Astral Codex Ten

Infinite Jest

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Infinite Jest

Article

Infinite Jest is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 05, 2021 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “when I think about all the loose ends in Infinite Jest”; “I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest”; “Infinite Jest is often considered the “first internet novel,”“. It most often appears alongside David Foster Wallace, MeToo, 21st century political dogmatism.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 05, 2021
  • Last seen: September 06, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
February 05, 2021 · Original source
"You said Drug A is better for most people than Drug B. But I tried Drug A and it was terrible, then I tried Drug B and it cured everything. I think you need to make it clearer that Drug B can be better than Drug A sometimes." Investing in index funds is usually better than investing in lottery tickets, but one guy will get a winning lottery ticket on the day the stock market crashes and have the opposite result; it's still valuable to warn investors that one thing is better than another. On the other hand, The Last Psychiatrist blames overly facile Drug A/Drug B comparisons for killing David Foster Wallace. Do I want to kill David Foster Wallace? Sometimes, when I think about all the loose ends in Infinite Jest - but most of the time no.
Inline links: killing David Foster Wallace
Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks.2 And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.
Inline links: 2
What to say about Infinite Jest? It remains Wallace’s masterpiece, widely considered the greatest novel of Generation X. It takes place in a near future where the US, Canada and Mexico have been merged into a single state. Each year is corporately branded, with most of the action taking place in “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” It’s set in three locales: a drug rehabilitation center, an elite tennis academy, and a Quebecois terrorist cell.3 The novel clocks in at over a thousand pages, two hundred of which are footnotes. It includes sentences of absurd length, with some descending into multi-page molecular descriptions of various drugs. The book pulls the kind of stunts that shouldn’t work, but in Infinite Jest they do, because the book is that good, the characters that deep, the subject matter that prescient. Infinite Jest is often considered the “first internet novel,” predicting in particular its addictive allure.
Inline links: 3
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was.