This Week in the Mercury
Friday, June 26, 2009
Books Infinite Summer
Posted by Alison Hallett on Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 1:50 PM
If you're playing along at home with Infinite Summer, you need to be on pg. 63 today. I'm not, but I'm planning to play catch-up this weekend and hit Monday's goal of 94 pages. For those of you who are on schedule, here's an open thread; for the rest of us, here's an encouraging primer entitled "How to Read Infinite Jest."
Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.
1
I think I got that sinking feeling on about page 3. Lay off the speed, duder. Just kidding, partly.
2
I had to look up "wen." I knew it was a weird growth thing, but specifically:
(Med.) An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.
(Med.) An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.
4
... and if you are despairing, set your hooks in the humor of the whole thing. Herds of free-ranging hamsters? Why the video phone eventually failed? I mean, c'mon.
5
Erik just said this to me and all the other compulsive word looker uppers:
"if you start looking up all the words you don't know in infinite jest, you're going to add a few hours to each reading session. (the first time i read it, i did just that, writing definitions of all the words i didn't know in the margins. probably did 4-5 a page before I stopped doing it about three-quarters of the way through.) there's a reason for all the obscure word choices. you find it out later. in other words, you won't lose anything by not understanding each and every one."
Pfft.
"if you start looking up all the words you don't know in infinite jest, you're going to add a few hours to each reading session. (the first time i read it, i did just that, writing definitions of all the words i didn't know in the margins. probably did 4-5 a page before I stopped doing it about three-quarters of the way through.) there's a reason for all the obscure word choices. you find it out later. in other words, you won't lose anything by not understanding each and every one."
Pfft.
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