[A guest post by Jake Jabbour, originally posted on his Tumblr blog. — ed.]
It took me 26 months, give or take a week, to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in its entirety. Depending on what you know about this book and me, that either comes off as nerd boasting, or a sad confession by an idiot. I prefer to think of it as a column A, column B situation. It only took 24 hours to watch season one of the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black. On the merits of devouring, it would seem as if OITNB was more enjoyable, but that’s if your analogy is baked goods. Think of it as booze. I hit the ground running with OITNB, and binged on it like an ice-filled bucket of Pacifico. Infinite Jest I soaked up in small strong sips like a long pour from a 15-year-old Kentucky Bourbon. Both have their appeal, both can be abused, and both have kept me from making something of myself. This essay is about three things:
- A book I think is great.
- A writer who Nostradamusized Netflix
- How Orange is the New Black might be arsenic-laced brain candy.
Reading Infinite Jest was a profound experience. It was difficult. I had to restart reading it three times. In order to fix my mind on it for the first 300 pages, I had to give my brain no other alternative. Early on, if I was at home with the book, I would find myself drifting to something that demanded less of my cognition. Perhaps an episode of The Office, or a bag of chips, or masturbation, or when compared up against that book, solving the national debt. I had to find the equivalent of blinders for my brain. So I brought the book to the gym, hopped on an Elliptical machine, cued up the soundtrack to Drive, and set the timer for 20 minutes. 20 minutes was as long as I could run my legs on the machine, and my brain on the book. In theory I would shape and smarten up. Unfortunately outside of the gym, I was eating Pop-tarts and watching youtube videos of polar bears shitting in pools. I was undoing all my hard work. But not really. At least not the reading work. Because the strength in a good book is that it will seep into the depths of you. It may not float on the surface for easy recall and pontification, but it will alter the way you feel and how you think. Infinite Jest is the literary equivalent of the gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into a hulking monster. It’s alteration of you is pretty fucking cool, but no one wants you showing off at a party because it’s invasive and no one likes a story topper, or a room killer.
I eventually weened myself off the strict parameters and was able to read the book anywhere. Well not anywhere. If you take that book into public you’re a) kidding yourself if you think you’ll be able to follow along and b) kidding yourself if you don’t think everyone in that coffee shop doesn’t hate your smug guts. It weighs like seven pounds. You might as well be lugging around one of those big dictionaries found in libraries you self-important jerk! In the time it took me to read Infinite Jest, I only read one other fictional book—Life of Pi. I had purchased dozens, but buying a book is as much a guarantee that I’ll read it as finding a woman attractive guarantees I’ll sleep with her. I’m better off just hitting up the internet for the good parts. Not surprising, I didn’t really need another book to read. I prefer non-fiction, usually personal stories, pop-culture pieces, memoirs, but IJsufficiently spanned gamut of my interests. It struck more true to life than most non-fiction I’d read. I’ll feel like a fool trying to summarize it, as it is both a difficult task and one I’m unqualified for. However, I feel belittled when I ask someone about something, and they say something like “I can’t even explain it to you.” It feels dismissive even when it never is. So in the splintered remnants of a nutshell, the book is about a tennis academy, it’s founder’s suicide, his family, a halfway house, wheelchair assassins acting on the directive of Canada’s distaste with America, the future, and a thousand other things. The title is in reference to a particular rumored movie that exists that is so entertaining that people cannot turn it off or stop watching. They view it on repeat until they starve to death. We’ll get back to this hauntingly prophetic plot point later.
It’s great storytelling (i.e. a bloody brawl outside the halfway house), and some not so great storytelling (he catalogs some sixty fictional art films and gives detailed descriptions of all of them). It’s peppered with, or more aptly, marinaded in heartbreakingly honest and thoughtful ideas about human nature and the social and moral responsibility humans experience and cope with. And if you’re like me, those really sad moments that hit home are reassuring. I always assume I’m crazy until I find evidence that someone else behaves the same way. All you need is to observe a second occurrence, it’s no longer crazy, it’s a pattern, and it’s just what some people do. Here are just a few declarations and notions. I also listed many more in an earlier piece. See here.
“you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.”
“females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.”
“loneliness is not a function of solitude.”
“try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”
“The idea that achievement doesn’t automatically confer interior worth.”
On pot smoking: “the so-called munchies that accompanies cannabis intoxication may be a natural defense mechanism against the kind of loss of practical function (smokers abstract thinking questions practical function), since there is no more practical function anywhere than foraging for food.”
“It is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off.”
On parenting: “I saw upscale, educated, talented, functional, and white parents…conforming to every last jot/tittle of a good parent…who raised kids who where (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing…
On consumerism: “viewers had been conditioned to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true.”
“‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
“trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.”
“everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.”
