Infinite Jest

Doing a read­ing today, a Dead Authors thing, where we all take turns read­ing stuff from writ­ers who died this year. I’ve got David Fos­ter Wal­lace, and’ll of course be doing the aloud thing to some Infi­nite Jest. Too, it was cool: I wrote a friend, asked him what I should read, and one of the two pas­sages he got back to me about was one I already had marked. So that one it’ll be.

Any­way, pag­ing through again, and I remem­ber buy­ing this book. I was in Tal­la­has­see at the time, deep in grad school but about to jet north to Mon­tana for a week or so. How­ever, first stop before the air­port was this lit­tle book­store I’d never been into, a long hall of a place, no clue about the name. I wasn’t there for Infi­nite Jest, though — I was late for that, really (I’m think­ing this was 97) — but Mason & Dixon. Which I quickly nabbed. On the way to the counter, though, there was this blue card­board fold-up lit­tle dis­play stand thing, with this big brick of a blue book on it. With clouds on the cover. I couldn’t help myself, I had to read it a bit. And then it was like, I don’t know, is ‘kismet’ the word that means some­thing like ‘serendip­ity?’ Then why not just say serendip­ity, yeah (because it always reminds me of drag­ons, that word, I don’t know why). Any­way, either on the dust­jacket of Infi­nite Jest (I don’t know; first thing for me is always get­ting rid of the use­less, use­less dust­jacket, so I don’t have that any­more, now) or from talk­ing to some­body at the same shelf, they told me that this David Fos­ter Wal­lace, he was out­Pyn­chon­ing Pyn­chon. Which of course had to be a joke. But of course, too, I had to see for myself. So I charged both of them, am prob­a­bly still pay­ing for them. Hap­pily. Too, I was lot tougher back then. I slammed through Mason & Dixon in some­thing like three days, then spent the rest of the week in Infi­nite Jest. Good times, good times. I was stuck in Boze­man with it, I think. Snowed in close to a McDonald’s. Charged some excel­lent boots that week as well, which I would have paid for twice over.

But, Infi­nite Jest. There likely won’t be a record­ing of the read­ing tonight, but this at least is the record of my first (as-yet: only) read of it, from bet­ter than ten years ago now, I guess:

Click on the reduced images to get the ginor­mous ones. No clue what that sticker is either, but I always do that too. Could be any­thing. And, I con­sider it kind of a tes­ta­ment to the book that it wouldn’t fit into my scan­ner all at once. Any­way, I’m proud too, though it’s from him, to have his name at least on the front of one of my books (the Demon The­ory paper­back, I think, though of course now I can’t find one in the whole house, so who knows, maybe it’s on back).

Posted: 12|11|08 at 5:35 pm. Filed under: Main.

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