Ran out of new books in my inbox, so I'm re-reading Infinite Jest<\/i>. I read it ages ago, but I barely remember any of it: tennis, drugs, a video that melts your brain, The Year Of Glad - not much else. And, 50 or so pages into it, I'm realizing why...<\/p>\n
David Foster Wallace was an awesome writer: unbelievably insightful and clever. Nearly every chapter has something brilliant in it. But, I'm dying to figure out WTF any of what I've read has to do with anything else. I've read at least a dozen chapters so far, but I still haven't found a plot. It's just sketch after sketch - each interesting in its own right, but almost completely disconnected from all the others. Asynchronous, non-linear. Things happen; but you don't know when anything happened in relation to anything else, or why you need to know about it. It's like a David Lynch movie, but with the scenes played in random order.<\/p>\n
I realize most of it gets pulled-together by the end. But man, it's a tough read to start. Very hard to keep focused and enthused when he's doing everything he can to pull your attention in as many different ways as he can. Much tougher than Gravity's Rainbow<\/i>. Probably not as tough as Ulysses<\/i> (which I cannot get into, let alone through).<\/p>\n
Spoiler?
\nMakes me doubt that the book itself could be eponymous The Entertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ran out of new books in my inbox, so I'm re-reading Infinite Jest. I read it ages ago, but I barely remember any of it: tennis, drugs, a video that melts your brain, The Year Of Glad - not much else. And, 50 or so pages into it, I'm realizing why... David Foster Wallace was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}