Clinamen

Right after putting up something thoughts about Infinite Jest and infrastructures¹, I got to thinking about whether Infinite Jest is a "new media object."²

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1. Brown, James. "Infinite Summer: Infrastructures and/of Uncertainty." 27 Jul 2009, 10:55am CST, Clinamen, http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown/node/281

2. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich theorizes "new media objects."^a For Manovich, such objects can be pieces of art, web pages, video games, or numerous other technological objects. Manovich's project in TLoNM is to theorize the design principles of such objects - the emerging language that we are using to build new media objects. One portion of Manovich's discussion seems to be applicable when it comes to Infinite Jest:

I am now 339 pages into Infinite Jest (well ahead of schedule!), and I've got lots to say. For the time being, I'd like to float an idea that I've been kicking around for a while now. As I read some of my favorite contemporary authors - most or all of which could probably fit comfortably under the "postmodern" umbrella - I see a repeating focus on infrastructure. Here are just a few that come to mind:

--In Didion's Play It As It Lays, Maria deals with the trauma of having an abortion by compulsively driving California highways.

--In Wallace's The Broom of the System, Lenore's place of work is plagued by crossed phone lines. Her grandmother (a devoted reader and, one might argue, "follower" of Wittgenstein) ends up in the tunnels and presumably is the one mucking things up and crossing the wires.

I joined what is probably one of the biggest reading groups in history a couple of weeks ago: Infinite Summer. The task? Read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest over the course of three months. A lot of bloggers are going to be posting responses, and we're on a strict reading schedule. (This means I have to be careful about spoilers too. I don't want to mess anything up for any other Infinite Summer-ers.)

In case you didn't already know this (it's probably safe to assume that most readers of this blog are familiar with the book), IJ is a TOME. 1,079 pages including footnotes. It sits on people's bookshelves and nags. For many, it is nothing more than a reminder of something that they never quite got around to. This (along with, I'd imagine, Wallace's recent suicide) is why Infinite Summer happened. A whole bunch of people are ready to check this off the list.