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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2892 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.

I'm really locking into Infinite Jest, a work of unrealistic genius and prescience, so good that I don't even know what to say about it.

On audiobook I finished Two Weeks, Eight Seconds which was exactly what I wanted at the time that I wanted it. A perfect sports book.

In between I've been reading the Fort Bragg Cartel about drug running in the specops world in the South. It's good, but the author is just such a weenie. I'm antiwar as they come, but the book is so preachy about it when it is irrelevant to the action in the book.

Infinite Jest is nearing the top of my to-reread list. I first read it in 2012 or so. I thought it was great and want to see if holds up.

I remember the worst parts being the terminally unfunny bits that drag on and on and on. There are some "jokes" that weren't funny to start with and certainly didn't get better with repetition.

When you're done, you need to immediately re-read pages 1-17. Then there is an interpretation of "what really happened" written by Aaron Swartz that is worth reading, although it has drawn some criticism.

the Fort Bragg Cartel

My buddy (who has periodically contemplated trying out for the 19th SFG and could probably hack it) put me on to this. It's entertaining, but if I had to take a drink every time the author delivers what is supposed to be harsh criticism of Delta or ST6 that actually makes them sound absolutely fucking rad, I would have passed out in a state of advanced intoxication a quarter of the way through.

I wonder if that would improve or ruin my use of the book as my "read a bit before bed" book, the whiskey might cause me to pass out faster by that ruleset, but the hangover would be killer.

I think any profiler should start from a place of sympathy with their subject, even if it is ultimately a hit piece, the story will hit harder if you start by looking at them as a hero. Even a biography of Stalin or Mao is better if you start by looking at them as on Campbell's Hero's Journey and then show them going off the rails, show them becoming a villain. If you start out hating them, it kind of undermines the story. The closest he gets is the kind of standard shitlib "oh he was kind of sad and pathetic and poor before he joined the army" thing.

Particularly I guffawed when he described Delta Force selection ending with a "40 miles ruck that would turn a normal man's ligaments into gelatin." Which, I'm sure I wouldn't pass half the stuff they have to do there, and I'm sure it would suck, but 40 miles isn't gonna kill you. But the guy just clearly doesn't do anything.

Lol, I read it more as addressed to an audience that's never done anything than as by an author that's never done anything, but you may well be right. Separately, the accounts I've read of Delta selection (e.g. Haney's Inside Delta Force) make it pretty clear that the challenge comes more from navigation, elevation gain, bushwhacking (using the road is an auto fail), and beating the time cutoffs than from merely covering ground as such.

I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?

I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. The author is a gifted wordcel: he has nothing worthwhile to say, but he is very good at saying it. It's just Reddit philosophy, dressed well.

When I read it around age 17 (circa 2002), I found it really invigorating. I got a kick out of the detailed detours (especially the footnotes) and it struck me as novel and true. I reread it 2-3 years ago and it was a bit of a slog (though I still finished it--I just wasn't excited each time I picked it up). Sometimes you have to be in the right place in life for a book to speak to you, and sometimes you've already seen the tricks that make a book notable that the charm wears off.

I no longer feel compelled to continue reading books that don't hold my interest though. Give it 100 pages. It should be clear at that point if it currently resonates with you.

The worst parts of Infinite Jest are:

  • The use of footnotes endnotes
  • The fact that it's considered so pretentious to have read it that it's now just a punch line that nobody takes seriously

Still haven't met a single person IRL who's finished it. Bummer.

Footnotes would be fine. What makes IJ obnoxious is that it has extensive endnotes such that you are constantly flipping to the back of the book. Or have they fixed this in newer editions now that Wallace isnt alive to stand in their way?

Anyway, if you guys enjoy IJ, I would consider Solenoid to be an absolute must-read.

Sorry, you're correct, it's endnotes. It makes the Kindle edition of the book really the only readable one. I'm curious if DFW was sending a message of contempt to his readers with the approach. A lot of artists hate the people who consume what they create. I've specifically isolated myself from reading his interviews etc. because I suspect it may have been the case here.

@FtttG

This is my third or fourth attempt to read this book. In the past, I've gotten a few hundred pages deep only to fizzle out as it didn't go anywhere in particular. It's incredibly difficult to read, not so much because of the footnotes or the pure length as because of the structure of the story.

I'd previously enjoyed DFW's shorter work, and to some extent I think Infinite Jest is just a really large short story collection that links together in intricate ways to produce a bigger work. A lot of the chapters, or sub-chapter units of the book, really constitute stories or vignettes or essays of their own, and their significance to any broader plot (indeed the existence of any broader plot) only becomes significant later. DFW's brilliance in writing essays and short stories gives you these really gripping moments throughout that seem to have nothing to do with the entire rest of the story. DFW also uses very non-linear storytelling, with a confusing in world neologism for years, to obfuscate what you are seeing and when.

