viz.

"Tropium" — Image Credit: WebMD 

Infinite Jest (IJ) is more than a novel, as anyone who has carried a copy around for awhile will attest.[1] Elsewhere I have argued that IJ is a performative utterance, following J.L. Austin, that IJ turns readers into addicts on the one hand and then thwarts the jones for textual mastery on the other. Here I wish simply to invite you into the tropium den[2] so you can see what it's like to cook up some of the visual texts that having been using Infinite Jest. I begin with the work of designer Chris Ayers, who created a tumblr called "Poor Yorick Entertainment" with the aim of "bring[ing] some kind of visual life" to the world of Infinite Jest (according to the site's "About" page). Many of the visual artifacts featured on Ayers's blog are also available for incarnation into the physical world through purchase.

Image Credit: Steve Rhodes

I’ve always loved the moment in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” when he praises Las Vegas for being the least pretentious city in America. What an astute thing to say. Who among us could have looked at, for example, the Bellagio’s famous fountain, Paris Las Vegas or the Venetian and describe them as not pretentious? (The Wynn complex wasn’t built yet, but everything interior designer Roger Thomas has done there since confirms Wallace’s point.) The irony Wallace is highlighting, of course, is the fact that these institutions pretend to be nothing other than what they are: spaces smartly designed for people to come into and enjoy wasting their money. They don’t pretend to be otherwise. No Vegas weekender sees the Paris’ Eiffel Tower and looks for the Louvre, because that structure isn’t there to trick people into thinking they’re across the ocean: it’s there to encourage people to luxuriate in their extravagance. Wallace makes this point, I suspect, because deep down he was worried that a certain degree of pretentiousness in modern American culture is fostering a strong undercurrent of cynicism. With all the naïveté of Wallace’s ideal citizen, I’m hoping the Miami Marlin’s new stadium, aptly named Marlins Park, isn’t a great example of what Wallace was worried about.

Delivered in  twenty-three minutes, David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College had an audience of a few hundred. However, in the years which followed, the transcription of Wallace's speech became an internet phenomenon, coursing through millions of email boxes and introducing the writer to people unfamiliar with his complex fiction.  "Thanks to the enthusiasm" of people who knew nothing about Wallace's work, and the "magic of the cut-and-paste function," Tom Bissell remarks that the address likely ranks "high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote." But perhaps the most significant testament to the speech's popularity is that the short speech would eventually become a book in its own right. In the year after Wallace's passing, the "Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address" became This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009). And yet, even as Little, Brown's publication of the lecture gave the speech permanence and stability, it also aroused significant debate about whether the form of this publication worked with or against the speech's message. In examining the remediation of Wallace's speech, I suggest that the debate refracts core concerns that Wallace addresses.

"A Tingle Table used by the IRS" — Image Credit: Eric Paul Zamora/Associated Press (at nytimes.com)

A peculiar find in David Foster Wallace’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center points to the intersection of two threads in Wallace’s thinking: questions of fraudulence and authenticity, and the notion of procedurality. Wallace frequently engaged and struggled with the former throughout his career, asking what it means to authentically engage another person and inhabit another consciousness without the needs, addictions, and deceptions of the self getting in the way. That is, what does it look like to operate outside of those mechanisms that turn us back inside of ourselves and translate our experience into the logic of the self?

Image credit: buzzinemusic.com, amazon.com, and Marjorie Foley

[In honor of the David Foster Wallace Symposium being hosted at the Harry Ransom Center this week (and in honor of how much we at viz. love David Foster Wallace), this week's posts will be dedicated to all things DFW. Look out for guest posts from outside writers and lots of excitement from the viz. staff.]

Two summers ago, I spent ten hours a day for ten days reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. At 1,000 pages, this means that I was spending an insanely long six minutes on each page, reading and rereading sentences in order to first understand the grammatical structure, then to understand the basic meaning of the sentence, then to understand that sentence's relationship to the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and so on. While at times I felt like I was working, and suffering while I worked, Infinite Jest was also one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life--while DFW is often criticized for his overblown prose, his writing is also full of batcrap crazy fun. The Decemberists, in the video for their "Calamity Song," capture the fun, the hilarity, the chaos, and the pain that is always present in David Foster Wallace's work.