IJSRT

2666…?

So - Im just about to finish off Blood Meridian, and I was thinking about picking up 2666 for my summer long read.

Any one have interest in reading along with me? (I assume Matt will be back again this year too.)

Let me know and I’ll do my best to set up a schedule and get people access to IJSRT so we can write as we go.

When Do We Celebrate? And Random, Tired, Writing About Entanglement

God I’m so tired.

Haven’t had a decent nights sleep in months. Work is not going well, and I’m standing against the wall in the office bathroom looking at the fan in the ceiling. It’s loose and so when it’s on it wobbles back and forth and makes a little “clapping” sound. I’m staring at it and it’s putting me to sleep.

In a couple hours I have to meet for drinks with people from another agency - people I may need to impress in the very near future - and I look like shit: bags under my eyes, cheeks red from the cold and my hair is…unfortunate. No amount of straightening my tie is helping.

I had another Infinite Jest dream a couple nights ago: I was in the basement of a school watching these men dig a hole in the ground. They were dressed like they were from the 20’s or 30’s - overalls, collared shirts, big work gloves, and, oddly, those round welding goggles. The earth they were digging into was yellow and chalky and I understood that they were mining for something. They we lit with two or three portable flood lights, but otherwise everything was dark. My mother-in-law (who hasn’t read the book) was standing next to me, and she was asking “when do we get to celebrate these characters? when do we get to celebrate the lives of these people?”

I woke up thinking about annual energy production - the cycle from waste to energy to waste - and the circular nature of the book. That you get to the last page and then to continue the story you have to start over at the beginning.

I have no specific commentary on this, it’s just what I woke up thinking about.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading/listening recently about theoretical physics - specifically quantum mechanics - as it figures heavily into something else I’m writing. I was re-listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast where their guest was talking about model for understanding quantum entanglement and it made me remember something I was thinking about right before I finished IJ: that Hal and Don felt “entangled” to me.

Any way the model went like this:

In one room you have a rectangular fish tank with a fish in it and a video camera pointing at one side of it.

In another room you project the feed from the camera onto the wall.

You then add a second a camera pointing at one of the adjacent sides to the first camera and project this second feed so that it is right next to the first, with no seem between them - effectively making it appear to be one projection. A person sitting in the room with the projections would see two fish swimming around that, although never physically touching, seem to be connected. Every time one fish moves or turns, the other fish moves or turns in an apparently connected, but always different way.

The idea of this model (as I understand it) is to explain to us, trapped as we are in a 3-ish dimensional existence, how two things that appear to be entangled to us, may actually be a single, higher-dimensional object.

Apropos of not much

Two notes I have that I’m not sure mean much:

At the point in Infinite Jest where Wallace is discussing the rise and fall of video calling I have in the margins a little note that says: “You Will ads”. If you’re not - and I do hope you’re not - a student of advertising, you might not be aware of the suite of ads AT&T ran in the 90’s showing people what the future would look like. Specifically this ad:

Some things to note:

1) Tom Selleck did the narration, which is cool because he’s Tom Selleck.
2) These were released in 1993 - the year Wallace started IJ.
3) AT&T didn’t actually do ANY of this.

Obviously I have no idea if he saw these ads, but I thought it was interesting. In this ad in particular (there were, I believe, something 5 or 6 of these) we have video on demand and video conferencing - both of which figure heavily into IJ.

Another interesting thing: both the ads and the book manifest the same “the better today” phenomenon about future predicting. Which is to say that in the book and in the ads the future is made up of things that existed in 1993, just with a twist. For example - there is video conferencing, but from payphones. In a different ad, AT&T promisses that in the future you’ll be able to send a fax…FROM THE BEACH!

(NOTE RE: VIDEO CALLING

Leaving aside for now the whole “bilateral illusion of unilateral attention” aspect of Wallaces section on video calling (which in the case of IJ, is maybe the more important aspect of things) - it really does amaze me incredibly self-conscious I end up whenever I try to use something like FaceTime: I find my self trying out different places in my office, testing them out for both good lighting - avoiding areas that are, say, too backlit - but also with a nice backdrop of some kind. The whole thing just adds this layer of aesthetic decision making that just isn’t there with audio calls (pretty much IJ pg 144-148 points 1 and (some) 2) Usually I’ll go to the corner conference room that looks out onto Broadway and has a sort of “office in the city” visual aspect to it, and because there are two sets of windows, results in both me and the city being well lit. Harder though are the evening calls when either I or Megan are out on business trips. While it is sort of “oh my god we live in the FUTURE” to be able to see each other and have a nice conversation face-to-face (as it where) at the end of the day, the realities of inexpensive camera optics, small digital camera sensors, non-terrific hotel lighting, and worse, hotel internet bandwidth all conspire to make the logistics of these calls challenging beyond what really one might desire in an end-of-the-day type call. And none of this even takes into account the fact that it’s nontrivial to both be reclining in a hotel bed, chin sort of smashed into ones chest, propping up either an iPhone or laptop, and maintain a physical appearance anything close to dignified.

Point being: Wallace pegged my own personal vanity and vanity/technology related hang-ups pretty much 100%

END NOTE)

Another note I have in the margins of my copy: “1993 bombing of the World Trade Center”

I have yet to really resolve for myself what the role of terrorism is in IJ - meaning, I can’t decide if it’s simply a device to further a different narrative element, or if it, in itself, is significant - but clearly it’s important to the novel. There is the AFR, of course. But there is another place in the novel where terrorism plays a big part that, at least in my poking around, hasn’t been explored much: Eschaton. While the main super powers of the game broker a sort of cold war truce, it’s the actions of a rouge player that throw the entire situation into chaos.

