damn

Slipped up on posting again. It's hard damnit, trying to be witty or intelligent. But that's at least part of the goal, to keep writing, keep the ideas flowing see what pops out.

So I guess...speaking of writing I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which is amazingly well written and impressively agile in its ability to jump between narrative styles, points-of-views, dialects and ideas. Yesterday I read an  extended riff on telephones and the way people always doodle and only half-pay attention while talking on the phone yet somehow believe that the person on the opposite end of the line is paying them rapt attention, and the consequences therewith that would occur upon the widespread use of videophones. It was impressively conceived and written. And funny. Did I mention the books quite funny?

But...(there had to be a but) it all gets a bit tedious sometimes, the constant long winding witty monologues from desperate stoners or obsessive tennis players, indepth descriptions of quebec separatist movements or other bizarre fixations. Eventually it all starts to collapse a bit under the sheer monotonous weight of the thing; for realz, the book is hardcover size (though softcover) and over a thousand pages. Mostly this is due, for me at least, to a lack of narrative pull to the novel. Most of the reason for continuing to read on is just to see what other inventive situations Wallace thinks up, but the piecemeal, unconnected pick-n-mix style results in a sense that you could just start reading anywhere and not have too different an expereience. It's just more of the same, though it's a pretty good same. I figure at some point in time some over-arching theme might evolve, or some things will happen in succession that will build causally to something else, but right now I'm not seeing it. And it's taken me maybe 2-3 weeks to get 150 pages in and I don't know whether I'll be able to hang on long enough to see it.