hoshizora

I first tried reading Infinite Jest when I was in Hawaii. I got about maybe halfway through before bogging down, although I bought some of David Foster Wallace's essay collections and despite not having finished his major work, the man's writing was very near and dear to my heart.

He committed suicide a year ago, which prompted me to begin rereading IJ. I was fortunate at the time to be graced with company willing to hear the book read aloud; some passages lent themselves to this much more readily than others, but it was on the whole a new way to enjoy the work; good writing is always such a pleasure to speak.

It was slow but steady going, and even when I lost the opportunity to read aloud, I'd become sufficiently enamored of the book to want to finish, this time. I didn't push it, I didn't ruin my own enjoyment trying to read more at a sitting than I wanted to. My progression through IJ happened in the background of many other books.

And last night I finished it, all 981 pages and 388 endnotes.

It was really good. I wish Wallace were still around.

'When he talked about this thing as a quote perfect entertainment, terminally compelling—it was always ironic—he was having a sly little jab at me. I used to go around saying the veil was to disguise lethal perfection, that I was too lethally beautiful for people to stand. It was a kind of joke I'd gotten from one of his entertainments, the Medusa-Odalisk thing. That even in U.H.I.D. [The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed] I hid by hiddenness, in denial about the deformity itself. So Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release—it'd paralyze people. It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me.'

Joelle van Dyne, Infinite Jest, p. 940

From me:

• Celebrating Pants Apert
  
• Ringing Provener
  
• Polishing the Eye of Clesthyra
  
• Stroking Diax's Rake
  
• Enlarging one's Sphere
  

From torts_schmorts:

• Chanting with the one-eyed millennarian
  
• Showing the aliens your analemma
  
• Winding the speelycaptor
  
• Going Hundred
  
• Planing your fid
  

I just finished Iain M. Banks Player of Games after being clued in to the "Culture" series of books. It was excellent and reminded me how much of a credulously dewy-eyed SF nerd I can be.

Tangentially, I think I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon dreaming up fanciful names for Corazonan airships.