RESPECT.

Not Actually Cannonballing Through Literature

Like Matthew Yglesias, the quietly bubbling hype around the Infinite Summer project was getting me all excited, and making me feel like I should read the book for the 2.5th time. (I read it all the way through the first time, started rereading it last year and set it aside for other things.) Except that:

(1) 75-80 pages a week is nothing. When I read Infinite Jest the first time, I cannonballed through it, probably knocking it out in four or four and a half days. (I was on winter vacation, freshman or sophomore year in college [can't remember precisely at the moment].) Slowly savoring a 1000 page book of dense internal allusiveness doesn't work as well, I think, when you're pacing it out at 12 pages a day, or even knocking it out in bigger chunks every few days. You lose focus and there's something to be said about creating a hothouse in your own head. This is also a big part of why I love (and greatly prefer) watching tv shows on DVD, because I can plow through episodes at a time, and thrive on the continuity and interconnectedness (or, alternately, rave at the incoherence and contradictions).

(2) I'm starting my own cannonball literary run. Maybe I'll say some more another time; but I'm one quarter of the way through the Iliad. So you could say I'm starting way back.