Comments on: Book Review: Infinite Jest (alternate title: “Look At Me! I Read Infinite Jest!”)

By: Ialdabaoth

Ialdabaoth — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:58:06 +0000

Actually, it’s because they’re spamming thousands of very similar messages. When they attack blogspot.com, it’s important that they can make inane, contentless posts like “I visited many sites but the audio feature for audio songs present at this web page is really marvelous” sixteen thousand times or so. Rather than writing 16,000 such inane posts, they only write 500 or so, and then the script randomly permutes specific letters so that large blog-hosting sites don’t notice “someone posted the exact same message to 800 different blogs in our hosting farm.”

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:36:20 +0000

Spammers have high rates of mutation. Details in particular examples are probably the result of chance. General trends are probably selected for, though. I can imagine reasons for using the Latin alpha in place of an A, such as to get through a spam filter that knows the word viagra, but not viɑgrɑ. But that doesn’t apply to the word “many.”

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By: glomerulus

glomerulus — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:18:35 +0000

Why is “many” in a different font than the rest of the comment?

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By: Zvi Mowshowitz

Zvi Mowshowitz — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 17:33:09 +0000

I am confused by your question on Pale Fire including a but. Is such a task similar to a scientific discovery of “Aha! I have discovered the Grand Reality Reconciliation, and since my book came out in 1962 I published first”? Does the fact that such an excellent book exists (and it is excellent!) that attempts to address such things mean that the problem are unnecessary because hey, Nabakov took care of it?

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By: Adom Hartell

Adom Hartell — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 03:38:35 +0000

Nope. Unsuccessful.

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By: Adom Hartell

Adom Hartell — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 03:37:55 +0000

[Sorry, I messed up with my first comment and can’t figure out how to edit. I’m not really sure if it’s going to work this time but if not, I’m just going to leave it.]

Sometimes this means Helping Other People, and this is one of the few heavy-handed parts of the book. M. Remy, a Wheelchair Assassin (there, uh, might be an entire cell of wheelchair-bound terrorists in this universe) becomes suicidal after his disabling accident but regains the will to live after rescuing a deformed woman from a truck

I disagree about the above. Rather than seeing Remy’s motivations as healthy and admirable, I agreed with (the admittedly very drunk and about to chose pleasure over life) Kate that his relationship to his wife was actually dependent and weird and sort of pathetic.

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By: Adom Hartell

Adom Hartell — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 03:34:27 +0000

I disagree about the above. Rather than seeing Remy’s motivations as healthy and admirable, I agreed with (the admittedly very drunk and about to chose pleasure over life) Kate that his relationship to his wife was actually dependent and weird and sort of pathetic.

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By: Mike Evans

Mike Evans — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 01:16:53 +0000

An entertaining and insightful review. I just finished the novel–all 1079 pages, including the notes–and feel a bit let down. I had hoped the plot lines would come together more artfully. I can also see why some readers start over immediately.

Comparisons to “Tristram Shandy” are apt; it is useful to remember the last lines to that marvelous work:
L–d said my mother, what is all this story about?–
A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick–and one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
Notice that this comment comes from the argumentative parson Yorick, whose Shakespearean namesake is described by Hamlet as being “a fellow of infinite jest.”

Two other works that come to mind are “V” and “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It is hard to imagine Wallace without Pynchon.

However, the most comparable work that comes to my mind is Joyce’s ” Ulysses.” I find the same love of concrete sensuous detail–lots and lots of it; the same love of language; the same indifference to narrative; the same fascination with popular culture and high culture alike; the same fondness for parody and mimicry; the same love of arcane lore; the same fascination with excreta and ejaculata; the same gentleness its satire; and the same comic spirit. Like Ulysses, it is extremely funny. And as with Ulysses, I have made my own index to it on the endpapers.

Swarz’s and Wallace’s own comments on the book are illuminating but only a little. Perhaps the most infinite jest of the novel is the endless stream of criticism, exegesis, and whatnot that we can look forward to. Life is short but the art is long.

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By: anon

anon — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 03:58:12 +0000

Apparently there are a few who can’t handle their addiction to weed. If I’m not mistaken, even one character in the book(Don Gately) wonders why some people ends up in a halfway house or maybe ends up ruining their lives when the only drug they’ve taken is “just weed”.

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By: Gareth Rees

Gareth Rees — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:08:59 +0000

MrbTongue’s take is interesting, but I am not so sanguine about the process of shandification: certainly the narrator of Tristram Shandy doesn’t see the process of digression as a pleasant diversion along the route to the goal, but as an ongoing losing struggle (“why do I mention it?—Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern not it”) against entropy (“It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read”).

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