Over at Infinite Summer, the guides are telling us about where they got to Infinite Jest [IJ] (here, here). This post is about where IJ got me to.
In the mid-to-late nineties (and early ’00s) pretty much all I read was about maths or physics or pop-science (anything from Ian Stewart and Richard P Feynman to Roger Penrose and Murray Gell-Man to Douglas R Hofstadter to bios of mathematicians, physicists, etc—I mean, the really nerdy stuff). This started to move into history of science and maths and then philosophy of science and maths, and the darker stuff, including Russell, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Popper, etc…
But, in the summer of 1998 (which was to me for many reasons my summer of _____ of any reminiscence-driving-movie-or-TV-show), fittingly, in the Boston area (quick-fire foreshadowing) I first saw IJ (having heard nothing of it as I knew nothing of fiction). At the Coop, the blue-skyed cover taunted me… After I found myself, by sheer coincidence, reading Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and watching the movie on the same day (which was opening day), I began to wander into the philosophy of culture and, then, the fiction sections at the library and at bookstores. Jen Banbury’s Like a Hole in the Head proved a nice light start to my foray into the until-then unbeknownst. Then came Joel Rose and through the summer I walked into or, rather, ran at full speed into Douglas Coupland, Charles Bukowski, Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut, et al. I mean, my world really opened up via this hodge-podge of newer literature (which means I’ve read little of the classics, and have not caught up). That same summer I came upon Alain de Botton, who taught me how to read fiction (in How Proust can Change Your Life) and I read Catch-22 and became engrossed with the possibilities of the written language, and read more and began writing. (It was also then that I read Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker and decided that I would become an investment banker or the like…) And on every visit to the library or the bookstore, there sat IJ. And it taunted me. And it taunted me into all this fiction. And taunt it did.
About a year later, I was fully into the philosophy of science and dense maths and physics and had semi-abandoned fiction (as I no longer ran into the watchful tomes of DFW). I remember walking through Seattle and suddenly seeing those ominous clouds coming at me from every discount used book table in town. So I bought my first copy and kept it on the shelf (which was the top of my fridge), but thought about fiction again. Rainy season and then winter in the Upper Left Corner (and, on a minuscule budget) meant I had time (and little choice but) to stay in and read. And pick up a little fiction again… Coupland was a perfect companion given the setting, but then William Gibson came up (on top of more by the aforementioned and other stuff). Despite the continued obsession with maths and physics and computing and all that, I managed to get to Nick Hornby… And I started IJ for the first time. My brother saw it over Thanksgiving (yes, while recoiling from the WTO clashes) and said something like “what the hell is this?” I lost the copy… (and never got to another one as I was concentrated on getting myself out of Seattle).
Another year went by, and as I was searching for Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart’s The Collapse of Chaos I walked into Infinite Jest and decided to go back to fiction (getting a hold of my current Picador copy then). I loved it, and decided to lug IJ around to taunt me into reading fiction. It paved the way for Brett Easton Ellis and Michael Chabon and Paul Auster and and and……
My brother recently posted in his blog that he “recuerd[a] hace años ver a mi hermano cargar con el pesado Infinte Jest,” and then goes on to say that he gave me Everything and More for Christmas, thinking it was a “mathematician’s thing”. That Christmas I received a copy from him and another one from my mother. Both of them thinking of it as a text befitting my nerdiness and math-obsessed persona—not knowing that by then I was off maths and devoted to reading mostly fiction and some philosophy. They dedicated the tomes by saying that I “always [seek] more” and that it was up to me to “define [the] more”. Well, they (my brother, my mother, and the tomes) allowed me to seek and define the more as more IJ and more DFW. And I’ve been at it since…
(And I keep reading mostly fiction [and pop-/current-event-essays] and only veer—mostly to business books, admittedly—when I have placed my IJ somewhere where I can’t see the spine for some time.)
