Are you burned out on freaking group reads, and want to rebel?

I am. I'm on the verge of abandoning Infinite Jest. Too damn depressing man, this time around. Drugs. Addiction. Burglaries gone bad. Tennis drills 24/7. Suicide. Spiders. Cockroaches. Secrets. Shadows. Wheelchair assassins. Aesthetically challenged people, like the poor people who look like they have Down syndrome but don't actually have Down syndrome. Feral hamsters the size of Buicks. Madame Psychosis and her litany of deformity. Found meaningless cinemas. Glimpsing-Medusa-like-consequences of viewing the Entertainment (the samizdat). Himself. Machines. The Moms. So much knowledge but no action-Jackson. The large-headed (like an infants head size compared to its disproportional body mass), lovable freakoid, Mario. Maps o'd'ing on draino-laced smack. Paragraphs, if not sentences (if not parentheticals), that last for effing pages. Footnotes whose footnotes have footnotes; the latter of which - the footnotes whose footnotes have footnotes - oftentimes too have footnotes. Disconnection constantly paradoxically engaged and hopelessness everywhere. I love it all, no lie, but I can't take it anymore. And I know I'm not alone.

I'll finish this book, IJ, when I want to finish it, and not because its assigned like I'm in school and have to read it because the teacher's syllabus says I have to read it because the teacher probably read somewhere or thinks that it's an important book to read and to teach and so inserted it into his or her syllabus that our intellects would expand and our critical thinking skills improve. But I'm not in school anymore damnit! Nor do I wish to be in anything similar to school anymore damnit!

So, I'm rebelling against my own schedule! Take THAT schedule, you bass turd! You can't make me keep reading this, 'Frique, you can't, I will not, I won't do it, just because it's what we're supposed to be reading in March and have been preparing for for like two years to be reading in March. I've become a poor and innocent and unwitting victim to my own damn schedule, and "I'M MAD AS HELL, AND I WON'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. Where's the spontaneity, the freedom, in some schedule! Aren't our lives scheduled enough as it is by work and children and responsibilities enough amen hallefuckinglujah?!

Get 'em a paperbag someone, he's hyperventilating...

My dear,

I am not reading IJ (mostly because I don't own it). Would you care to join my in my pursuits in lieu of IJ?

JPE, my dear, there's a copy of IJ just down the road from you that I'm not currently reading. No excuses... ;)

I admit to beginning to hyperventilate slightly when I see Proust looming in June. I am not getting to read much these days, boohoo. Not sure I'm quite ready for the reread. (Buck up, Medellia. Breathe in, breathe out. OK.)

You're right, the schedule is crazy. Let's just throw it all over and read some more Melville! Who's with me on a group read of his civil war poetry! Starting now! The scheduled group read is dead, long live the unscheduled group read!

There, does that make you feel better? Should I start the next Melville thread?

I actually am in school, and that's had a large amount to do with why my Salon reading has been struggling. I'm doing an English masters and a qualifying year for another program at the same time, and it means there's never enough time. Lame! I am catching bites of Les Mis wherever I can, and was actually looking forward to Infinite Jest (is it depressing? It sounded so hyperbolically postmodern, in the fun way), which I hope to start reading in April. But I think I am honour bound to read something for Le Salon u Faulkner first . . . .

Disciplined and regulated by reading obligations! It's Don Quixote read through Foucault.

It is hyperbolically postmodern in a fun way. Its a bit depressing in a way that life isn't very often unless you are chronically depressed. DFW won't let his characters catch a break. It feels a bit sadistic considering he could have given them a break if he had wanted to...

I can walk away from IJ only because of the fantastic job pyrocow and Sutpen are doing in leading us through it, amen everyone? I'm enjoying the commentary and discussions much more than the book presently - a temporary malady I'll recover from. The book is too real, and I presently have enough reality in life, and don't want anymore reality in life. Nonetheless, I'm continuing to follow the IJ threads and look forward to more of pyro's and sutpens and everybody elses - Anna and slick and tomcat and dchaikin (did I miss anybody?) contributions that have made the journey all the more interesting as well.

