Meta-post on K Guilfoile’s not-so-secret secret

Over at Infinite Summer, Kevin Guilfoile inaugurates his Wednesdays (here) by noting that “fiction’s little secret” is that the author is counting on the reader to interpret and via interpretation sort of “creates” the book she is reading. Kevin states he is not a radical relativist but still… Now the point he is making highlights that he is not mourning the death of the author of Barthes. And his anecdote would surely make the post-structuralists happy. However, there is a very explicitly implied suggestion that “[DFW] is counting on [the reader to]” do exactly this. That DFW is calling for the death of the author (seriously, no pun intended). But DFW was relatively clear (or characteristically unclear) on his view on “authorial vital signs”—which seems to be in the “anti-death” camp. In “Greatly Exaggerated” (in the Harvard Book Review or in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), when talking about the whole debate, he closes up by saying that “For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane.” So it would seem that what DFW is counting on us for is to be at the other end of what he is trying to communicate to us (and only that).

(I’m on the pro-choice side of the Barthesian debate, but DFW seems to have been in the pro-life one as opposed to Kevin’s pro-death. Except, characteristically, DFW might have managed to dwell in all camps.)

Infinite Jest as the source of all (of my) fiction

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.)

ι = 981 (the IJ constant)

This is a new version of the other part of my first comment at IS.

IS notes (here) that all IJ editions have the same number of pages (981). I had my doubts about the 981 constant as I have a UK Picador trade paperback edition. But lo-and-behold, it is 981 pages! I guess one of the beauties of IJ is that. The IJ constant? We could use a little ι (iota) to signify 981, THE “IJ constant”. It also works because ι is a definite descriptor in formal logic. We could formalize “there is exactly one number of pages for IJ and it is 981″ like “ψ(ι[ppIJ](φ[ppIJ]=981))” (though admittedly it gets confusing if we replace 981 with ι) or something… We never know, maybe DFW wanted the consistency (and we pay a little hommage to his being a logician).

Training for Infinite Summer

This is a new version of part of my first comment at IS.

After DFW’s death, I decided to re-read him (post on his death upcoming). My last DFW re-read was The Broom of the System (TBotS). It is so abso-fucking-lutely genius. Logic, language, Wittgenstein… So now I will read IJ within IS (as per this blog’s objectives), I give you my…

Looking forward to IS, I have started with multi-level training. I thought of beginning with the heavier-lifting and dwindling down to the easiest, in order to get to Sunday (21 June 2009, the start of IS) fresh BUT sturdy.

0. Prep – what will I need? (Forgot this in the IS comment.) I went through Jonathan Franzen’s “My Father’s Brain” (in How to be Alone), which was recommended by a date a while back and I just got to it. Very fitting that he was a close friend of DFW’s, but also because it makes one think of how one thinks. Right, so, for IS, I will need a brain.

1. Muscle training – consisting of  reading DFW selbst. I read his Oblivion: Stories, the This is Water speech (as per the previous post), and the burning baby story (it made me silently weep in my office) in Esquire, which were all new reads for me.

2. Stretch training – reading a bit about language and logic and their constraints. I bought David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress because DFW praised it in the jacket. It is an excellent novel and it is is great prep as it is about language and logic and the mind and its limits… The relationship to TBotS is almost impossible to miss. But the writing is so peculiar, so special, that it feels at times like it has nothing to do with TBotS, or anything else, for that matter. I also re-read Paul Auster’s City of Glass, in the spirit of focusing on language. But this time I read the graphic novel, which is an incredibly good and beautiful adaptation (much better than the play at the Centro Cultural Helénico in Mexico City nearly a decade ago). There is definitely something to say about its use of the natural language of non-language (i.e. pictures).

c. Cardio workout – getting fit for the times. I read Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, to put me in a mid-nineties mood, ambiance, context, etc. I recently went through his IV, A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas as well, so that was like a soft cardio warm-up to the whole training.

And, finally,

d. Massage – something sweet and soothing. I read Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight in a delayed flight on my Kindle. This might be a surprise (given the above references) but I didn’t want to start something that would use up much brain muscle; that, plus I always get curious when things get all the rage (and I have to confess that it was a fun read).

Why blog? Water (big W)/water (little w).

OK, so I finally decided to start a blog…

The trigger was Infinite Summer (IS). I will spend the summer of 2009 re-reading David Foster Wallace’s (DFW) Infinite Jest (IJ) and posting on IS. So now I have something to write about that hopefully will drive other things to write about. As I guess is pretty clear, I am a big fan of DFW. And that’s the source of the title: DFW’s commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, published as This is Water (it gets harder and harder to find on the web). Anyway, I sent it to my brother for his graduation and he just replied “pura pinche agua”. The rough translation is “just fucking water” (even though it doesn’t quite work in English). And that’s the way am seeing things as of this writing, pura pinche agua. The question that will drive the non-IJ postings (and most likely many of the IJ postings too) is “what is Water?” (which I now capitalize when in re: to DFW’s Water). I guess this is the question that drives everything, or should. But I will also spend the summer sailing (well, learning how to sail and race) so that it will all be about Water/water, sailing being the non-capitalized kind. The link, or part of it, is that I will spend time on the water thinking about Water. We’ll see how it goes.

(The picture above, and the cloud pictures that appear through the site are not from an IJ cover, thought they are a pictorial and personal reference. They are all crops from one single photo. The photo was taken in Yagul, Oaxaca, on 13 September 2008 as we were talking about DFW and his death.)