{"id":108,"date":"2009-06-22T14:20:44","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T22:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/?p=108"},"modified":"2009-06-22T14:20:44","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T22:20:44","slug":"infinite-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/?p=108","title":{"rendered":"Infinite Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"infinite summer website\" href=\"http:\/\/infinitesummer.org\">Infinite Summer<\/a> is now underway, and I&#8217;m pleased to see that a book I&#8217;m reading has spawned its own internet book club for the duration of this summer.<\/p>\n<p>Infinite Jest is a book about a many things.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s an epic saga.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s really, really long.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s by the late David Foster Wallace whose <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gourmet.com\/magazine\/2000s\/2004\/08\/consider_the_lobster\">Consider the Lobster essay<\/a> (commissioned by Gourmet magazine, hailed by PETA in their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lobsterlib.com\/feat\/davidwallace\/index.asp\">fight against lobster consumption<\/a>) I found enlightening, well-written, and plain fun.\u00c2\u00a0 His writing is clever and engaging, and his mixing of SAT words with colloquialisms should feel gratifying to all who ever had vocabulary flash cards.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m told that Infinite Jest has been read by everyone in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uci.edu\">UCI<\/a>&#8216;s English department.<\/p>\n<p>In my case, I&#8217;ve not finished the book, though I&#8217;m around page 850 or so.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s about September in the Infinite Summer syllabus, which allows about 75 pages per week, not including footnotes.\u00c2\u00a0 You should know that some of the footnotes are short-story length.\u00c2\u00a0 Some footnotes have their own footnotes.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the book&#8217;s ideas are literally ridiculous. Yet it treats a number of serious themes on life and humanity, so I usually end up feeling more human after reading its pages.<\/p>\n<p>So, in summary, I think the book is great, and the whole Infinite Summer idea is great too (you will be part of a big effort with a bunch of other people, happening right now). \u00c2\u00a0 If you&#8217;re interested, check out his lobster essay first, because that&#8217;s article-length, rather than Bible-length.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Infinite Summer is now underway, and I&#8217;m pleased to see that a book I&#8217;m reading has spawned its own internet book club for the duration of this summer. Infinite Jest is a book about a many things.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s an epic &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/?p=108\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wilyness.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}