{"id":3822,"date":"2009-07-01T09:33:02","date_gmt":"2009-07-01T09:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/07\/01\/infinite-jest-my-favorite-foot\/"},"modified":"2009-07-01T09:33:02","modified_gmt":"2009-07-01T09:33:02","slug":"infinite-jest-my-favorite-foot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/07\/01\/infinite-jest-my-favorite-foot\/","title":{"rendered":"Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Infinite Summer<\/a> people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest<\/cite>, but I’m not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule<\/a>. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group.<\/p>\n

I’ve been reading a bunch of the commentary that’s already been posted (see here for an early round-up<\/a>, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers<\/a>), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There’s a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit that the infamous filmography footnote is something that only really makes sense later, footnote 304 has also come in for a lot of derision. I find that incomprehensible, as footnote 304 is one of my favorite bits of the entire book– it’s an infodump presented in the form of an anecdote about a student plagiarizing a term paper from an overwrought academic article. This is one of many bits in this book that convince me I could never really make it as a novelist– it’s way better than anything I could hope to produce.<\/p>\n

I’m also a little puzzled by the common complaints about the book starting slowly, and people feeling like they don’t understand what’s going on. This strikes me as kind of odd, as they’re not even 100 pages into an 1100 page book– you’re not supposed to have a solid idea of the plot that early on.<\/p>\n

Much as I hate fans-are-slans arguments, I wonder if this isn’t an area where reading genre fiction helps– I’m typing this in a room full of (mostly) SF books, many of them multi-volume epics running to thousands of pages. I’m not particularly intimidated by great big thick volumes whose plot arc isn’t obvious early on– I’m perfectly happy to roll with a book for a few hundred pages before I find out what the main plot is, provided it’s entertaining along the way. And Infinite Jest<\/cite> is very good, right from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Even the endnotes. I particularly recommend #304.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I’m not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace… Continue reading Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}