Martin Schneider writes:
Note: I’m participating in Infinite Summer, the widespread Internet book project dedicated to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. For more information, consult my introduction. My strategy has been to avoid lengthy commentary but instead list quintessentially Wallacean vocabulary and note other oddities, including Kindle typos.
I took hardly any notes for the second and third chapters. Chapter 2 is a pitch-perfect depiction of (as yet unnamed) Erdedy’s agitated hours-long wait for pot, and chapter 3 returns to Hal and introduces us to an eccentric and key relation of his. For some reason, neither one offers much for the fan of odd vocabulary (aside from Kindle problems with italics text).
The juxtaposition of these two chapters is a reminder that what most marks Infinite Jest is its combination of sections featuring unfussy, devastating, psychologically plausible character sketches and sections featuring hyperbolic, absurd comedy. The first elicits the reaction, “Oh my god, that is just how it is,” and the other, laughter and admiration for linguistic dexterity. Honestly, DFW is equally good at both, but forced to choose, I’ll take the unfussy stuff.
There’s also chapter 5, about the Saudi doctor, which is closer to regular narrative.
location 641: magisculed
location 667: The sentence starting “Was he in the bathroom”—can this possibly make grammatical sense?
location 716: caries
location 725: immeaning, Kindle typo
location 748: Seventhisn’t, Kindle typo
location 749: Eighthamends, Kindle typo
location 782: Spiegelresulted, Kindle typo
location 797: mise-enscene, Kindle typo
location 809: Citizen,and, Kindle typo
location 858: Töblerone, DFW persists in spelling it with an umlaut, which it doesn’t take.
location 858: monolial sinusitis
location 861: DeBakey
location 861: ad valorem
location 865: Valayat
location 876: spectation, IMO a quintessentially DFW kind of word; see plosive elsewhere
location 885: thrushive
location 889: and but so, a bit of usage familiar to readers of DFW’s nonfiction.

Martin Schneider writes:
Note: I’m participating in Infinite Summer, the widespread Internet book project dedicated to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. For more information, consult my introduction. My strategy has been to avoid lengthy commentary but instead list quintessentially Wallacean vocabulary and note other oddities, including Kindle typos.
That number, 868, sounds impressive, but Kindle users will recognize it as a shamefully low number (all of Infinite Jest has 25,756 locations). Anyway, this isn’t an update on my reading (coming soon!), it’s a report of an interesting link.
One of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum (with whom we’ve interacted fruitfully before), currently of Mother Jones, formerly of The Washington Monthly, weighed in on Infinite Summer from the perspective of someone who devoured the book a decade ago, and won’t be doing it again. Not that he didn’t like the book, he really did, a lot.
He links to his original thoughts, written in 1997 and only mildly spoileriffic.
Question: He notes that in 1997, Infinite Jest was one of the few books that had its own website. Today, it’s 404. What’s up with that, Little, Brown? That’s literary malpractice!
Update: Apparently it was 404 as early as 1999.

Martin Schneider writes:
I’ll be weighing in with some thoughts as the summer progresses, but most of my comments will be vocabulary-related. The Kindle lets you add notes to the text (it’s fun to add footnotes to Infinite Jest, like bringing coal to Newcastle). I’ll be noting typos in the Kindle edition and other words that caught my eye, struck my fancy, or needed looking up.
Basically it’s a promenade of my ignorance and admiration.
location 54: Kindle typo: eitherlor
location 212: Kekuléan
location 226: aviarian: “of or pertaining to an aviary”? Hmm.
location 244: lapidary
location 264: “myriad scrutiny,” genius.
location 270: nice work getting “Academy” right, Kindle.
location 318: Brewster’s-Angle
location 361: creātus
location 380: Nunn Bush
location 396: pases
location 479: hypophalangial
location 481: Kindle typo: What aBurger (caused by page break in original manuscript)

Martin Schneider writes:
Summer began yesterday, and with it began Infinite Summer, a massive book club project (sort of) in which the only book is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and readers have until the autumn (September 21) to finish it. The pace is 75 pages a week (not including the associated endnotes), which isn’t very hard, and readers are rewarded with all sorts of commentary and opportunities to discuss! (Here’s the schedule.)
I’m using the Kindle version, which should make it doubly fun (and also make navigating the endnotes a breeze). I read about 300 pages of it when it first came out, and then stopped, and then developed a block about cracking the book ever again. Until now!
I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!

