(Back in the City now)
It's Still Summer And I'm Still Reading...
...despite the fact that a friend of mine who is a playwright and former broadway actor thinks that IJ sucks; is unreadable; has no thread to follow; that David wrote all of it while he was stoned. The Playwright stopped reading about a third of the way through.
Me? I'm gonna keep going. There's a lot I like about this book. But am I reading it in such scattered, stuttering fasion - literally chopping the book up into bite-sized pages - because the book itself is scattered?
Another question: given my friend's complaint of a lack of a thread, a theme, should we ask: is this book even a novel?
The Playwright thinks that the book is more one big form of masturbation.
Could he be right?
I really want to get to the end at some point to find that this book that everyone is raving about is in fact a novel; but maybe I will find that Infinite Jest is just one big jest/joke played on the readers and that when DFW talked about ONAN he was talking about his own writing.
In reading the pages of IJ am I then just watching (and taking part in) a really brilliant guy (incandescent) - wacking off?
And therefore could IJ actually have been a better book (and a novel) if as the Playwright says, it was shorter and had a common thread running through it?
I suppose I've got to get to the end of it before I can get close to answering these questions.
Trouble is that - while I have left behind the mosquitos of the cottage, the summer breeze may continue to get in the way...
"No thread"? "Lack of a theme?"
ReplyDeleteThe question is: How important are these things in determining a piece's worth as a work of art, or whether that piece is in fact a work of the class it purports to be (eg "novel," "symphony," "painting," and the like).
Here at the Abbey, "lack of a theme" is regarded as only a minor inconvenience. The Library's much-thumbed spines include such themeless faves as At Swim - Two Birds, Finnegan's Wake, To the Lighthouse, Gravity's Rainbow, and the nine volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. The monks can't get enough of this threadless, themeless wanking. That's why they became monks.
While reading/wanking, the monks sometimes wind up the phonograph and indulge themselves to the strains of aimless, directionless "music" like the Firebird Suite, La Mer, and anything from Maurice Ravel that wasn't used in the movie "10." And on the walls of the Abbey's W.C. hang cheap poster-shop replicas of utterly pointless exercises in visual masturbation by Pollock, Kandinsky, Klee, and other onanists.
You might even say that here at the Abbey, "thread" and "theme" are held in some suspicion. But then, the monks never finish anything here. If they did, they might discover that
Bravo Abbot. Here's to beautiful onanism! I am a big subscriber. For instance, I set about to do some reading this morning and got lost in a deluge of handblogging. Would that I could make high onanistic art like Proust, Pollock and DFW...
ReplyDeleteAnd I am not at all hung up on the idea that I should be reading a complexly structured (caged?) "novel". Art is all that really matters to me anyways. It has always been thus for me. But, still, as much as I am enjoying basking in the incandescence emanating from DFW's Infinite Jest/infinite jest, I do admit that I want to get to the end now - to see if there is an "end".
But I am suspecting now that I will be missing the whole point of the book/"novel" - and perhaps life itself...
Could it be true that the secret of infinity is that there is no past, no future and that we should only focus on today, the pleasures of today, the beautiful onanism of today?...