Infinite Jest
Book Cover Redesign
Beginning Research
This book was very long. I read 150/1000 of the pages, so I think I got a taste for it, at least. But it got to a point where I didn’t think it would be beneficial to the project if I spent a month just reading the book. I supplemented what I read with online reviews.
Research into David Foster Wallace, the Author
- “David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 — September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing.” (wikipedia.com)
- “Wallace’s fiction is often concerned with moving beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism” (wikipedia.com)
- “As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player” (wikipedia.com)
- “Wallace struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, depression, suicide attempts, institutionalization, and at times inappropriate sexual behavior. He was reported to have slept with some of his female students while teaching at university and sometimes exhibited stalking-like obsessive behavior when enamored of a woman” (wikipedia.com)
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
It’s known for it’s humorous qualities. Infinite Jest is also known as a piece of literary fiction.
Mood/Tone
- “encyclopedic”
- funny
- sometimes ironic
- overwhelming
Setting
- ONAN, a dystopian North America
- Boston
Visual Language Notes/Ideas While Reading
- Entertainment- especially addictive entertainment
- pursuit of happiness
- America
- dying happy
- watching the movie Infinite Jest in endless repetition
- pleasures
- huge cast and multilevel narrative… so much going off. so many interwoven stories
- projection of a smile, pg 5
- eyes as great pale zeroes, pg 8
- marijuana — overflowing entertainment
- “He’d cure himself by excess” pg 22
- appropriation art aesthetic, pg 23–25
- tv screen aesthetic — pg 20
changing colors and intensities — primary colors - “entertainment cartridges” — part of some Netflix-like entertainment system
- overwhelming story
- “life was more or less one big party”
- unlabelled entertainment cartridge — pg 42
- zoning out
- bright beach ball in pool pg 43
- tennis & tennis court
- getting high
- psych ward — pg 68–69
- meds — pg 69
- depression
- escape — “wanting out” pg 72
- electric shock — pg 78
- “transcendence by tennis” pg 84
- smoke- could make this look really visually interesting
- “burnout” — pg 99
- a bunch of cartridges, pg 110
- watching Stan Smith on the TV tennis court — pg 110
- aloneness, pg 112
- boston imagery
- silk screen tank, pg 128
Original Covers
I like the idea of the clouds. But, I don’t find this cover that grabbing and I don’t think the hierarchy of the title and author are working. It feels bland, especially with the “a novel ellipse.”
The blue is ok, but I wonder how other colors would work.
Some other takes on the cover. I really like the illustrative style of #8.
Commentaries on the Book
- society based off of pleasure without purpose
- corporate sponsorship
- mirror breaking truck scene
- “wireheading”
- lots of drugs
- “a critique of postmodern society” (Postmodernism is an attempt to blur the boundaries between a text and the world.)
- “Well, my hands-down favorite part of the book was the description of “Eschaton”, a game played by drawing a map of the world on a tennis court, setting up various tennis players as Great Powers, and then simulating a nuclear war through a combination of extremely complicated math equations and tennis balls as nuclear missiles. The game goes well enough until it starts snowing, and the players get into an argument about whether they need to adjust for the snow when calculating the damage done by their nukes” (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/23/book-review-infinite-jest-alternate-title-look-at-me-i-read-infinite-jest/)
- Infinite Jest, the book = Infinite Jest, the movie described in the book. Whoa.
- suicide by head in a microwave.
- “But essentially, I think it’s a book about people seeking meaningless entertainment in a way that doesn’t truly involve interpersonal communication, in the form of a book that seems like meaningless entertainment but which is so complicated and so hard to understand that the attempt eventually produces true interpersonal communication with the author about this idea, completing a complicated but only partially self-referential loop” (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/23/book-review-infinite-jest-alternate-title-look-at-me-i-read-infinite-jest/).
06.08.2016 | Beginning to Visualize
I am really inspired by this image. I wonder if I could digitally manipulate it in some way, or if I could illustrate something like this.