Martin Schneider writes:
I’ve been a fan of Michael Bérubé’s since I was in college (graduated 1992), and was charmed to have a brief exchange with him several years ago about an essay of his that apparently only I liked, about 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which he argues persuasively that the extremely common default reading of the movie, which involves some variation on the idea that HAL “goes crazy,” is indisputably contradicted by virtually everything that happens in the movie, and that the movie is really a political movie about the Cold War military-industrial complex. It’s an eye-opener.
Anyway. Bérubé’s exhaustively hyper-droll style always brings a smile to my face, even when he writes 2-3 times more than my attention span can handle (he kissed the Blarney Stone). Today he turns his attention to his only appearance in The New Yorker, a relatively dusty (1995) look at Cornel West and a few other African-American intellectuals who became more prominent in the mid-1990s.
Be forewarned; his post of today is not for everybody. I like Bérubé because he chases down a lot of nuance in people’s arguments that other writers wouldn’t bother with; plus he’s funny in a way that no academic of my knowledge is. But not everyone will take him the same way.

Martin Schneider writes:
The indispensible Jason Kottke today posted a passage from Milton Glaser’s Ten Things I Have Learned, about how to detect when you are being nourished or sapped by a given person:

And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

Shrewd words indeed. They reminded me of a passage from “The Wilderness Campaign,” a David Remnick Profile of Al Gore from 2004 (the bearded, liberated, post-2000 Al Gore), describing why, for all of Gore’s success in politics, it might have been an awkward fit for him. Here it is (emphasis mine; New Yorker don’t truck with no bold text):

Other aides were less harsh, saying that Gore was brusque and demanding but not unkind. Yet, once freed of the apparatus and the requirements of a political campaign, Gore really did savor his time alone, thinking, reading, writing speeches, surfing the Internet. “One thing about Gore personally is that he is an introvert,” another former aide said. “Politics was a horrible career choice for him. He should have been a college professor or a scientist or an engineer. He would have been happier. He finds dealing with other people draining. And so he has trouble keeping up his relations with people. The classical difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that if you send an introvert into a reception or an event with a hundred other people he will emerge with less energy than he had going in; an extrovert will come out of that event energized, with more energy than he had going in. Gore needs a rest after an event; Clinton would leave invigorated, because dealing with people came naturally to him.”

That’s all. It jogged a memory, and I couldn’t rest until I had posted it here.

Martin Schneider writes:
At least according to David Leonhardt in the New York Times. A few quick reactions.
1. I’m reading it too! I’m almost done (bet that overachiever Obama beats me to the end, though—I’m savoring). I’m fairly certain it’s the first time that the president and I are reading the same novel at the same time. Did Clinton read Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century? I didn’t read any Zane Grey during the Bush years….
2. I admire Obama’s taste. I’ve run into a few people on Twitter and elsewhere calling Netherland overrated, but surely it’s a quality piece of work, even if one feels that it’s been overpraised. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet, but then again, I’m not done yet. Leaning towards thumbs-up, though. What did you make of it?
3. I wonder how much Obama knows about cricket. I know next to nothing.

Martin Schneider writes:
In my best stentorian anchorman’s voice, I can honestly write that Senator Arlen Specter “rocked the political world today” when he announced that he would switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, ensuring the Democrat’s a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate once Al Franken is seated sometime in June (it looks like). Specter is truly the man of the president’s 100th day.
When he was district attorney of Philadelphia, Arlen Specter was quoted in The New Yorker in opposition to the new Miranda rule. It was the December 14, 1968, issue. Since then he has appeared in the magazine’s pages many times—and there’ll be plenty more in the near future.
(Note that “Fight on the Right,” by Philip Gourevitch, and “Killing Habeas Corpus,” by Jeffrey Toobin, are actually about Specter, rather than merely mentioning him in passing.)
Here’s the full list:
“The Turning Point,” Richard Harris, December 14, 1968
Comment, Garrison Keillor, August 20, 1990
Comment, Adam Gopnik, October 28, 1991
Comment, Josselyn Simpson, August 3, 1992
“The Ogre’s Tale,” Peter J. Boyer, April 4, 1994
“Flat-Tax Follies,” Warren St. John, June 5, 1995
“The Western Front,” Sidney Blumenthal, June 5, 1995
“Ghost in the Machine,” Sidney Blumenthal, October 2, 1995
“Speaker of the Casino,” Sara Mosle, November 13, 1995
“The Stranger, Mary Anne Weaver, November 13, 1995
“Advice and Dissent,” Jeffrey Toobin, May 26, 2003
“Fight on the Right,” Philip Gourevitch, April 12, 2004
“The Candidate,” William Finnegan, May 31, 2004
“Hollywood Science,” Connie Bruck, October 18, 2004
“Blowing Up the Senate,” Jeffrey Toobin, March 7, 2005
“Ups and Downs,” Hendrik Hertzberg, November 14, 2005
“Unanswered Questions,” Jeffrey Toobin, January 23, 2006
“Hearts and Brains,” Hendrik Hertzberg, November 6, 2006
“The Art of Testifying,” Janet Malcolm, March 13, 2006
“Killing Habeas Corpus,” Jeffrey Toobin, December 4, 2006
“The Spymaster,” Lawrence Wright, January 21, 2008
“State Secrets,” Patrick Radden Keefe, April 28, 2008
“The Dirty Trickster,” Jeffrey Toobin, June 2, 2008
“The Gatekeeper,” Ryan Lizza, March 2, 2009