Out of context, and accompanied by a very spotty summary, none of that may make a lick of sense, but I would suggest that if there is any spark of curiosity from anything you’ve read, try the book. Don’t get hung up on understanding everything, because I don’t know that you need to. At least I didn’t. There’s probably two books worth of stuff I didn’t pick up. Like good television, you can enjoy singular episodes without grasping the long arc, or conversely look at the bigger ideas, and ignore the minutia. It’s all good son.
In addition to the waxing about life and suffering and meaning, Wallace’s foresight into the future (the book was written in 96, but takes place in 2009) also contributes to the reality of the novel. He predicts DVRs— “VCR recording advances that used subtle volume and hysterical-pitch-sensors to edit most commercials out of any program taped.” He essentially envisions Netflix and it’s impact on Blockbuster and it’s competitors— “choose and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff…” Those are the Netflix genres for The Expendables 2, Food Inc., 30 on 30, The Wonder Years, Orange is the New Black, and Ted Talks. GQ recently published an article on the founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings. They write “ he figured that the best way to keep customers was to personalize the experience.” In Infinite Jest, Wallace writes for the founder of his fictional company “what if the viewer could become her/his own programming director/ what if s/he could define the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue?” It’s like Hastings read this book as a Entertainment CEO for Dummies manual.
Wallace does a whole lot of crazy shit with his bizarro world that when you consider how accurate he nailed streaming video, doesn’t seem that crazy. In Wallace’s dystopia, politics get elevated to high entertainment because people begin to crave being witness to life. Streaming programming becomes so abundant and personalized that people don’t leave their home. They work from home and watch precisely what they want. It creates a void for being part of a live experience, witnessing something unpredictable, even if it’s not that exciting. Wallace extrapolates this to elevating the interest in politics, which our society has done, but he also inadvertently sort-of kind-of explains the boom in reality television. It’s this weird hybrid of personalized entertainment and live, unscripted (less and less I suspect) events. There is no way reality television is objectively (I realize objectivity is likely dead) better or even comparable to Shameless, Friday Night Lights, or The Wire. And yet reality TV continues to expand and spawn like a mold, or that protein that causes mad cow disease. None of this is in Infinite Jest, but that’s what the book does. It gets you interested in ideas that are only tangentially tethered to the plot lines and characters. It’s all incredibly fascinating, but it’s not why I sat down to write this. Let’s get back to my love of entertainment, and my and your inevitable downfall.
On July 11th, Netflix released the entire season of their original series Orange is the New Black. It’s based on a memoir about a woman who served 13 months of a 15 month sentence in prison. The premise is dark, the characters are complex, and it walks a beautifully delicate line of being both heartbreaking and hilarious. It’s not unlike the actual book Infinite Jest, and it’s not unlike the fictional film Infinite Jest in the book. Not in story, but in unintended consequences. As I said, I watched the entire series in 24 hours. It was convenient, enjoyable, and satisfying. I’m not going to watch the episodes over and over until I die, but I could see myself watching Netflix uninterrupted until my guts ate themselves, my bowels evacuated, and my cat ate my eyeballs.
Wallace had it so close. But his misstep was in thinking it would be a single piece of entertainment that would rot our brains. Instead, it seems more likely that it will be a never-ending stream of entertainment that I pay $8 a month for. It’s a milder, equally addictive form of freebasing. Not only is it totally personalized and effortless, it’s cheaper than going to the beach, or buying a book. We could all die at the hands of our hands wrapped around an apple remote.
My first exposure to Wallace was his commencement speech to Kenyon University in 2005. Here’s a link to it.
I keep a copy of it on my phone, I refer to it when I feel the walls of shit creeping in on me, and it comes with my highest recommendation. My take away from it is that you’re doing your best and at your greatest when you’re focused on helping others. And also that it’s incredibly hard, so don’t worry if you feel depressed, and hate everyone you’re standing in line with (lines that you’re also contributing to, and making longer for others). Basically, if you can take one encounter and make it a positive moment for someone else, you’re doing alright.
In 2008, David Foster Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself. That’s not comforting. It’s haunting that a man so smart and talented came to that tragic conclusion. It invites a lot of dark questions into my head. He observed and analyzed the world in a way that most us could not, and he articulated it with such humor and emotion that it bent the lens with which I view the world through. Like so much of what he did, his suicide is just something I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand.
I’m not really sure what all this has to do with Netflix and entertainment. I set out with an idea I thought was neat, not to be confused with an idea I thought was novel. Chuck Klosterman writes in his new book I Wear the Black Hat, “I’ve never had an idea that a hundred other people didn’t have before me.” I was going to write that here, but then I didn’t, but then I sort of did, because well, you get it. So television will probably unravel us all, and books probably can’t save us, so what do we do? I say let’s knock back our buckets of beer, sip our spirits neat, and on our better days be “kind in a way that costs us nothing.” -Infinite Jest