A_Musing, you want more Melville, you start more Melville at will!

I'm actually way behind everyone on IJ (but have started, and actually am reading from two copies, one on the nook, one my trust old dead tree edition) and avoiding many of the threads until I get deeper in. So no real time for Melville YET.

3 - Damn. Fine, I'll admit it. I just don't feel like reading it right now. :P

:)

This same feeling happened to me in a big way last month. I was reading Paradise Lost, I had two early reviewer books to review in a certain amount of time, I was trying to find time to read books by friends and give them input, and I was also very busy, and I kept feeling guilty and as if I was late on a school assignment, because that is the way I am wired. (I have anxiety dreams about being late and stuff, all the time.)

I fortunately (for my brain) got sick and had to take some days off work and got caught up on my reading, did my reviews, and now am happily reading IJ. But sometimes I do feel overwhelmed by the readings of this group - it depends on how hectic the rest of my life is. Last month was terrible.

So is the issue Infinite Jest or group reads?

Robert

>12 anna_in_pdx:. Getting sick, which happens to me rarely, is such a pleasure! I too am always looking over my shoulder, need to do this or that at this very moment ... and then I don't, because I'm sick. Yay!

Just thought I'd throw that in while the rest of you are wrestling with this challenging book. I can only imagine ... Closest I came in recent years was a Georges Perec book, but then, it was not an assignment I shared with others, just self-torture.

My experience in this group read is that the best way to go about things is to not worry about the deadlines, and just consider the start times as a good reason to pick up a worthwhile book. The speed in which I read, and the fact that I pepper my heavier reading with real trash for no reason other than I like the taste of it, means that so far I have been unable to read any of the non-tomes on the list. They've certainly looked interesting, but if I try to get to them I know reading will suddenly become a chore, and I can't read with any enjoyment if I'm thinking of having to finish and not about what I'm reading.

I can't think of anything worse than wincing at the thought of reading. I'd much rather drop a book than look at is as an assignment of some sort.

oh come on people, buck up.

Here: pile of herring on the table, some excellent Russian vodka, pickles, catnip, pigeon feathers for the cognoscenti, and chorus girls.

in spite of my madly busy work load this month, I am forging ahead and enjoying it. I am reading in snatches here and there and trying to fit in an hour a day of reading time, usually on the train. I agree totally with what slick said in >6 slickdpdx:; and Freeeeeeky, Oh Lord and Master of the Universe, your summary at the top is brilliant. I want to echo (raised glasses please) your praise of our leaders Pyrocow and sutpen, who are doing a sterling job under circumstances, and leading us through this very challenging book with erudition, dash and aplomb. (Hear! Hear! Pass the bottle please.)

It is depressing, sad and rather bleak. However, it is relieved by such bravura writing, such (I’m am going to hold forth at some length here – the spirit is upon me – so now would be a good time to take a leak if you have a weak bladder – ah friends!) such savage satire, such whacky and further out than far out humour. There are pages that I read with a kind of speechless horror at the genius of it, muttering ‘fucking hell’ ‘jaysus’ ‘oh mercy’. I have never read anything like it in many life times of reading.

I see in it echoes of Swift and Sterne, Hoffman’s delight in the irrational and bizarre and spurious scholarship, the French Decadents, Dickens’s satirical bite and accessibility, lashings and I mean lashings of Dostoevsky (phd thesis in the air) and George Eliot’s obsession with social detail, intricate structure and weird prescience. (shut those damn cats up! can’t hear myself think here!) William Burroughs and Genet inform the style and the vision. DFW in this book skewers the contemporary American soul and in doing so adds himself to the company of the American greats: Melville, Bellow, Morrison, Pynchon and Gaddis.