Martin Schneider writes:
I noticed in Jay Jennings’s review of Marshall Jon Fisher’s A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played, in the Wall Street Journal, that James Thurber is mentioned as “the tennis-besotted writer for The New Yorker magazine.” I didn’t know Thurber was such a tennis fan; does anyone know if the subject pops up much in the better-known Thurber collections?
The intersection of tennis and The New Yorker cannot but remind me of my father, who was a fan of both things for most of his life (Herbert Warren Wind was a particularly special byline). Furthermore, I remember him telling me about that particular match—Don Budge against Baron Gottfried von Cramm in 1937, a sort of tennis version of the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling bout, which happened a year later (turns out, both Schmeling and von Cramm were good guys; the story of von Cramm’s life is especially interesting). The setting was Wimbledon, but the match was not a part of the well-known tournament; it was a Davis Cup semifinal.
Knowing a fair amount about the subject but not about the book, I feel confident in recommending it anyway. The book apparently omits an amusing story connected with the match that my dad used to tell. Here it is, quoted from Budge’s memoir (I found it here):

I know I was still in a daze in the locker room. It was as if everyone was trying to outdo each other in congratulating me. Tilden came in, and it was right then that he came over and told me it was the greatest tennis match ever played. Others had about the same thing to say as Tilden did—everyone, that is, except Jack Benny. He came in with Lukas an Sullivan, and while they were raving on at length, Benny just shook my hand and mumbled something like “nice match,” as if I had just won the second round of the mixed doubles at the club. I remember, Jack Benny was the only calm person in the whole locker room. The place was like a madhouse.

[snip]

After I won at First Hills, I went out to Los Angeles to play the Pacific Southwest Tournament. After my first-round match there, which was a rather normal, unexciting one, I looked up from my locker, and who should be coming at me but Jack Benny. He was positively beside himself, hardly pausing to say hello before he launched into a babbling, endless dissertation on how wonderful, how exciting, how fantastic the Cramm match had been. It was like one of those scenes from his show. I would keep trying to interrupt him, unsuccessfully. “But Jack”—I would try to start. And he would go right on.

“Magnificent, Don. It was just marvelous. Why when you—it was incredible. And then you—why, I’ve told everybody about it.” And on he went.

“But Jack,” I kept on, so that at last he stopped long enough to take that pose he is famous for, the palm cupped on his cheek, staring at me curiously. “Jack, I don’t understand,” I began. “At Wimbledon, after the Cramm match, you were the only person I met who was relaxed and calm. Now you carry on like this. The match was two months ago. Then you were unmoved. Now you’re jumping around all excited. What is it?”

“Don,” he said. “The truth is, that the Cramm match was the first tennis I ever saw. Now since then I’ve seen others, but at the time I thought all matches were more or less like that.”

I decided to search Thurber’s New Yorker contributions for tennis references, and found a silly and slight short story called “This Little Kitty Stayed Cool.” I can’t improve on the abstract:

Tells of girl who is an excellent tennis player. Her name is Kitty Carraway. A man by the name of Poos is proposing to her, but she doesn’t like the name Poos and refused. It just doesn’t sound as nice as Kitty Carraway. Argument.