Forecasting “Infinite Summer”

So I mentioned below that I plan to embark on Infinite Summer in a few days.  I’m also planning to take Wizard along for the ride.  We’ve never “co-read” anything, partly because I read for work and partly because our tastes diverge quite a bit (oh, and partly because we’re not really the co-reading type, by which I mean we don’t tend to bathe in the sicksweet vomit of our love).  He’s mainly a space opera sort, though the range of what he reads outside that genre is wide (Plath, Rimbaud [really?], Coupland, etc.).  I’m more narrow-minded because of the whole exams/proposal/dissertation hole I’ve been stuck in the past few years.  This project will actually be the first time I’ve read for “fun”–not for the diss, not for conference work–in a long time.

I’ve taught post-1945 lit, and I spend my days and nights with millennial lit, and yet I’ve read little DFW beyond a few short pieces that were thrust upon me by an enthused officemate awhile back.  I know what I’m in for–the footnotes, the loopdiloopy plots, the heft and weight of 1000 pages–and yet I don’t look at DFW with the same glare I usually direct toward popular young white male authors (though to be fair, I don’t glare at Franzen or Foer either, so maybe I’m getting soft).  The fondness I have for him, I think, stems from the fact that I don’t think he’s a trickster for trickster’s sake.  That is, I don’t think the footnotes, the plot jumps, the confusion, are inserted into the story because he desperately wanted to earn his pomo cred.  Rather, I sense that he felt those things were integral to the story itself (whatever that story is–I haven’t read any of the overviews or reader guides, and I haven’t brushed up on Hamlet, either).

That said, who knows if I’m going to get through it.  I have a lot of excuses:  the baby, the diss, the advisor I’m currently avoiding.  Oh, and there’s also the abhorrent lack of discipline that has characterized me and my work since, like, September.  Maybe if someone made me a set of bookmarks to guide me through the dissertation I’d have a chapter written by now.  Oh, and I don’t actually have a copy of the book yet because I haven’t made it to the bookstore (thanks, baby!).

So.  Here we go.  75 pages a week.  Back in the day, 75 pages a week would have meant I was rapidly failing out of school.  Back in the day, kids.  Now it’s a fair but possibly unreachable goal.  I’ll let you know how it goes.