Infinitely worth it

A friend on mine called me a liar on facebook today. I have Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace listed as one of my favorite books. His note:

You're a liar. No one has read Infinite Jest.

Which is hilarious because it is probably mostly true. Infinite Jest is huge.
HUGE. It is like 2000 pages of small 10pt arial font densely compacted. It is an epic travel over four or five years of a young brilliant, drug experimenting Tennis hopeful, Hal Incandenza, in the "near but distant future". Oh, and it is about his family,friends and intertwining plot webs that connect randomly or nonrandomly over the course of these few years. Once you pick up the book and weigh its tomeishness in your hands and flip open the pages to the see the tiny tiny font, you also realize that the main chapters are really only a thousand pages. The second thousand pages are FOOTNOTES. Yes, footnotes. However, unlike most footnotes(which don't usually appear in long fiction anyway), these tell more detail of the plot in focus and begin to weave other plot angles all on their own.

The characters are brilliantly funny and tragic, the drug excursions are hilarious, and Wallace's "near but distant future" is so creative and satirical that it is both ridiculous and totally believable. To get you started, Hal starts out the story in The Year of Glad. Yes, the US (who has cluelessly convinced Mexico and Canada to form the "Organization of North American Nations" or ONAN) has finally sold the Year Calendar to corporate sponsors to make money. Just wait for The Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.

Infinite Jest is old. It came out in 1996 and I probably read it the first
time in 1997. Yes, the FIRST time. I have read it three times. One, because I have a shitty memory and the thing is huge and two, because it is that fucking GOOD. It is my deserted island choice.

So, Buy it and read it. I dare you. And then let me know, because I have actually never met someone who has read it- and I LOVE talking about it.

More about Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in 1970 and her M.A. in 1972. The same year she married a teacher at the university, the poet Donald Hall. After their marriage they moved to Eagle Pond Road in Wilmont, New Hampshire, which had been the home of Hall's family for several generations.

Although Kenyon was to write joyously about her life in rural New Hampshire, she suffered from severe depression throughout her marriage, and her final poems document her struggle against leukemia. Her first book, Let Evening Come, was published in 1990. She described the quiet life she led with her husband in many poems, but she and Hall were also well known through his books about life on their farm. Shortly before her death they were the subject of a television documentary that depicted their shared life of poetry and the changing seasons of their rural countryside.

Kenyon's poetry is delicate and subtle, a poetry of shadings and quiet musings. The poet Carol Muske wrote of her, "These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant."

-Taken from Bedford/St. Martin's Poetry site

Happiness

A friend sent me a poem by Jane Kenyon yesterday. I thought it was striking and poignent and it made me go read more of her work. I had started reading her a year ago, when this friend had first sent me one of her poems, but I had forgotten. A woman who struggled with depression, who worshipped nature and the simple beauty, and who died of a blood cancer-there is a lot that resonates with me.

There's just no accounting for happiness
or the way it turns up like a prodigal ...
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who files a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town,and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
-Jane Kenyon

Snow

It has been prohibitively cold for the last week. So cold, that it has distracted me from the significant and wondrous amount of snow covering my world. I hate to be cold, but I love snow.
I love the quiet clean of a snow-laden street at night. I love the black and white of trees and snow in shadow. I love the smell and the sparkle.

To me, snow is the physical manifestation of the sense of rest and renewal I feel in the winter months.

Thursday 7:48 pm
I am also reading a book entitled Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Orhan, born in Istanbul in 1959, has been under Turkish and Islamic criticism for his writing, although he claims to not really be interested in Politics. Snow, published in 2002, is set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey and tells the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists.
For me, Snow is more about religion and spiritualism then about politics. It seems to be about the human search for identity and meaning. In the book, the main character, an atheist poet name Ka, is struggling with his own views of religion and his place in the universe. It is the snow that continues to fall and cover his home town that continues to stimulate in him some concept of god or spirit. When I see snow, I think of God, he responds throughout the book to various individuals who question him of his faith. It is the only response he uses, as though he does not know what he believes but he cannot deny the absolute perfection and divinity in snow.

As an agnostic struggling with my own spirituality, or at least in defining it, I am drawn to his words. And I am drawn to snow.

JARHEAD

I went through all of my reading material the first few days in Africa. I found a worn paperback copy of Jarhead in my room and I haven't been able to put it down since. I am not really a big war book fan, but I have read a few spy books and being in a compound surrounded by burly Texans and Scots felt a lot like a few episodes of M*A*S*H, so it felt appropriate. I really had no idea what I was picking up. I seem to recall some sort of furor about it a few years ago, and from the paperback cover I can see that they made a movie about it (I know, I suck. Apparently I was living in a cave at the time) but that is pretty much all the background I had before starting the first page. By the end of the first chapter it was clear that Anthony Swofford is a shit-hot writer and that I was going to get a glimpse into the raw, fragile psyche of a young man who has not only seen and done some serious shit, but who has also done some serious analysis of himself and of the USMC.

The following paragraph from the first chapter has stuck with me for days. Swofford is talking about how, after getting their orders, his unit goes out and gets every war movie they can find and then they sit and watch and drink and get themselves ready for combat. Swofford talks about the ironic fact that our most famous anti war movies, movies that the general population would list as being commentaries on the cruelty and uselessess of war, are actually fuel that fires the murderous agression in these young military minded men.

Filmic images of carnage and death are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his First Fuck. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar--the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

I wonder how Coppola feels about this.