We are in the presence of the most important book of our time, I think. (puff puff) And I’m thrilled to be reading it now. in the fellowship of los Salonistas!

So, girdle your loins, comrades! After all, look what it cost DFW to write it. We owe it to him and to ourselves - and to each other - to read it well.

Ah! Look, the sturgeon has arrived at last!!!!

And the cheerleaders!!!! Hurrah!

Infinite Jest is just one of 8 or 9 books I am reading at the moment. I just read it until I need a break from it and then pick up Carrington; A Life or The Three Musketeers or any one of all the others. So I am definitely not bored by any of them. And I too, try to start each group read with the others, but I finish them when I finish them. Ahhhh, such is life.

I'm with 'Murr. Suck it up Salonistas! ;) Dave Eggers, in the intro of my copy, claims it took him a month to read it and he was probably reading it on deadline. So, I figure it will easily take me three to six months (oh, and must still make room for Proust). I guess I'll just glide along at my own pace and take in the excellent Salon commentary when I get to it. Besides, it's an incredibly interesting book.

I stopped Group Reads 2 years ago..I left School in 1973...never going back.

Are you all ah tryin' to tell me I should just DEAL WITH IT and GET OVER MYSELF and keep reading it like everbody else? FINE THEN!!! I probably will (though I'm taking a break this weekend to read some light stuff: William T. Vollmann's The Ice Shirt and Steve Erickson's Tours of the Black Clock.

Tomcat, I am very very pleased to hear you rave on IJ like that, and put DFW in the same company as all those literary heavyweights. I agree, though I must say I'm not as well versed as you, of course, with all those literary heavyweights, but I, for one, am taking your good word on it.

But, what the hale, O Classic Literary Critiquer of all renowned Classic Literary Critiquers (bless you!) took you so long to get to Infinite Jest!!! You may blame me, but I blame the Taiwanese Government for not stocking IJ on its bookstore shelves! Or maybe Infinite Jest was like a Little Mutt and You were a Scaredy-Cat weren't you, your back arched and fur bristling at the thought of 1000-plus pages of extreme density and luminous, loquacious, lugubriation stalking you, "ruff ruff". Am I right or am I right?!

13> the issue for me is actually more group reads at the moment, than IJ. IJ was merely the presenting symptomatology of the reading disorder, while group reads are at the root of the psychopathology.

I sure hope a bunch of you stick with it. I've been pretty grateful to have the opportunity to talk about the book with some smart people. Only one of my friends has read it, and she thought it was "sterile." So basically I just can't talk about it with her.

I bought Infinite Jest not too long after it came out in paperback and started to read it not too long after that. I set it aside for some long forgotten reason, but I always imagined I would get back to it sometime. There was a description of, I think, an alcoholic dry and not wanting to be that fully captured that experience; I was sure that Wallace was a competent writer.

More recently, goaded by chat hereabouts, I bought The Broom of the System. The other night after finishing something else I ran across it before I came to the book I was looking for (A Handful of Dust) and started to read it. I have finished it. I reckon it a waste of time and attention. The embedded cleverness does not, to me, add up to a tale about anything finally interesting.

It is now much less likely that I will read Infinite Jest. I have read Everything and More and, I believe, one or two essays. I may read more of his essays, but I am not in a rush to.

I have done best in group reads not participating too much and with books that I have already read or already been reading. If, when I return to War and Peace there is a discussion on LibraryThing going on that I know about, I will probably join in. I joined this group because of Ulysses; I have a long planned project with respect to that book, and I will resurrect threads in this group when I get to it.

Robert

Robert, put IJ aside for a moment: There's a woman waiting on the nature thread for you tell her how to upload photos onto messages.

22:
Just fyi, I'm pretty sure DFW would have agreed with your evaluation of Broom. By the end of his life, he was uncomfortable with the kind of writing he did as a young man.

Don't you worry Sutpen, the waves have been rough, but nobody's abandoned ship just yet.

