We're Gonna Build Something This Summer

I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading it myself.

If you're not familiar with the book, this is not a trivial undertaking. The main text is some thing like 1000 pages, with an additional hundred-odd endnotes. Many of those endnotes are just names of drugs (this makes sense within the book), but a fair number of them contain information that is critical for the plot, so you need to read with two bookmarks, one in the text, and one in the endnotes.

It's a fantastic book, though. Sure, it's not without its missteps-- the "Wardene be cry" sections remain excruciating-- but there are huge sections that are absolutely brilliant. It's not to all tastes, but if you like Wallace's non-fiction, you should add Infinite Summer to your RSS feed reader, and follow along. Especially if you've started and not finished it before-- the first couple hundred pages can be a little rough, but reading along with a group may provide the moral support needed to get you past that.

I mention this not only to evangelize for the book, but also as a warning to blog readers. I am ridiculously fond of Wallace's writing, but it tends to have a deleterious effect on my own writing, both by increasing my tendency to use words like "deleterious" but also by enhancing my natural tendency to drop little asides into the middle of otherwise unremarkable sentences and paragraphs (the book-in-production has a whole bunch of footnotes, though none of them contain plot) and leading some of my sentences to spiral out of control like an astronomical body perturbed in its orbit by the passing of some giant attractor--a sort of free-roaming literary black hole, as it were. So re-reading Infinite Jest may cause some of my posts to read like third-rate imitations of Wallace's style, in much the same way that my recent purchase of a Hold Steady live album has caused me to once again start sprinkling my blog posts and Facebook status updates with cryptic snippets of or references to Craig Finn's lyrics that only about five people reading (either the blog or my Facebook news feed) will recognize, and probably only one or two of whom will find clever or amusing.

So, you know, if that happens, um... sorry. It'll pass.