discursion about the sunburn an intentional reference to your tendency to drift into Wallace's writing style? Because if so it was pretty hilarious, and if not it's positively eerie.
Posted by: Dan Miller | July 8, 2009 2:21 PM