Sorry you didn't like The Broom, Mr. Durick. I've yet read it. Was it funny at all to you? I had to put down Everything and More - dry dry dry - kudos to you for finishing that. His essays are probably his funniest and most accessible of his writings. That speech he made at Kenyon that got turned into a postmodern devotional of sorts, This is Water, I think is quite profound, and rather sadly ironic considering how he ended up.

I look forward to your Ulysses-thread resuscitations. I've a love-hate relationship with that book (mostly hate).

The Broom of the System did have clever parts; it was pretty much an assemblage of clever parts. Some of those parts were funny. The novel was not funny.

My Ulysses project may not start for years yet. There are other books, and I haven't finished Time Regained which I started probably a decade ago.

Robert

The Broom of the System is clever and funny and juvenile, though sufficiently offbeatedly erudite to mask the juvenility. It's kind of like On the Road, you must read it when young, if you hit 30 without having read it, you'll just never dig, man.

I think DFW was wrong in his view of The Broom; it wasn't what he wanted it to be, and neither was IJ, but there is still something about it that puts it above the Dom Delillo's of the world.

Interesting you should say that, about On the Road. My daughter is a young writer, among other things--she teaches, but also has a monthly gig doing reviews for LMP--and when she was gobbling up everything around, being influenced--as young writers should be, by what's helpful for the moment--she picked up the Kerouac and hated it. She found it dull and uninteresting, despite being hyperbolic. So I don't know if it's a matter of reading it--and other stuff--before you're thirty (she's twenty-four). There seem to be generational things going on too.

>20 absurdeist: I don't know. That is one problem: it's hard to come by anything by DFW here and the Taiwanese government is definitely to blame for that (blame the government for everything dammit).

This is only the third group read I have ever done The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr and Master and Margarita being the first two. Most of my reading is probably not very interesting to others (5 different translations of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin anyone?) so I relish the opportunity to focus on one book in detail with a group.

It makes total sense to me to read a huge tome in company with the help of passionate experts or those who have at least been there before. That's why I love the salon.

Maybe, Freeeeky, you just burned out with all the group reads in the salon, I mean, there are lots going on, apart from the tomes. all the books the salon is reading are very good and I want to read them all at some point, but I have made a point of restricting my participation in group reads to only the huge tomes. (And I'm not even sure I will have time to join Proust if I want to be ready to (co)lead Karamazov in the autumn.) Even if one is not reading one of the slated books, following the threads is really interesting. just be more selective about what you decide to commit yourself to.

So vive le salon, I say, vive le (occasional) group read!

WOW , Tomcat I loved those chorus girls !!! what an epiphany ! I want more of that !

I'll check that clip again tonight, sip my Zubrowka and roar with the boys.

You go on with your discussions guys, while I go backstage.

Mac, leave the cheerleaders for me!!!!!!!!

I'm still here, taking IJ in, albeit very slowly. I'm getting a lot out of it so far. It does have the one little issue of demanding time free of distractions - something not so easy for me to find. (I wasn't able to open it this weekend) But, still, even when I'm not reading, I'm thinking about it.

IJ -- Before I enter the threads, I'm seeing whether I have the endurance even to get to page 100; think I'll be there tomorrow. I might actually be getting in a rhythm of reading it -- not exactly a lap book, and facing page after page of solid text, oy. So far: totally entertaining and gobsmacking in the moment and confusing overall. :)

33:
Don't psych yourself out. It's just a book. If you've that close to page 100, you're more than capable of tackling the whole thing. I look forward to seeing your commentary.

33,34> Yes, it gets better and better the farther you dig into it. I found from about page 175 on, and especially when Madame Psychosis showed up on the scene, soon followed by Eschaton, and then as we get to know the inhabitants of Ennet House better, the novel, while digressive, wordy (but I love every arcane word) really does develop a rhythm and a pace, I found.

yes, its' really all coming together now. DFW's skill in handling all these different threads is amazing.