Without getting into the vast and way to (at least for me, and really at least for this post) complicated sociopolitical rational behind actual terrorism - there is, I think, an over-simplified but not 100% inaccurate way to look at this, at least through the lens of IJ: while the motivations of the powerful might be counter to one another, they’re unified at least one regard: they all want to remain in power. Through this, a stasis of mutual self-interest develops - not unlike the Cold War. The people not in power have no voice at the table and so their options are limited and so they act in a way that might not be in their own long-term self-interest, but that in sort terms breaks down the imposed reality of those in power.

All that said - I’m not sure it amounts to much. Or if does, I don’t know what it is yet. The themes of IJ seem far to personal for any sort of global/political message to make much sense. And as with the ads, it’s entirely likely that none of these has anything to do with anything and is entirely a coincidence.

Still, it seemed interesting and it’s one of those things that makes IJ feel very post-9/11 to me. The concept of loosely organized groups, operating within a set of complex, certainly non-obvious, and possibly self-defeating goals is something that is simply a reality in 2011. It’s interesting that this was, at least for the U.S., only just beginning in 1993.

And of course none of this even begins to cover the way the U.S. government deals with terrorism in IJ, which seems precognitive in terms of the thought processes and language used right after September 11th.

Joelle’s Cat

1) I started reading a new book: A Visit From the Goon Squad. It’s fine. About one third of the way into IJ I picked up used copies of Oblivion, Girl With Curious Hair, and Everything and More, each of which I want desperately to be reading, but for various (mental health) reasons, I felt like I should take a little break from Wallace. Here’s the thing: I miss Infinite Jest. I miss it physically - I feel weird not hauling that thing with me everywhere. But also I find I miss having it my daily life. It’s still sitting on my nightstand, I can’t bring myself to shelve it yet, even though I know full well I can and will read it again. Every time I look at Goon Squad I think “you’re not Infinite Jest.” Which is neither rational nor fair.

2) More on this later - but for what it’s worth I’ve become increasing convinced that at least quantum mechanics and maybe also relativity - both things it would seem Wallace had more than a passing familiarity with - play a non trivial part in IJ.

With that in mind, a thought exercise I’ve been playing with: Joelle is a figurative Schrodinger’s Cat.

Rather than trying to deduce whether Joelle is deformed or not, imagine that DWF meant for her to exist in a sort of literary superposition, that she is, by virtue of her viel, both deformed and not deformed, and that only observation can collapse that narrative wave form. Where would that leave us? What would that imply? Entanglement is something that figures heavily into Schrodinger’s experiment, which I think also lends itself rather elegantly into IJ’s overall trajectory. Also a quote to keep in mind regarding wave form collapse -

“consciousness causes collapse”.

This is isn’t the only place where I think things like this could play a part in understanding the narrative - think the wraith’s concept of time and time dilation/relativity - but where this idea gets actually interesting to me isn’t in “solving” the plot mysteries of IJ. I could be wildly off base here, but I don’t think Wallace would have stuck a bunch of clues in a book like IJ to answer a relatively pedantic question like “is Joelle deformed”. I think her deformity means something greater.

Rather, my hope with this path of thought is to try to use these concepts to understand the trajectories of the people in the book as they relate to us.

So any way - like I said, this is a pretty fresh direction for me, and it could peter out quickly. It could also prove over my head as my knowledge of stuff like quantum mechanics is minimal to say the least. Or I could be like Steeply’s father falling into a hole of imagined signs. Your guess is as good as mine.

Spinning Beach Ball In My Head

Days later and I’m still trying to wrap my around this book.

I’m not sure why, but the last 15 or so pages really threw me. Up until that point my general feeling was, while certain I had missed much, that I had generally kept up and understood, on at least a macro level, the trajectory of the novel. Now though, I feel like I’m so far from understanding this book, I can’t really even fully articulate why the end threw me off so badly.

Being well short of working out what I think the book/Wallace are/were trying to say, what I’m working with now is just trying to understand the method by which I might approach thinking about what book/Wallace are/were trying to say.

On the one hand - my first inclination is to try and break apart the book, understand each individual part, and then see how these pieces integrate into a larger whole. I feel like the book is to fragmented itself, almost begs this kind of approach.

But then I begin to wonder if that’s really the right way to think about the book. Should I instead be approaching the book as a single unit? When I finished House of Leaves one of the things that stuck with me was the idea of observing a book as a piece of architecture. It would seem weird, when looking at a building, to break down judgement or understanding to that of individual elements. I can’t imagine looking critically at something like the Empire State Building by starting with the door knobs leading to the washrooms.

Or maybe I can. I honestly don’t know. And this is really the main thing that’s still processing away in my head: I want to be able to simultaneously understand Infinite Jest as a collection of it’s parts AND as a 2 pound block of paper. This is the path that feels the most right to me - to try and observe it from the micro and macro and the same time. Of course, I’m not even sure if this possible, let alone if it’s within my own mental capacity.

1079

Umm, I have no idea what just happened.

More to come, but this is going to have to sink in. I was not really prepared for that ending.

I can tell already I’m going to read this again. Maybe next summer. Maybe sooner.

I feel messed up.