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: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]