Then you have the overall setting, which is sort of semi-sci-fi magical realist near future-past in a way that's incredibly difficult to find your bearings in. When I read Tolstoy, I know what the rules of the universe are because they are the rules of my universe. When I read Asimov or Tolkien, I can quickly grok the rules of the universe because they're very different from the rules of our universe in specific fairly well explained ways. Infinite Jest's universe is different in confusing and non-specific ways, and it's not clear when narrators are unreliable or taking the piss, or when we're supposed to take things seriously. At times DFW chooses to be brutally realistic, at times absurdly fantastical, nearly always pessimistic in outlook.

It's also disgusting, viscerally disgusting in a way that only a writer as talented mechanically as DFW can be. Everyone is asymmetrical, everyone is disgusting, bodily acts are described in extensive detail, rape abuse illness and addiction are commonplace, deformity is everywhere. It's just how the book is, but there are significant sections that are just viscerally unpleasant.

Finally, I think the book has gotten a lot harder since its publication, in that it represented a fork from the past around the publication date. For my partner in my book club, who was a teenager when it was published and read it for the first time when she was in art school in the early 2000s, there are a lot of references or just moods that make more sense to her than they do to me, ten years her junior. It's very like Stranger in a Strange Land in that way, a retro-futuristic work that projects the current mores and world forward. In your mind you have to back up to 1995, then fast forward to a world where some technologies never develop and others hyper-develop.

That said, my foolproof method for reading difficult books is to just keep swimming. This developed when reading the great Russians, in that way that Americans typically get confused by the use of first name or surname or patronymic or title or affectionate diminutive to refer to the same character, I used to get stuck trying to figure out who exactly was who in Anna Karennina then I decided one day that I should just keep reading and I'd figure that out later, and that worked. I approach everything confusing in DFW the same way, I just keep reading and I figure it out later. I think this is what @Rov_Scam is getting at, knowing that it's an important book he keeps trying to read it while understanding everything said but it's impossible to understand everything so he can't read it; his brother just read it without worrying about understanding everything and was fine.

The other aid getting me through this reading is my book club, in which I meet up with a pretty lady every few hundred pages and we discuss the book and its themes and broader philosophical topics over drinks. And this creates accountability in that as a man I can't let a pretty woman mog me at something, and also makes the book easier in that discussion helps explain things. Marx's famously dense Kapital was originally published in France serially in socialist newspapers for workers to read in clubs, they wouldn't (probably couldn't) understand such a book on their own, but in a group it becomes comprehensible. The lack of reading groups is one of the unfortunate consequences of our world today.

It's truly a work of rarely-reached genius, a fitting heir to the western literary canon (though in my mind the canon truly ends with Joyce). It's highly prescient philosophically, it has a lot to say about modern concerns on AI. Though I also kind of think the whole book is just about internet porn. Everyone on this forum should put in the work to read it, it's worth it, but I can also see how its cultural impact is mostly negative rather than directly influential.

I do wonder if Parker and Stone were influenced by Infinite Jest when they wrote South Park, though.

I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.

What really used to get me were the diminutives, which are not intuitive to an English speaker. Ilya doesn't naturally turn Ilushka in my mind.

Yes, Mr. Ivanov, Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander, Alex, Sasha, Sanya, Shura, Shurik, Ivanych, etc. are all the same person, depending on context. And using the wrong one in a wrong context may be a major social faux pas too. Unless you grew up with it, it can be a bit tricky to guess, especially that some diminutives have very little obvious connection to the full name, and some of them are also non-unique. You just have to know it.

It's my favorite book but it can be Work.

I am shocked at how it only seems to become more prescient as I age.*

*and disturbed.

Recommend me any outside the box interpretations I can bring to book club to look smart l.

Now the secret is that I haven't actually reread it in nearly 20 years. But it was "sticky" (and formative given my age when I read it).

It's okay to love something and not be obsessed with it. It's also okay to keep bouncing off of it even if you love it - stop when you feel you've got enough.

That's maybe one of the lessons of the book haha.

My experience of the discourse of the book is course then out of date.

I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.

MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.

Another interesting part is that it rewards reading it twice. I didn't have the time to commit to it but yeah.

I don't think you have to read it but I did hit a bump in it part way through, fought through it, and then was glad I did.

Loved the cruise ship essay too. One of many reasons I haven't done one

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